T w e n t y S i d e d

This is my sixth time playing through Final Fantasy X. Each time I play through the game it takes between 60 hours (my first time) and over 160 (last time, when I did every stinking sidequest). Let’s take a wild guess and say the average is around 90 hours. When I’m done with my current play-through, I will have enjoyed this game for ~540 hours, or 22^1/2 uninterrupted days. My brother picked up this game in 2002, used, for $10.

So, the game has cost us $0.018 an hour. Nearly two cents an hour. However, that copy got scratched and I had to get another copy, this time for $12. This greatly devalued the game for us, since now the game has cost us an astonishing four cents an hour!

Compare to Doom³, for which I paid $50 and which offered perhaps (I’m being really generous here) 40 hours of gameplay on all of my play-throughs combined. This comes to $1.25 an hour, or about thirty times the cost of FFX.

Starcraft would be a bargian similar to FFX, but I’ve purchased about six copies over the years as I’ve loaned out copies that were never returned. They also got used a lot at LAN parties, which seems to be the most common way to end up with a scratched disc. Even now I only have one copy, and that one is a backup. (I still have a couple of original cases, though.)

Unreal Tournament is another astounding bargain. Once you apply the patch, you no longer need the CD. So, if you have several computers everyone can play from the same copy. (Note also that since the game doesn’t nag for the CD, my original copy is still in good condition even after 7 years.) I probably paid $40 for the game, and if you add up all the time my friends and I have spent playing the game over the LAN, PLUS all the time I spent online and in single-player, AND all the time I spent making levels like this one, then we’re talking about about hundreds and hundreds of hours of play. The game doesn’t clock hours the way FFX does, so I can only speculate at how many. Let’s say 600, just so we’re not here agonizing over numbers all day long. That puts UT at an affordable $0.06 an hour.

My brother and I played Diablo II for a long, long time, but the game was expensive ($50) and so was the expansion ($30) so the game isn’t that cheap, per-hour. Since we each needed our own copy, I’ll just calculate my side of it. I probably played for (total guess) 300 hours, and a paid $80. So Diablo II cost $0.26 an hour.

Half-Life 2 was by far the most expensive. Take the 45 hours I’ve spent playing the game, then SUBTRACT the three hours of my time the game wasted because of Steam. I pre-ordered the game for the very painful price of $60, which brings us to $1.42 an hour. This is being generous. I value my time quite a bit, and if I were to add the value of those three hours onto the purchse price instead of just subtracting those hours from the playing time, this game would cost more per hour than going to the theater.

I doubt I’ll ever see a game that is as much of a bargain as FFX, even though we bought it twice.

And no, I don’t have a point to all this, why do you ask?

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

LATER: In the end: I admit my explanation Just Doesn't Fit. I think mine would have made more sense and would have been easier to understand, but it doesn't work and can't be made to fit. Read on for my analysis if you like, but people in the comments below point out several fatal flaws with all of this.

Alas.

This should go without saying, but just in case: Ahead are massive spoilers for Final Fantasy X. Proceed as wisdom dictates.

The afterlife isn’t some philosophical concept in the world of Spira. It isn’t something you need faith to believe in. It’s an observable fact that when people die, they need a Summoner to come along and perform a sending on them to send their soul to the Farplane. They can see this happen, and they can see the results if they don’t have a summoner and their spirit remains in the world of the living.

At one point Lulu says that if the unsent remain in Spira, their souls become angry and eventually they turn into fiends. We can see that this isn’t always the case, because we meet a number of counter-examples in the game. Auron, Belgamene, Seymor, and many of the Maesters of Yevon still retain the properties they did in life. They might no longer age, but other than that they seem to function as they always did. It’s possible that the fate of the unsent depends on how powerful they were in life, and how they died. Average Joe Shoopuf is probably doomed to become a fiend if he’s killed by Sin and someone doesn’t come along and perform a sending on his body, but mighty warriors and summoners can sometimes keep their identity, particularly if they aren’t killed by Sin. If they are healed, they can get back up and begin living as before, but now their soul has a tenuous grip on their body. If a nearby summoner performs a sending, they will go to the afterlife, willing or not.

In any case we can see that the connection between Spira and the Farplane is broken. It wasn’t always this way. When Tidus lived in Zanarkand, it’s obvious people had no trouble getting into the afterlife. They didn’t have summoners and sendings, and the place wasn’t overrun with the unsent. When people died they stayed dead. Tidus never even heard of this problem until he entered modern-day Spira.

Occasionally the unsent stay put and don’t get back up. This happens when their body is so badly damaged that it can no longer move and nobody is able to repair it. These dead give off pyreflies, which contain some of the memories and a little of the life-foce of the deceased. When the summoner performs a sending, these gather and around the body and carry their soul to the Farplane. But if no summoner is around, the pyreflies linger. If enough dead are gathered together, the pyreflies become so dense that people nearby will see visions and memories of the dead.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.