T w e n t y S i d e d

If you has asked me, the first time I beat Final Fantasy X, how long the characters traveled together and how much time passed in the game world, I would probably have guessed several months. It’s a huge, epic game and when you’re done it feels like the end of Lord of The Rings: The whole world is different, and ages have passed.

But on subsequent plays I noticed there is an implied day / night cycle. We can judge where one day begins and another ends by keeping an eye on the lighting and the sky. Using this as a guide, how many days pass within the game world between the opening credits and the final scene? How long does Tidus spend in Spira? Let’s look:

Play blitzball in Zanarkand at night. Get attacked by Sin. Team up with Auron and then get pulled into Spira. Wake up in the ruins. Build fire. Meet Rikku. Get Kidnapped. Salvage Airship. Get attacked by Sin and knocked into water.

This is a very slow-paced day. Tidus wakes up on the Besaid beach and meets Wakka. Travel to the village. Enter temple, do the trials, and then end the day at the campfire.

Wake up in Besaid village. Leave town. Fight Kimari. Take the boat to Killika. Fight Sin on the boat. Arrive at Killika at sunset. Yuna does the sending and then everyone calls it a night.

Wake up at the Killika inn. Visit the temple. Meet the #!$&ing Goers. Get back on the boat and set sail for Luca. Spend the evening talking to everyone and learning the Ject shot.

Wake up on the boat. Arrive in Luca. Meet Mica and Seymor. Rescue Yuna during round 1 of the tournament and then compete in Round 2. Humiliate the #%@!ing Goers. Fight Sin in the arena and reunite with Auron. Then travel the north road to Rin’s Travel Agency. Talk with Yuna at sunset and then sleep at Rin’s.

(The entire tournament in one day? If all these people from around Spira travel for days to get here, they ought to expect more than a day of entertainment. However, we never see the sun go down, and there is no break in the action, so I guess this all really was supposed to happen in a single day. What a ripoff!)

Wake up and fight the Chocobo eater. Travel the Mi’ihen highroad. Take part in Operation Mi’ihen. Fight Sin. Lose badly. Travel to D’jose temple and do the trials.

Wake up at D’jose temple. Travel road to Moonflow, and then ride the Shoopuf. Rescue Yuna from the extractor and reach the other side. Reunite with Rikku, and have her join the party. Visit Seymor at Gaudosalam and see the Zanarkand recordings. Then Seymor proposes to Yuna. They discuss it, and then cross the Thunder Plains to to Rin’s Travel Agency.

Cross the second half of the Thunder Plains. Go through the woods. Stop at Rin’s. Get attacked at the lake and fight the Al Bhed tank. Go the the temple and Fight Seymor. Do the trials. Escape the temple and confront the Guado at the lake. Fall into the abyss under the frozen lake.

The is no explicit day / night change, but we get moved from one area of the world to another. It seems to be about the right time for a night to pass.

Wake up, mysteriously, on Bikanel island. Cross the island and find the Guado attacking. Head through the complex. They have a key turning point in the game, where Tidus finally learns what’s going on. Get on the airship. Blow up the Al Bhed home. Fly to Bevelle. Fight the Guado onboard and then fight Everae. Crash the wedding, help Yuna escape, and then head for the trials. Get captured.

They stand trial and are tossed into Via Purifico. While Yuna faces issaru, Tidus faces Everae. (again) They escape in the evening and fight Seymor (Again!) just after sunset. Then they meet in the woods outside Bevelle at night. Tidus and Yuna meet at the lake and have their moment together.

Wake up at the campsite in the woods. Optionally get a chocobo and visit Reminem Temple. Then trek all the way over the Calm Lands. Fight the guados at the bridge. Optionally detour into the sunken cave to visit the stolen Fayth. Then head for Mt. Gagazet and and meet with the Ronsos to get passage up the mountain. Kimari must fight his brothers. Then climb all the way up the mountain. This is the densest fighting in the game, and the climb takes a while. Reach the top and confront Seymor. (Again!) Then head through the caverns, open the way, and reach the Zanarkand summit. Fight the guardian. Tidus has his encounter with the Fayth. Several conversations and cutscenes follow.

Finally, reach the base camp on the outskirts of Zanarkand at sunset. The party rests until nightfall, talking. Once it is dark, they set out into the ruined city.

They fight their way in and do the trials. Then they fight the Spectral Keeper. Finally they reach the inner chambers and meet Yunalesca. Things go sideways and they kill her.

Talk about long days!

At sunrise they emerge from the place and see the Airship waiting for them.

All the rest of their efforts seem to happen during one day. It stays daytime until the very end, when we see them gathered on top of the airship at sunset for the final scene.

So there it is. The whole thing takes 11 days.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alas.

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

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

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

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

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

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