Final Fantasy X Part 12: Bikanel Island

By Shamus Posted Thursday Sep 8, 2016

Filed under: Retrospectives 95 comments

The Guado catch up with Yuna and her friends at Lake Macalania and give us another boss fight. It’s the same lake where we fought the Al Bhed tank earlier. How many earth-shaking boss fights can one frozen lake withstand?

(Spoiler: One.)

Ice. How Does It Work?

This is a SUPER wide shot. Our heroes are just tiny little figures at the bottom of the image.
This is a SUPER wide shot. Our heroes are just tiny little figures at the bottom of the image.

Well, it’s called a lake, but looks more like a pond. It’s about half the size of a football pitch. I bring this up because at the end of the fight, the boss punches a hole in the lake and everyone falls through. They plummet a long way, but nobody seems to get hurt for some reason. And despite the small size of the lake, when we get to the bottom we find ourselves in an open space the size of a couple of stadiums.

Look Shamus, this is Final Fantasy. Sometimes spaces are, you know, stylized.

Okay, but the space under the lake is larger than the lake itself. And the space under the lake is hollow. Like, usually a frozen lake is ice floating on top of water, but this is a roof of ice over a vast stretch of nothingness with no visible means of support.

The FANTASY part means this is a world with magic, Shamus. And you’re going to complain about an ice roof?

In fact, it kind of looks like the ice is holding up the massive TEMPLE, which is now looming overhead.

It’s Final FANTASY, Shamus. What part of this is confusing you?

Yeah I get that, but there’s water here at the bottom and it’s only ankle deep. And it’s not frozen, even though this should be colder than the ice overhead.

FINAL. FRICKIN. FANTASY.

And Sin is down here with everyone else. Under the lake. Under the water. Which is shown to be ankle-deep.

Yeah okay. I’m having trouble picturing how that’s supposed to work.

Like, how did Sin even GET here?

Okay. Fine. You made your point. Jerk.

Time to Regroup

There's a LOT of fog in this scene, so I've tampered with the color and contrast in these screenshots to make it clearer for people who haven't played the game.
There's a LOT of fog in this scene, so I've tampered with the color and contrast in these screenshots to make it clearer for people who haven't played the game.

I make fun of the goings-on under Lake Nonsense, but the writer knows what’s important right now. This scene is here so our characters can have a quiet moment to process everything that’s happened. They’ve been reunited with Yuna, killed a Maester, and been branded traitors. Wakka is now a traitor to the religion he’s clung to his entire life. Yuna has to face the fact that her plan failed. Tidus has to process yet another load of stuff that he didn’t know. Auron has to pep-talk the kids into remembering what’s important and getting them back on task.

Yuna sort of half-justifies her harebrained plan to marry Seymour in exchange for… whatever it is she thought they could do to bring him to justice. She apologizes and everyone is on the same page again.

One of the mistakes of the latter Mass Effect games is that far too many major revelations and turns happened without the characters stopping to properly discuss them. Shepard died, and there was never a moment like this one where everyone gathered together to express their views about what happened, give their opinions on what they want to do next, and address the various audience questions about how it happened and what it means.

In a storytelling sense, it makes it feel like characters don’t notice how big the changes are. Moments that should be poignant or revelatory end up feeling like a bunch of random noise.

Your plan to marry a murderer in exchange for getting him to confess didn't pan out? Man, who could have seen THAT one coming?
Your plan to marry a murderer in exchange for getting him to confess didn't pan out? Man, who could have seen THAT one coming?

When Yuna admits her plan wasn’t very good, we understand that the writer doesn’t expect us to believe this was a great plan. Blame for the mistake is placed on the character, where it belongs. It makes Yuna more interesting by showing the lengths she’s willing to go to in order to protect her friends from “her” problems. We understand that she’s not stupidWell, not by the standards of this world, anyway., she’s simply driven, a little naive, and protective of her friends. This character detail will become crucial when it comes to the moment of truth at the end of her pilgrimage.

Compare this to when Shepard has to use the Reaper technology to go through the Omega-4 relay in Mass Effect 2. She’s risking the life of the entire crew by going through a magic door that has killed everyone who has ever tried to use it. There’s no moment where she says, “This is a terrible gamble. I hate that my friends have to take this risk with me, but it’s what I have to do to save the day.” There isn’t a meeting with all the characters where each of them says something insightful, funny, poignant, or revelatory about the risk they’re all about to take. When they make it to the other side, Shepard doesn’t exclaim, “I can’t believe that worked!”

I point this out not to beat up on poor Mass Effect again. I’m pointing it out because when a writer does their job, we often don’t notice. This little scene under Lake Nonsense doesn’t explain any of the ridiculous geography at work here, but it serves the important purpose of synchronizing the audience with the characters so we can understand why people are doing the things they’re doing.

Yes, this is a shot of gargantuan Sin, which is supposedly somehow lurking under the same water the party is standing in. This is literally impossible for about a dozen different reasons and I have no idea what the writer or set designer were thinking.
Yes, this is a shot of gargantuan Sin, which is supposedly somehow lurking under the same water the party is standing in. This is literally impossible for about a dozen different reasons and I have no idea what the writer or set designer were thinking.

It turns out that while the party is having their big reunion mope, Sin is lurking under the water. There’s music coming from the temple. People are singing the Hymn of the Fayth. That song seems to be playing 24/7 at all the temples. Jecht LOVED that song, and it seems that hearing it makes Sin docile. Or if not docile, then just LESS mass-murder-y. This is the setup for Chekhov’s Hymn, which will become important at the end of the game.

The writer seems to be aware of just how inexplicable this whole lake scenario is, so to escape they push the red button labeled “Sin shows up and magically transports our hero to another part of the world for purposes of plot convenience.” Again.

And so we magically appear on…

Bikanel Island

Lulu you ditz, how is THAT supposed to work? Won't you all end up waiting for each other forever? SOMEONE has to move.
Lulu you ditz, how is THAT supposed to work? Won't you all end up waiting for each other forever? SOMEONE has to move.

Everyone appears, alone, in a strange desert. After some messing around the party reunites. Except for Yuna, who is missing again. Rikku reveals that the Al Bhed probably kidnapped her again. This is the third time they’ve kidnapped her. By this point she should probably start paying them rent.

Rikku offers to lead the party to the Al Bhed home city, which they have imaginatively named “Home”.

When they arrive at Home, they find the place is under attack by Yevon. It’s not clear why this attack is happening now. Maybe Operation Mi’ihen was done in order to get the Al Bhed to commit their best troops and weapons, softening them up for this knockout punch. Or maybe Yevon magically knows Yuna is here and Seymour is still trying to recapture her.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you how flammable metal and sand are.
I'm sure I don't have to tell you how flammable metal and sand are.

The party storms the city and they find the cells where the Al Bhed have been keeping the summoners prisoner to keep them from going on their pilgrimage. But Yuna isn’t here. She was, but then the Yevonites kidnapped her, even though she was already kidnapped at the time.

Who does she think she is? Princess Peach?

