T w e n t y S i d e d
This scene is schizophrenic. We start off with a cutscene that shows the Wedding procession, which is unwilling Yuna and unhinged Seymour surrounded by a crowd of unarmed blue nuns.
Okay, so it’s just a bunch of nuns for us to deal with.
Then we get another view, and suddenly the nuns are gone. Instead, there are legions of knights with rifles, and a bunch of forbidden machina.
Okay, so NOT nuns then? Looks like we’re about to assault an army in an entrenched position. This seems like a terrible idea.
The next cut shows our heroes leaping into battle. Bullets are flying everywhere, but nobody seems worried. Tidus is even smiling.
I get it now, this is a JRPG where bullets do as much damage as a stiff slap.
Then there are a few standard encounters with robots and guys with rifles. Also there are nutjobs with flamethrowers, even though they weren’t shown in any of the previous cutscenes. I love the idea that Seymour decided he wanted a bunch of dudes with FLAMETHROWERS to defend his wedding ceremony on this narrow platform.
Our heroes make short work of the mooks and reach the platform where Maester Seymour is trying to marry Yuna. Then we get a cutscene where the party is surrounded and captured by dudes with guns.
What? So now that we’ve killed almost everyone, we get surrounded? And our heroes are afraid of guns, when the last few cutscenes established that bullets are just an annoyance?
Yuna didn’t try to send Seymour during the confusion during the assault, when all the guards were ostensibly busy and her friends were fine. But now that her friends are captured and have guns to their heads, she conspicuously tries to do her little sending dance. Seymour threatens to kill them, and she stops.
Seymour then kisses her. Afterward he orders his men to kill her guardians, even though they’re the only leverage he has over her. Which doesn’t matter, since none of the soldiers pull the trigger. I don’t mean they rebel. Everyone seems ready to kill the party. They just feel the need to pose for suspenseful music and dramatic camera angles first. You might think this is one of those “moment suspended in time” kind of deals, but then we see that while everyone was glaring at each other and doing nothing, Yuna somehow moved about ten meters to the edge of the platform.
Yuna threatens to jump off the tower if her friends are hurt. She tells the soldiers to throw down their weapons. They don’t, but they do lower them slightly. Then she jumps off anyway, even though nothing has changed to make her friends safe and her life was the only leverage she had to keep them alive. She calls an Aeon to catch her.
The guards continue to stand around doing nothing while this happens. Seymour, too. Rikku shouts for everyone to cover their eyes. I don’t think anyone does. The guards certainly don’t, even though they heard her say it. They also don’t shoot her, despite the fact that she’s obviously about to attack them and they’ve already been given orders to kill the entire party. Rikku throws a flashbomb and the party runs off.
I’m not sure why the guards were blinded. Even if they didn’t look away, they’ve got helmets that cover their eyes. The flashbomb can’t make them any more blind than they already are.
And of course, nobody fires a shot.
The best part of the scene is where idiot Seymour casually watches the flashbomb land at his feet and he stares right at it while it goes off.
The entire scene is incoherent madness. We randomly switch between pre-rendered cutscenes and in-engine cutscenes. And every time we switch to a different view the position, composition, and presumed threat level of the enemy forces seems to change. Between camera cuts the author constantly loses track of who has leverage or for what reason.
I realize this is Final Fantasy and we’re not allowed to nitpick all the stylistic quirks of the series. I can accept a story that trades in tropes, cliches, and in-jokes, but at some point you have to put your foot down and insist the writer adhere to the basic concepts of time and space. I’m not asking for realism here. I’m willing to believe whatever the game says about the position of our foes and the threat of firearms. Just PICK SOMETHING and STICK WITH IT.
But whatever. The guardians escape. Our heroes realize that Yuna is most likely heading for the temple, even though that’s an obvious move and Seymour can just have his goons camp the exit. She’s completely driven to complete her pilgrimage, and refuses to give up even in the face of hopeless odds. Sure enough, they’re all reunited and subsequently captured at the end of the puzzle trials. They surrender even though here the odds are better than they were on the wedding platform.
The party is put on trialThe kind with judges, not the kind with glowing spheres and lame puzzles. for… what? They are charged with “crimes against Yevon”. But their only crime has been killing Seymour, and he’s present at the trial. So they’re probably not on trial for that. What did Seymour claim they’d done wrong?
In their defense, they counter-charge that Seymour murdered his father. They’re basically confessing to being vigilantes and killing a head of state because he was a bad guy. Is that wise? It’s hard to tell. We have no idea how justice works in this world. It’s safe to assume the Maesters don’t preside over every case of murder and larceny in Spira. We don’t know who enforces the law on a day-to-day basis. It’s hard to tell if this is a really egregious show trial, or if their judicial system just sucks. I suppose it’s possible that both are true.
