T w e n t y S i d e d
As I mentioned earlier in the series, creepy Seymour is a Guado, one of the other races / factions of Spira. It’s yet another way that the Final Fantasy distinguishes itself. If this had been written by a western developer, they would have just made them Elves. (And the Ronso would probably be Orcs.)
Seymour invites the party to his home in Guadosalam for a very creepy dinner of villainous exposition. His servants all praise him, he says vague grandiose things that nobody questions, and it basically feels like you’ve walked into a cultist’s compound. He asks Yuna to marry him. He offers her one justification for the decision, but he also tips his hand as to the real reason he wants to do this.
His stated reason is to make the people happy. He claims to be a big fan of his father’s efforts to have warmer relations with the rest of Spira. Yuna is the closest thing Spira has to royalty, since a great deal of respect is given to summoners who bring the Calm. Seymour is the leader of the Guado and Yuna is the daughter of the last High Summoner. This would make a pretty good political marriage.
It’s also a good marriage from the standpoint of public theater. Yuna is the young and beautiful champion of the people, fighting to bring the calm. Seymour is the young new Maester and he’s pretty popular, particularly after the spectacular display of power that saved the Blitzball arena from fiends at the end of the tournament. Seeing them marry each other would make for a pretty good celebrity marriage.
But his real reasons are (surprise!) sinister and insane.
I have to praise the environment design, here. Guadosalam is spectacular and it’s impossible to do it justice with just a few screenshots. This is one of those moments where you see just how much love the folks at Squaresoft put into their craft. A tremendous amount of work went into giving the Guado their own clothing, architecture, furniture, lighting, music, character models, and color palette. The whole place makes the Guado feel truly alien. The twisting corridors and layered walkways give the place an appropriately unsettling feel.
Seymour has a recording of ancient Zanarkand. Or a reconstruction. Or something. Look, the recording technology of this world makes no sense. There are these spheres that are filled with pyreflies, or maybe a special kind of water, and maybe they also have mechanical parts? They hold memories that can be played back like full 3D holographs. The whole thing runs on space magic and there’s no point in asking what the rules are because they’re just a way to deliver visual exposition. Anyway…
Seymour has a space magic hologram of ancient Zanarkand. He gives the party a tour. His recording shows us Lady Yunalesca and Lord Zaon, who were a husband and wife team who battled Sin. Yunalesca was the first summoner to defeat Sin.
Yuna was obviously named after her. Seymour tells Yuna he wants to play Lord Zaon to her Yunalesca. If this is your first time through the game then you’ll naturally assume he’s just professing his love for Yuna. It would be like him saying he wants to play the Westley to her Princess Buttercup or the Mario to her Princess Peach. But if you know what Auron and the Maesters know, then you’ll realize what he’s really proposing is, “Turn me into a Fayth and use me to defeat Sin.” He’s proposing they get married and then kill themselves fighting Sin.
So, more Romeo and Juliet than Westley and Buttercup.
The Farplane
I know I already complained about how nonsensical death is in this universe way back in part 4, but at the time I skipped over the little detail that in this universe the living can go through a magic door here in Guadosalam and visit the afterlife.
The farplane is a rock platform floating in clouds of pyreflies and particle effects. If you think about someone who is dead, then a peaceful apparition of them will appear nearby. The image doesn’t talk or interact, but it’s “real” inasmuch as it can be seen by people who didn’t know them. So it’s not just an image in your mind. The image will only appear if the person is actually dead, regardless of whether or not you know / think they’re dead.
I’m surprised this place isn’t more popular. I’d expect there to be a line out the door of travelers from all over Spira, come to see this natural wonder. Imagine if you could visit the grave of someone you loved and they would appear in front of you so you could talk to them. It’s also a great way for testing to see if a missing person is dead.
The rules of death were already pretty dodgy, but now they’re about to evaporate entirely. The ghost of Lord Jyscal – Seymour’s fatherwho was certainly given a proper sending ceremony! – comes crawling back out of the Farplane portal and drops a physical object that Yuna picks up.
While I’m a big fan of Final Fantasy X, it’s not really my favorite style of fiction. I’m usually a details-first kind of guy, so it’s really hard for me to not stop and spend thousands of words explaining how absurd this all feels. I’m going to just accept this and move on, but I hope you’ll appreciate just how difficult this is for me.