Some questions have been forming in the Blitzball-addled mind of Tidus. Finally the light comes on and he asks, “Why do the Al Bhed keep kidnapping summoners?” Rikku breaks the news to him that all pilgrimages inevitably end in martyrdom. He takes it about as well as you’d expect.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Summoners Isaaru and Donna are here, having been captured by the Al Bhed. They argue in their defense, saying that, basically, it’s their choice if they want to martyr themselves.

It’s a pivotal scene, because a lot of earlier moments didn’t make sense until now. This twist hasn’t been pulled out of thin air. You can go back and replay every previous conversation and they all hold up – and are even improved by – this new information. This storyteller knows that a “plot twist” isn’t just an excuse to re-write part of the world, it’s a payoff to something you’ve already written.

I actually really like this scene. It’s moving to see Tidus looking stricken, shouting, “Why didn’t I know?!” At the others. It shows just how out of his depth he is. It also shows that the other members of the party haven’t really been taking him as seriously as they probably should have. He’s an official guardian for Yuna, but nobody told him the things a guardian ought to know.

They say they weren’t trying to deceive him, it’s just that talking about Yuna’s death is hard and nobody wanted to say it. But if any of them thought Tidus was really important, they probably would have sucked it up and told him.

Another interesting character wrinkle is that this is one of the things Yuna liked about him. She liked that he didn’t know. He was having fun on the journey because he had no idea he was escorting her to her death, and his oblivious enthusiasm was actually comforting to her. She likes being surrounded by joy.

Auron, as always, is silent. This moment had to come eventually. None of this matters to him and his plans.

I’d like the scene a little more if it was more transformative – if Tidus acted a little more serious and grown up from here on. But if anything, he’s more brash and irresponsible going forward.

Still, this is a pivotal moment in the story. Tidus (and thus the audience) are finally let in on the first Big Secret. And they’re very likely they’ll assume it’s THE Big Secret, which means the next one will be yet another gut-punch.

A Circle of Secrets

I admit that comparing Final Fantasy X and Mass Effect is a little strange. They’re different stories with radically different tones, from different genres, with a different approach to gameplay and player empowerment. A story beat or character that works in one might be disastrous in the other. Even so, it’s sometimes useful to make the comparison because it illustrates the different ways these stories are constructed.

In Final Fantasy X, Yuna is the group leader and the character with the most agency. Tidus is the audience POV character. Auron is the only characterOn the protagonist side. who sees the big picture. In Mass Effect 1, all three of these attributes are embodied in Commander Shepard.

In Mass Effect 1, a lot of the companion characters are just an extension of Shepard and her quest. They believe what she believes, and their goals align with hers. There’s one moment where this stops being true, and it instantly becomes a point of conflict. When Wrex and Shepard disagree on what to do about Saren’s base, the story must stop until their difference is resolved. The vast majority of conversations take the form of one-one-one chats between Shepard and one of her crew.

Apparently Wakka knows overall less than TIDUS.
Apparently Wakka knows overall less than TIDUS.

Meanwhile, in Final Fantasy X Yuna is basically herding cats, and most conversations are group conversations. There are multiple compartmentalized secrets within the party, and these secrets all contribute to the ongoing tension between the characters and inform their individual character arcs.

Wakka’s distrust of Al Bhed prompts tension within the group because it causes everyone to keep Rikku’s heritage a secret from him. This tension escalates when he says ignorant things about the Al Bhed in front of her. Everyone has to either endure his tirade, or tell him the truth and face the fallout.

Once he knows the truth, the conflict moves from external to internal. Once Wakka knows that one of his friends and loyal allies is an Al Bhed, it becomes that much harder for him to cling to the teachings that insist that Rikku and her people are somehow contributing to the ongoing problems of SpiraAside from the kidnappings, which everyone sort of takes in stride.. And once he sees the followers of Yevon slaughtering the Al Bhed, it becomes even harder for him to resolve this image with what he’s been taught. We in the audience can see this conflict is building, and we’re powerless to do anything about it. We can see that sooner or later, Wakka is going to have to choose between his faith and his friends.

I’m not saying this conflict makes Final Fantasy X “better” than Mass Effect, but it is an illustration of the kind of drama you can’t do with a player-controlled protagonist. If Commander Shepard was running Yuna’s party, we would (quite reasonably) insist that the writers allow us to call Wakka out on his bullshit, possibly with the “Renegade” option to side with him. We wouldn’t accept taking no action in the face of a serious interpersonal conflict simmering away right in the middle of the group.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Well, not by the standards of this world, anyway.

[2] On the protagonist side.

[3] Aside from the kidnappings, which everyone sort of takes in stride.



From The Archives:
 

95 thoughts on “Final Fantasy X Part 12: Bikanel Island

  1. Ninety-Three says:

    Compare this to when Shepard has to use the Reaper technology to go through the Omega-4 relay in Mass Effect 2. He‘s risking the life of the entire crew

    In Mass Effect 1, a lot of the companion characters are just an extension of Shepard and her quest

    I am either pointing out an editing error, or simply commenting on an interesting phenomenon: In each segment, you use a consistent gender for Shepard, but it switches between segments.

    Edit: And in another interesting phenomenon, apparently two consecutive quotes like that are hell on the site’s formatting.

    1. Matt Downie says:

      He’s an either-gendered character, so referring to her by any given gender-label shouldn’t affect how you view him; her gender identity is as flexible as his renegade/paragon stance, and there’s no need to force her into one or the other, no matter how you feel about him.

      (Not a serious comment, by the way; just seeing how torturous I could make that sentence. Sometimes I wish English had a widely accepted pronoun for these situations…)

      1. Fists says:

        I think Shamus’ choice of pronoun might reflect how negative his current train of thought on ME is. He’s on record as believing femshep is Correct but uses the male pronoun when talking about a less-than-good set piece.

        Or maybe I’m just making stuff up…

      2. Nixitur says:

        The singular “they” has actually been a commonly accepted gender-neutral pronoun for hundreds of years. It’s only comparatively recently that people have been criticizing it. Which doesn’t really matter since usage determines what’s correct.

        1. Deadpool says:

          Being super pedantic here, but English language defaults to female for non gendered concepts. “The Protagonist” is always female.

      3. Will says:

        Sometimes I wish English had a widely accepted pronoun for these situations…

        The singular “they” is universally understood, widely accepted, and has a illustrious history including Shakespeare.

    2. The Rocketeer says:

      In Final Fantasy XII, the Occuria are these inhuman, vaguely angelic creatures that speak with two voices overlaid on top of each other, one male and one female. In my LP of the game, I chose the most obtuse possible way of referring to them: use “he” in one sentence, “she” in the next, and “it” in the third. Then back to “he” in the next, and so on.

    3. 4ier says:

      Formatting:
      It seems plausible that the first blockquote is indented to avoid clipping with the gravatar. Because the block fills a line above and below the text, the linebreak that is invisibly inserted after the timestamp gets filled up with the block, so it needs to be indented to avoid overlapping.
      Two blockquotes deeper into a comment wouldn’t be affected by that, let’s find out.

