T w e n t y S i d e d
Tidus is still stuck in a dreamworld, and a ghost kid is taking a huge exposition dump on him.
I think it’s interesting to compare this kid (while he isn’t explicitly named in the story, I’m going to call him Bahamut from now on) to Some Kidd from the end of Mass Effect 3. In both cases you’re using a transparent ghost child to deliver exposition in bulk. Both are introduced / hinted / foreshadowed in the opening scene, are hinted at in visions during the story, and then show up again in the third act where they explain things. Both are cryptic and mysterious and they even seem to be about the same age.
Some Kid Dreamed
Here is why I think Final Fantasy X gets away with this plot device while Mass Effect 3 doesn’t:
1. Clarity of purpose.
In Mass Effect 3, the Star Child is being pulled in at least three different directions. He’s being used for brute-force pathos when Some Kidd dies and the game plays sad piano music. He’s supposed to represent the millions of people lost to the Reapers and he’s supposed to drive Sheppard emotionally. But he’s also the spokesman for our ultimate adversary, the evil Reapers. And finally he’s a little exposition giver.
These three things don’t work together. The game tells us we should feel sorry for him and we don’t. Then the game insists that we trust him and we don’t. The failure of his two main purposes means that even his expositional dialog fails.
For contrast, Bahamut is long dead and isn’t expected to be one of the emotional pillars of the game. He’s just a mystery child. He’s not our enemy. He’s just here to explain things.
2. No burden of convoluted cannon.
Mass Effect 3 wasn’t a stand alone game. It was act three of what was supposedly a single story. The Star Child didn’t just need to explain the Reapers, he needed to do so in a way that didn’t contradict either of the two previous games. Those games had made big promises, so Star Child had a lot to live up to and was greatly constrained by a great tangle of lore.
Meanwhile, Bahamut just needs to concern himself with the lore of a single game.
3. The dialog wheel makes exposition harder.
Tidus isn’t the brightest and he’s barely hanging on to this dream world. He’s just trying to figure out what’s going on before he wakes up again. We understand he can’t get all the answers, and we don’t expect him to.
But Mass Effect 3 had our hero in a situation where the player was supposedly free to talk. Sure, the Reapers were kicking the crap out of the Alliance, but players felt like they had another five minutes to ask questions. Which leads to the frustration of, “Why can’t I ask this perfectly obvious and reasonable question?”
4. This isn’t the set-up for a decision.
This is a really important point. When you ask the player to make decisions, it will naturally and unavoidably intensify their demands for clear information, leaving you much less room to leave things vague and undefined. While we can accept characters that make bad choices based on emotional state and hunches, players themselves are usually going to want to make the most informed choices possible.
The Star Child was presenting Shepard with a choice that was going to impact the lives of every single person in the galaxy. This requires that Shepard be informed and understand not just the origin of the problem, but what the result of his decision will be. When we can’t get that information, it robs the decision of its significance. We get frustrated with the dialog because it won’t let us clear this up.
Bahamut doesn’t have this problem. This is just exposition. We (the player) aren’t being asked to make a decision on behalf of all of Spira. If Tidus was about to push a button to either blow up Zanarkand or restore Old Zanarkand, then you can bet players would want to understand what those two outcomes meant before they made their choice.
5. This isn’t the finale.
In Mass Effect 3, we went all the way to the very end of the story and then the writer tried to explain everything at once. Here in Final Fantasy X, we’re being given the exposition well before the climax, so we have time to reflect on it.
Back to Reality. Sort of.
Tidus snaps out of this vision and the party continues on, leaving the player shaking their head and wondering what they’re supposed to make of all this.
I’ve always found the next section to be kind of annoying. The party has to pass through some caves. To do that, they need to solve some basic timing puzzles and our swimmers (Tidus, Wakka, and Rikku) need to fight some monsters. We’ve just had a huge boss fight, followed by some major revelations, and we can tell we’re right on the threshold of Zanarkand. The story has been building up the tension as we approach the city, and now we have more questions than ever before. But instead of crossing the threshold we end up screwing around doing dumb puzzles and fighting monsters that just feel so unimportant right now. It’s not a long sequence, but I’ve always felt like it killed the pacing.