Jyscal dropped another recording / memory sphere gizmo. In this one he accuses his son of his murder from beyond the grave. Yuna views it, but doesn’t share it with the rest of the party. Instead, she gets the genius notion to confront Seymour about it in private. She hopes to use the wedding as leverage. I think her angle is that she’ll marry him if he submits himself to the authorities for his crime. I suppose she’s trying to weed out this corruption while minimizing the damage to Yevon. The problem is that she’s vastly underestimating Seymour’s ambitions and power. She probably assumes he killed his dad so that he could become Maester, but Seymour doesn’t give a garm’s ass about political power. This whole thing is part of his plan to destroy the world, so to him the murder of one guy is a trifle.
At any rate, Yuna announces to the party that she plans to marry Seymour.
We’re going to skip a lot of story here, because it’s all character-based stuff. The pilgrimage plot kind of stalls for the next few hours and instead we spend time watching various people react to Yuna’s decision. Her guardians obviously don’t like the idea, but she’s the boss as long as she’s on a pilgrimage to fight Sin. Tidus hates the idea because he loves Yuna, hates Seymour, and he’s probably spent the entire voyage thinking that he and Yuna can start dating once she beats Sin. The general public loves the idea because to them it’s a storybook wedding to gossip about.
The only other noteworthy thing in this chapter is that the Al Bhed assault the party on the way to the next temple. They bring a tank this time. Afterwards that awful racist idiot Wakka seems to think people are bad just because they try to murder you with a tank. He finds out Rikku is an Al Bhed and gets upset. Tidus talks him down by saying that “Rikku is just Rikku”.
Yes Tidus. The Rikku that enslaved you and then tried to murder you in a submarine after kidnapping the woman you love for reasons that haven’t even been explained to you yet. That Rikku.
The writer keeps showing us the Al Bhed are bad guys and telling us they’re good guys. Thankfully, this is the last of that nonsense. We won’t see the Al Bhed again for a couple of chapters, but the next time they show up they will be sympathetic good guys and everyone will forget about the whole LOL MURDERTANK business.
Footnotes:
[1] who was certainly given a proper sending ceremony!
Self-Balancing Gameplay
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
The Gradient of Plot Holes
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
The Gameplay is the Story
Some advice to game developers on how to stop ruining good stories with bad cutscenes.
Tell me about it.
I really want to hear Shamus’s opinion on Tales of the Abyss. The world is full on details first, internally consistent and with hard sci-fi themes… except all the details are bonkers fantasy elements and the story is mostly character and drama driven.
More than that, he could probably get several posts out of explaining how awful Luke is for the first quarter of the game, lol. But yes, I agree it’s a fabulously well crafted world, especially the Fon magic and all the detail put into that, including one of my favourites in any fantasy work: properly detailing why magic doesn’t affect your own party.
At least Luke is awful on purpose. Poor boy has the body of an eighteen-year old and the mind of a seven-year old, and that’s before we add in the sheltered upbringing and his mentor probably not being a very good influence.That’s generally how every Tales game is in my opinion. Abyss is actually one of the better ones.
And Zestiria is easily the worst. I can’t remember what the evil magical force is called in the game, but it’s always whatever the author needs it to be. Is it environmental? A poison? A curse? Is it just caused by “not being grateful” to the angels? But the angels are jerks, often.
I get the feeling in the original Japanese the fact that ancestor worship is a part of their religious experience would make this be more sensible, but unlike, say, Miasma, I never knew what the hell I was fighting and why.
We could give him the show to watch first and see if it catches his interests.
I would BUY Shamus a copy of Tales of the Abyss to see what he thought of it.
I am not kidding!
Shamus said, about a month ago:
So if you think it’s a good candidate, and are okay with him maybe not playing it, go ahead.
Intriguing, but I’m not entirely sure how I’d go about it, since it’s not digitally available.
I only discovered it this year through the Let’s Play Archive, but found it a very interesting setting and would be interested in seeing Shamus’s thoughts on it as well.
Well, without undue concern, I hope neither of you decide to institute refraining as a consistent policy. :D
I want to dig into the details first vs drama first storytelling “debate”. As everyone here has being pointing out drama first storytelling can lead to inconsistent worldbuilding. But details first storytelling can lead to sacrifices in arguably more important things like characterization and narration, rendering a work to be like a technical manual or thought experiment instead of an actual story.
Like most anything in life, the “Details vs Drama” is really just a spectrum, and where you fall on that spectrum greatly influences how a work is perceived and whose itch it scratches. Even within the Final Fantasy series, you’ll find it jumps all over the place.