They have no proof regarding Jyscal’s murder, but Seymour casually confesses to it anyway. They claim that Seymour is unsent, which is like finding out the Pope is a zombie. This ought to cause a scandal. But plot twist: Grand Maester Mika is also unsent. Yevon is corrupt to the core.
The party is sentenced to death.
I have to pity poor Wakka here. It’s been a hard process of watching his beliefs unravel. First he saw Operation Mi'ihen. While that seemed to reaffirm that the teachings that Machina Are Bad, it did so at the expense of showing that the Maesters themselves don’t really respect the teachings. Then he arrived in Bevelle to see that the Maesters are also massive hypocrites who guard their temple with machines and weapons supposedly forbidden by their own teachings. Then he found out the Maesters are also politically corrupt, which was followed by finding out they’re also unsent.
And while he doesn’t know it yet, his faith is going to take a few more knocks before the journey is over.
“Inescapable” Prison Easily Escaped
The party is thrown into Via Purifico, the execution dungeon of Yevon, where (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) “Nobody has ever escaped.” The dungeon even has an exit, which the Maesters know about. They’re like, “We should send someone to guard the exit just in case they miraculously make it through!”
Why would your execution dungeon have an exit? Why not brick that over just in case?
I don’t mind that this is goofy and trope-y as hell. Yes, they throw the heroes into a dungeon with all of their equipment and weapons instead of just shooting them. Fine. What bothers me is that our heroes seem to know that they’re in a trope dungeon. As soon as the door slams shut behind them everyone is like, “Let’s go find the exit!”
Why would you expect there to be an exit?
Via Purifico is talked about like its a single place, but it actually has two parts. One part is entirely underwater, the other is a more conventional maze filled with random encounters. And both routes lead to the same exit! As luck would have it, swimmers Tidus, Wakka, and Rikku are tossed into the underwater part and everyone else is thrown into the maze. I have to say that’s pretty sporting of the Maesters. If they did it the other way around, Lulu, Auron, Yuna, and Kimahri would simply drown, and the other three would probably die in the monster maze without support from their black mage and healer.
Not only do they assume the dungeon has an exit, they assume both versions of the dungeon have an exit and that they will be connected. And they’re right! Both teams make it through their particular version of the inescapable prison and the party regroups at the end.
BRB abandoning you for 5 min.
Seymour is waiting for them of course, and so they have to kill him again. This scene has one of the most baffling and unintentionally hilarious moments in the entire game.
Even though they already wrecked Seymour once, they’re afraid to face him a second time for some reason. Sure, this is a second boss fight and so we in the audience expect a rougher fight this time around, but our party shouldn’t really be aware of that.
Kimahri runs forward and stabs Seymour with his spear, an attack which Seymour calls “unpleasant”. Auron then shouts for the others to escape with Yuna to safety. The party obediently runs away, reluctantly leaving poor under-leveled Kimari to face Seymour alone.
But after a hundred meters or so Yuna stops. Suddenly she can’t bear the thought of ditching her childhood friend and guardian. She and Tidus have a little moment where he affirms his loyalty to her and they revolt against Auron’s guidance. They decide to go back for Kimahri. One by one, and the rest of the guardians follow suit. They have to fight their way back to Kimahri and Seymour through a bunch of random encountersThis actually turns out to be a pretty good spot to grind, if you need the levels. There’s a save sphere nearby and the spawn rate is really good. to reach them.
The whole thing will probably take you five or ten minutes of real-world time from the moment you ditch Kimahri to the point where the party comes back for him. And yet, when you get there you’ll find the two of them still standing there, having an awkward silence with Kimahri’s spear poking into him. It’s such a strange scene because it’s clear that time must have passed here, and yet it doesn’t make any sense that either of these two would remain in this position. Seymour could have made short work of abandoned Kimahri. Barring that, there’s no reason for Kimahri not to give Seymour a few more good pokes or at least attempt to perform a haircut. Barring that, it seems like Seymour would, at the bare minimum, see to getting the spear out of his chestular region and perhaps reflect on the decision to saunter into battle with his shirt open.
Even after Seymour is dead, the party is still stuck in the middle of the most important city in Spira, surrounded by foes in every direction. The writer doesn’t seem to have a plan to get them out of this situation, so they employ the time-honored tradition of Time-Cut That Nobody Talks About. We fade out in Bevelle, and then fade back in on the party in the forest.
Footnotes:
[1] The kind with judges, not the kind with glowing spheres and lame puzzles.
[2] This actually turns out to be a pretty good spot to grind, if you need the levels. There’s a save sphere nearby and the spawn rate is really good.