      1. This is the first blockquote.

      2. Blockquote doesn’t even look like a word anymore. :P

      EDIT: That seems to be what happened. :)

  2. Christopher says:

    I’ve ended up trying to play through ME3 lately, partly because of and with the support of that blog series for when I get frustrated. I feel like I want to do the same with FFX, because you’re really selling it well here. I could really go for a good, traditional JRPG. Haven’t played one since Vesperia. The party banter stuff in particular always grinds my gears with regards to the bioware games.

    1. Henson says:

      I’m going through FFX for the first time myself, and it’s been pretty worth it. Shamus’ articles don’t touch on everything going on, so it’s not like you won’t get a fresh experience.

    2. Ringwraith says:

      The Tales games do like sprinkling the little party chats to help flesh out the relationships between characters, which is a neat touch. As well as actual scenes between subsets of the party.
      Also for shoehorning in jokes, many jokes.

      Of the ones I’ve played, the Xillias are my favourites. Doesn’t hurt Alivin’s a great character. (But good grief pick Jude’s perspective, it makes far more sense by itself).

  3. Darren says:

    This series–and the excellent reader commentary–is making me realize how much of a bastard Auron really is. He’s fundamentally right in his goals, but is he an admirable, likable character? Is he really worth our respect given how disinterested he is in anyone outside his schemes? It makes his surprise ghost-voice cameo at the end of FFX-2 to encourage the Gullwings seem a bit like character rehabilitation (though maybe Braska dragged him along?).

    1. Ninety-Three says:

      To steal Rocketeer’s thesis from a much earlier post: Is Auron right though? His goal doesn’t appear to be to beat Sin, he just wants to tear down the pilgrimage. His plan ends after perfectly manipulating the party into killing Yunalesca. Once he does that, he has absolutely no plan for dealing with Sin, and only by the grace of this being a JRPG is the party able to defeat God in a contest of martial prowess.

      There’s a persuasive argument to be made that Auron’s goal is an irresponsible revenge-quest that leaves the world defenseless. It’s an argument I can’t really counter, except by allowing Auron to break the fourth wall and know that it was remotely reasonable for Tidus and Co. to kill God through sheer strength of arms because they’re the protagonists of a JRPG.

      1. DanMan says:

        Right, but isn’t that what the un-sent are? So obsessed with whatever circumstances that led to their deaths that they eventually turn into actual monsters that attack people? You could say that if Auron wasn’t able to get Tidus into this party and/or join it himself, he’s just a couple steps away from completely losing it and going all mass-murder-y

        1. GloatingSwine says:

          No.

          Some unsent degenerate and become fiends, but not all by any means.

          It’s wrong to think of what’s going on in FFX as Auron’s plan either. It’s not.

          It’s the Fayth of Zanarkand’s plan, specifically their plan to commit suicide/free themselves from the endless summoning. Auron is a part of the plan and is in on it, so is Jecht, even though he’s busy being Sin. They know Sin’s true nature and its weakness, they set up Jecht and Tidus to be able to defeat it, Bahamut’s Fayth delivers the information about Yu Yevon to Yuna and Tidus as the alternative means of defeating Sin for good. Auron is only the on-site contact to keep the plan on track, it’s not his plan.

    2. RCN says:

      Technically Auron is right by merit of his plan screwing with Sin’s own plan and cycle. Without Yunalesca, Sin can’t get new uber-aeons to take over and can’t become more powerful.

      Considering the fact that he becomes more powerful each cycle is the reason that technology wasn’t a match to him (he grow more power faster than technology becomes more destructive), there’s a silver lining there.

      The problem comes from the fact that, without the calm, there won’t be time for more development as the world will be locked in a non-ceasing Sin cycle. And who knows how Sin will react to not being able to grow more powerful anymore? Maybe he will destroy the world for good out of spite. Maybe not.

      In the end, though, Auron’s purpose was to end the cycle. And the cycle is more or less unsustainable to begin with. Eventually Sin will simply become too powerful and no uber-aeon will be a match to it. So breaking the cycle is good in the long run. It is just that it will completely screw things over in the short run and probably keep the world of Spira from having a long rung to begin with.

      In any case, Auron doesn’t care. He just wants to rebel against the stupid cycle because it is stupid, unfair and running on fumes. Also, the Maesters are dicks.

  4. Abnaxis says:

    Yeah, I’ve been defending FFX to this point, but from about Home onward the consistency of the setting kind of unravels…

    However, I want to point out that at some point its said that the temple makes the ice at the top of the lake, not that the temple is supported by the ice, which….kiiiinda makes more sense than the physics-defying “hollow lake” it looks like. Like, maybe someone made the temple while the lake was frozen, and that made the lake level underneath fall but the ice remains thanks to temple magic?

    Sin showing up is totally a load of BS though. It might work if you stretch you brain hard enough–maybe Sin pushed up a river upstream from the ocean just so he could show up to spirit the party away, because he knew the plot needed it?

    1. The Rocketeer says:

      Yet in FFX-2, Macalania Temple is said to have collapsed into the lake bottom because the ice above melted after the fayth was vacated. So it’s supported by the ice it generates…? Of course, that’s assuming the canon of the second game is necessarily applicable to the first, which I don’t take for granted.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        That’s what I’m saying–they actually say in FFX that the temple is generating the ice, in the little quite-time chats after the guado fight.

        It’s an implicit rule in these discussion that if you want to say something about the setting, you have to support it with material from FFX not the sequel (which I haven’t played in forever and didn’t finish anyway) or the Ultimania Guide (which I haven’t read and didn’t even know existed until these discussions started)

  5. Ninety-Three says:

    I’m not sure if I should be more confused about how or why Sin keeps transporting the party.

    Is Sin physically crossing these distances while carrying people, or is teleportation? Why did the party get split into two groups? Is Sin doing it on purpose? Is it intended to be harmful? Does Sin do this often, are people aware of it?

    It raises so many questions, and the “drama-first” excuse only goes so far. This is just lazy plotting, and I’m surprised Shamus isn’t being more critical of it. I’d think that maybe there’s only so many words you can write about “The writer’s a lazy hack not bothering to explain their magical plot conveniences”, but then Shamus wrote an entire article about TIM Island.

    1. Hector says:

      I remember this section, and how weirdly it skipped about, and eventually came to the conclusion that some content got cut and this may have been a hasty way of patching the plot up at this point.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        Yeah, my guess is that Yuna was supposed to be kidnapped again after Macalania, and the assault on Home was supposed to A) be better foreshadowed and B) coincide with Yuna’s rescue, but the sequence got cut and Sin-transport was clumsily shoved in its place.

        Heck, I kinda wonder if the “Sin attacks the Al Bhed now Tidus is in Besaid” transition in the beginning was shoved in just to justify this later weird transition (a shipwreck or tech malfunction would have worked just as well as a Sin attack for the former transition narratively speaking, after all).

