T w e n t y S i d e d
Our first chapter (Besaid Island) showed us how nice the world is when it’s not being ruined by Sin. The next chapter (Kilika Island) showed us how bad Sin is. The following chapter shows how the world copes with it. (By watching Blitzball and praying a summoner defeats Sin soon.) This next chapter anticipates the most obvious question that people will have by this point: Why can’t we kill Sin with guns or technology? Have people tried? Sure, the writer could just throw out a few lines of dialog explaining how guns won’t work, but instead we get to see the result first-hand when we witness…
Operation Mi’ihen
(It’s pronounced operation mee-hen. For some unfathomable reason. I guess you’d have to ask Tee-dus.)
The Crusaders are kind of the military arm of Yevon. They’re in charge of fighting sinspawn while waiting for summoners to do their thing. Most of their power is concentrated around Luca, because the Blitzball stadium is there. That sounds kind of messed up, but the way Wakka describes things it makes some kind of sense. Blitzball is their way of taking their mind off of the horrors of Sin. It’s the main coping mechanism of their entire society. If there’s one place they all collectively want to defend, it’s the stadium.
Yevon forbids the use of technology. Sort of. The rules seem pretty arbitrary and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for it other than, “Technology is bad because the Maesters say so, the Maesters say so because the teachings say so, and the teachings say so because technology is bad.” Technology like the stuff used to run Blitzball is allowed, while weapons technology and most labor-saving devices are forbiddenThe real reason – as pieced together from the Ultimania guide and fan conjecture – is that Sin deliberately targets any area that looks too advanced. Yu Yevon is probably wary that some fancy weapons program would find a way to kill Sin if he let their technology run unchecked. He wants to keep the population reliant on magic and summoners..
Everyone in the party has a different take on this. Tidus notices that this doesn’t make a lot of sense, but is gainsayed by the ever-faithful Wakka who accepts it without question. Auron seems to know how nonsensical the rules are, but he’s also wise enough to know that arguing is a waste of time. Lulu never once advocates for the teachings, and I was surprised at the end to find out she was apparently a firm believer the whole time.
The Al Bhed are the only people in Spira who don’t follow Yevon, and they spend a good part of their time salvaging old technology and trying to figure it out. Here the Crusaders have teamed up with the Al Bhed. Everyone is arming themselves with technology – guns, mostly – and are going to take a crack at beating Sin with conventional weapons.
The twist here is that the Maesters seem to be giving their blessing to the operation. Instead of ordering the Crusaders to throw down the Forbidden Weapons and drive the Al Bhed away, Maester Seymour (this seems like a guy we can trust!) is present and encouraging their efforts.
Sin shows up and basically kills everyone while taking no appreciable damage itself. Afterward, Auron observes what a win this is for the Maesters: People who doubted the teachings are dead. The survivors are more likely than ever to embrace the teachings (and thus the word of the Maesters) without question. The Al Bhed weapons were shown to be futile. A bunch of Al Bhed died, which should help keep their numbers low.
Seymour presented the operation as an effort to be open-minded and unite people under their common desire to fight Sin, but it was actually a ruthlessly calculated maneuver to consolidate power, winnow out doubters, and cull rivals.
On One Hand…
Despite the failure, I have to wonder if the effort was really as futile as the Maesters assumed. Laying aside the fact that I’m pretty sure the author was trying to definitively say that technology can’t help against Sin, I think you could make a pretty good case that victory would be possible just based on what we’re shown in the cutscenes.
Certainly it was a complete massacre this time, but a big part of that defeat was that everyone’s tactics were terrible.
The soldiers ran down to the beach and engaged the incoming sinspawn directly, which put them within range of a vaporizing attack. Next time maybe they could build (say) bunkers or trenches and let the sinspawn come to them.
The Al Bhed had a doom laser. But it was up on an easily-destroyed pole which made it unstable. Some better engineering might solve that problem. The laser couldn’t punch through Sin’s shield, but it seemed to come pretty dang close. Maybe three or four lasers would burst the shields? Elsewhere in the story they have an airship that can fire massive salvos of missiles. Maybe combining that with the doom laser would be enough for a knockout punch?
On the Other Hand…
We eventually learn that Sin is the result of a war fought 1,000 years ago. It came down to summoners vs. technology. Since the technology was mostly destroyed and Sin is still here, then you could make the case that Sin trumps technology. If the massive technological armadas of the past couldn’t beat Sin even when wielded by their creators, then certainly the leftover scraps of technology in the hands of the ignorant aren’t going to do any better.
On the Gripping Hand…
At the end of the game our heroes basically defeat Sin by hitting it with their swords. Yes, they had a Secret Technique to make Sin hold still for a bit, but maybe that same technique could have been used here to make the doom laser more effective.
Seymour!
It seems to be a staple of Final Fantasy that:
- The main villain – usually some kind of terrifying world-eater – will lurk in the background of the story while we deal with some secondary threat. Often we’ll fight them multiple times during the course of the game. Just like Saren helped put a face on the Reapers in Mass Effect, our secondary villain gives us someone to shout at while on our way to fight Satan. In previous Final Fantasy games Jenova had Sepheroth, Ultimecia had Seifer, and here Sin has Seymour.
- Early in the story, you fight beside this eventual rival.
The pattern is clear enough that I’m sure it’s not a coincidence, but I don’t know what the trope is for. Is it to establish how powerful the rival is before you fight them? Maybe the goal is to show you how high their stats are and how far they outclass the rest of your team? I don’t know.