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
A holy labyrinth with an exit could have worked if they expanded on it, like the old ‘trial by combat’; you’ve committed a crime, so we’ll throw you in a pit with God and he’ll decide whether you die or have purified yourself enough to get another chance. And then because the priests are all corrupt and don’t actually believe God’s in the pit they guard the exit anyway. (Or maybe they know it’s just Evrae again and we killed him getting to them.)
Bevelle was very clearly never finished; there’s a path to Bevelle that’s never used and a save sphere that’s never accessible, who knows what the plan actually was for Via or the machina reveals.
…nothing would have saved the wedding though, that thing’s just bad.
Maybe, if it had been lampshaded. Like this is a known way to deal with those who oppose the Maesters.
But they don’t even go “hey, this is that trial by combat thing we all know about”. Instead they have no idea where they are but seem to assume that all paths lead to an exit.
“There must be a way out” is not a bad assumption, there’s probably guards, but hey, we can fight.
“Both these paths must lead to the exit, let’s meet up there” is pushing it though.
“For your sins we condemn you to the Sacred Dungen of Via Purifico, from whence no-one has ever escaped!”
“Wow, really? Has this been going on for long?”
“Well… You’re sort of the first people we’ve ever condemned to it. Incidentally if you do ever escape would you mind doing it within 30 days before our warranty runs out?”
It wouldn’t be ‘Trial by Combat’ it would be ‘Trial by Ordeal’.
As far as I’m concerned, this second Seymour fight is a mistake. It doesn’t add anything to the story, it doesn’t have a ‘big showdown’ feel to it, it’s not particularly memorable. But the worst thing is that it cheapens Seymour’s later appearances. As it stands, we leave Seymour defeated, unsure of his status (is he still unsent? does he take long to recover from ‘defeat’?), and so when he shows up at Mt. Gagazet later on, the reaction is not ‘oh shit, Seymour caught up to us’, but more ‘oh, is this guy still around? I can’t keep track of whether or not he’s dead’.
And of course, there is the problem of diminishing returns: the more we fight Seymour, the less importance his fights have. It would be so much better to have Seymour simply demonstrate his power once more before we flee Bevelle, so that his fight on Mt. Gagazet could have the proper drama behind it.
I’m imagining Seymour as just a ridiculous hairdo sticking out of a flowerpot and every time you defeat him he says “Oh no, not again.”
You, sir and/or madam, truly have a Heart of Gold.
The amusement I got out of that was quite improbable, though not Infinitely so.
Tidus actually has this reaction of “not you again” the final time Seymour turns up, without much explanation, as is his wont by this point.
This second fight does let Auron (if you select it as an action) very unhappily give a speech to Seymour though, and those are always neat.
Agrajag was such a tragic character.
It’s the first time you get a boss who can no-sell your aeon’s existence after a single turn. Just imagine how much more annoying fight three would be as the only instance in the entire game that happens. For some stupid reason fight four doesn’t do it.
If the final Seymour fight let him dismiss Aeons, you miss out on the thematic richness of having Anima beat the shit out of him.
I mean if you’re doing enough sidequests to be getting anima you’re probably ALSO doing enough that anima can one turn him now that her overdrive isn’t bugged to be weaker than it was supposed to be.
He’s not tha saviour of Spira, he’s a very naughty boy.
Also, since it was apparently her plan all along, why the blue heck doesn’t Yuna SEND Seymour now that he’s defeated. Wasn’t that the entire purpose of the whole “sure, I’ll marry you” plan?
THIS. THIS AND THIS AGAIN!
I did always like the moment when playing when you see Yuna snuck her staff in to do the sending, making it ‘ah-ha, clever girl!’ The spectacle of the rescue distracted me enough I didn’t consider Yuna failing ot use the distraction.
Maybe she was busy untangling it from that wedding dress and veil during the first part of the distraction? That’s a funny image, everyone’s dramatically staring, Yuna’s hopping around trying to get the staff free.
It would have been pretty cool if Yuna DID Send him, and Seymour just no-sold that shit.
“Now be at peace!” *shiny lights*
“THE HELL I WILL. Come back in twenty levels and we’ll see, girl.”
“Maybe I will!”
Like his willpower and strength as a premier Summoner let him exist beyond death regardless of whatever anyone else had to say about it.
I felt this way about Kefka from Final Fantasy VI. Of course, I’m one of the few people who didn’t really like the villain from that game. Dude’s got more plot armor than Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight, and is smug as hell about it.
Oh, look, we’re fighting Kefka again. Oh look, he got away because the fight bored him….again.
I think there’s a difference between not liking some of the fights with Kefka and not liking Kefka as a villain.