  6. The Rocketeer says:

    Note that the cutscene of Sin beneath the surface of some body of the water is completely context-free; there’s nothing to indicate that Sin is specifically beneath Macalania, and nothing in-engine at Macalania to suggest Sin is present besides the dialog. This could be footage of Sin in any deep body of water in the world. I think this cutscene was just footage they had lying around, and they used it here to justify the awkward geographic transition. In fact, everything from here to the party’s escape from Bevelle just reeks of running short on money and time, and the game makes some pretty broad leaps in logic to keep the party hitting their marks until you hit the Calm Lands.

    I’m pretty sure this section was heavily cut for time or reworked, and the team focused on rushing the party from place to place in order to maintain the broad strokes of their plot and justify using the very expensive cutscenes they’d already commisioned early in the dev cycle.

    Not that Lulu makes what might be the last reference to Sin’s “toxin.” About that: Sin’s toxin doesn’t seem to be a real thing. Tidus isn’t actually suffering from any such ailment; it was just a convenient lampshade for the mystery of Tidus’ abrupt transition to Spira. Aside from that, only one person in the entire game claims to be affected by Sin’s toxin, and its a survivor of the destruction of Kilika. No survivors of Operation Mi’ihen. No one you meet anywhere along the Pilgrimage. Not Rikku and the Al-Bhed from the beginning of the game around Baaj. Not Tidus himself, nor Auron, nor anyone else in the party, despite their frequent proximity to Sin. Honestly, the evidence points to that one Kilika survivor suffering from shell shock, and Sin’s toxin being an in-universe myth.

    1. Hal says:

      Entirely possible. It’s difficult to do this kind of forensic analysis about a game. You try to piece together the game they were trying to make, the story they were trying to tell. I remember a lot of talk like this with KOTOR2. That game had very obvious breaks to indicate it; quests that led no where, jarring scene shifts without explanation or transition. At least in this case, the writers took the time to say, “Oh no, Sin did this!” It’s an obvious (and not particularly good) lampshade, but they thought to include it, so they have that going for them.

      1. Killbuzz says:

        That’s not a very helpful analogy. Kotor 2 is a game that was cobbled together in a year by a newly formed company working out the garage of their CEO at the time, while Final Fantasy X was made by a company that could afford to have a 100 million marketing budget for one of their previous games, and obviously lengthy development times for any of their games.

        Even so, Kotor 2 is a lot more coherent and better thought-out than Final Fantasy X.

    2. Syal says:

      I’d agree; it looks like there’s sun above Sin in that shot, and no ice in sight. Likely a shot originally from Operation Mi’ihen or Kilika.

      I’ll point out The DarkId thought the party was supposed to be standing in the city on Sin’s back here, which I never got the impression of and shows how vague this bit is.

      1. The Rocketeer says:

        “Standing on Sin’s back” is just barely on this side of possible. Sin actually has some sort of city ruins, or some simulacrum of such, embedded into his back. The party might be standing in them. I wonder if the Save Sphere is there on Sin’s back, too? Boy, wouldn’t that be handy.

        But really, the idea is just too damn silly, even for this game.

        1. Syal says:

          When you see the Arrival In Bevelle cutscene, you realize that nothing is too silly for this game.

        2. Shoeboxjeddy says:

          You do hop up on Sin’s back to fight it later, so… it’s not that crazy?

    3. Decius says:

      “Sin’s toxin” being a euphemism for PTSD makes a lot of sense if you look at how the other characters use the term around Tidus.

  7. Hal says:

    Speaking about the dramatic differences between ME and FFX, you see a lot of that kind of tension during tabletop RPGs. There’s a certain level of drama you can get with single-author story-telling. The more input the players are allowed to have, the less control there is over that kind of drama. You can’t tell your players how their character feels about something, or tell them how their character should react to something. Some GMs try, of course, but it goes over . . . poorly.

    Usually that GM is told if he wants this kind of control over the narrative, he should just write a novel instead of trying to make it happen with an RPG.

    1. Joe Informatico says:

      Just like “every character has secrets” can make for good drama in more linear, directed fiction, but in a tabletop RPG, they’re ticking time bombs that can blow up party unity. It’s not that you can never have them in your game, but there has to be a lot of trust among the players and GM–everyone really needs to be on the same page about the themes and direction of the game.

      1. Hal says:

        In my experience, PC secrets aren’t ticking time bombs; more like ticking party poppers. The secret might actually be significant in some fashion, but most players aren’t great improv artists, and so whatever drama is there gets brushed over rather perfunctorily. Usually there’s more surprise on the part of the players than the actual characters; by the time the players process everything, the characters’ responses tend to be, “Oh, okay.”

        Of course, I’ve never played with anyone whose character was truly subversive of the party’s purpose, so perhaps I haven’t had a chance to experience real time bombs. But even then, that can be a disaster at the table top the way it wouldn’t be in a novel. Think Cait Sith from FF7 turning around and making amends, or Kain from FF6 shaking off his mind control. Most subversive player secrets don’t end up like that; the player just ends up looking like a jerk who screwed over the party for his own jollies.

        1. tmtvl says:

          I played a double agent character for a couple of campaigns (about… 10 years ago I think?) and the GM forgot about that about every other game so I always had to write a note to pass him. We also used note passing for stuff like thieving skills and stuff like that, so the other players didn’t find out until the end of the last campaign I played him, where he betrayed the party causing them to wind up in the enemy prison.

          Fortunately we had a good group, so we all laughed it off. Though it took a good while until they trusted my next character, was an enemy guard who they talked into converting to their side. The double agent got killed later by another player, which was a nice bit of comeuppance.

      2. Joshua says:

        I think it works only if the system encourages it. White Wolf games, Paranoia, and probably a number of others explicitly encourage party members to have their own secret sub-goals. It’s not a big annoyance when one person reveals a surprise twist when every other player there was doing the same thing.

        For games like D&D, based around the concept of players working together, it works…less well.

        I remember reading a character optimization board a few years ago when 4th was the latest edition, and someone was asking how to make their character able to take out the entire rest of the party. His explanation was that he was a Necromancer and that he might want to preemptively attack them in case they decided to attack him when he was found out.

        Most users responded with combinations of “Why would you want to do that?” or “This is the worst edition to try to take out other players”.

        I wanted to add that it was practically impossible for one PC to pull a Face/Heel turn and take out the rest of the party. Even if he were to somehow accomplish it within the rules, the likely result would be that the DM would simply respond with “Ok, that was interesting. Um, Steve, please leave my house and you’re not welcome to come back. Ok, where were we before Steve’s character mysteriously and spontaneously fell over dead?”

      3. Epopisces says:

        In my current game there are two kinds of secrets. The kinds the DM has created using the backstories we provided him that no players know (party member A’s father was murdered by part member B’s employer!) and the kinds individual characters keep from other characters, but all the players know out of game (party member C is actually an Oracle of the Apocalypse, not a Cleric of the war-god!).

        The DM is pretty adept at turning the former kind of secret into the latter kind (party member B learns about what her organization has done, but A doesn’t find out). This helps deal with the improv aspect Hal mentions as well as smooths over potential metagame tension. The suspense then comes from when the bombshell will drop to the larger party (at least among the better roleplayers in the group–two members of the party can’t keep a secret irl and, naturally, neither can their characters :P).

