Final Fantasy X

Games
21

Addressing Ben and Rimbo, and anyone else who didn’t like the ending:

SPOILER ALERT *********************888

So I’m curious as to why you guys didn’t like the ending? Too sad? Did you want more of a happy ending, or a bigger twist at the end perhaps? I thought having a poignant and sad ending was very fitting since they’d been telegraphing it for you since about the 1/4 mark in the tale. They’d been telling you that Tidus was going to die. But he was afraid to face, afraid to ask questions about it until later in the game, when it became more obvious that once the Fayth stopped dreaming, he would disappear.

I personally was really scared that they would disobey their own rules and have some kind of Disney ending instead where Tidus lives after all. Instead, they handled it really well. They balanced the joy of Spira, versus the personal loss for Yuna (who I always think of as the main character in the game anyway) for losing the person she loved. I thought it was a very cool ending.

Now, contrast that with the ending at the end of FFX International, which had this thing about an aftermath which was a setup for FFX-2, where they found a sphere that showed Tidus as still alive, that IMHO, was a TERRIBLE ending. I’m glad that wasn’t in the U.S. version of the game. After spending the whole game telling us how Tidus was going to die, it would have been horrible to dangle that in front of the players just to setup a sequel instead of establishing closure.

Now, there’s one other possiblity: Maybe you’re not upset by the sad nature of the ending, but the very very last scene, where they show Tidus in the water. I’ve had some people say to me that they interpreted that as Tidus still being alive somehow, in the minds of the Fayth or something. And while that’s a possiblity, I think that scene was more just a memory, like one last scene where Yuna is remembering Tidus how she wants to remember him: as an energetic optimistic guy. Even if the interpretation is that he’s still alive in the dreams of the fayth somehow, that doesn’t mean he’s alive in real life.

Oh, and I did play all the way through Final Fantasy X-2. What a waste of my time. I even unlocked the different endings to see the big CG ending, now THAT was a terrible ending. Totally reversed what happened in the first game.

*************** END SPOILERS*********************

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******* SPOILER REPLY **********

Rock, they tell you very specifically what happens to Tidus when he wakes up in the water at the end. One of the Fayth tells him that they will dream a final dream for him, an endless ocean for him to swim in. Or something like that. It is, for all intents and purposes, an afterlife.

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**************SPOILER REPLY *******************

Oh yeah, Scry, I agree. In other words: He would be dead. Just like they’d been saying for half the game. I mean, on the one hand I really was yearning for them to find a way to keep him alive so that Yuna wouldn’t be heartbroken, but at the same time, I didn’t want the game to break its own rules with that kind of an ending, if that makes any sense? I guess I didn’t want there to be a sad ending like there was, but with the game’s fiction pointing only one way, nothing else seemed possible. And I’m glad they didn’t cheat. It was a bittersweet victory in the end for Yuna, and I really liked that about the ending. Now, whether or not Tidus spent time in a comfortable afterlife was a moot point in my mind. Afterall, Tidus wasn’t really the character I cared about, Yuna was.

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Oh, I expect we will keep playing. I was trying to decide whether to buy FF XII. Seems like the answer is “yes”.

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SPOILERS…

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No, Tidus dying suited me just fine, because the character was irritating. Rather, I found the entire “Tidus isn’t real; he’s just a dream of the Fayth” thing to be crap.

I found most of the plot had little to recommend it, really.

Diverging from the rules they’d laid out for themselves could only have helped the story. Far better would have been for Tidus to go all Pinocchio – “I’m a real live boy!” – triumph over the whatsit with Yuna, and on the way back home end up in a freak accident on the airship where a propellor blade buries itself deep into his brain, leaving him a bloody pulp.

Did I mention I didn’t like Tidus very much?

26

I dunno, I got to the part where Sin is opening his mouth and discovered that I can’t deal damage quickly enough to beat him. No doubt I was supposed to pursue ultimate weapons or something (I found the crafting aspect of the game boring and mostly skipped it).

Implicit but unstated requirements like this irritate me. I can’t see replaying large sections of the game to get by it, though.

Don’t see what’s not to like about Tidus. Like everyone else in the game, he’s a cardboard character. But there’s just enough story to keep going.

27

FFXII is really nothing like FFX. The game starts a bit slowly, like many other FFs, but it actually has really good, solid, interesting gameplay. It’s also far more difficult than previous FFs, and far more free-form.

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How does that make any sense? I never finished the game (I think I was near the end, but hit an impossible dungeon; I figured out it’d take many, many hours of mindless grinding to get my party up to it and just gave up), but I seem to recall Tidus was searching for his father, who had somehow transformed into the big bad thing that was destroying the world. Was the father also a dream? And wasn’t Tidus from the future or something? Was the future also a dream?

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MAJOR SPOILERS FROM SOMEBODY WHO BEAT THE GAME, BUT MAY NOT BE CANNON

My memory might have a few holes, but here’s the gist. The Zanarkand you are in at the beginning of the game is not the real Zanarkand. The “real” Zanarkland was destroyed 1,000 years ago in a war between it and Bevil(?). In response the people did two things, created Sin and created a massive fayth that recreates the city of Zanarkand in its memory. This memory continues on for a thousand years, and is linked with Sin. Therefore, by destroying Sin (which can only be done be killing a spirit that possess Aeons called Yu Yevon), the Zanarkand Fayth stops (along with all other aeons). By now, the spirits channeling Zanarkand have had enough and want this outcome. Tidus, therefore was simply a dream of the fayth brought back to “life”. When you defeat Sin, you destroy the Zanarkand fayth (I hope this makes sense, because it was a bit vague as to what to call it in game), and consequently Tidus. I never had the stomach to finish X-2 to find out if he makes a reappearence.