At any rate, Operation Mi’ihen is our chance to team up with Seymour. While the Crusaders are being devoured in their frontal assault on Sin, our party is left to mop up the sinspawn that slip through. The game has you do the same boss fight twice in a row. The first time you face it with access to your entire team. The second time everyone is scattered in the chaos and you’re left with just Yuna, Auron, and Seymour. And sure enough, the second fight is usually easier even though your options are more limited, because Seymour’s stats are pretty badass.
There are a lot of guides that can help you though these fights, but here is my go-to strategy:
- Yuna and Auron fight the Boss.
- Seymour casts fire on himself over and over until he’s down. Then Yuna will revive him and the process begins again.
The fight takes a long time to win like this, but you have to take into account the advantage of watching Seymour repeatedly set himself on fire.
Seymour also has to talk Yuna out of trying to help. When things go pear-shaped, Yuna offers to summon. Apparently now that all of the fighters are dead, she wants to take a few more useless potshots at Sin. This would be suicidal. Sin is leaving. It’s not retreating, mind you. It’s just done stomping on this particular anthill and doesn’t feel inclined to chase down and squash every individual ant. But if Yuna began pestering it with one of her aeons, it might decide to squash her on the way out.
Seymour talks her down. This seems like a nice gesture until later you realize he’s only doing it because he needs Yuna alive for his plans. He didn’t encourage anyone else to hold back, after all.
We’ll talk more about Seymour’s schemes later.
Footnotes:
[1] The real reason – as pieced together from the Ultimania guide and fan conjecture – is that Sin deliberately targets any area that looks too advanced. Yu Yevon is probably wary that some fancy weapons program would find a way to kill Sin if he let their technology run unchecked. He wants to keep the population reliant on magic and summoners.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
Rage 2
The game was a dud, and I'm convinced a big part of that is due to the way the game leaned into its story. Its terrible, cringe-inducing story.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Let me guess, if you could you’d give Seymore a free balloon and get him to stand in front of half a roller coaster?
Ooh, nice call back! And just remember, you’re older than you’ve ever been, and now you’re so much older . . .
Yeah, I’m pretty much the same with Manchester United, if I’m honest.
(PS I reckon it’s ‘gainsaid’. Oh, and ‘Sephiroth’. Also if you want to make a verb out of ‘magic’ you can whack a ‘k’ in there: ‘magicking’ – although I dunno; ‘magic-ing’ works rather well, in context.)
Thought I was the only who did this. Though last season’s possession football really did try my patience.
Getting back on track:
1. Wouldn’t words with a double “i” result in an “eee” sound, and not “eye”?
2. I don’t like pronouncing it Tee-dus either, but apparently it comes form the word Tida (which means sun).
3. Nothing about O’aka the Extraordinaire?
4. I presume the equipment is over 1,000 years old. How does it still work? I’m having flashes of FO4.
5. Did anyone notice how Lulu is the only one to remain at a distance when the boss jumps from the cage?
6. Plot reasons aside, I found the reasons for Seymour choosing Yuna over the summoners (Donna?) interesting. Crafty bastard.
Back in the day,we used to make things to last!Not like you young uns and your self breaking light bulbs.
Hello, Victorian gentleman. How’s the arsenic poisoning? We still have a lightbulb or two of yours about, good engineering there, I’ll grant you.
For the equipment still being functional its worth pointing out that the main issue in FO3/4 is that people are still relying on scavenging to survive and somehow there is still stuff to scavenge after 200 years including fully edible food, most complaints don’t have too much issue with old laser rifles or glitchy protectrons still being mostly functional.
While I haven’t played FFX it seems like the scavenging of old tech is fairly limited in scope so it makes some sense that there is still more to find. Now ofc ancient technology being that advanced and still functional after that long would be implausible irl but this is a world where magic exists and the advanced precursor tech is a fairly common dramatic trope. With FFX being a drama first story it seems perfectly acceptable to lean on the trope in such a fashion, and you can compare the relics to the prothean beacon in the first ME which follows the same trope of advanced ancient tech where as its a details first world they give some acknowledgement to the issues with it namely that it is barely functional, incredibly rare, and was built to last.
Yes, only the Al Bhed dare brave the open seas to actually scavenge anything (plus the fact that Yevonites don’t dare do anything with technology for fear of baiting Sin). All the other boat routes are ones that stick close to the coast for fear of Sin, and there wouldn’t be a lot of scavenging done on those.
As for the stuff still working… Most of the Al Bhed are great with machines because they spend their time tinkering with them. They have a knack for technology, and they repair and refit them. That’s exactly what happened with the airship, it’s was in pretty bad shape when found at the beginning, and by the time you get to the Al Bhed’s home, they’ve repaired it somewhat (and trusting in their luck that it’ll hold while flying).
“ii” would, but the standard use of apostrophes is a stop, so the pronunciation I’d have gone for is Mih-ih-hen, or Mih-ih-yen because that flows better. The pronunciation given, I’d probably have gone with using some accented characters, though how easy that is for that era is questionable, though they were making proper EFIGS translation with all that nuttiness.
Out of boredom, I always used to rename the characters FFX allows you to rename (Tidus and all the aeons) by replacing all the vowels with accented vowels for the hell of it, so it was definitely possible for the era.
I renamed them all into emoticons. It’s hilarious to see sad dialog subtitled with xD.
My guess is that it’s a remnant of its Japanese language origins, which only has the one ‘i’ sound (hence why it is the same between Tidus and Mi’ihen). At least, that’s how I understand it.