– Details First: FF Tactics and the rest of the Ivalice series, with an emphasis on shifting alliances and fairly grounded in realism, with the supernatural elements still PRESENT, but less crazy. Less attention is given to the individual characters and more to the world itself. This doesn’t mean there isn’t nutso-banana-rama stuff going on (this is the Final Fantasy series) but more attempts are made to make sense of it all.
– Middle Ground: FF6, FF7, first half of FF8, FF9 which do a great deal to explain things, but there are some bits that make no sense. More character driven, but with relatively sane worlds…usually until the last disc or so, when the crazy shit happens.
– Drama First: FF10, FF5, last half of FF8 where basically stuff happens because of Plot (TM), logic be damned. The world is interesting, sure, but we are now officially here for the characters and most of the non-sense is either lampshaded, handwaved or ignored entirely.
What I’m taking issue with is people saying or implying that stories on the details end of the spectrum are superior to stories on the drama end. I mean, yeah we have personal preferences, but people are going to be left cold if you imply that a story can get away with flat and wooden characters as long as the rivers are done right.
There’s also the realism discussion, but that’s a separate issue.
If I want to go beyond the details/drama split, one question I’d want asked is how much is a story driven by its characters. Are the characters driving the story or are they at the mercy of Plot?
I tend to see that impression sometimes as well — even in shpelley’s reply — but it’s not really the case that one is inherently better than the other. Both can be done equally well and equally poorly, and even some of the things Shamus divides up into details vs drama in these posts might be drama-first done poorly.
The main idea, though, is that in a drama-first work, the details are, in fact, far less important — and possibly even unimportant — to the work. You get enough details to go along, but they only come up to make sure that you don’t get sucked out of enjoying the drama and characters by wondering “But what do they eat?”. In good works of this sort, if you’re asking those questions you are applying the wrong mind-set to it. The original Star Wars trilogy is a good example of this: the characters say things about the world, but only enough to keep things moving.
In a details-first work, it seems to me that the drama and the charactertization, if it’s done well, are supposed to FOLLOW from the details. It’s not just that you throw the details out there and the readers swoon, but instead that they build a detailed world and all of the characters and characterization and plot are integrated into and greatly impacted by that.
In both cases, it seems to me, the question you are going to ask about the plot details are “Does the plot give me enough to understand and follow the story and characters along, and not a lot more than I need?” The thing is that in details-first works you are going to need far more and a far more complicated plot for it to work, while in drama-first you clearly won’t. But in both cases, if you find yourself asking if the plot is more drama-oriented or details-oriented, at least while watching/playing/reading it, they aren’t doing it right.
It might also be useful to add in a third-category, action-first, where the plot and characters and even drama are just there to get us to the next action scene. So, any Michael Bay movie, for example [grin]. When we add this category in, we can see that it’s divided up by main purpose, not by quality. If you feel like a good action romp, you don’t want to pick up a details-first work, and even a drama-first work might not give that to you, so you likely want to go for a well-done action-first work. On the other hand, if you really want a details-oriented work, even the best action-first work won’t give that to you.
The sad thing is, I didn’t mean to have it come off that way. I love Final Fantasy Tactics, probably my top game of all time in terms of time spent (followed VERY closely by Disgaea 2/5) but I have played Final Fantasy X and 5 probably more total times because I find them more traditionally “fun” and enjoyable a lot of times. Drama-first usually does a better job at just getting the player to “relax and have fun with it” which…for a video game is pretty good!
Shamus has said,multiple times,that this is not the case.And in fact,most people here agree.Neither one is inherently superior.But they are different,and you have to present them differently.Also,some people prefer one,not because its better,but because thats just how their taste is.
I don’t think “details first” is being held up as better than “drama first;” however, this community has sort of built up around nit-picky deconstruction of narrative and setting, so most readers around here have a subjective preference for “details first.” That bias tips the scales as far as specific praises and criticisms go, and of which works tend to be favored or disfavored.
It’s been brought up much more often in this series precisely because Final Fantasy X lies pretty far outside the typical fodder of this site, and its usual method of scrutinizing games: Twenty Sided typically either examines how details-first stories trip up on their premises, or, more commonly, how drama-first stories end up stepping on their priorities by drawing undue attention to the gaps and weaknesses in their own verisimilitude.
