The Danger in a Prayer Trivia Quiz

Answer: Alundra

"Alundra" was a fluid but morbid action role-playing game released in 1997 by Matrix Software for the PSX. The young dreamwalker Alundra quested with the ultimate task of thwarting the demon Melzas who drew his power from the belief and prayers of the villagers of Inoa. It was not until after many villagers had died and suffered through frightening nightmares that they finally figured out that Melzas was a false god and supported Alundra in his attempts to depose him.

Whilst the game had a limited production run in North America and thus faded to relative obscurity quickly, reviewers praised its mature dialogue, tight controls, massive landscape and challenging yet satisfying puzzles in out of the box dungeons. The last dungeon was a confusing masterpiece and a worthy challenge for any puzzle lovers.

Answer: To foment war, subvert rebellion and control the masses

Another PSX release in 1998, "Xenogears", was Square's love letter to indie developers as - quite uncharacteristically for the time - creator Tetsuya Takahashi was given a huge amount of free reign to create according to his whims albeit on a relatively low budget. This reworked "Final Fantasy VII" plot - which had been rejected for being too 'dark' - was a sprawling epic intended to have been the fifth of an unrealised six-chapter "Star Wars"-like continuing series. In fact, the plot was so vast that much of it ended up being told in an array of disjointed cutscenes in the second disc.

Getting back to the prayer business: Ethos was just a cover for Solaris, the large dystopian and advanced caste-based empire who used every tool in the book to control the masses. They posed as a religious group who would offer aid to the suffering, protect cultural artifacts and purge the nuisance Wels monsters. Meanwhile, they would covertly abduct people for slave labour or human experimentation whilst supplying weapons to warring factions and maintaining the bad air between them.

Religion was a large part of the core plot of the game, too. In fact, the game almost didn't release in North America due to controversial plot themes such as depicting crucifixions at 'Golgoda' (a thinly veiled Golgotha) and, before it had been translated out, killing the antagonist 'Yahweh'. Ultimately, the creation, existence and destruction of God guided many of the characters' motivations.

Answer: Ares

All the 'A' Greek gods listed here featured in the series, amongst others, and pretty much all of them were... honestly, not very nice at all, though it took Athena a while before she really became oppressive. Indeed, that's a large part of why Kratos essentially became the antihero people loved to hate in this combo-based hack and slash role-playing Santa Monica Entertainment series.

To expand a little, in the opening title Kratos was a warrior who served the Greek gods. He used to be a Spartan champion but found himself in a bit of a bind against a barbarian king. Fortunately - or not perhaps - Ares heard his call for help and granted it, giving Kratos the underworld-forged Blades of Chaos and accepting his servitude. So, next, Kratos was tasked with destroying an Athena-worshiping village and its temple; Ares in his desire to create the perfect servant warrior transported his wife and daughter there who were easily slain under Kratos' blind berserk wrath.

Obviously, this turned out to be a bad call: after ten years of servitude and of painful nightmares of that day, he found a way out through Athena who tasked him with the murder of Ares and the promised reward of salvation. Through the game he worked to obtain the Pandora's Box to be able to face and defeat Ares, ultimately taking his place as... you guessed it, the God of War. Reviewers praised the game for seamlessly blending puzzle and combat elements, and for fun over-the-top combos and dark gory humour.

Answer: Final Fantasy VI

When talking about "Final Fantasy VI", people always come back to the story. It's been very rare - almost unreplicated - to see a convincingly told single-player role-playing game with fourteen playable characters and no true main character.

Narratively and mechanically, the game was roughly divided into two halves corresponding with the World of Balance and the World of Ruin. The latter, brought about by Kefka's actions, took a strident diversion from the previously linear and narrative-heavy World of Balance to essentially allow players to do what they want and to take Kefka on whenever they felt like it. In fact, after a few mandatory story beats, the player in theory could visit the final dungeon - which was split into three different sections requiring just one character per section to depose would-be god Kefka.