I can see why the game designer put the puzzles here. We just had the pre-Seymour cutscene and his boss fight. We may have even had to go through that more than once. Then we had another cutscene after the fight. Then the player walked a short distance with no combat and got a massive expositional cutscene that “explained” Dream Zanarkand, followed by a conversation between party members as they react to Tidus passing out. Right after the puzzles is another boss fight, and after that, there’s another really big cutscene that gives an audiolog from Yuna earlier in the story. That bit is followed by another huge cutscene as we reach the edge of the ruined city.
So I see why this puzzle sequence exists. You couldn’t really cut any of these dialog scenes. They are filled with revelations, exposition, and character beats needed to make the next section work. This is a big story with a lot of threads, and the writer is about to bring all the threads together. You don’t want to half-ass this. At the same time, if you removed these puzzles you’d end up with two back-to-back boss fights sandwiched in the middle of about half an hour of movie with no gameplay. That would not be an improvement, pacing-wise.
I’m not sure what the solution is, here. I suppose if nothing else, I wish these puzzles were more interesting.
Zanarkand
At last the party reaches the edge of ruined Zanarkand. They stop at the edge of the city for some sad piano music and one last somber moment before the final push. Everyone gathers around a campfire. Their weapons are piled up nearby. Everyone is together, yet nobody speaks. Tidus stands up, pats Yuna on the shoulder, and then climbs a little hill to look at the remains of his civilization.
A funny story about this cutscene:
When this game was new, these cutscenes were spectacular. Even 15 years later, they still look pretty good. The music here is powerful, and perfectly sets the melancholy mood of the scene.
When you first start up the game, it automatically plays this sequence. You can press a button at any time to start the game, but the scene is so impressive that in 2001 I watched it all the way through before I dared touch the controls. Then I began the game, only to discover it begins with the exact same scene, except with a voice-over and no option to skip it. So that was an annoying (but I suppose fitting) introduction to JRPGs for me.
Then I reached the ruined city of Zanarkand, eagerly anticipating what was going to happen next, only to find I had to sit through the scene a third time.
The End of Yuna’s Journey
Everyone believes Yuna is going to her death. Tidus and Rikku have been trying to think of some way to prevent this. Lulu and Wakka have already accepted this fate, although their hearts have been getting heavy as the end approaches.
But Auron has nothing to say. Like I’ve mentioned before, Auron watched his two best friends go through this a decade ago, and it’s a safe bet he didn’t come all this way just so he can watch their children die the same death. Auron has an agenda. He’s been telling some things, hiding others, and speaking in riddles.
Let’s look at the personal timeline for Tidus again:
- Day 1: Tidus arrives in Spira and meets the Al Bhed. The day ends when Sin attacks.
- Day 2: Besaid island. The day ends after meeting Yuna.
- Day 3: The ship ride from Besaid to Kilika. The day ends when Yuna performs the sending.
- Day 4: The ship ride from Kilika to Luca. The day ends while sailing.
- Day 5: The Blitzball tournament. The party sets out on the Mi’ihen highroad. The day ends at the inn where they fight the Chocobo eaterWhich I didn’t mention in this write-up. But trust me, they fought one..
- Day 6: Operation Mi’ihen. The day ends at Djose Temple.
- Day 7: Moonflow to Guadosalam. Afterward you stop at the inn in the Thunderplains. While you can’t see the time of day, the game does play the “sleeping for the night” lullaby sound.
- Day 8: Exit the Thunderplains. Pass through the forest. Lake Macalania. Kill Seymour. The day ends when Sin attacks under the lake.
- Day 9: Bikanel Island. Visit Home. Nuke Home. Fly to Bevelle. Get captured. We can presume the day ends with our heroes stewing in their jail cells.
- Day 10: Show trial. Party is sentenced to be inconvenienced inside of Via Purifico. Seymour Round 2. The day ends when Tidus and Yuna have their moment at the pond.
- Day 11: Calm lands. Mt. Gagazet. Seymour Round 3. Dream Zanrkand. The party makes camp for sad piano music.