30

It went down something like this:

Once upon a time, there was Zanarkand and…someplace else. I don’t know, Eastasia or something. They had a small world war thing going on, small because it’s a pretty small world, and also the armies could only fight each other three at a time.

One of the sides had a secret weapons program involving the Fayth, who were these dudes who got so amazingly high that they turned to stone. The cocktail of psychedelics they were on were so potent that–aside from the turning-to-stone thing–their hallucinations became, for all intents and purposes, real. You know, like Tibetan monks generating tulpas, only trippier. One or both of the sides figured out how to weaponize that into Aeons by having logistics support staff who would whisper “You see…a giant, like, crab dragon, man! Whooaaaaa!”

Obviously that led to an arms race, until one side made a drug so groovy that it let them hallucinate Sin, whereupon the world went to shit. Making lemons from lemonade, the surviving Zanarkandians turned the recurring bad trip into state religion. Things got under a semblance of control again.

With the war over and most of the population dead, the military was demobilized, and most of the Fayth stockpiles mothballed. So most of them didn’t even have to hallucinate giant tank-moth-sparrow hybrids who shot lava beams out of their tail feathers for the occasional Summoner with the proper clearance codes any more. So of course they all had a more pleasant trip involving a Zanarkand-that-never-was, full of blitzball fans and whatnot. Among the hallucinated population was Tidus F. Jerk, Sr., and his kid Tidus G.D. Whiner (he took his mother’s surname).

Drug trips being drug trips, paradise doesn’t last. The fayth who were thrashing and freaking out as they ‘dreamed’ about Sin spoiled the whole image, and they forgot who was hallucinating who. Tidus F. Jerk, Sr got dreamed into the real world, like a long-term alcoholic Aeon. Later, Auron died from saki poisoning (his publicist spun the story it was actually from one of those pilgrimmage deals), the Blitzball City trip went sour again, and the rest spun out in the game.

Points of that may not be accurate, my memory’s fuzzy on details at this point.

31

Actually, my impression is that FFXII is like a single-player MMO.

There are tons of quests, plenty of places to go at any given time (including places that will get you killed), real-time fights, and endless opportunity for grinding and tinkering if things get tough.

And while FFX is basically fully linear (until the end), FFXII goes to great lengths to warn you when you’re about to enter a linear bit of storyline where you’ll lose your freedom for a while.

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As has already been widely noted, FFXII is some kind of railway accident in which the FFXI train ran over the Star Wars bus. It bears almost no relation to FFX except it’s got chocobos.

In XII they seem to make every efffort to reference FFXI gameplay and some basic content elements while using as many themes and styles as possible from Star Wars. All the FFXII references to the (apparently) nonexistent FFXII crafting system are in effect FFXI jokes – even the basic FFXII trophy drops such as fire crystals and the like are from FFXI, where they were a core part of the crafting system.

They really do a good job at these twin forms of emulation, too. For example, FFXI combat is so rote and repetitive that the FFXII gambit system does a good job of being a FFXI player bot. Practically the only thing that’s missing is a quest to fish for 10,000 salmon, acquired one at a time…

Anyhow, despite the above snideness, XII is an amazingly good game, surprising me with its quality in almost every area, except its astonishing lack of minigames.

33

ARISE! No, wait, that’s not it. FULL-LIFE!

Square announced today that for some reason they’re going to re-release Final Fantasy X on the PS3 and the Vita, because they’re completely out of ideas.

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They could do much worse than X. I got a good 180 hours out of it thanks to post-game content. Hell, I even got 1/3 of the way through X-2 (God forgive me) just to try to get to the conclusion of the plot, but I have my limits.

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No they’re not…

But to be fair…

http://www.1up.com/news/persona-fighting-game-headed-consoles-persona-4-vita

Music and Fighting game aside, that makes one great and one very good JRPG coming to the Vita. But geez, how about giving us NEW games? They should be working on Persona 5. I would totally buy a Vita just for that.

36

Final Fantasy X wasn’t that long ago, and it’s not like it looks hideous (FF7), could really stand a retranslation (FF8), or needs a gameplay overhaul (FF9). FFX was perfectly fine.

I look forward to 2014’s re-release of Final Fantasy XIII.

(My argument with FFIX’s gameplay is that the party and the enemy seemed to be on completely different timers, and I won the final battle without touching the controller for 25 minutes because Steiner got Berserked, Silenced, and Poisoned, had Auto-Regen to counter that last one, and attacked over and over again for 9999 damage while the rest of my party slept.)

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Oh, and I can see them releasing FF X for the PS3, they already released 7, 8, and 9. But they should do a remastered FF XII - I would totally buy a PS3 for that!!!

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Typical Steiner! He’s such a riot!

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Why? PCSX2 is fully functional with FFX and FFXII. I recently replayed through X and XII on PCSX2 at 1080p and 2x AA and it looked absolutely fantastic.

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Everybody’s doing the HD PS2 port these days. It’s not like it’s an actual remake.

Anyway, Final Fantasy X is a fucking terrible game (mostly) so it makes sense that Square-Enix would want to re-release it.