Kefka himself was pretty much a volatile ball of chaos; one of the reasons cited as to why he was so wild and unpredictable is that he underwent a failed transformation into a Magitek Knight by the Empire. Whilst the game literally enjoyed some theatre with a famous Opera House event, Kefka brought his own theatre to proceedings with his jester-like costume and his whimsically irreverent demeanour, dismissing the party's moralising by saying that they 'sounded like pages from a self-help booklet'. Unlike many villains, for a while, he won. He secured ultimate power, and brought the world to its knees. But, they all fall in the end...

Answer: Gold, and lots of it

This original PSP release was a somewhat lighter title with whimsy and silly meta humour relating to the RPG genre at large and followed a simple formula - albeit with many variations and mutations - the hero had 30 seconds to save the world from an Evil Lord's apocalypse. Of course, 30 seconds isn't enough time to do much of anything, so the hero had to literally buy time from the Time Goddess. They would then need to, in most cases, solve the level's other objectives to gather strength or open up the route to the Evil Lord and prevent the death spell in time.

If the player tried to refuse the Time Goddess' original offer of time for gold, she would appropriately reply: "Has there ever been an RPG that begins when you say 'no'?". As to why did the Time Goddess want gold in the first place? Well... no complex character motivation here. She was just really greedy.

The alternative game modes were also fairly quirky: in Evil Lord 30 players are tasked with real-time strategy puzzles; Princess 30 was a sassy shooter; Priest 30 an escort mode and, for those who enjoyed an extra challenge, Hero 3 was a three second special level.

Answer: He had died long before the game's timeline

Yep. God was dead. One of the game's myths concerned the ancient war - isn't there always an ancient war? - set thousands of years before the game began, and in that apocrypha, the good god Granas saved the planet from the evil Valmar. He was cleft asunder, his bodily parts split across the realm and 'sealed away'.

These seals, of course, ended up being specialised technology designed to use human bodies as hosts for Valmar's power. And the leader of the Church of Granas, Pope Zera Innocentius, knew Granas had died long ago, and used priestess Elena to gather up the parts of Valmar for him to absorb and become a god of his own. To add insult to injury, Granas probably wasn't squeaky clean when he was alive - an ancient automaton informed the party that Granas gave humanity passion, technology and wonder in return for ceaseless prayer. This became oppressive enough that many, such as the Kingdom of Cyrus, turned instead to the destructive Valmar.

"Grandia II" was originally released for the Dreamcast in 2000, then ported to the PC and PlayStation 2 in 2002. The game was largely bright and colourful and animé and frothy. The original Dreamcast release was significantly better received than the later port - scores of 8 or 9 typically dropped by a point or more largely attributed to poor graphical execution and the emergence of other stand-out titles. The game's innovative combat system - making a turn-based system feel like it was in real-time - and enjoyable characters in a rich and vibrant world were praised, where the mixed quality of voice acting, bland dungeons and clichéd plot came under fire.

Answer: Velvet Crowe

"Tales of Berseria" was an acclaimed Bandai Namco release (2016 in Japan, 2017 in NA/Europe) and the sixteenth main title of the very wide-reaching "Tales" series. It acted as a prequel to "Tales of Zestiria" and explained a lot of the aspects of that world that were either shrouded in mystery or whose stories were unresolved. Core features of the game included a rapid, combo-based combat system emblematic of "Tales" games and a series of bright and whimsical skits juxtaposed against a darker-than-usual plot which chronicled a conflict between reason and emotion.

As a character, Velvet was pretty refreshingly hardcore, but not without good reason -- in the prologue of the game, you play through her backstory as she took care of her sick younger brother, Laphicet, ultimately watching him be bloodily impaled as a sacrifice by their adoptive father, Artorious Collbrande. She turned from almost painfully sickly sweet to a ruthless and callous one-woman-storm whose only original goal was to exact vengeance upon Artorius.

The repentance scenes were essentially an optional running joke; whilst Velvet showed contempt for the whole idea of repentance, other characters disturb the priest in different ways. The witty mage, Magilou, pretended to be attracted to the priest before 'confessing' that she never should have read that 'trashy romance book', embarrassing him. She concluded: "Oh no! I meant to confess my sins, but instead my confession was another sin!". Eleanor - who used to be one of the Abbey's exorcists - 'repents' for blindly trusting in their ideals and preaching to those she thought beneath her without really understanding how the world worked, bringing the priest to tears. When finally receiving an apology for the party's non-compliance, the priest said he wasn't ready to forgive all the trouble they've caused, and that priests are only human too.