FFX is, by contrast, a story that works as well as it does precisely by promoting its dramatic premises to the fore, and de-emphasizing any details of the setting or its mechanics to negligibility, without drawing undue attention to those background elements. Of course, nit-picky dorks like us are still given to pointing them out when inconsistencies or mysteries crop up, but the gaps are largely (and thankfully) immaterial to the story being told, and the strengths of the game are largely undiminished by them. The game’s strength is in keeping the audience engaged strongly enough not to worry about them in the first place, and in not undermining its dramatic premises even when that engagement breaks. Reasonable minds may differ, of course.
This game very much isn’t Mass Effect, which wants to be a dramatic, character-driven game but can’t help but constantly draw attention, inadvertently or otherwise, to its flaming trash heap of botched worldbuilding, which is as necessary to understand and appreciate the individual events of the plot as it is detrimental to that same understanding through its own factual contortions and its sensation of naked contrivance.
It’s important to bear in mind that a story can display a very strong priority for drama or details without ignoring or underfeeding either element. Consider another Square-Enix title, The World Ends With You. TWEWY has a complex but airtight rationale behind every setting detail and game mechanic; underneath every single action, motivation, and system in the game is some sort of metaphysical justification rooted in the supernatural mechanics of the setting. But contrary to that rigor, TWEWY is a solidly drama-first story, and almost none of that detail is necessary to understanding or engaging with the events of the narrative, which is overwhelmingly character-driven and rooted totally in clear, immediate emotional stakes, most often survival itself. Whenever a metaphysical detail is necessary to appreciate a character’s motivation, that detail is foreshadowed well in advance and is firmly in place by the time the player’s emotional investment comes to rely on it. The game has a very firm sense of how much the player will understand at any given time, and leverages mystery and revelation superbly for drama’s sake- without reeking of contrivance, which is the primary advantage of a setting that builds and prioritizes drama atop sensible, consistent rules.
Final Fantasy X is noteworthy as a game that doesn’t really withstand even the lightest rational scrutiny, and offers almost no answers to an audience more interested in history, physics, and culture than melodrama. But its wise management of its storytelling means that such scrutiny is rarely warranted in the moment and often isn’t possible except in hindsight, after its all-important dramatic payload has (hopefully) already been delivered. In other words, by the time you realize Final Fantasy X cheated, it’s already won. Unless your only exposure to the game is secondhand, learning all the inside information and its cavernous empty spaces upfront with no emotional investment or engagement with the careful weft of an unfolding story. Which is unfortunate for people coming to FFX through this series, I guess. On the other hand, The World Ends With You is noteworthy as both a thoughtfully-constructed setting based on complete, consistent and (eventually) accessible rules and details, but keeps that wealth of detail fairly deep in the background, carefully leveraging it for verisimilitude and providing a nigh-irreproachable foundation for its far greater priority: telling a story rooted overwhelmingly in interpersonal drama, character arcs, melodrama, and vintage, 120-proof Power of Friendshipâ„¢. Does this make The World Ends With You a better game than Final Fantasy X? Well, that’s totally up to personal interpretation, but the answer is YES, yes it absolutely does.
This is like the third time in a week you’ve posted a long thoughtful comment that really knocked it out of the park.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XcKBmdfpWs
Good post.
And I like details as much as the next nerd. But, like what you said about TWEWY, I’d want the details to support the story rather than be the story. Otherwise you get the kinds of issues Joe Informatico was talking about.
And I was also thinking of “TV Tropes” style analysis where someone evaluates a work by just checking its Mohs hardness and tracking how many tropes a work does or doesn’t subvert then calling it a day. I’m no good at literary analysis either, but that kind of thing still leaves me wanting.
Thank you so much for brining up The World Ends With You. It’s one of my personal favorite games, but I feel like not a lot of people have played it. It’s great to see it getting some love.
To the interested, here is a small taste of why I fell in love with the game. With minor Spoilers: Your character starts the game with amnesia. Like you may have just done, I sighed and excepted this as a standard Jrpg writing crutch or an attempt to add an un-need layer of convolution. Then later in the game something amazing happens: you find out why you have amnesia, it make sense with what you’ve been told before and it’s reasoning was perfect for the story. Not only was the amnesia not a crutch by the writer, it actively added to the story being told, making it better than it would have been without it.
Tactics in particular was funny because at first glance it can seem to not make sense – people are killing each other, switching allegiances, and sometimes you aren’t quite sure what your role is in the matter. But really digging into the plot and details shows that things ARE consistent and make sense in the end – it’s just that everyone’s part of this massive Gambit Pileup (sorry) as different groups try to win for different reasons.