You can argue that “many days” pass when the party rests at an inn, but that’s all headcanon. The story clearly depicts a day-night cycle as you progress, and the various areas are locked to a specific time of day. It’s always morning on the Highroad, day at the moonflow, sunset on the approach to Zanarkand, evening in the forest, night in Zanarkand.
If we go strictly by the depicted day / night cycle, then the story will end tomorrow on day 12. This is, of course, completely disconnected from how the player experiences time in the game. Day 3 probably takes about half an hour, while day 11 might take ten hours. The player might spend a few dozen hours on day 12, gathering super-weapons, playing Blitzball, exploring the optional Omega Dungeon, completing the Monster Arena, and otherwise dawdling on their way to the finale.
Rather than resting, the party decides to press on into the city, which is now guarded by ghosts and ancient machina.
It figures that the final “temple” is inside of a ruined Blitzball arena. I’ve known people who got their religion confused with their sports, but this is ridiculous. In any case, after one last round of busywork puzzles it’s finally time to meet…
Lady Yunalesca
And so we meet the ghost of Lady Yunalesca, the first summoner to defeat Sin and the current title-holder of “most ridiculous hair in Spira”. I think she’s also the only person to have battled Sin in a bikini.
Is she a ghost? Maybe she’s an unsent? Look, I don’t know how it works and the game isn’t forthcoming. The point is that she’s here at the end to act as the bearer of bad news / spiritual guide.
She explains that Yuna must choose a friend to die with her, and tries to soften the blow by saying that once they die, they won’t have any more pain. That’s an interesting argument and might work in another universe, but in this one it is demonstrably not true. This party has run into lots of dead people who seem to be in an awful lot of pain. More to the point, every time Tidus has a brush with Sin, he can sense his father. And he knows dear old dad is miserable as Sin. Death isn’t the end of suffering, it’s just the end of you being able to do anything about it. Lady Yunalesca is full of shit.
I wonder if she knows?
Footnotes:
[1] Which I didn’t mention in this write-up. But trust me, they fought one.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
Object-Disoriented Programming
C++ is a wonderful language for making horrible code.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
Good to be the King?
Which would you rather be: A king in the middle ages, or a lower-income laborer in the 21st century?
I think another big reason why the kid worked for FFX and didn’t for ME3. In FFX we’re shown a kid that we can tell from the moment we first see him is no ordinary kid and can likely defend himself. It’s fairly obvious this kid isn’t the true form of whatever he is, just a part of it though that part takes awhile to come clear. In ME3 we see the kid as a helpless child on a world being torn asunder before our eyes. Then at a sudden moment at the end it’s revealed that he is the core of the system tearing planetary civilizations to bits. We’re really not given a reason to care about the kid other than the fact that it was tragic to see a kid in the battlefield that Earth became, it was however inevitable due to the nature of the battle and could easily be dismissed as something to sink home the fact that reapers won’t discriminate between adults and children.
A small but important thing I think that Shamus didn’t touch on, is that the FF10 kid actually feels like an old-school spiritual guide.
It’s clearly trying to help you, in it’s way. It’s just so alien or limited in ways you aren’t, that what it’s trying to tell you””to it plain as day, comes across to you/Tidus as ‘prophecy gibberish’ that won’t be useful until too late.
The ME3 Kid, though? He feels like an arrogant little turd that could fully well explain just what the hell is going on, but it’s more important to him to sound wise, smart and benevolent, then be any of those things. A feeling that’s not exactly helped by the ‘Screw you guys, I’m kicking over the sand-castle and going home!’ ending if you try shooting the Star-child’s holo-gram projection.
Seriously, the little bully even puts on a demonic voice filter, has his intangible, invulnerable projection walk ‘off camera,’ while growling something about ‘THEN SO BE IT!’ if you dare be frustrated with him. Cue a flash-forward with the only thing left of galactic civilization being Liara’s probes.
One of those two are more forgivable, more sympathetic then the other, and I think that makes quite the difference.
Seconding – Bahamut kid is definitely trying to help advise you, but is having trouble being able to connect with the hero. It also helps Bahamut shows up at the beginning as Bahamut; not some other kid that Some Kidd then takes the form of.