I like the idea of him. He’s a scheming guy who gets a powerful but in theory subordinate position to a powerful leader. The leader thinks he’s useful, and can control him, and is proven wrong. Kefka is literally willing to destroy most of the world to gain power. He’s the threat no one saw the potential of until it was too late.
I find fights with him, especially the early ones, really frustrating. As you say, he can sometimes just walk away from the fight without you really getting to take a shot at him. Frustrating as this is, it’s kind of realistic. He’s got the army of an empire at his back, and you’ve got a plucky band of misfits. It’s entirely realistic that he won’t fight when he doesn’t have to.
Kefka never made me feel like he was cheating – that he showed up to fight when he shouldn’t know we were there, or that he walked away when he shouldn’t have reasonably been able to escape.
Compare to Ultros, who admittedly is more comic relief than anything else, but who shows up as calamari-ex-machina more than once, and really shouldn’t be able to keep getting away to fight again. He’s much more comparable to Seymore, IMO – he’s just “there” to be fought when the writers felt like throwing a fight in there, and even though you win he never goes away.
Ultros gets away because he’s “not your average calamari” and seems to have mastered stagecraft magic in addition to everything else he can, for some reason, do.
Ultros is such a weird character. He’s not even aligned with the empire or Kefka. He just randomly shows up and develops a random hatred of your party, and follows them to the ends of the Earth trying to comedically kill them.
This is what I think FF7 did right with Sephiroth; they keep the tension and dread of his character high because the game shows constant displays of his power both in and out of cutscenes so when you finally confront the guy he pays off all of that build-up. So when you’re playing the game it’s always ‘Oh fuck Sephiroth is here’ rather than ‘Oh it’s just him again’.
That, and you never fight Sephiroth directly; you fight Jenova, which is… different. And weird.
But don’t you fight him at the end? I distinctly remember the last moment of that boss battle being a mano-e-mano between Cloud and Seph.
Sure, but that’s the point we’re making; you only fight him at the very end of the game as the final boss. Every other time you encounter him before that you either don’t get the chance or things go very, very badly.
I never finished VII, and was just starting Disc 3 of 3 for the PC, wherever that places me. However, from what I saw, I’d agree with your assessment.
Now FF IV went the opposite extreme, where you didn’t encounter or even *know* about the final villain until the last 5% of the game.
Or FF IX, where the final villain isn’t revealed until just before you fight it.
FF X is sort of the same thing if you count Yu Yevon as the final villain.
Which, honestly, I feel you shouldn’t because Tidus’ entire character arc leads up to his confrontation with Jecht as Sin’s core, and not the Magic Space Tick that has no relation to anyone. Yes, destroying him puts the final nail in breaking the Cycle, but destroying Sin’s core could easily have done that as well if the writers just added “well, without Sin he’s dead anyway”.
That was easily my least-favorite part of IX, partially because I was invested in the story and didn’t have any idea who that was…
…and partially because I got my ass stomped into paste. T_T
I never did get to the end of FF9, but Kuja made a pretty acceptable villain. He wiped the party in the rain that one time, and other than that he’s mostly been wandering around being a dick to Black Mages or whatever.
They probably should have just stuck with that guy.
That’s the thing about recurring boss fights, you’re not supposed to take them seriously themselves, they’re symbolic of the larger conflict. Gilgamesh and Kefka are comic relief evil sidekicks, Seifer’s like Squall’s inner turmoil or something, Beatrix and Zorn&Thorn are both tools of the Queen. Jenova’s weird in a few different ways but the game always presents Sephiroth as being the one in charge. The diminishing returns are intentional; ExDeath and Gestahl can’t keep you away, Squall’s coming to terms with himself, the Queen is running out of tricks, Jenova’s… well, Jenova’s weird.
10 is unique because Sin has no followers at all, and because Sin is presented as being both supernaturally beyond physical confrontation, and actively rooting for the heroes to find a way to stop it. Seymour’s the best substitute it’s got, as someone who aspires to be that strong some day and without the desire to restrain himself. But he’s also a stand in for the Church leadership and Spira’s sacrificial faith in general. It’s a weird position where the secondary villain’s got enough narrative independence and pull that he could be the main bad guy if the game wanted him to be.
But he isn’t, and so as he diminishes the Church itself diminishes, and so does the Church’s picture of Sin as an omnipotent evil. As intended.
I’ll throw in that part of what I love about FF Tactics is there are a dozen factions and they all have recurring fights against stand-ins before you deal with the main threat.
But would the main game lessened without him? Is he really that needed as metaphor? I always thought he distracted from the actual atmosphere of helplessness of the people of Spira.
“Oh my god, the masters are unsent, Yevon is a lie, there is nothing left but despa … OH, there is the weird dude with the evil grin and the weird hair! Not all is lost!” Yay?