You have the poor ex-soldiers who are tired of being exploited by nobles, the nobles tripping over each other trying to assume regency power over the country, the church involved in its own spoilery plans, and then here comes Ramza who just wants to do the right thing.
I still consider it one of the better examples of intrigue, betrayal, and conflict in media – it’s really too bad that it’s difficult to understand what’s going on in a first (or even 2nd, 3rd…) playthrough, not helped by poor initial translations. Still, even with that it’s a pretty fun and interesting game.
The initial translation REALLY hurt things, as did the decision to move a lot of the game into the Brave Story menu instead of the game proper, then give each character 3 mispelled names each. It would have created a lot of cutscenes, but I think the audience for a Tactics game would have appreciated them.
But I agree. Frankly, Delita is one of the most interesting characters in any of the Final Fantasy games if I had to choose one.
Despite it’s technical issues, the “War of the Lions” remake on the PSP, and later moved to Android/iOS, fixed the problem of the poor translation.
It’s really ballsy how much Tactics is committed to everything going to hell no matter the sacrifices and decency of your characters.
The scarequotes are well justified, because it isn’t a debate like the kind you might have when trying to decide which of two possibilities is better than the other.
They both have their place, and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. As shpelley says, there isn’t a bright line between them. (And if you ask me the possibilities for admixture are such that they don’t even fall neatly into a spectrum! It’s more of a, I dunno, fuzzy clump.)
It’s worth bringing out some Shamus quotations from when he introduced the dichotomy, p’raps:
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=27836
Is there really a “debate”? I’ve always seen it, at least in Shamus’ essays, as a simple comparison. I don’t think the general idea is that one style is better than the other, or doesn’t have flaws, etc. Any set of storytelling priorities along any set of variable axes can fall prey to both general and specific problems if the writer slips up (or fails catastrophically, etc.)
In this particular case, though, I’d say that the problem has nothing to do with whether it’s detail-first or drama-first storytelling overall; it’s a case of some details being included (because it’s pretty much always going to be a mix, rather than purely one or the other for an entire narrative) and then seemingly being broken. There’s nothing wrong with emphasizing drama and glossing over details, but if you do commit to a detail, it’s probably bad form to mix it up later on. It’s an apparent writer (team) slip-up.
Well, and then sometimes you get the problem of inconsistent detail. For me, this often comes up with technothriller fiction–i.e., the genre where the author has done massive research and gone to great lengths to get the one or two things they care about absolutely precise. And that’s great, but what frequently annoys me is that the precision the author gives to those handful of areas often serves to set off how almost everything else is not held to the same standard.
So the author might have made all the technology in the story completely realistic and true to life, but then it becomes plain that their characters are just one or two-dimensional stock archetypes. Or the technology behaves as it should but none of the bureaucracies or institutions depicted in the story react to things the way they would in reality.
Obviously this genre has its fans, and there are a couple books in it I really like–usually smartly-written ones that know how to work around those limitations. But it is a recurring thing that often irritates me in the genre.
Where the threshold between conventional entertainment and porn is transgressed, a different standard is tolerated.
Buttercup and Westley, not Wesley.
Was that really true love, or did he just crush her?
Shut up Michael!
It’s actually “to blave,” which means “to bluff.” He owed her gambling debts.
Volunteer pyreflies, maybe, for the new sphere? (I could see people bringing recorders and recording devices to show their loved ones).
Though some important stuff for Auron happens at the Farplane, too…
Do you mean that he is just an elf with a different name,or that western elves are always the same?
Not the former, certainly – later he talks about how much work went into making them distinctive and alien, which wouldn’t sit too well with a nameswap interpretation.
I think he meant that western fantasy races are always the same, while Japanese ones can get pretty wild.
Yeah,thats not the case.Im pretty sure that to japanese people the tropes of their culture are just as common as western tropes are to westerners.
I can say with some authority that much of what we’re seeing here (as opposed to, say, Youkai Watch) has *nothing* to do with the “tropes” of traditional Japanese fantasy in the way that Tolkien’s work is both based on, and a founder-of-contemporary-interpretations-of, modern Western fantasy tropes.
Maybe, maybe not – but even if it is the case, it at least seems to me like they have a lot more room for variety.
To me it feels like the point that’s being made is that they bothered to give them attention, to craft something unique for this story. In stead of going, eh, we have some archetypes lying around, why would we NOT cut this corner? No, the designers used their imagination (their FANTASY) to come up with something one of a kind, even if it does borrow from familiar elements.