We know Bahamut knows what’s going on – figuring out enough of Spira to understand the rest of what Bahamut says is one of the player’s goals – and to some degree, one of Tidus’s. Bahamut, after all, is way ahead of Auron as he actually tries to volunteer information!
Some Kidd just shows up, assures you this is the truth, really – so choose, don’t think. It’s also apparently a whim or something of Some Kidd to give some agency. It’s also apparently unconnected, that the superweapon is, in fact,a control mechanism. Maybe, that is somehow connected to the Catalyst.
Bahamut kid on the other hand – the big reveal also reveals weaknesses – how the fayth are stuck and trapped and reliant on the hero’s agency – but also that their dilemma is the hero’s dilemma and Spira’s dilemma. It’s new information, and throws the mission into new context; that the mission to Save Yuna is related to bringing a permanent calm.
“And he knows dear old dad is miserable as Sin”
– deliberate pun or accidental?
That was my first thought, too …
I would say the bigger problem with Mass Effect 3 is that The Catalyst is not Some Kidd, but looks like him, adding to the confusion. I think the Shepard may truly have seen Some Kidd playing on the roof, but once the action starts, every other view is a hallucination. Then Shepard dreams about Some Kidd but those are just dreams. Here, I presume that when you see Bahamut or he is hinted at, it actually is Bahamut since he’s a projection the entire time.
I have chosen the appearance that would be most pleasing to you.
“these items are still their weapons for purposes of cinema”.
One of the nice things about ever-more-powerful hardware is that modern games can render this stuff in real time now; Guild Wars 2 has all sorts of cutscenes and conversations between the player character and other people; your character is always wearing your current armor and weapons in them.
I don’t think there was a technical limitation forcing them to depict the characters with their starting weapons (Outside the pre-rendered stuff, anyway.). Kingdom Hearts, another Square game which came out for the same system the year after, had cutscenes where Sora, Donald and Goofy were actually using the equipment the player equipped them with in gameplay.
Square made a deliberate choice to only ever show the FFX cast using their starting weapons in cinematics; If I had to guess why, I’d say it was for iconography purposes.
Well, it’s probably complicated in FFX’s case by there being two types of cutscenes: the in-engine ones and the prerendered ones. I’m sure they could have shown the party’s current equipment in the in-engine cutscenes, but there’s no way they could have done it in the pre-rendered ones. So for consistency, if nothing else, they keep the weapons the same in both.
And, plus, I kind of like that little bit of separation between the cinematics and the game mechanics. I don’t actually imagine that a lot of the RPG mechanics (like changing weapons) would actually be happening in the “canon” version of the story.
Never really thought of it that way…
It makes perfect sense, though. Looting corpses is hardly heroic, and half of these games give you a weapon that would be extremely significant to your character (My father’s sword, my staff as a mage, my lightsaber, etc)
You just made a whole bunch of RPG’s make a little more sense to me, so thanks for that.
“it was for iconography purposes”
Which totally worked. In a compilation/crossover game, it’s a thrill of nostalgia to get a Buster Sword, or Gunblade, or Tidus’ big Blue sword. They could give you 100 swords from FFXII and they wouldn’t be identifiable as such without a name tag.
Are you thinking of Final Fantasy Record Keeper?
You’re not wrong, but the game does have to stretch to identify “iconic” weapons from each game. In some cases, they have to be invented whole cloth. For example, Golbez is a playable character in FFRK, even though he isn’t one in FF4; his iconic weapon is a Runed Axe, which only makes sense in the vein of “Well, we had to give him something.”
Also the obvious issue that the piled-up-weapons are first thing you see, before you’ve played anything. Ergo they have to be the same for continuity.
Which also makes it easier to do as then they don’t have to account for anything different.
Actually there was at least one cutscene in which Tidus is rendered with his current weapon. It’s the one before they fight Seymour on Mt. Gagazet. Right before the fight begins the camera switches back to Tidus and he’s in battle-ready stance with his weapon out. I remember this because I happened to have his Capture weapon on and so Tidus was threatening Seymour with the most pansy-ass plain-looking weapon in the game — colored pink — and looks about as menacing as a bunny.