That’s what I was going to guess. The problem with English (well, one of the problems) is that it has several more vowel sounds than it has letters to represent them, so all the vowel glyphs have to pull double (or treble, or quadruple…) duty. See, for example, the different ways the letter ‘i’ is pronounced in shin, shine, and machine. This leads to ambiguity in pronunciation that isn’t present in some other languages.
Interestingly, English in particular has its vowels wrong. If you look at the rest of the indo-european languages, their words that are spelled with ‘i’ also have an ‘ee’ sound. And it’s not just a matter of orthography, it’s that sometime from the 13th to 16th centuries, most English vowel sounds shifted in place. “Meat” was pronounced “met,” “mate” was “maht,” and “knight” was pronounced with an ‘ee.’ (Knight was actually pronounced how it’s spelled, which is where the spelling comes from. “K-nee-ch-t.”)
When it comes to Japanese romaji, the ‘ee’ sounding phonemes were romanized into ‘i’ because that’s how ‘i’ is pronounced in the majority of languages that use the Latin alphabet.
We’ve also got a lot of diphthongs, which I don’t remember from other languages at all (but quite honestly I only know about the ones in English from voice lessons).
Diphthong: combo of 2 vowel sounds in a single syllable. Examples include out and toil.
Re: how close they came to defeating sin, that laser the Crusaders and the Al Behd shot Sin with is pretty much the exact same uberlaser the airship uses to blast off Sin’s arms later on. So yah, the ‘distract him with sword fighters and then shoot him with a laser cannon’ strategy is /precisely/ the tactic the party winds up using to bring him down later in the game. The big irony of Mi’ihen is indeed that they came really damn close.
Was about to say the same thing — if only the Crusaders and Al Bhed had an airship to mount that doomlaser on, they’d have worked out just fine.
So Shamus had it backwards; they actually needed a much, much taller pole to install the laser on. Sin would just sit there, glowering over the beach, ignoring the innocent metal rod reaching hundreds of feet into the air, then BAM! Sky laser outta fucken NOWHERE!
IIRC, it’s not “pretty much” the same laser, it is literally the same laser scavenged from the battlefield and strapped to the airship. I haven’t gotten to that part in my second playthrough yet, though.
The real difference being the song, keeping him docile/confused long enough that he doesn’t just do that “wipe everyone out immediately” wave. I think this wave is his Overdrive in the boss fight, and is the same attack he uses at Operation Mi’ihen. Chances are, had they known about The Power of Song, they would have won that part of the fight. You’d still have weird Pseudo-Spirit Dude floating around….
If only they’d been able to get a hold of a Minmay at Mi’ihen.
Nah, Basara was much better at getting them to stand still than Minmei.
That part of the story is pretty weak. “Our gun stopped working, we’ve got to retreat!” “No, get closer and I’ll stab it in the face for the same effect!”
My headcanon is that
killing Yunalesca depowers the Final Aeon, which in turn depowers Sin as the former Final Aeon.(Is it worth using spoilers? Probably not.)“Drive me closer, I want to stab them with my sword!” is what you mean, right?
As for your headcanon… No, it’s because of the Hymn that Sin is barely fighting back at that point.
That’s the official reason, but that song’s been around as long as Sin has. It’s a quite unsatisfying solution on its own.
I’m pretty sure it’s that
Jechtfinds the hymn relaxing that does it. I don’t think it would have worked if it were anyone else.When the party is under the ice temple, Auron tells us that Jecht really liked the hymn, and then shows us Sin just floating there basking in the hymn.Then we’d need an explanation of why that’s unique. It’s a song that everybody in Spira knows and sings as a song of hope, even the Al Bhed. It’s hard to believe it’s never come up before.
The difference with that particular Sin is that everyone in the world was singing it. That’s never been done before.
And it’s quite possible that the previous Sins liked the song just as much, there just weren’t anyone to see it and make a thing of it.
FFX is also a huge fan of implying things…
It is implied that Jech is particularly strong willed and has been exerting a greater influence on Sin than the average Final Summon does.
Also implied this makes the game’s Sin is weaker than the normal Sin because of it…
This also (well, partially) explains the whole how-did-auron-get-to/from-zandarkan thing, as well as some other stuff. Jecht-sin ferried him accross.
It’s more than just being strong-willed, however. This incarnation of sin is still fresh. Because of that, Jecht can still exert some control.
Sure, Yu Yevon would have taken over sooner or later. That was inevitable.
But as near as we can tell, no Final Aaron has had as much control over Sin as Jecht had at any point in their tenure. This seems to be a Jecht specific thing, supposedly due to his personality. I always thought him not being real had an effect on this, but after two games and several side stories without mention of that Inguess it will just remain as head canon…
OK! OK! I’ve resisted stumping up for the PC version ’til now, but I’m only human! *commences download*
*which is enormous*
So it comes bundled with X-2, and when I say ‘bundled’, I mean ‘bundled’. They are two completely separate games – two very different experiences – which of course immediately suggests they should definitely come as one giant 34GB download…
Yeah, this annoyed me too, since I just wanted to play FFX and got stuck waiting for FFX-2 to download. I’m guessing this is sort of a Steam limitation? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Steam game split into multiple library entries that can be separately downloaded.
Also be prepared for a degree of annoyance since the port does not really use the mouse and there are a LOT of tool tips missing that you would think there surely must be. I’m looking at you battle interface with your not telling me what skills or items do and requiring me to look them up in help BEFORE the fight and NOT allowing me access to help DURING the fight.
(It's pronounced operation mee-hen. For some unfathomable reason. I guess you'd have to ask Tee-dus.)