His backstory as summoner who failed at his pilgrimage gets lost behind his weird schemes and his hair. Why is he there? Why does he do all these things? Because of some personal drama we never really fully explore because this is Yunas story. Not his.
(He is my least favourite 2nd rank villian* and his hair always made him look like a strange Sephiroth knock-off. I may be biased.)
*What do you call all these guys? Almost every if not every Final Fantasy title has these reaccuring almost main antagonists. But in the end they aren’t. Is there a name for such characters? A thing between mook and endboss.
Probably check out Decoy Antagonist or Man Behind the Man on TV Tropes for your answer.
Will do, thank you. :)
I imagine a series of catacombs of varying punishment; there’s the catacomb of misdemeanors, which is the punishment for minor crimes, and various, more difficult, more dangerous labyrinths for greater punishements, until the execution catacomb which is supposed to kill everyone.
>> “until the execution catacomb which is supposed to kill everyone.”
Reserved for child molesters and people who talk at the theater, of course.
…What? It makes about as much sense as anything else the church is doing here.
I swear, by all of Seymour’s my hairspray, I will end you.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/ffx_bevelle5.jpg
Auron: Gotta say, Tidus, your talent for alienating people is darn near miraculous.
Tidus: Yes, I’m… very proud.
EDIT: DAMN IT! I’m trying to start this post with Shamus’s picture of Tidus and Auron in the cage, but I can’t get it to work. Anybody know how?
Ten thousand words describing the picture.
That would sort of kill the joke. And that’s more Shamus’s style than mine anyway. Don’t want to muscle in on his turf. :P
In any case, it’s too late to edit the comment now. So unless Shamus decides to fix it himself it’s a moot point. I’d still like to know how to insert images for next time, though.
The functionality exists because Shamus did it a few times something like 8 years ago when he was running DMotR, but I’ve yet to see anybody else be able to post an image. He’s probably got it locked away.
[SCENE MISSING]
“My, that was a narrow escape!”
Brilliant!
For what it’s worth, the mass of blue monks (they seem to be all dudes) would be offscreen on what we see in the third screenshot you took here (the one where we see the party sliding down the cables), while the army is standing between where the party lands and the stairs we see in the back, so there’s no geographic problem there.
Timing… I just watched the video of the wedding scene from the previous post, and my goodness is the timing laaaame!
This looks exactly as if they were using first-time actors, each of whom requires two seconds to remember their line or action, and who will always patiently wait for everyone else to finish their line/action before starting their own.
Like, back at primary school I was in a theater piece, and one guy was supposed to interrupt someone else speaking. So he waits until that guy stops speaking in the middle of a sentence (since he knows he’ll be interrupted), then takes breath, and then shouts “stop!” That’s precisely the vibe I get from that scene. Or maybe it’s more like some child playing with action figures and not able to move more than one, max two of them at the same time.
Good thing Yuna knows about this. Otherwise it would have been pretty stupid to try and start a sending ritual, in slow motion, while standing right in front of Seymor. But since there’s no multitasking, he can’t just slap the wand out of her hands, right?
I’ve always understood the weird timing to be an issue with the English dubbing over animation originally done for Japanese.
That would not explain the huuge pauses between Yuna jumping down, the warning about covering your eyes (sure, the other guys won’t hear it…), throwing the flashbang, taking another breath, everybody busily being blinded and the party starting to run off.
Or, you know, Yuna trying to perform the sending in slow-motion, with Seymour watching, or the guards not moving a bit for seconds after being given the order to shoot.
This seems to be some stylistic element in Japanese storytelling. Like in every other anime, people attacking each other will spend enough time in mid-jump to have a two-minute mono- or dialogue about their motivations. You can regard that as a kind of Matrix-style time dilation used to put into words what would otherwise be a 1-second thought, I suppose, but in the wedding scene it all just comes across wrong to me. Or maybe I’m culturally too far removed to get it?
(I already know the answer is “because you’re supposed to have a boss fight here,” but . . . )
I’m not entirely certain why Yuna can’t just Send Seymour while the party distracts him with combat here.
Frankly, I think this would have been a good mechanic to include in the game. Yuna stands off to the side of the active combat group, doing her little dance. A certain number of turns have to take place before she completes it and the unsent enemy goes away. Every time she gets attacked, that ending gets pushed back a bit more. Perhaps the active heroes could even block attacks against her at some cost.
“But then you’re just hunkering down and waiting out the fight. You’re not attacking or casting spells or doing any of the cool stuff the character is built to do!”
Perhaps, then the damage done to the villain has to reach a certain threshold to keep his attention off of Yuna, then. Or just remove the mechanic altogether; once you do enough damage to the enemy, Yuna “completes the dance” and the enemy is Sent. It’s no different than things currently are, but it actually incorporates that idea into the game beyond the cutscenes.