C’mon man, five ME3s and six Star Childs equals eleven drinks on a Thursday morning? My pour liver.
Speaking of technically spelled correctly
Day 10: Show trail should probably be trial.
So, here’s some odd questions:
Lady Yunalesca teaches the Final Aeon summon. She was the first summoner to defeat Sin by the use of this summons. She’s also an unsent, so presumably, summoning the Final Aeon, although fatal, doesn’t prevent the summoner from sticking around as an unsent.
Are there other summoners who remain as unsent? Unless Lady Yunalesca is performing the sending so that the summoners don’t stick around and spill the beans, but . . . how would that work?
Following up on that, how did this whole faith of Yevon even get started? Yunalesca is the first person to summon the Aeon and defeat Sin. She’s, presumably, stayed in the ruins of Zanarkand ever since. So, who was the second summoner? How did he know about the Final Aeon? How did he know to go to Zanarkand to learn it?
Like, it seems at some point the leaders of the faith of Yevon and Yunalesca had to have some sort of sit down to talk about matters, which seems . . . weird. I dunno.
“Are there other summoners who remain as unsent?”
You mean aside from Seymour? Yes, at least one. Shamus either met or passed her by three times now, though you don’t learn the truth until very late.
No, I mean other summoners who summoned the Final Aeon and died while doing so. If they stuck around as an unsent, it seems like they’d spill the beans on the whole “Final Aeon” thing.
There’s a LOT of “It seems like they would have [inconvenience]” with the conspiracy angle, the answer to which is always, “but the church.”
The mechanics of becoming an unsent instead of a fiend are also completely unclear.
Its supposedly a question of willpower. People with strong willpower retain their sense of self and their appearance, while people with lacking willpower lose themselves to the rage and loss and pain and whatnot and end up becoming a monster in both form and mind.
Or, in other words, plot.
I don’t know if the other one got as far as Zanarkand, but she does summon every Aeon in the game, including the hidden ones, which suggests that she at least got close.
There’s no information about whether any of the previous High Summoners (the ones who actually beat Sin; I suppose it’s possible that some got the Final Aeon but were still too weak or just unlucky) were ever Unsent.
As for spilling the beans, I don’t see why they would, really. It would upset the delicate balance of society and discourage summoners with the potential to beat Sin from ever making the journey, benefiting no one and increasing the amount of death in the world.
Because they would be upset and bitter that their sacrifice meant nothing and that someone they loved was now inside a magical death machine murdering the very people they died to save? Or they naively think that knowing the truth would make the people try to find a better solution? Or at least tell people that treating the Al Bhed like crap is wrong?
Heck the whole reason Seymore went crazy and Auron is doing this crazy gambit is because they refuse to accept the unfairness of the current system. They can’t be the only ones who think this way.
Not that it makes sense that she can summon Anima.
Maybe she got that one AFTER dying? Probably travels by flight aeon.
It’s not explained in-game, but in the Ultimania, they confirm that after the first Sin got defeated, Yunalesca and the heads of Yevon (which was just the rulers of Bevelle at the time) did indeed get together to discuss the whole Yevon faith and what to do with Yu Yevon and Sin.
I mean, you’re not wrong, but again: Final Fantasy games, despite the hair and belts, are fundamentally D&D. While the sun doesn’t rise and fall as you cross the overworld, the cheapest, most effective restorative is resting up for the night in a tent or inn. Likewise, only being able to use tents on save points while within a dungeon is their way of modeling a D&D party barricading themselves into a safe room/Rope Trick/Leomund’s Tiny Hut for the night before resuming the adventure in the morning.
Taking that into consideration, standard protocol is spending 1-2 tents/nights traveling to a dungeon, 1 while inside, and 1 when you return to town and crash in the inn. So the general implication is 3-5 days per “quest”.
FFX not having an actual overworld obviously throws this for a bit of a loop; it’s hard to accept that kind of abstraction when your save point is in the middle of a road and the same NPCs stand there waiting to chat. But still, the spirit of the game and the story suggest that we’re looking at a few months, not a week and a half. (With an obligatory time dilation effect when the evil plan nears completion at the same time a bunch of sidequests become available.)