  8. skeeto says:

    I thought your Chekhov’s Gun link was going to point to this classic: Antiques Roadshow – Chekhov’s Gun.

    1. Christopher says:

      Thanks for the link, I had a good laugh!

  9. Volvagia says:

    Do Tales of Symphonia next. It’s very similar narratively, but with characters you don’t want to throttle as much and environment design and world-building that’s not nonsense.

    1. Christopher says:

      Is there even any way for Shamus to play it? You can’t play Gamecube games on a Wii U, and he hasn’t got a PS3. I suppose if there’s good GC emulation out there.

      1. Volvagia says:

        There was a Steam version released this February. Yes, he’d have to find a patch due to the issues with the initial release, but it’s doable.

        1. Christopher says:

          Oooh! Sounds like a gift option to me. I’ve been wondering if there was something to gift him that he’d get anything out of but wouldn’t buy on his own since the Huniepop thing.

      2. sofawall says:

        Dolphin Emulator recently gained the ability to boot every single GC game ever officially released. The vast majority are completely playable.

        1. King Marth says:

          Last I recall, Shamus has a moral stance against piracy, even if the original developer is paid in some way (in the ever-present “I run a cracked version but I totally bought a legal copy” defense). If companies take good games and don’t make them available for purchase, or only provide horribly DRM-crippled versions, then Shamus doesn’t get to play them at all. Silly producers, leaving money on the table.
          Plus side, the steam release makes this a non-issue, provided the technical problems are tolerable.

          I’ll second the recommendation, by the way. One thing that Tales of Symphonia definitely has is character development. It’s subtle as well, I only really noticed on my first New Game+ how insufferable Lloyd starts out as since I had gotten used to him with a game’s worth of wisdom. Colette, though… At least Yuna didn’t try to marry any other murderers after the first attempt failed. I’m not convinced that Colette would have stopped trying if she had been in the same position.

    2. Grudgeal says:

      ‘Not nonsense’ is a bit of a strong description I think. I mean, the Tales games are pretty infamous for having this strange type of all-over-the-place form of technological where knights and sorcery are mixed with 20th century social structures and technology provided with ‘magic’. Once the full extent of the Cruxis organization and their setup gets revealed it’s fairly obvious the whole worldbuilding was based on ‘because it’s cool’, and the story has more sudden twists than an impromptu 60ies nostalgia party.

  10. BlusterBlaster says:

    Doesn’t Tidus also know that Rikku is an Al Bhed?

    1. Hal says:

      Good point! And there’s no overlap between just those two circles here.

      1. Paul Spooner says:

        Of course, then you just combine the blue and yellow circles.

      2. Nimrandir says:

        Yeah, but four-set Venn diagrams are awkward as all get out. I don’t blame Shamus for that one.

    2. Droid says:

      A way to easily rectify this is to swap the indigo and yellow circles and paint Tidus into the overlap between yellow and blue (that is the empty indigo-yellow overlap right now).

      1. Shamus says:

        Okay. Put up a fixed version of the diagram. Hopefully I didn’t introduce any new problems.

        1. Alexander The 1st says:

          Well…part of me wants to point out that the bigger reveal than Rikku being an Al Bhed is the reveal that Yuna is half Al-Bhed.

          Given, you know, Yuna’s the one Wakka went and decided to be a Guardian for.

          It’s been a while since I got to the Rikku reveal, so I’ve forgotten if that reveal actually happens or not to Wakka, but it totally should, if it didn’t/

          1. Syal says:

            It happens right here on the lake, Rikku and Brother have a shouting match in Al Bhed after the tank fight.

            1. Abnaxis says:

              No, it happens on the airship right after Home, when her uncle–the leader of the Al Bhed–is all about “I’m going to go rescue my niece now,” and Wakka’s like “wait, niece?”

              It’s not a major moment, but it’s there. By that time Wakka’s already accepted Rikku so it isn’t so traumatic.

              1. Syal says:

                …well, ‘that reveal’ is a bit ambiguous.

                Rikku’s the big moment on the lake that’s one of Wakka’s first major shocks, then the Yuna reveal is on the tail end of killing a Maester and saving the Al Bhed from an army of Yevonites so Wakka’s just kind of like “well, I guess it figures I was wrong about that too”.

  11. KarmaTheAlligator says:

    That lake bottom isn’t just the bottom of the boss fights area, but also the adjacent ones going to the temple, and the temple one, that’s why it’s so big (you can see how big it is on the way to the temple proper).

    As for the ankle deep water, I always assumed they landed on a part that was shallow, since you have buildings and ruins next to them (and those need some ground), and Sin is just chilling next to them.

  12. The Rocketeer says:

    I think Home is a pretty good demonstration of the debatable usefulness of machina in Spira. Here, we see that, in total isolation from Yevon, the Al Bhed have been free to construct a city with no limits on technology but their own resources and ingenuity.

    Sin never attacked this place? It’s implied that Sin targets cities based on their population, so maybe their actual tech level doesn’t matter. But then, the only place Sin ever attacks is Kilika, a little pile of straw huts. So maybe oceanside convenience is a big factor for Sin, over population or sensing the presence of tech.

    But then Luca and Bevelle are both right on the waterfront. Luca is home to the most widely-known technology in the world, and Bevelle is secretly built around tons of ancient tech… which is, what, still left over from when Bevelle was Sin’s first, largest, most specific target when it was created?

    The game throws up a smokescreen about the Crusaders working hard to keep Sin away from Luca, and this must go for Bevelle, too. I don’t buy that. No one should buy that. The Crusaders might as well cover themselves in barbecue sauce and have a sweet, smokey orgy in the Calm Lands; it would never distract Sin for a millisecond if it decided it wanted to level any given city, much less the two most tempting targets on the planet.

    So Sin hasn’t attacked Home despite its huge machina presence and its presumably high population. How do they live? Well, apparently machina allowed them to make a city even in the barren Sanubia Sands, but we don’t actually get a chance to see what life in Home is like. The place is already being destroyed when we arrive. Between you and me, though? The place looks like it sucks.

    There’s a fundamental problem with the machina ban in Spira: Spira has no problems machina could solve. Spira is mostly a Paradise. They don’t seem to be stuck subsistence farming; in a non-industrial society, growing food should be 80% or more of the population’s living, but aside from a handful of fishermen, Spira seems to be able to establish large cities like Bevelle and Luca without anyone growing anything. No one has any sort of disease or ailment that medicine could solve. And the setting has white magic for that, anyway. There is no sort of daily struggle or large project that machina could hasten or ease for anyone.

    Spira is a Luddite paradise. The entire world is beautiful, everyone has enough, everyone is healthy. The only thing people want is their dumb nonsense sports tournament, and they have that. In fact, Luca is a prime example of another problem: the Temple does, in fact, allow machina for many things; they even have systems to broadcast games throughout Luca. Yevon’s ban on machina is a fairly soft ban, and the general ease of Spiran life blurs the line of how much is actually restricted by the Temple and how much people have simply chosen to forego.