That is, if I’m not being too generous :)
They pretty much are elves, except they look like tree-people. Guado are immortal or near-immortal, isolationist, live in harmony with nature and shun machinery, look down on humans and are naturally magical. The appearance is different but the story tropes that went into their creation are the same. If you replaced all the Guado models with stereotypical D&D elves you’d hardly notice the difference, barring perhaps a slightly stranger sense of architecture in their elf-village.
Are Guado near-immortal? I never got the impression that they were any more long-lived than humans.
Certainly, Seymour has a lot of dead ancestors with portraits hanging in his entrance hall…
I’m not sure the comparison is quite so obvious, and for a player in the game I don’t think it’s immediately evident – which for the purposes of the overall experience is perhaps enough.
They may be ‘elves’ when we think about them now, but I can safely say that didn’t cross my mind while playing, which made them much more interesting to me. Something as simple as a rename and reskin can make a lot of difference if done right.
Perhaps not. Maybe I’m being overly unfair. I still feel that the storyline purpose of the Guado — to represent the ‘mystical, isolationist race’ — is one that is filled often by elves both in western RPGs and in eastern RPGs, and that to fill that story purpose they end up sharing a lot of the common tropes, like the
It may also be that they’re simply the most recognizable fantasy race by the standard of FFX. I mean, in jRPGs dwarves tend to be the ‘technological race’ that blend magic and machinery but the Al Bhed are certainly nothing like dwarves (beyond being technological and clannish), and the blue cat people fit into a sort of ‘tribal warrior race’-ish fantasy archetype, but that still doesn’t leave them feeling like blue furry orcs. The Guado simply cleave closer to the whole package, looking a bit like dryad/tree people and being pretty much elves otherwise. Looking at the concept art for some of them makes the elven/fae influences quite clear too.
I think that was Shamus’ point, that you can make them Elves and all the character beats would still work.
I’ll say it definitely makes a difference upon introduction though; elves carry their own connotations, usually positive, so Seymour’s introduction with “That’s an Elf, isn’t it?” sets up a different picture of what to expect from these guys. Introducing him as a new race with eerie music and no elaboration leaves an uneasy hole in expectations.
Pretty much. Using elves brings along with it a lot of (perhaps unintentional) extra baggage caused by their presence in other media, which can color our perception of them in a large number of ways not tied directly to the game. That and they’re inherently less interesting because we’ve seen them before – regardless of how they’re used, elves are to some extent a ‘known quantity’.
Whereas a completely different race possessing many of the same qualities can stand on its own for the most part, at least up to the point where someone starts calling then ‘elves’ because they noticed enough similarities. And in a case like FFX, it doesn’t seem like that’s likely to happen until the game’s already over.
Unless you’re a Dwarf Fortress player. :)
It’s amazing that this whole franchise has been concocted so that every game has a totally different wacky world that works on entirely different principals than the last one. It provides such a blank slate for the writers, yet still can benefit from a huge fan base.
Spoony appreciates it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wl9ZlvRdVKA&t=7m30s
Spoony’s Ultima stuff was great, but does anyone know what’s going on with him these days? Seems like he’s only putting out a video every other month or so now.
He is streaming a bunch of games and I think he is doing a movie.But if you check his youtube channel,youll find all those games that he streamed,and those videos are looooong.
Considering the “Spoony Tries Ecto Cooler” video along with what’s going on with the rest of the main Channel Awesome people, my assumption would be that he’s got a decent part in Jesus, Bro from Brad Jones/The Cinema Snob.
That’s the only movie that’s really been mentioned, although Shot on Shitteo is also finally finishing production. :P
I follow him on Twitter and he’s having serious mental health issues. For some unknown reason, he can’t sleep for more than 3 hours at a time, which is leading to severe exhaustion and, because of who he already was, seems to be exacerbating what I assume to be already-present depression.
He’s spending some time trying to figure out what the hell is going on, but there hasn’t been much of a conclusion by licensed professionals so he’s basically in limbo right now, if limbo involved a complete lack of REM sleep.
Has he been checked for sleep apnea? That would be my first guess
Among a laundry list of other things. :/
As an update, he’s been using a CPAP machine for the past few days and it’s caused him to not sleep at all, so there’s that. =/
I know I’m better off biting my tongue, but… dammit.