Apropos of nothing, I’m giggling at the idea that the summon is called Bahamut because the kid was called Bahamut.
“Bahamut, dear, time for dinner! Wash your hands before coming on, now.”
Shamus! You gotta do Chrono Cross. Some Kidd dreams AND some Kidd dies!
Also, the plot of that one is simultaneously straightforward and completely nuts.
I’d love to see the man do Chrono Cross too. That was my first great RPG experience (I only played Chrono Trigger five years later, and I never beat it), and I feel like I love it way more than anybody else I’ve ever met.
So, I guess, in internet slang this is the point where I’d say: ‘mein neger!’?
I am also one of the only people I know who liked that game! Though I did play Chrono Trigger first and love it much more. Chronos Cross was incredibly interesting and had some story ideas that really resonated with me; including some things I have never seen any RPG do since.
Chrono Cross is brilliant. I am the evangelist of that game to my particular group of friends.
I thought the gameplay was pretty fun but I thought the story became too crazy. The parallel universe was initially interesting but then things got too all over the place for me. It’s possible I just don’t remember it well enough at this point. I definitely didn’t feel it merited its connection to Chrono Trigger, a far superior game in my opinion.
I’m not sure they ever explained why Sora was at the center of the world splitting, unless it was because of [spoiler]whatever crazy hoodoo his dad had to do in the Frozen Sea to save his life in one timeline.[/spoiler]
I don’t think there’s any point where you should say racial slurs.
Honestly, I’d prefer Xenoblade and the entire sodding Kingdom Hearts series (because just the first isn’t nearly crazy enough), but these are pipe dreams.
Xenoblade Chronicles is the greatest RPG ever and should be experienced by everyone with the means to do so. It’s just so thoroughly excellent on so many levels. The best part is the only things I’d consider flaws are entirely based within optional content. Looking at you specifically fairy tale diodes and ice cabbages. Looking at YOU!
There’s no way they’d be able to do KH simply due to the sheer number of games in the series and the number of different platforms they’re on.
They’re all on PS3 now (except for DDD and KH4 which will be on PS4). But yeah, it’s a lot of games hence why I said “pipe dream”.
Chrono Cross could also be an amusing tie-in to the regularly scheduled Bethesda Writing rants. For the uninitiated:
Chrono Cross has dozens of party members, and they all basically cease to have personalities, goals, or anything else as soon as they join the party. Their character arcs culminate in recruitment, and that’s pretty much the end of the line. But it’d be weird if your teammates never said anything, so the designers recognized that they’d need to chip in some dialog during story events. On the flip side, the sheer number of characters means you’d need a lot of additional writing and potentially additional programming.
The solution they decided on instead? Story scenes all follow a static script that includes placeholder parts for “Companion 1” and “Companion 2.” Party members don’t have unique versions of lines – you won’t get situations like one person agreeing with an action and another chiding you for it – but each one has a designated “accent” that gets programmatically applied to the original line.
So if the script says “Increase power to the engines!” it might come out as “Increase powarr to the engines, yar!” or “Increessssse power to the enginesss!” depending on who’s there to say it. It’s the Fallout 4 dialogue wheel, NPC-edition.
And some are there just to have more weird characters. They don’t make much sense. To be fair, they can still be very helpful due to the importance of elements to the gameplay.
I remember that! Young teenage me thought it was HILARIOUS. It meant that basically everyone had to have a silly accent or a verbal tic or something.
Except Glenn. Shame that fucker was so good on the battlefield, because I did not like him at all. I think I became determined to use that luchadore priest named Greco instead, just because I wanted to go all Zangief on everybody. Power bombs everywhere!
I read The Dark Id’s Let’s Play of that on the LP Archive a few months ago, and the procedural accents thing is actually kind of a neat idea, technologically speaking.
Shamus, have you ever listened to Soren Johnson’s (Civilization IV, Offworld Trading Company) Designer Notes podcast? You should, and so should everyone else. It’s really quite good, and I think you’d dig it. It tends to cover a lot of topics I know you’re interested in.