There’s a difference in how Japanese(and my own country, for that matter) and English sometimes pronounce I. Our sound for I is the same as the “e” sound(which you often spell out like “ee”). Or like the Is in Indigo(or in in). We pronounce all our “e”s like “eh”. Like in “enemy”. So Shinji Ikari, not Shainjai Aikaray. And related: Ryu, not Rayu. I guess that’s what makes the name sound weird to you, while “Teedus” is how I always assumed it was pronounced.
The ' is a mystery sound to me, though.
Edit: I just remembered you used to watch anime, so you probably knew this already, actually.
Heh – reminds me of how ‘ghoti’ is pronounced ‘fish’. (‘gh’ as in ‘tough’; ‘o’ as in ‘women’; ‘ti’ as in ‘fiction’.)
Cheops = Khufu. Yeah, I would NEVER have figured that one out if someone hadn’t told me.
Basic lesson–if you’re transliterating something into English, spell it in a way that will make NATIVE English-speakers pronounce it semi-correctly.
Isn’t that one because the Greeks gave everyone and everything in Egypt (and everywhere else, really) new Greek names though? Memphis, Thebes, Osiris, Heliopolis, that sort of thing? And then early Egyptological scholarship preferred the Greek names because – well, that’s what they were familiar with from classical literature at that time.
…Well, wikipedia seems to agree on the ‘Cheops is a hellenisation’ bit at least, insofar as that is ever basis for an argument. I unno.
Yep. More specifically, Egyptian seems to have been a syllabic language, and the Greeks generally extended a lot of words. Apep, for example, became Apophis.
I always liked the fact that Nabucco Donossor = Nebukadnezar. Greeks and Indian historians just added in different vowels in the same name-as-written (neh/bek/dun/sir as far as we can tell).
Also the lack of written vowels in ancient Egyptian plus, as I was taught, ancient Greeks were there to hear some kind of pronunciation (even if it had surely changed through millenia), while no egyptologist has.
Slight issues, one, native English speakers from where? Two, I know a couple of English speakers who have no idea how to sound out words and will ask me how to decipher words as simple as ‘lass’ and ‘lava’ (had my younger siblings talking about “molten lager” for years), and anyone who watches YouTube enough will know how cringey well-educated people can be at making sounds with their mouths. There’s a strong myth that English spelling is fundamentally useless for pronunciation, and some people have a mindset of learning words like Chinese characters rather than sounding it out phonetically, so a lot of people aren’t going to build up the skill. Thinking about it, that method of learning words is probably overrepresented in Japanese to English translators.
Really, the only method with a chance of working is to have a word spoken and subtitled when it’s introduced. At least then anyone who doesn’t get is either deaf or deserving of ridicule.
This isn’t even touching on the distinction between “writing in English” and “writing in Roman characters”. Hepburn for Japanese and Wade-Giles for Chinese make sense(broadly) to moderately educated English speakers, whereas Romaji and Pinyin are more consistent with how the languages work and provide a more even playing field to foreigners in general, while being largely nonsense or misleading at first glance.
The best solutions to these kinds of problems are generally practical instead of theoretical:
1. Get some native English-speakers (doesn’t really matter from where, that’s not the point)
2. Read the word aloud to them
3. Get them to spell it
4. Have them vote on which spelling is the “best” one.
Fin.
The point isn’t to achieve some kind of Platonic Ideal Best Spelling but one that’s pared down to simple elements so it won’t be distracting.
Well, unless the POINT is to make it impossible to pronounce.
Reading this, the words remind me of Hawaiian. The pronunciation seems similar, and the tick mark (‘) is an actual sound.
However, with this note that Mi'ihen is pronounced Mee-hen throws that out the window; I keep reading it as Mee-ee-hen.
“Mee-ee-hen” is almost EXACTLY how it would be pronounced in Japanese, with the caveat that there’s no stop between the syllables. The actual syllabary is closest to “mee-ee-heh-nn” or “mee-ee-heh-mm”. When you put that into a sentence and remove some rigor from the pronunciation, that comes out “meehen”.
Eh, it’s a bad translation, original Japanese is 「ミヘンã€, “Mihen”.
“Mi’ihen” would be 「ミイヘンã€.
Oo, someone else familiar with Hawaiian! I took two semesters of it in college. :)
I think the resemblance comes from the fact that Hawaiian and Japanese have similar phonologies, with a much smaller number of vowel sounds than English has (from what I’ve seen and read, I haven’t actually studied Japanese). According to Wikipedia, Japanese has only five vowel sounds, the same as Hawaiian, where the letter i is pronounced ‘ee.’
(Nominally, anway””in actual conversational use in Hawaiian a and i often have “shorter” pronunciations based on location in a word; for instance “aloha” should have both a’s pronounced as in father, but in reality the first one often becomes more of an ‘uh’ sound. [This also has nothing to do with the fact that vowels in Hawaiian may be literally pronounced slightly longer or shorter in time, which is important in some words.])
And as someone who knows Hawaiian where the Ê»okina is an actual letter representing a glottal stop and is CRITICAL in differentiating various words, the (TVTropes warning!) Punctuation Shaker trope drives me absolutely bonkers. Sometimes I take a perverse pleasure in pronouncing such names as if the apostrophes actually did represent glottal stops…
That moment when you click on a tvtropes link on the twentysided blog, leading to a tvtropes page with a tagline from Chainmail Bikini. Further proof that the internet is a circle!
And that Shamus’ influence is slowly spreading throughout the digital cosmos!