Answer: Salt and Sanctuary

The Nameless God in "Salt and Sanctuary" was originally a Saltborn - a mortal - who'd become fully engrossed with the popular fantasy of wanting to become a deity all would bow to. But, there was just one little snag: he couldn't ever cultivate the soul of fire that the other real gods had. Imprisoning them, intercepting their prayers and starving them to death just wouldn't change that he was just another mortal being. That didn't, however, stop him from proclaiming his superiority to any other living creature.

In terms of the gameplay, players can adopt one of several classes such as the Priest or Knight and explore Castlevania-esque levels whilst obtaining the game's currency, Salt, to both level up and strengthen equipment with. If the player dies, they lose all their Salt, but get one chance to reclaim it from the enemy that killed them. The IGN review for "Salt and Sanctuary" noted that the notoriously difficult FromSoftware's "Dark Souls" had very clearly been a large inspiration for this game, and that it might have been quicker for them to have a side-by-side comparison table.

Answer: Thalmor

"The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" was somewhat of a sensation after it had been released by Bethesda in 2011; it allowed players to add modification scripts and programs to customise the game to their own wills and whims. Procedurally generated quests and dungeons were blended with intricately designed towns and cities with their own political struggles and plotlines to create a massive world with an established lore-base that players could lose themselves within. Whilst there was a 'main plotline' - one where the Thalmor do actively feature - players could almost entirely sidestep it if they so wished.

Onto the Thalmor, then. Whilst the player can choose one of ten races to play from - the catlike Khajiit and lizard-people Argonians among the more interesting of these - the Thalmor were essentially a supremacist faction of Altmer who were more than happy to sit by whilst the Stormcloaks and Imperials waged a Civil War against one another, with the acceptance of the Talos worship ban being one of the largest cited reasons for this conflict.

Within this game, the Thalmor's most visible agenda was to enforce the ban on Talos worship across the lands. 26 years before the player's timeline began, King Titus Mede II signed the White-Gold Concordat, a treaty where the Aldmeri Dominion (Thalmor) agreed to stop their Great War and return their occupied territories if the worship of Talos was banned. Few facts about Talos were known, other than he united the nations of Tamriel under a single Empire; the viking-like Nords disagreed with the Thalmor that a man could not be a divine. Ambassador Elenwen once stated "Talos was a heroic man, but not a god. It pains the Altmer that we must remind our younger cousins of the difference.". There may have been political benefits for holding that stance, but their disputation over a human's ability to be a deity was their most verbalised sticking point.

Answer: sin

In 2001, Square first published "Final Fantasy X" for the PS2, which unsurprisingly was the tenth main entry in the series. It chronicled the seemingly endless woes of the people of Spira, who were stuck in a spiral of sacrifice to strike down the seemingly theological Sin. Unlike its predecessors, it featured voice acting, continuously connected locations and the Conditional Turn-Based Battle system that allowed players to take as long as they preferred whilst deciding their actions.

Ultimately, Sin was not borne out of the need to repent, and the only real divine provenance in this game came in the form of the magical aeons whose origins were non-theological. Those aeons in fact were the product of Yu Yevon, the parasitic embodiment of the ancient summoner who'd transferred his soul into the body of the Final Aeon used to defeat Sin, forming it into another Sin and continuing the cycle. He lost his humanity when summoning a dream version of Zanarkand at its peak - the Zanarkand the players experience in the prologue - using the ancient citizens as fayth to help maintain the dream. It was these fayth who granted the ability to summon aeons, and, ultimately, who helped Tidus and his friends understand the nature of Yu Yevon and destroy him letting the dream of old Zanarkand die. Whilst Yuna as the summoner was the initial sacrificial lamb, it was her lover Tidus - a dream of the fayth - who disappeared once they were awakened at the end of the game.

Of course, faith still remained an important part of the world of Spira, as seen in the sequel "Final Fantasy X-2" with the New Yevon faction maintaining the old moral teachings. In this game, Yuna acted as the protagonist solving some quite different problems as a sphere hunter.