So basically… Ar Tonelico. Though that’s more protecting your Reyvateil so she can cast hugely destructive magic, but same basic deal :)
It’s slightly different in that you wouldn’t be able to have Yuna heal or use summons.
I mean, you couldn’t in the desert or half of Bevelle either, but still.
In the .hack games, glitch enemies were invulnerable to being killed until you hacked them with your character’s special bracelet. In order to do that, you had to do an arbitrary amount of damage first, which opened them up to being hacked and then killed. So maybe something like that?
I think the reason the party hesitates to fight Seymour is because they have nothing to gain from it. First time, they decided he had to die because doing so would eliminate the threat he poses, so it is worth taking the fight, risking injury or death (in-character) and probably investing some resources (out-of-character investment).
Now that he isn’t dead after all, and the party is not sure whether they are able to prevent him from reviving himself again, they have nothing to gain from it in-character. Doing so does not eliminate a threat to the people they’re trying to save. And they have better things to do than annoy an important political figure all day long, even though he really has it coming.
Seymour would . . . perhaps reflect on the decision to saunter into battle with his shirt open.
Seymour long ago seriously considered the pros-and-cons of sauntering into battle with his shirt open. The awe-inspiring pecs won out.
OTOH – he *chose* to have that haircut so its not like he’s all that bright.
“How long has my shirt been unbuttoned? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
This made me burst out laughing, quite loudly considering it is 1 in the morning.
Waah! My site theme! It’s different! I fear change!
For reference, on mobile (iOS) seeing a very generic WordPress theme right now. May be intentional. :).
It’s somewhat unsettling. But I do like the little biographies at the end of each post.
The theme does seem kinda broken, but maybe Shamus will talk about it more in another post/the diecast/…
Strangely, it’s messing with my page up/down/end/arrow keys navigation.
I already made fun of this stuff last week, but I still can’t get over my urge to be a long-winded spoilsport about everything. So I guess I’ll just fall back on making fun of Auron.
Sometime in the next update or two (I think), the party will fight the Spherimorph and recover the first of Jecht’s Spheres, little bonus cutscenes that flesh out Braska/Auron/Jecht’s Pilgrimage ten years ago and unlock Auron’s remaining Overdrives. The real interesting bits are getting to see the Three Amigos back in the day; because the spheres are supposed to serve as backstory for Yuna’s story, Braska & company’s own backstory is largely glossed over. But I’m here to do what I do best: fixate on a small detail to extrapolate conclusions I like and rake Auron over the coals for the fun of it.
One of the spheres shows the band being put together, with Braska and Auron springing Jecht from Bevelle’s drunk tank. In the process, Braska muses on their underdog status: Braska’s married to an Al Bhed, Jecht is a drunk claiming to be from Zanarkand, and Auron is *drumroll* “a warrior monk, doomed to obscurity for refusing the hand of the priest’s daughter.” Tidus, in his mediocrity, never brings this up to Auron. But no matter! I’m here to say that, beyond any doubts I’m willing to listen to, I can prove whom Auron was intended to marry ten years ago. I’m stipulating that it must be a named character, one present within the story of FFX. That’s just how stories work; it’s not satisfying if it’s some random nobody!
Let’s review the facts. Auron was intended to marry “the priest’s daughter.” Not a priest’s daughter. The priest’s daughter. Someone with enough pull that refusing their daughter’s proposal (or the priest’s own proposal made on his daughter’s behalf) saw Auron immediately put on a journey that he wasn’t intended to survive.
Auron must have lived and worked in Bevelle. That’s the only place we see warrior monks, which Auron is; elsewhere, the Crusaders are trusted to provide security. Auron was also something of a hotshot within the monks. A different one of Jecht’s spheres (actually, the one labeled “Auron’s Sphere”) shows a conversation between Auron and Kinoc, in which Auron, already on his way out of the monks, has been passed over for a promotion to second-in-command in favor of Kinoc. Kinoc affirms that Auron had truly deserved it, and given that Kinoc eventually became one of the four maesters (and presumably the head of the monks in the interim, assuming that his position as maester doesn’t fill that same role in Yevon’s heirarchy), we can assume that Auron was on track to become a maester of Yevon within a decade from his current standing.
So Auron was something of a big deal in Bevelle, but the priest in question must have been an even bigger deal, natch. Maybe a maester? The only two people we know for a fact were maesters at the time are Jyscal Guado and Yo Mika. Mika was Grand Maester even then, and seems old enough that any children of his would be a bit past marrying age. And Jyscal’s only child is Seymour, who would have been a bit on the young side at that time and is arguably not a daughter. But Braska does not say they were a maester; merely a priest. Braska would definitely just have said “maester” if that’s what he had meant.