“We eventually learn that Sin is the result of a war fought 1,000 years ago. It came down to summoners vs. technology. Since the technology was mostly destroyed and Sin is still here, then you could make the case that Sin trumps technology. If the massive technological armadas of the past couldn't beat Sin even when wielded by their creators, then certainly the leftover scraps of technology in the hands of the ignorant aren't going to do any better.”
The ultimate technological weapon of the past wasn’t actually released in time to fight SIN. A fight between SIN and Vegnagun would be awesome. (And vaporize the planet but hey.)
I can say the pronunciations are very much how a spanish speaker would pronounce those names. I don’t think it has any connection or that it’s the actual reason, but it’s…random trivia, I guess? Yes. That.
I’m helpful!
I….thiiink if you talk to the people running around setting up the guns before Mi’ihen, they tell you that the Napoleonic cannons are guns the Al Bhed-built, while the doom laser is (presumably) irreplaceable salvage tech, but don’t quote me on that.
That sounds familiar.
Final Fantasy villains fall into one or more of three broad categories:
The Other: In the earlier Final Fantasy games especially, nature and a natural harmonic order was set up as the ultimate good. The Other was set up either as an evil counterpart to this goodness, in a Manichean sense, or as something aberrant and external to it entirely. You can also make the case that every ultimate villain in the series is or becomes a Type 1, regardless of whether or not they distinctly embody the form. But mainly, you have big, evil space monsters like Chaos, every iteration of Elemental Fiend, Jenova, Exdeath, etc.
The Emo: The Emo’s pain is more important than everyone else’s pain, and the Emo’s pain demands everyone else’s pain. I extend this to characters driven by rage or psychopathy, as well: Kefka, Kuja, Zemus, etc. The cause or target of this suffering often leads one to becoming…
The Zealot: The Zealot believes the world is inherently broken in some way and must be cleansed in fire. While it often overlaps with the Emo, it doesn’t need to. Actually not as common for Final Fantasy, if you can believe it. But still has representatives like Mateus, Sephiroth, and Lord Vayne.
When people refer to a JRPG villain or Final Fantasy villain as a stock character, as in, “Hugh Darrow suddenly became some dumb JRPG villain,” they’re usually referring to a Type 2/3 hybrid. Probably ahistorically codified as a series cliche by Sephiroth, who (in)famously embodied all three types at some point or another in FFVII’s rambling narrative.
In FFX, Sin/Yu Yevon is the big Type 1. Though, depending on how you see Spira, you might also say that Sin is a sort of unique anti-Type 1; rather than a horror that contrasts the nature of the setting, a horror that instead embodies that nature. This is actually a view extolled by certain characters within the setting. But pure Type 1’s need a public face, hence Seymour. Seymour is the Emo, became the Zealot in his Emo-ness, and becomes the Other in undeath, but is still angling for that big promotion, the tryhard. And, of course, Auron is all three types, regardless of whether or not he’s a villain or just an asshole.
I have a very specific definition of ‘villain’ in my head.
‘Villains’ are actively sadistic. They laugh at the pain of others. We hate them. (Example: Emperor Palpatine.)
‘Monsters’ are dangerous and destructive, but they inspire fear, or sometimes pity, rather than hate. (Example: Darth Vader.)
‘Enemies’ are people who just happen to be opposing the hero due to being on the opposite side of a conflict; if through circumstances had been different, they could have been on the hero’s side. (Example: Boba Fett.)
By my definitions, most FF bosses aren’t villains at all.
(Whole post is spoilers).
Kefka may be broken, but he’s a sadist who wants to take away hope and love from people because he can’t feel it anymore. Exdeath similarly likes hurting people and amassing power. Palamecia is an assured ruler who commits war crimes because he believes he deserves to rule the world. Garland’s motivations are complicated between Dissidia’s retcon and what we do know from FFI, but originally, he seemed to be an evil dark knight, the blackguard trope embodied. The Cloud of Darkness is more of a monster, an Eldritch abomination, and Xande does deserve to be pitied. Zemus is a bigot who believes that his superior species deserves to wipe out others and eventually becomes an embodiment of evil as a result. We only see things change with Sephiroth, and even then Ultimecia is a much more self-assured villain. Kuja may be sympathetic because of the lie about his nature, but he’s still kind of a dick until the end.Sorry, mac; no substitutions. Just what’s on the menu.
Final Fantasy Tactics has examples of all of these:
The beginning chapters of the game involve almost solely Type 3 “Enemies,” people with different political affiliations and shifting allegiances.
Then there are those being used by the Lucavi, which make up Type 2 “Monsters.” They have selfish ambitions and goals but don’t necessarily do things For the Evulz. The human hosts of all the Lucavi fall into this category as well, until they are possessed (whereupon their motivations change to Type 1 “Villians”)
Lastly, there are the Lucavi and Ultima herself, all Type 1 “Villians.” They are demons who wish to murder everyone else, actively enjoy the slaughter of the innocent and are clearly evil.
—————–
Interestingly, Delita starts as a Spectator, then re-enters the story as a Type 3 “Enemy,” goes off the slippery slope into more of a Type 2 “Monster” all in an attempt to The Big Hero. This is why I love Delita.
The problem that I had with a lot of these games, and their villains, have is that often the “real” villain only gets revealed in the final act of the game.
In FF4, for example, you spend the game chasing Golbez around to stop him from getting crystals (a goal which the game never truly justifies.) Just before the last chapter of the game, however, you learn that Zemus is the “real” villain, having been pulling Golbez’s chains the entire time.
(You can see similar narratives employed in FF8, FF9, and FF10.)