    The big, specific machina ban is weaponry. Anything more advanced than a sword is a no-no, and this is both the only example of how the machina ban makes life harder for the average person and a genuinely sensible thing for Yevon to restrict. The only real hardship Spira seems to suffer is attacks by fiends and by Sin itself. Machina weaponry would help defend the people from monsters, but the presence of martial machina would also attract Sin. Or not; I mean, it never attacks Home, or Luca, or Bevelle. It actually makes no sense.

    But when Sin does attack, it seems to retaliate in kind to any threat it perceives. It levels half of Kilika more or less by passing near it. It atomizes the Crusaders after they shoot at it. Leaving the average Spirans to cower in their bungalows means having the remaining half of the villagers rebuilding, but putting guns in their hands means having a fiend-infested crater.

    So, Home is inexplicably safe from Sin despite its technological presence, its presumably large population, and its lack of nonsense Crusader protection. They don’t seem to live any better than other Spirans, since regular Spirans have no problems for machina to solve. Actually, Home seems discretely worse than everywhere else, since they live in a fucking desert instead of a maritime tropical Paradise, and their only building material is steel. Unless one of their earliest reclaimed technologies was central air conditioning, the Al Bhed probably all just want to fucking die, or have already succumbed to their oven-dwelling.

    But they do have weapons to defend themselves. The Al Bhed build or salvage robots like nobody’s business, and they all seem to carry guns and grenades. So they should have no problem with fiends. In fact, running with the logic that Operation Mi’ihen was a scheme on Yevon’s part to discredit faith in machina weaponry by pitting it against an opponent that no amount of martial force could surmount (until later, when it does), the Al Bhed should be terrifying opponents. Except that the main party regularly defeats machina, up to and including a tank. And when we find home, it’s being hopelessly overwhelmed by the Guado. How did the Guado get here, again? Nevermind. How can they summon fiends? Why don’t the fiends attack the Guado, too? Can Guado command fiends? Whatever. Yevon’s evil! Don’t question it!

    So the Al Bhed get their shit ruined by elves summoning Dual Horns, Garudas, and Bombs, which the party has been defeating with melee weapons and magic for a while now. But not in these numbers, sure. How many Guado are here, though? Home apparently shelters the entire Al Bhed race. Apparently that amounts to, what, twenty dudes, most of whom are on the Blitzball team? Nothing about this attack makes sense. Nevermind! The point is, the Al Bhed, who should be the most dangerous people on the planet, get facerolled by elves, dogs, and birds. It’s really worth asking: is machina weaponry actually worthless, too?

    But the entire place gets wiped out by a missile barrage from the airship. In fact, this airship will be the MVP of our party for the rest of the game. But I’m not counting it. Airships have always been in a special class of their own, from the earliest days of the series. It doesn’t matter what you have: airship always wins, except against a better airship. The game needs to pony up some evidence of machina superiority aside from the airship, or I’m accepting it as a myth. Of course, it turns out that Al Bhed machina was actually kid stuff and Bevelle has been hoarding all the good ones for the past thousand years. Nevermind shit-tier M1 Garands and potato masher grenades; Bevelle has that, and also flamethrowers and heavy mortars and over-bulked punchbots and even a robot that kicks people over the horizon. The party, again, beats these by the drove.

    Sure, I accept that our party is just more badass than everyone else on Earth. That sort of takes the tension out of everything, but whatever. I guess you can rationalize that, canonically, the party relies on Aeons to fight the really ridiculous stuff, like Bevelle’s robot army. Except that that’s impossible in the scene coming up, where Yuna is captive. And all the tough endgame bosses have cheap anti-Aeon gimmick moves to force you to fight them straight-up. Whatever. Isn’t it kinda fitting that Yevon tells everyone that machina are evil, and then they have all the most and biggest machina, but they’re also totally evil? Wild how that works out. Doesn’t this just bear out Yevon’s point that relying on machina is pointless against Sin, and that only a party of guardians and their summoner has any chance?

    You ever wonder why summoners just don’t gather in one big group in Bevelle before setting off on Pilgrimage, and just steamroll their way across Spira with all the Aeons at once, and like a hundred guardians and the stongest Crusader veterans? I guess that would screw up the setting. Sorry. Just popped in my head.

    I forgot where I was going with this.

    Whatever. Don’t think about it. Tidus and Yuna love each other, it’s so poignant. Yevon’s bad. Beat Sin. Machina? What? Bad? Airship! How did the Guado get here? Did they ride Sin with us from Macalania with us? How did we do that? Is Sin’s toxin real? Crazy how we never risk that. How’d Yuna get abducted again? We’re about to fly an airship to Bevelle and she’ll already be there. Whatever. I bet Auron knew Home would get wrecked, too, and didn’t tell anyone just to be a jerk. Did Square butcher all this for budget reasons, or did they just kinda forget? Were they drunk? Can Guado teleport? If teleportation is a thing, can someone teach it to our party? Can we summon fiends? Whatever. Airship! What the hell is Home supposed to be, anyway? What are those giant towers? What are those pulleys for? Machina? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR HAIR?!

    1. Henson says:

      I think this is my favorite comment so far this week. Analytical and entertaining.

      A few points:
      (1) I would argue against your claim that the airship ‘doesn’t count’. It’s a machina, it does machina stuff, and the fact that it’s unique doesn’t change that. It may be an exception, but it most certainly counts.

      (2) I wish I knew what percentage of the machina the Al Bhed use are all salvaged from the past, and what percentage they construct on their own. If they make most of their own machina (as they made Home), then the weakness of these machina makes sense, given that the Al Bhed are struggling to rebuild what was lost, both in machines and in their knowledge of them. Yevon has a history of repressing the Al Bhed, presumably so that their machina won’t progress past the infant stages. And the Airship makes sense as a very useful device since it’s a relic from the past where machina were well-established.

      (3) When a group of a summoner and guardians defeats Sin, everyone in the party other than the summoner and one of the guardians learns the truth about the Final Summoning, and then they all go back to Spira. This puts pressure on the Maesters of ages past to keep Pilgrimage groups to a low number, so that the secret can be more easily controlled.

      (4) I’ve often wondered if Sin is particular about attacking coastal areas, but this may also be a preference of Jecht as well. As a champion Blitzball player, he’s probably more comfortable in water, so that may affect where he goes as Sin. But then, you’d think he’d also have a tendency to head for the Blitz sphere in Luca…and as for Sins of the past, I dunno?

    2. Henson says:

      (5) Guns are actually not as useless as you think. They weren’t enough for the Al Bhed in their defense of Home, but the threat of guns was enough to take the entire party prisoner in Bevelle. This would also imply that that either the Maesters have better guns, or that they have the numbers in weaponry that the Al Bhed don’t.

      1. The Rocketeer says:

        Yes, the party is taken prisoner by gun-wielding monks… after slicing through crowds of gun- and flamethrower-wielding monks backed by heavy mortars and kick-bots. Guns are worthless, but the hand of the writer is heavy indeed.

        After all, we have to have a “we’re in jail, oh we escaped” sequence in every single one of these games, even if it’s a really, really lazy one, like the one in Bevelle.

        1. Henson says:

          Good point.