I bring it up now because the most recent episode features Amy Henning, who worked on the Uncharted games and there’s a bit where she describes a situation in the first Uncharted that reminds me of the puzzle section you talked about in this post. The way she described it, there’s some sort of boss fight or set piece which was meant to be followed by a short, combat-less section (she calls it a “traversal” section) and then a touching cut scene between the hero and his love interest. But the level designers apparently thought that the combat-less-ness went on too long so they threw in a bunch of pirates or some-such. Unfortunately, that means that the hero goes directly from killing a bunch of dudes to touchy-feely talk. The thing is, though, she decided not to fight them on it and given her description of the game-making process I can just about understand why. It’s pretty interesting stuff.
As for the pacing issue: When Final Fantasy games are strong around this point in the narrative, the story does things to make you feel a sense of urgency. In Final Fantasy 6, for example, when you arrive at the
World of Ruin, you really want to prepare and gather as many resources as you possibly can forfinally sticking it to Kefka for all he’s done. Your opponent’s not really in the process of doing more destruction: he’s sort of dormant and you want to rob him of resources while strengthening yourself insofar as possible. They’re able to fill the endgame there with all sorts of information about the background of the story and fill out characters, but you still feel an apocalyptic sense of foreboding alongside a sense of hope that you might be able to at least get some justice.So in this case, the puzzles and the encounters should communicate some kind of feeling of desperation or revelation. It should make you feel like you, like the characters, are being challenged in order to find out the truth, with the world against you.
“You’ve probably replaced them with upgrades by now, but these items are still their weapons for purposes of cinema.”
I actually really like the way this game handles this. First of all, I’m used to RPG’s where any given weapon will deal a base amount of damage in addition to your strength modifier. In this game, it’s flipped around: you deal a base amount of damage based on your strength, plus whatever modifier your weapon has (if any). I don’t play a lot of JRPG’s, so maybe this is normal for the genre, but I think it gives the system a really cool tweak. Another nifty tweak is that partway through the game, you gain the ability to have Rikku customize your weapons abilities, so the goal is no longer to find the strongest weapon, but the weapon with the most ability slots.
But the thing that I love most is Tidus’ sword, Brotherhood. It’s not his starting sword, but it’s given to him very early in the story. It’s a sword with a lot of history to it, belonging to Wakka’s late brother, Chappu, and symbolizes Wakka’s trust and friendship with Tidus. A lazy developer might have just left things there, causing players to leave it to rot in their inventory, or worse, sell it when it became obsolete; imagine how Wakka might react to that! But these writers decided to have Brotherhood scale with the Tidus, incentivizing the player to keep it and keep using it, and thus causing him to always be associated with that particular weapon. It’s not always the best weapon for the job, but it’s good enough that it is highly plausible that Tidus could still be using it when this cutscene plays.
The other weapons are probably not what the player has equipped, but I notice only two other weapons are stacked there: Wakka’s ball, and Yuna’s staff. I’m not certain, but I don’t think there’s much cosmetic difference between the various weapons of these two characters. In fact, besides Tidus’ swords, the only character who I distinctly remember having cosmetically different weapon choices was Lulu.
Your comments on the sword remind me of Aveline from Dragon Age 2. When you give her a certain, special shield, she will mention that she had her late husband’s shield and will comment on if she still has it, you sold it, or if it’s at the bottom of the inventory pile.
There are plenty of differences between the different balls Wakka can use, some of them not making any sense (like a ball covered in spikes). Same for Yuna’s, although slightly more subtle for her.
I liked how lightsabers worked in KotOR II, where all lightsabers have exactly the same stats (barring the difference between single-bladed/double-bladed/short varieties), but can be upgraded with two crystals and three different other upgrades. That way you could, as the Exile, craft a new lightsaber a bit into the game and have it feel significant (it’s a replacement for your old one you gave up voluntarily many years ago), without immediately ditching it a planet later for a better one. Instead, you can start with just the basic lightsaber, then upgrade it over time to be better (plus you have the choice of how to improve, it which is nice). It was common for pretty much every character I made to still be wielding their recreated lightsaber at the end of the game. Tricked out with the best upgrades I could buy/craft/loot, of course.