This never worked for me. You develop this emotional attachment to the villain, and suddenly it’s snatched away from you. Defeating that fiend who has plagued you the entire game should bring immense satisfaction and closure, but it’s often set aside to have you fight someone else. Sure defeating the final boss, the Final Fantasy Satan, carries a measure of satisfaction, but it doesn’t resonate the way defeating your established foe does.
I mean, imagine they’d employed this in FF6. Kefka is considered one of the best villains, not just in Final Fantasy games, but in all video games period. Your conflict spans the entire game, and even when he achieves phenomenal cosmic power and ushers in the apocalypse, you still dust yourself off and knock him off his nihilistic throne.
Now imagine you are preparing to assault his citadel, and an NPC is there to say:
“Kefka as you know him is gone. When he absorbed the magical energy of the three Goddesses, their spirits were awakened. They overwhelmed him and destroyed his soul. Now they inhabit his mortal shell and prepare to return this world to a state before humans were around.”
It might make some sense in the context of the game world, but where’s the satisfaction? You don’t care about those Goddesses, you wanted to give Kefka the comeuppance he’s deserved since the first act!
It helps more when ‘the real villian’ has a significant part in the story prior to the reveal, either through being an existing character you never expected or through semi-heavy foreshadowing. It’s much more likely to get the “Oh, HE was the real bad guy?!? No way!” reaction when looking back suggests “I should have seen it!”
Problem is that a lot of cases ‘the real villian’ just shows up out of the blue or has very little build-up. Why do we care about this Yu Yevon? He’s just a name and nebulous concept we’ve had very little insight into for the majority of the game (though it does help that Yevon is the name of who they all worship, so it’s not a complete disconnect here).
In 10’s case, Sin is still the main villain, and Yu Yevon is basically just Sin’s heart.
There is actually a lot of evidence and build-up to let us know that, while Sin (and by extension, Jecht) is the Big Threat, we are told/hinted at well before the climax who the big threat is.
Contrast this with Final Fantasy 9 (a game I love, by the way) where Necron is basically A Giant Space Flea From Nowhere. Hell, if they wanted a 3-stage boss fight, they should have just had Kuja attempt to MERGE with the Crystal to attain immortality or something and fight some weird form of him.
I love Necron just for how out of nowhere it is. It’s a nice throwback to Zemus and Garland 1.
(And for Zidane’s “we’ll prove that things don’t have to inevitably die, by killing you!”)
Yu Yevon, to me, is basically like if someone decided that the Lavos Core in Chrono Trigger should somehow be an independent character that was ‘behind’ Lavos.
Whilst FF4 might have a “real villain” that shows up late on it’s harder to make that argument for other games.
FF8 reveals the nature of the “real villain” relatively early and clearly shows her acting through proxies even if she doesn’t personally show up.
Garland might be behind events in FF9 but Kuja remains in the villain slot throughout the game and even though the “true final boss” is something else it only arose because of him.
Yu Yevon shows up in person late but was driving Sin personally not being a behind the scenes manipulator and the player will heartily distrust the name Yevon by the time it actually shows.
Most of the other games have a clear villain introduced relatively early on in the story.
I think this flaw (I agree it’s a flaw) is because something in the FF storyteller’s mindset says that only a truly epic/powerful/cosmic enemy is suitable as the last boss of the game. And simultaneously, such an entity would have little interest in talking with/taunting/or harassing the party throughout the game.
Then there’s things like FF7 Crisis Core where the game is about the conflict between the military and the science division. The science division keeps betraying or mutating the best soldiers of the military, driving a rift between the main character (Zack) and his job as a Soldier 1st Class from the rest of the game. The 2nd act climaxes in a battle against the science division’s greatest monster (Sephiroth), then as the 3rd act starts heading towards the finale, you fight Genesis, another science division castoff.
So the Grand Finale. The Final Boss. It’s… a horde of regular mooks from the army. While this is a fascinating ending to a game basically about a superhero, I don’t think it fits with the theme AT ALL. Like… nothing to do with it, no proper foreshadowing, nothing. They wrote the wrong story for the ending they were locked into.
“Jenova had Sephiroth”
later you find out it’s more like “Sephiroth had Shinra, Inc.”Not really.In order for it to be salvaged,it had to have been somewhere away from a battlefield.Meaning the places old tech is salvaged from probably used to be labs,universities,factories and such.But most importantly,some of the salvaged places probably were museums,places where old tech is usually kept whole,in almost working order(after a bit of maintenance).
Maybe, but that would require a vision of Pre-Sin society with a diverse, functional economy and a realized culture. To put it bluntly, it’s too smart to be the backstory of FFX, in which an advanced city is defined by having lots of big buildings, and nothing else.
In this story, it makes more sense to just save time and say that cannons shared space with lasers and missiles. You know, the way some people fight with swords and other people fight with sports equipment.
Why not fight with a blitzball? This thing can maintain force and speed when thrown underwater, it’s very clearly not just a volleyball. Say, for example, Wakka flung a huge slab of granite at people, which is what he’d reasonably need to be doing to be able to maintain any kind of velocity underwater. Getting hit with a rock the size of a man’s head, I can absolutely believe that killing someone.
Even whike playing the sport as intended, it’s possible to poison and (temporarily) cripple others with the official equipment. The Jecht shot involves two bank shots off of the other team’s defenders, even.
That would be like a baseball batter hitting a home run off of the heads of the catcher and first baseman on purpose. Every time he was at the plate.
As I said above, I’m like 90% certain the Napoleonic cannons are Al Bhed crafted, while the death beam is salvaged pre-Sin tech.