Because spheres of all kinds are, as stated, weird magic contrivances with no real rules behind them and seem to be made of exactly the magic stuff that the Farplane is rife with, it makes enough sense that Jyscal could just poof such a sphere into existence from his ethereal vantage, to persist indefinitely in the mortal world regardless of how short-lived his personal manifestation might be.
Except… the contents of Jyscal’s sphere state in explicit terms that it was something he recorded before his death, which he foresaw but chose not to prevent. So in abnegating the more magical, yet more plausible, means of introducing that sphere into the plot, we’re led to assume that Jyscal made a jailbreak from Hades to, um, cough up a physical object that must have existed somewhere in the world prior to his death? Presumably still in his nightstand a short jog down the road?
And I know this is effectively an invitation to contrive an explanation out of nothing. I’ve made my peace with that. At least try to make it really clever or really nonsensical, since an amusing, insane explanation will hold just as little weight as a boring, practical explanation.
I do love some explanations out of nothing.
Jyscal never actually recorded that sphere. He planned to, but things kept coming up and then Seymour killed him before he got around to it (Guado leaders are busy, man!).
As a Sent on the Farplane, his memory has faded, so that he remembers there’s something important he had to say but can’t remember what. The trauma of the Sending brings that memory violently to the surface, and his (second) last act is to preserve it as a record before he forgets it again.
Upon the second Sending, his soul turns into a Chocobo, who must then travel down the Farplane waterfall into the dream fields to gather the pieces of his shattered Guadoity. He meets other shattered souls, has grand adventures, and pieces himself back together, with the inclusion of a few poignant pieces of other shattered souls, by the time Yuna reaches Zanarkand.
*round of applause for particularly ‘Guadoity’* :D
Presumably the sphere was hidden in the Farplane before his death? Jyscal isn’t strong enough to expose his son–perhaps in part because doing so would expose Yevon and threaten the social order, since Seymour’s plan is all about exploiting the secret of Sin’s existence–but he could reason that someone might visit the Farplane who would. We don’t entirely know how death works in FFX, but between X and X-2 it does seem as if the souls of the dead persist after death and can communicate with one another, so Jyscal would be prompted by better-informed spirits that Tidus and/or Yuna are good candidates for this.
So ghosts have protagonist radar. Works for me.
I’m getting the sneaking suspicion the whole Al Bhed issue might be the byproduct of culture clash with regards to how the Japanese deal with confrontation.
It might be. I have played a lot of jRPGs and seen anime where people are simply forgiven without a second thought despite their previous status as foes, as long as “they’ve put the right effort into it”. It might be a cultural thing; I don’t really know Japan well enough to comment on it.
It might also be that the writer simply didn’t put that much thought into it.
I tend to assume it’s related to how Japan’s constitution forbids aggressive military action.
I think its partly gameplay and story segregation. There’s no way that the Al Bhed tank or any of their other crazy machines can actually kill you (becuase people just wake up when the battle ends with nary a scratch, and if you get a Total Park Kill then you reload so the TPK never actually happened). So basically you and the Al Bhed are just having a humorous kick around.
Yeah, I know that’s a stupid justification.
When people talk about JRPGs I often get frustrated because, whatever we think of their writing, there always seems to be some cultural context us westerners are missing, have been missing for the past thirty years, and where not even the weebs have stepped forward to explain it to us.
Like, what JRPG tropes do Japanese gamers complain about?
I feel like the details vs drama debate is about the push-and-pull of the author trying to surprise the reader with twists. It’s about your nebulous sense of whether those twists are “fair.” A details-first story will establish the rules of what kind of twists are allowed by the physical laws-and-limits of the setting, so when the author puts them together in an unexpected way to surprise us, we’re delighted; whereas an author that breaks the rules is “cheating” and that debases the story. In a drama-first story, what matters most is the emotional resonance of the twist. Like, the logistics don’t matter if that’s what the character would genuinely do if they could do it. Conversely, it’s cheating to move characters around puppet-like to accomplish some goal. A good twist in drama-first is motivations clashing in a chaotic medley and creating unexpected conflict and alliance.
So in that sense, “details first” is about what people could do, and “drama first” is about what people would do. I feel like some ideal perfect story would embody both of those. But for non-perfect art, well, the author has to decided which to prioritize as coming first.
Moving from the general to the specific,
The thing with FFX was that it felt like there were rules, we just don’t know what they are.
I mean, start with the idea of a “soul”, that is, information content that lasts beyond the destruction of the storage media. That’s a brutally mechanistic way to look at it, but that’s basically what a “soul” is.