          1. Hector says:

            It’s Final Fantasy. All weapons are pretty much equal, although swords are more “heroic” in a general sense. The important part is the wielder.

            Speaking of which, both Tidus and Auron use swords, even if they are of a different type. Why? Well, my guess is that it’s because is literally the hero of another story – one in which we only ever see small snippets of.

    3. Syal says:

      There's a fundamental problem with the machina ban in Spira: Spira has no problems machina could solve.

      While I agree with most of the post, I don’t think that’s a problem, it think it’s setting flavor. The Al Bhed are the counter-culture, but they aren’t presented as being right, really. The party doesn’t beat Sin by embracing the Al Bhed way, they beat it by coming up with something else entirely*. The machina ban isn’t important to the plot; you could replace it with a ban on eating meat and the narrative wouldn’t be affected. All you would lose is the visual flair of fighting Al Bhed technology monsters.

      *(the thing they come up with is dumb. I’m holding to my fan idea that Yunalesca was enhancing Yevon’s power and nobody realized.)

    4. MrGuy says:

      There's a fundamental problem with the machina ban in Spira: Spira has no problems machina could solve. Spira is mostly a Paradise. They don't seem to be stuck subsistence farming; in a non-industrial society, growing food should be 80% or more of the population's living, but aside from a handful of fishermen, Spira seems to be able to establish large cities like Bevelle and Luca without anyone growing anything

      But what do they EAAAAAATTTT??????

      Ah! My versimilitude!

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Chocobo eggs.

    5. Grudgeal says:

      Whatever. Don't think about it.

      I think THAT was where you were going with this. Because the writer didn’t, else there would probably be some answers to these objections.

  13. Orillion says:

    With regards to that last bit, Bioware DID sort of try to give us that, once. The problem was, because of the (imo kind of unfair) complaints about re-used level assets and the like, Dragon Age 2 is probably the most critically reviled Bioware title to date.

    Which is a shame. Hawke was a very interesting character, and not having full control over his thoughts like you do with the Grey Warden or Shepard (to an extent) gave him real personality and allowed him to hold onto opinions and knowledge that the player wasn’t necessarily privy to. All while still allowing the player a good amount of control over him (class, sex, overarching personality). I doubt we’ll see his like again in AAA RPGs.

    For that matter, the other main characters in DA2 often talked to each other. Rarely more than two at a time, but it still gave us a good insight into what everyone thought about each other by showing us, rather than having them just tell Hawke.

    1. RCN says:

      In Dragon Age: Origins they also talked to each other. Every few minutes they start bantering away. Sometimes even three characters at once. My favorites were between Zevran and Wynne.

    2. Grudgeal says:

      Baldur’s Gate 2 gave you the chance to ask each of your companions (if you brought any) about their motivation before facing the final boss and letting them affirm their firm belief that said boss needed his hiney stomped. It was just a quick question-and-response thing, but it was there.

  14. Hector says:

    To contradict a poster in an earlier FFX thread, I think the game shows Auron as having a deep concern for the wellbeing of both the party and Spira, even though he’s not necessarily fond of many of the people in it. He’s the kinda guy who probably couldn’t crack a smile if the world depended on it, and wouldn’t admit to liking anybody very much if asked. Yet, he’s gone to great lengths, not to force people to do what he wants, but to give them the choice to do so.

    His presence on the journey is important, because (A) he can cut through the armor dudes, and (B) he’s making sure nobody else can manipulate Yuna as he, Jecht, and Braska were manipulated, and that going forward, people wouldn’t be making these choices blindly anymore. He sees that the world has to change, that the existing system is deeply corrupt – not just the Maesters, but also that Yevon and Yunalesca have been warping things to their own ends. And of course, he isn’t about to let Braska’s daughter die for the same false hope. Auron never forces them to do things his own way, but he makes sure they all end up learning the hard facts before they have to choose. He knows they won’t readily believe some of the nasty truths right away, but he does ensure they learn those truths.

    We later learn Auron set Kimarhi to guard Yuna and later helped Tidus grow up, both before and during the events of the game. He and Jecht would use their link as the means to find a way to end the cycle for good, and let the world move on. I don’t think it’s an accident that we see the Wall of the Fayth, stressed and exhausted from a dream that never ends, because it’s a symbol of what Spira is also going through.

    So why bring it up for this post? Well, it’s because Auron is, to me anyway, faintly amused by the events going on here. The group is struggling to put together what they know and eventually understand the weight of what’s going on (especially Tidus), and this is quite similar to the events that Auron went through earlier with Braska and Jecht. AT the same time, the big dramatic bits and battles for the rest of the group really don’t mean anything in the larger picture, which Auron understands well. He’s a classic mentor figure, but at the same time we eventually learn he’s gone beyond humanity. Unlike the Maesters or Seymor, or the Fiends for that matter, he retained his essential sympathy for the living. Even if he has to drag the people he cares for halfway across reality, kill demigods, and face off against a the kaiju armor of blind nigh-invincible spirit, he’s going to doit. His friends died for a lie, so Auron is going to make sure the people he cares about have a chance to live for something true.

    And he’s gonna look damn good doing it and have a few shots of the hard stuff along the way, because REASONS.

    1. Considering his overdrives, I think calling it simply “hard stuff” is a massive, massive understatement.

      Unless we’re going by a Dwarf Fortress/Dungeons of Dredmor scale, in which case it’d probably be fairly mid-range.

      1. RCN says:

        Ron Swanson would drink to that.

  15. Blunderbuss09 says:

    I want to throttle Tidus as much as the next person but I was so 100% on his side during the Big Reveal that I angry that he wasn’t given a big enough chance to tell everyone to go fuck themselves.

    He’s an immature little shit, sure, but he’s also a nice guy who likes making people happy and encouraging others to succeed. And all of that good cheer has been rubbing her incoming death in her face this entire time. That’s such a betrayal to what he is as a person I don’t think you could make a bigger gut punch.

    He deserved better than the tantrum he throws in that scene. He deserved some real heartbroken anger at the party who let him hurt Yuna over and over. As said this should have been a transformative moment for him and the others, where he both grows up and they take him more seriously, but at the cost of souring their relationships.

  16. MadTinkerer says:

    I’ve noticed that I tend to have a habit of completely forgetting the worst / most ridiculous parts of games I don’t love. I’ll remember frustrating things I fought through and beat to get to the best parts of games, but other times, after certain parts of games, my brain goes “Nope, never happened. Not worth remembering EVER.”.

    [Unintentionally long rant about Half Life 1 edited out. The point was that I had a bad experience with just a couple parts of Half Life, so for a while I hated a great game because I couldn’t get past the part I hated the most, but I’ve learned to forgive it. Incidentally, those parts were cut out of Black Mesa, so that says a lot.]

    Anyway, there’s no part of FFX as bad as that one part of Half Life that made me forget an otherwise mostly-great game. But I really don’t remember the lake at all. This is the first part of FFX that Shamus has written about that I can’t remember at all, even though I know I played the game all the way through.