So we’re looking for someone higher than Auron’s presumed position a couple steps below the maesters, but not yet a maester themselves. That narrows it down to a handful of bigwigs. Or, given that priests of Yevon shave their heads unless they’re Ronso or Guado, whatever the inverse of a bigwig is. So whose daughter could Auron have refused to marry?
Actually, it’s worth asking why Auron refused to marry. Auron, as we can see, was fiercely loyal to Yevon, a real zealot. It’s hard to believe that Auron would turn down such an offer; a decade later, he doesn’t seem to care one way or the other about Seymour’s proposal to Yuna, but that’s arguably inadmissible since he’d clearly read the game script at that point and knew its inevitable failure would help sour Yuna on the church. But at the beginning of the journey, what would have so shaken such a loyal, single-minded follower that he refused a marriage arrangement that no doubt would have pleased the church and improved his own standing? Is Auron gay? Was she really hairy?
Or what if that marriage proposal itself would have been against Auron’s traditionalist mindset, a solecism, or a lowering of station he couldn’t have accepted as a stiff-necked Yevonite apparatchik? How could it be that, and also be a proposal from a high-ranking priest’s daughter? I think I know.
Wen Kinoc became maester in less than a decade’s time after Braska’s pilgrimage. The mystery priest was either just as close, or closer to that point, and someone whose daughter’s marriage to Auron would have been valuable enough to them, or to Yevon itself, that his refusal was grounds for punishment unto a de facto banishment to certain doom. So who do we know ascended to the rank of Maester somewhere in that period? Only two people. One of them is Wen Kinoc. I think we can say with certainty Auron didn’t refuse to marry Kinoc’s daughter; there’s heaps of evidence against it, not the least of which is Kinoc’s late goodwill (recently broken, admittedly) toward Auron.
That leaves one candidate: Kelk Ronso.
The Ronso and Guado were only recently brought into Yevon under the direction of Grand Maester Yo Mika. Jyscal was presumably the first Guado Maester, and only assumed his office recently. Seymour succeeded him at most a year or two before Yuna’s Pilgrimage. If we say that Jyscal was made maester a decade prior to that, that puts his accession right around the time of Braska’s pilgrimage. The Ronso are even more insular and far-flung than the Guado; if Kelk, the first Ronso maester, acceded to his position even a short time after Jyscal, that puts him right in the sweet spot to be living as a high priest within Bevelle, but not yet a maester.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of Yo Mika. You have a campaign to bring the sub-races into Yevon’s fold, and bring all the peoples of Spira together. You’re already making two of them maesters. What else can you do to strengthen the ties between humans and ronso? The Guado were brought together with humans in large part due to Maester Jyscal’s marriage to a human, and the birth of their half-breed son, Seymour, a living symbol of the two races’ unity on the fast track to become the Guado peoples’ leader. So, you take your good buddy, Kelk Ronso, aside one day in the High Fane. “Kelk,” you say to him, “Kelk, bend down here. I got an idea. Jyscal’s made a pretty sweet deal for us Yevonites. You got a daughter? You got five? Jesus, I know what you people do to stay warm up there! Look, pick one of ’em out. We can break that bread a second time. I know the perfect guy. Super loyal, super traditionalist, nothing between the ears. He’ll be maester in a decade or so, one of the patsy maesters like you that we’ll murder when it’s convenient. He’s perfect!”
So Auron gets the message that he’s got to stop polishing his katana up in his room all day, ‘cuz the clergy have set him up with a bride. She’s blue! She’s eight feet tall! She speaks our language, kinda! Auron gets his life turned upside down. Auron might have conceded to a different arranged marriage, one that he thought raised or secured his standing within Yevon and honored its traditions. But a marriage to a neophyte of his all-important faith, one that people of both races might look upon poorly in the short term? His swift and seemingly certain rise through Yevon stood to be invalidated: either stunting it due to prejudice; or invalidating its legitimacy, in the sense that he wouldn’t be perceived to have earned his station, by dint of Yevon needing him to flourish and thereby polish the appearance of his political marriage. And also she’s a huge furry beast person. Not to say Auron is racist. But if he just drew his line in the sand somewhere shy of Ronso ladies, would you really blame him?
I’m not saying that the events of the game were set in motion entirely because of Auron’s cowardly loins, but do we give the young Auron’s swordsmanship so little credit that we think Braska and Jecht could have defeated Sin without his aid, or with some other rando being sent to their death in his place? Or that Tidus would have ever come to Spira and helped set Yuna on a different path if Auron were busy siring a litter of blue kids in Bevelle? Maybe if he’d had a stronger penchant for snu-snu, Braska and Jecht would have been eaten somewhere along Mi’ihen Highroad.