Then it makes sense that certain animals — pyreflies — could evolve to take advantage of that and become “info parasites” that use leftover knowledge from dead people to organize themselves, and that the information could hijack them for it’s own ends (Hence Seymour’s dad’s ghost puppeteering pyreflies to interact with the physical word again). Similarly, it makes sense that necromancers could take advantage of that kind of phenomena to turn pieces of people’s souls into a file format for storing media data.
So what makes FFX (and other FF titles more generally) so interesting is that it feels like really early on, one of the writers took a couple axiomatic positions about how souls/magic/afterlife works, and then derived a bunch of stuff from it, but we never get any explanation of how A went to B, or even necessarily what A was in the first place. Just a bunch of B-category stuff that looks like it might be related. And the exasperating part is you never know if that’s really the case, or if they were just flying by the seat of their pants the whole time and in the end Seymour was just The Cigarette Smoking Man.
This is why I’m not 100% sure calling FFX “drama first” is appropriate, especially in the beginning of the game. To me, the qualifier for “details first” isn’t in the details the audience is shown, but rather in the details and the process by which the author crafted their world.
Once when discussing “drama first” versus “details first” someone linked a good article by an author who talked about creating magic systems for fantasy settings. The basic idea behind the article was that the more details an author pins down for their magic system–what energy powers it, how practitioners acquire and practice their art, how magic interacts with society, etc–the more the author can pull the audience into their world at the expense of constraining the drama they can portray with it. The less the author never specifies what is impossible to do with magic, the more they can get away with when the going gets tough for the protagonists for drama’s sake.
To me, drama-versus-details is a broader generalization for the “how much do I want to pin down” trade-off, which has very little to do with the details we’re actually shown in the audience, and more to do with how the author constructs their world.
Salaam!
Do Guado butchers make Guadosalami?
That made me think “Goudasalami” which works entirely too well.
One little detail of the Guadosalam section I liked is the idea that the Al Bhed have a very different interpretation of the Farplane than the Yevonites; the Al Bhed argue that the pyreflies are just manifesting part of the viewer’s memory, and there’s at least one conversation where characters bounce back and forth various objections to the different explanations.
It’s a small thing, but having people disagree over the proper explanation for a mysterious phenomenon is a very human thing that Fantasy stories sometimes lack.
I feel like a lot of your issue with the Al Bhed is that Final Fantasy (at least, all the ones I’ve played) is really fast and loose with how you’re supposed to interpret violence. In FFX (and I think in anime in general, but I’m not remotely enough of a authority to say for certain) this seems like a common trope–characters take ultra-violent actions that range from “that should leave a mark” to “that should land the victim in the hospital,” but it’s not supposed to be taken literally. It’s shorthand for “this character is annoyed” that you have to look at context and character reactions to know the difference. Taking everything literally is kind of like concluding that Bugs Bunny is a psychopath because of all the abuse he inflicts on Elmer Fudd–it’s overlooking the tropes and expectations the author is working with.
The Al Bhed in the beginning aren’t abusive slavers with no regard for human suffering, they’re hard-asses who don’t trust Tidus and aren’t interested in giving him charity. How do I know that? Because that’s how Tidus acts in response to them. By the same token, the Al Bhed aren’t murdering hundreds of people when they kidnap Yun, because you never see a dead body. And Rikku’s machina wsn’t actually going to kill Tidus or Wakka, because she said it wouldn’t and Tidus accepted it. By the same token, the assault on Home IS bad because the first thing you see upon arrival are dead bodies strewn all over the place.
Once you accept the fact that violence in FFX isn’t literal, a lot of the “are the Al Bhed evil or not” problems kinda disappear (though the whole intro where Rikku isn’t speaking English in the beginning goes on for way too long).
Lets not forget, too, that there are multiple levels of ‘dead’ at play here – you can take a pretty incredible amount of damage, and be fixed up by a phoenix down or life spell…
Having just replayed the intro again, the bit about Rikku not speaking English doesn’t go on for too long, she does it the moment he says he doesn’t understand them.
I have to say, I’m a little disappointed that you didn’t name this article “Guadosalami”.
I read it that way every time now.
Rereading this entry, I couldn’t help but notice:
“Wait. Anti-magic technology exists in this universe? Because I can think of about a thousand times when that would have come in SUPER useful.”
Yeah… I think you destroy the only working prototype in this battle.