    “which they have imaginatively named “Home””

    Bear in mind that English is an exotic foreign language that makes everything sound cooler. It’s not necessarily the developers fault when translators make the mistake of not-translating things that are already English and the original intent vanishes because you don’t think your own language is exotic, foreign, or especially cool-sounding. See also: the entire lyrics for “Eyes on Me” and “Simple and Clean”.

    By contrast, “Otherworld” is the best part of any Final Fantasy soundtrack ever. (YMMV.)

    “Who does she think she is? Princess Peach?”

    I don’t know if this was the intent or not, but I took Yuna’s constant kidnappings as a running gag. There may be a pun involved? I’ve often discovered that when something doesn’t initially seem to make sense in Japanese games or Anime, there’s probably a pun that just couldn’t easily be translated.

    “There are multiple compartmentalized secrets within the party, and these secrets all contribute to the ongoing tension between the characters and inform their individual character arcs.”

    The thing about Final Fantasy X is: there are parts of it that I really like. This is one of those parts. Compared to all of the earlier games, I think VIII’s story doesn’t hold up as well as X, but VIII had better gameplay and much better progression / management systems, and otherwise I-IX are all just better than X. But just because I don’t think X is very good for a FF game, personally disappointing in important ways, it’s still very good in parts.

    (Then there’s the fact that XIII took the bar and lowered it so far that it retroactively made X and even X-2 worthy entries in the series by comparison. I’ll probably never finish XIII, but I’d play through X again.)

    1. Abnaxis says:

      Wait, Home is called “Home” in the Japanese version?

      That’s interesting.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        Wait, are Brother and Father also “Brother” and “Father” in the original version?

    2. MilesDryden says:

      I just love it when people make wild claims about the quality of XIII and then immediately admit that they never finished the game. It’s so adorable!

      1. Chalkbrood says:

        It’s almost like you can easily infer if something is bad based on many hours of experiencing that thing

  17. Mike says:

    Maybe I’m misremembering this, but I don’t think Sin is lurking under the ankle-deep water, the water is ankle deep because they’re *standing on Sin’s back!* If you watch the cutscenes of Sin closely, you can see that he has a little collection of ruined towers perched right in the middle of his head, and I’m about 90% sure that those are the towers they’re stood between at the bottom of Lake Macalania.

    Maybe I’m wrong about this, but that’s how I’ve always parsed that scene. It doesn’t explain why Sin is at Macalania in the first place, but it does explain how he shows up out of nowhere.

    1. Phantos says:

      I think you might be right. Even the “glaciers” around the towers are a very similar shape to some of Sin’s body parts.

  18. Rob S says:

    Don’t you just hate it when meaningless non-standard measurements are used? So just how big is a football pitch? Is it bigger than an airport? Smaller than a parking lot? Does it weigh more than a city bus?

    1. Abnaxis says:

      If it helps, it’s roughly the same size whether you’re talking American football or what everyone else calls football. Rectangular, roughly 100-120m on one side, between 50-75m on the other side

      1. Syal says:

        I thought a football pitch would be the distance a football is thrown during a hike, so like 5 or 10 yards.

        It would be exactly the weight of a city bus when pitched to Jerome “The Bus” Bettis.

        1. Abnaxis says:

          “Pitch” is another words for “field” that I hear sports people use sometimes. I’ll hear someone say “player A is running down the pitch” or “player B goes face-down on the pitch”.

          Is “pitch” not a term used elsewhere?

          1. Syal says:

            I think most Americans associate a pitch in a sports game with baseball pitchers. “The pitch” could be either a throw or possibly poured building material, “a pitch” is usually a throw.

            (I’m going to throw in a dictionary link just because I think it’s interesting how many meanings ‘pitch’ has.)

    2. MrGuy says:

      As we all know, the best unit of measure for computer geeks is Libraries of Congress.

      The Library of Congress in Washington DC occupies 3 city blocks, all of which are rectangular in shape. At a sightly rough conversion 10 blocks to a mile, this means the Library of Congress covers about 0.03 square miles.

      Wolfram Alpha claims a FIFA football pitch can cover 0.00417 square miles.

      Thus, a football pitch is 0.139 Libraries of Congress in size. Or, if you like, about 7.2 football pitches would fit on the land occupied by the Library of Congress.

      Hope this helps!

      1. MichaelGC says:

        And so what’s that in Sid’s rooms?

  19. MrGuy says:

    Yeah I get that, but there's water here at the bottom and it's only ankle deep. And it's not frozen, even though this should be colder than the ice overhead.

    Water, unlike almost every other liquid, freezes from the top down, not the bottom up. Most liquids increase in density as they cool until they freeze, and since the solid is heavier than the corresponding liquid they will start freezing from the bottom.

    Water is densest at 4C, which is slightly above freezing. Cool water below 4C, and the colder water will rise above the relatively warmer 4C water at the bottom (deep ocean water is pretty much all at about 4C). Also, ice is less dense than water, so ice forms at the surface of a pool, not the bottom, and stays there. It’s likely life as we know it wouldn’t have evolved if water didn’t have these 2 highly unusual properties.

    So, yeah. Water under ice should be less cold than the ice above it.

    Of course, the ice shouldn’t usually be floating 20 feet above the water, so yeah.

    </nitpick>

    1. Pinkhair says:

      Maybe Sin busting in drained the lake, leaving the ice?

  20. Syal says:

    I like that line about staying in one place when they split up; it’s a cute nod to the gameplay part where the party member is just standing around waiting for you to find them.

    I miss the pre-PS2 days with the adorable knee-high cities on the overworld map. You never had to wonder why a 30-foot lake had a mile of walking space underneath it, because the 30 feet was the overworld measurement.

    1. Phantos says:

      That is kind of the drawback to making the graphics less symbolic and more literal.

      Square-Enix probably found that out the hard way in VIII. Since characters didn’t get squished little sprites to represent them like the towns did, Squall seemed to be towering over entire cities on the overworld map.

  21. Soldierhawk says:

    Okay, I’ll finish reading this article in just a second, but I ABSOLUTELY JUST HAD to come down to the comments, after a long fit of laughter, to express the fact that the lake near Macalania Temple will FOREVER be known to me as “Lake Nonsense.”

    This is my favorite thing ever, and thank you for it.

  22. natureguy85 says:

    Oh, I got tons of crap from fanboys on the Bioware forum for saying that characters should have reacted more to major events, or at least acknowledge them. This was a big problem with both Shepard’s death and the “foreshadowing” of the Catalyst on Thessia with the comment about some force driving the Reapers.

    I didn’t mind them going through the “magic door” because they found the magic key in the IFF. Yeah, they should test it but whatever; the story was already goofy. What was more ridiculous was TIM having found a Reaper and not mentioning it before. And of course, the dumbest thing in the story, get everyone on the shuttle for “the next mission.”

  23. LB says:

    Yo Shamus, they were standing ON TOP of Sin. That’s what those inexplicable ruins are (they’re the ones on Sin’s head that you explore as the final dungeon later). That’s why the water is ankle-deep yet Sin is under it.

    That point is not clearly shown at all, and the rest of the stuff there makes no sense, sure. But thought you should know!

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