I don’t know what the moral of this story is. Actually, forget I said anything. This was a mistake
I award you one (1) Internets.
And I pray that that Auron’s not-quite-bethrothed wasn’t named “Kimahri.”
This is beautiful.
All I have to add is that we killed Spherimorph a while ago, back in the Ice Forest.
See, you travel through that place twice: one after the Thunder Plains, on your way to Macalania Lake, and then again after you escape Bevelle and the famous cutscene happens. I can never keep straight which events happen at which point. I might still have it wrong in my head.
Spherimoths (the annoying sphere thing that changes elements it’s using constantly and you have to keep guessing what he is using now, yes I know he allways does them in order but still) is definitelly after you escape Bevelle.
Incorrect. Spherimorph appears before you even go to Macalania.
This is now my official headcannon for the game, forever.
“This was a mistake”
No. No it wasn’t. One more Internets for you!
That made me smile. Thumbs up to you sir/ma’am/preferred nomenclature.
You, sir, are a master of your craft.
So wait. You’re saying you didn’t have flamethrowers at your wedding?
So as someone who hasn’t played the game, would you say this section had some real nun ‘n’ gun gameplay…?
This has nothing to do with this article, but is the site background weird for anyone else? It seems to have broken the site’s horizontal width, and doesn’t follow you when scrolling down like the old ones did.
Y’know what Seymour should have done at the wedding?
Summon goddamn Anima.
The earlier cutscene of him summoning it was an excellent piece of writing because it showed a) how powerful he is and b) what kind of fayth creates a summon that horrifying. Him using it here, at a wedding where he and Yuna are dressed in white, would be some great symbolism, especially after we learn more about Anima.
Basically Anima is his mother after turning into the Final Summon meant to destroy Sin before Seymour abandoned his pilgrimage. Mmm, Freudian.I mean, this is the first time we see a practical use of a summon in the game itself and one thing I liked about FF9 is that summons were logically used as weapons of mass destruction. This game really misses out of exploring evil summoners in further depth.
So, Seymour threatens to summon Anima, which obviously would cause collateral damage on the city below. Holding innocent civilians hostage would do a better job of stopping the heroes than puny guns. It’s still ridiculously eeeeeeevil but this game threw out subtly the moment we saw Seymour so whatever.
Priest: “Who gives this man to marry this woman? ”
Seymour: “Oops, hang on a sec…” *starts summoning*
Oh, that’s wonderful. It’d have been perfect.
Wait, I’m confused. Why Seymour is alive, but dead? What dance? Who’s unsent? Did Shamus explained it earlier?
If he did he probably mentioned it back in Killika? (the one that got wiped out by Sin) village. Basically given enough motivation the dead are unlikely to stay dead but revive. The sending, the dance Yuna performs in Kilika, is meant to ensure that all dead depart for the Farplane? and do not distrub the living any more.
Basically unsent are undead/litches.
Only the whole thing is a lot more messy, complicated, and nonsensical than that explanation makes it appear. ;)
I have to say, I remain mystified that anyone liked this game. It’s such a train wreck, even on first playthrough for me.
Incidentally, playing through FFX again now (I blame Shamus, though it was more likely the ost I was listening to a while back), it’s worth noting that
Auron, also an unsent, happens to be around attempted Sendings. Which is notable because you can, if you know to look for it, see him react…unfavorably to them.It would seem that Sending unsent actually takes a more focused version of the Sending than Sending the recently dead. So the longer someone stays Unsent, the harder it is to Send them.
Unsent usually turn into fiends, i.e. the random encounters you meet in the game. It’s not clear why Auron, Seymour, and the Ghost Pope are immune to this.
Well to be fair seymour isn’t really immune to it. He may keep some measure of his original thought capacity, but the dude is pretty clearly hopped up on fiend juice in later encounters.
I admit final fantasy x has glitches but the impossible escapes and fantastical escapades are what I love
Methinks when designing this whole part of the game, they were focused more on the game part rather than the “does this make sense” angle.
I can just imagine someone excitedly suggesting flamethrower guys for the wedding scene, rather than asking if the wedding NEEDED a flamethrower.
(The answer is always “Yes”)
But from a gameplay standpoint you should at least make this opposition not completely pathetic. Think about it. It doesn’t just make the cutscene after the fight make less sense. Where’s the fun in one hitting pathetic mooks that wouldn’t have stood a real chance since early killika? COUNTING that party not having yuna? Yeah. That’s what I thought.
> It's hard to tell if this is a really egregious show trial, or if their judicial system just sucks. I suppose it's possible that both are true.
Japan’s view of systems of law is much, much more cynical than ours.