Can we stop talking about pronounciation of names, as it’s completely butchered in the US release anyway? Here are the katakana for the characters, found on the Japanese Wikipedia, followed by their English names, followed by the Romaji transliteration.
ティーダ (Tidus) Tiida
ユウナ (Yuna) Yu’una
ワッカ (Wakka) Wakka
ルールー (Lulu) Lulu
ã‚マリï¼ãƒãƒ³ã‚¾ (Kimahri-Ronso) Kimarii-Ronzo
アーãƒãƒ³ (Auron) Aaron
リュック (Rikku) Ryukku
I’m not going to re-write pronounciation in English, because that’s very pointless, as English is infamous for having unclear vowels all over the place. “Break” vs “Beak” vs “Steak”. I recommend to all English speakers to learn the phonetic alphabet, and how to pronounce all those sounds, especially how to do all the vowels and umlauts. It’s only like a dozen.
Look up Romaji pronounciation, it’s very straight forward and systematic (short version: It’s 99% like German (z is different)).
“Butchered” and “localized” aren’t the same thing.
This – the English pronunciations seem to be pretty accurate in this game, given how different the accents involved are.
In theory or in practice?
It amuses me how so very close Rikku’s Japanese name is to the Shinigami from Death Note. Kinda puts her ditzy behavior in a new light…
It’s Kimari, not Kimarii. I assume you’re mistaking the = between the two names for a vowel extension. It’s not, it’s used in the same way as a hyphen would be to connect two names together in some way.
Ronso is the tribe/clan name, appended to the name of every member. So Kimahri-Ronso, hence why it’s got a = between them in the JP version. Likewise, シーモアï¼ã‚°ã‚¢ãƒ‰ (Seymour-Guado) and エボンï¼ã‚¸ãƒ¥ (Yu-Yevon) are written the same way.
Regular katakana names (ie, first name and last name) are written with a ・ to delineate, like クラウド・ストライフ (Cloud Strife).
“Can we stop talking about pronounciation of names,”
No. It’s still interesting / funny to some people. Moreover, it’s interesting / funny to ME.
The answer to many of these things is the great vowel shift.
Funny enough, the first foreign language I learned was English, and when I went to learn Italian, German or even Dutch, I found that most (single) vowels were pronounced just as in my native Spanish and no way like in English. The phonetics of Japanese are surprisingly similar to Spanish and of course the vowels are like in the non-English European languages.
This extends to the game, the way every name is “supposed” to sound is the most natural way for me. In fact I had not considered this to be an issue until I started reading this series.
You guys are kinda the odd ball here. I mean, after 20 years of speaking your language, I still can’t get the English vowel sounds right for spelling if I don’t sing the vowel song I learned from Muzzy first.
You have to remember that the rules of spelling, pronunciation, and grammar for the English language are only there to annoy foreigners and are treated as entirely optional by native speakers.
Especially in England where a brisk walk ten minutes in any direction probably means you’ve wandered into a completely different dialect where you don’t understand a word people are saying anyway.
And they did an amazing job at that. Consider a word like “wifi” and that the two “i” have, canonically, different sounds. Endless fun.
I think that, if you combine this with the fact that when the Japanese opened to the world they made deals with mostly non English-speaking people, the choice of “what should this new alphabet sound like” was an easy one to make. I don’t know anything about the period when the correspondence between Latin alphabet and Japanese sounds was made, but it seems that the Dutch and the Portuguese were considerably influential.
To understand how to pronounce most of these FF names, it is probably easier to identify every vowel with a unique sound and stick to that sound wherever that vowel may appear:
“a” like in “clap”
“e” like in “get”
“i” like in “meet”
“o” like in “for”
“u” like in “root”
And so: “Mi’ihen” and “Tidus” are trivial to pronounce as intended.
Mika is wrong though.
That is correct… well, exception! (now along will come 200 more exceptions and the rule will be useless).
I tried.
GO ENGLISH! We have no agreement on how to pronounce anything, we steal and mangle other languages, and we’re one of the dominant languages. How? Frack if we know, we speakers haven’t agreed on anything since the 1700s. :)
>GO ENGLISH! We have no agreement on how to pronounce anything, we steal and mangle other languages, and we're one of the dominant languages. How?
Probably because we spread our language globally after we gained temporary dominance over the world post-WWII.
Probably the British Empire had something to do too. Spanish is spoken by 500 million people and we did nothing before or after WWII.
The point is: Talking about how a name translated from Japanese to English (which has no clear rules about how to say vowels) is quite pointless. Neither the director nor the voice actor knew how to pronounce it (case in point is the protagonist’s name!), so everyone just made something up on the spot.
It’s like talking about the result of dice rolls.
Talking about how to pronounce names in the original (or in any language that isn’t English) can be interesting, because those names were chosen deliberately, unlike the English version where it is the result of chance.
And if we talk about pronounciation, can we (as a people) please stop using English as the “you say this like [example word]” language? Because that is the only language where this won’t work! It’s easy enough to look up the phonetic alphabet and copy-paste the symbols, and for most of the world those symbols are very clear, as they match their own language quite well.
How do you pronounce “ghoti”? Like fish. “gh” as in “tough”, “o” as in women and “ti” as in “nation”.
There’s no such thing as better engineering in Final Fantasy. All engineering is exactly the same effectiveness.
Bullshit. Engineering performed by anyone named Cid is categorically superior, as this game and every other game in the series clearly demonstrate.
Also, older is always better. This is why their using thousand year old guns rather than building their own. It just wont measure up to something that has survived a millennia buried in the desert or at the bottom of the ocean.
And so for true engineering excellence what you want is something built a thousand years ago by someone called Cid.
Or, something ancient re-engineered by Cid, of which there are multiple examples, like the airship from Final Fantasy V, or Doctor Cid’s nethicite innovations in Final Fantasy XII. Or the other one that we don’t talk about.
Eh, that depends if the Cid in question is pre or post Oglop transformation ;)
Little nitpick, it’s not that Yu Yevon is afraid of losing Sin (it’s just a mass of pyreflies, after all, and those are always going to be plentiful, so he can remake Sin as many times as he wants), he’s afraid of people finding Dream Zanarkand and messing with it.
Part 6: So good we decided to do it twice! (you may want to adjust the title)
Sin might also be targeting advanced areas because the summoners created Sin as part of their war against a technology-based civilization. Their strategy was to create a giant magical monster, while their enemy decided to create a giant mechanical monster (see FFX-2).
I wish more ancient wars were decided by a winner-take-all kaiju battle.
Ironically Zanarkand, a city famed for being Machina Central was the one who created the horror of Summoning, while Bevelle, which would become heart of a Luddite Empire, created the greatest horror of Machina.
Zanarkand used machina like every other city, but it was known as Summoner Central from the start. They mention it plenty of times, that it was a summoner city.
Yeah, but in modern times it’s known as a wreck full of ancient machina, the first city punished by Sin. The reversal of associations is the point that was being made.
“I trust this creepy-looking guy with the creepy theme music.”
He just looks like the Guado version of a boy band member. And he talks in a soft, almost feminine voice that doesn’t feel remotely threatening to me.
I kind of like his battle music too. Rocking the keyboard, interspersed with a vaguely threatening line of cymbals at parts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MvSr8jKS0Y
I would describe his voice as more ‘oily’. It honestly feels a bit gross just to hear him speak. It’s true that most of the time it’s hard to feel threat from him, even when he’s
monologuing about destroying the world. You want to go have a bath instead.I apologize if anyone else has already mentioned this in the comments, but I just need to point out what I heard in my head every time Seymour came on screen:
Lift up your head, wash off your mascara
Here, take my Kleenex, wipe that lipstick away
Show me your face clean as the mornin’
I know things were bad but now they’re okay
Suddenly Seymour is standing beside you
You don’t need no makeup, Don’t have to pretend
Suddenly Seymour, is here to provide you
With sweet understanding, Seymour’s your friend
Nobody ever treated me kindly
Daddy left early, mamma was poor
I’d meet a man and I’d follow him blindly
He’d snap his fingers me I’d say, “Sure”
Suddenly, Seymour is standing beside me
He don’t give me orders, he don’t condescend
Suddenly, Seymour is here to provide me
Sweet understanding, Seymour’s my friend
Tell me this feeling lasts till forever
Tell me the bad times are clean washed away
Please understand that it’s still strange and frightening
For losers like I’ve been it’s so hard to say
Suddenly, Seymour
(Suddenly, Seymour)
He purified me
(He purified you)
Suddenly, Seymour
(Suddenly, Seymour)
Showed me I can
(Yes, you can)
Learn how to be more
The girl that’s inside me
(The girl that’s inside you)
With sweet understanding
(With sweet understanding)
With sweet understanding
(With sweet understanding)
Seymour your man
(Seymour is your man)
EDIT: Wait a minute…
“Is it to establish how powerful the rival is before you fight them?”
In FF and other jRPGs it seems to be mainly used in two ways:
1) The character is reasonably powered and starts off as an ally. If you’ve avoided spoilers, they could be easily be mistaken for a permanent party member. This is usually to build sympathy so we can forgive them when they turn back from villainy later.
2) The character is overpowered which highlights the fact that they don’t belong in the party even though they’re fighting alongside us. The devs are hinting at the heel turn (Our friend is more powerful than the boss monsters at our level! Hmmm…) but also usually trying to build sympathy for a tragic antagonist.
In a third, rare, case, sometimes your actions decide whether the character dies as a heel or has a face turn and rejoins the party. And, of course, in Undertale
the entire game is all about the entire possibility spectrum of alive/dead/friends/enemies. Actually, it just occurred to me thatin Undertale you are the overpowered boss in the party that may end up as an enemy or allyAND, if you try to get all the endings,the “terrifying world-eater”.Another idea: In Final Fantasy the alliance is usually against generic universal threats before splitting into a more central philosophical conflict (even if the philosophical conflict is often “should everything continue to exist or not”). Usually the philosophical conflict correlates to a shift in the protagonist’s mentality and the recurring enemy, if we want to, can be seen as the protagonist’s past clashing with their current worldview.
Sephiroth and the Turks are Cloud’s time in Shinra, Seifer is sort of Squall growing from listless mercenary doing what he’s told to a leader fighting for an ideology, Beatrix is sort of Garnet’s complacence in Alexandria’s actions, and Seymour is Yuna’s view of Yevon.
…your description of Seymour’s plan sounds disturbingly like what’s happened in Turkey.
in star ocean: the second story, playing through the claude story side, you end up with a rival (Dias) from your teammates past(Rena). You fight against him and it shows how outclassed you are by him. But when playing as the Rena story side, while claude loses to him in that fight, there is an opportunity you get to recruit Dias into your team permanently a bit later. It was a nice change up from the other rpgs trying to show off the villains power and a reason to play both sides of the story, as there were characters you could only understand the story behind by playing both, and you could only recruit some when playing as one or the other.
No this week?