{"id":33995,"date":"2016-09-15T06:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T10:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33995"},"modified":"2021-02-19T02:26:25","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T07:26:25","slug":"final-fantasy-x-part-13-the-wedding-crashers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=33995","title":{"rendered":"Final Fantasy X Part 13: The Wedding Crashers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The airship Tidus helped salvage at the start of the game<span class='snote' title='1'>The Al Bhed don&#8217;t acknowledge this or thank him, which would really go a long way to smoothing out that whole unfortunate slavery &#8220;misunderstanding&#8221;.<\/span> is parked here, and it&#8217;s been cleaned up and is ready to fly.<\/p>\n<h3>Wait. How Long Has it been?<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/ffx_bikanel4.jpg' width=100% alt='I&apos;m sorry, I know this is Final FANTASY but I refuse to believe this thing flies.' title='I&apos;m sorry, I know this is Final FANTASY but I refuse to believe this thing flies.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>I&apos;m sorry, I know this is Final FANTASY but I refuse to believe this thing flies.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>If you go strictly by the visible day \/ night cycle in the game, then&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Day 1: Tidus arrives in Spira and meets the Al Bhed. The day ends when Sin attacks.\n<li>Day 2: Besaid island. The day ends after meeting Yuna.\n<li>Day 3: The ship ride from Besaid to Kilika. The day ends when Yuna performs the sending.\n<li>Day 4: The ship ride from Kilika to Luca. The day ends while sailing.\n<li>Day 5: The Blitzball tournament. The party sets out on the Mi&#8217;ihen highroad. The day ends at the inn where they fight the Chocobo eater<span class='snote' title='2'>Which I didn&#8217;t mention in this write-up. But trust me, they fought one.<\/span>.\n<li>Day 6: Operation Mi&#8217;ihen. The day ends at Djose Temple.\n<li>Day 7: Moonflow to Guadosalam. Afterward you stop at the inn in the Thunderplains. While you can&#8217;t see the time of day, the game does play the &#8220;sleeping for the night&#8221; lullaby sound.\n<li>Day 8: Exit the Thunderplains. Pass through the forest. Lake Macalania. Kill Seymour. The day ends when Sin attacks under the lake.\n<li>Day 9: Bikanel Island.\n<\/ul>\n<p>So in nine days the Al Bhed hauled the Airship up from the bottom of the ocean, cleaned it up, figured out how it worked, found or built replacement parts, repaired it, fueled it, figured out how to pilot it, and gave it a factory-fresh coat of paint?<\/p>\n<p>Yeah, yeah. Final <b>Fantasy<\/b>. I know. <\/p>\n<p>I know.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>Airship Ahoy!<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/ffx_bikanel6.jpg' width=100% alt='Nope, still don&apos;t believe it can fly. Also why does the airship have a CAPE?' title='Nope, still don&apos;t believe it can fly. Also why does the airship have a CAPE?'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>Nope, still don&apos;t believe it can fly. Also why does the airship have a CAPE?<\/div><\/p>\n<p>Way back in 2001, I played through this game with my brothers, who were both long-time Final Fantasy veterans. They watched my progress carefully, making sure I was being properly indoctrinated into their fandom \/ subculture \/ cult. But every few hours one of them would say, &#8220;We STILL haven&#8217;t got the airship yet?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s staple of the series. Or at least, of the last few previous entries<span class='snote' title='3'>From the standpoint of someone in 2001. I don&#8217;t know what the series is doing these days.<\/span>. Once the story is established, you&#8217;re given an airship and allowed to fly around the world sandbox-style. It&#8217;s often used as shorthand for, &#8220;Okay, the tutorial is over. Now you&#8217;re <i>really<\/i> playing the game.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This part of the story is where I think the expectations from returning fans really come back to haunt the author. The player reaches this point in the story and they think, &#8220;Okay! Now we have the airship! Time to explore the open world.&#8221; But no. This is a tease. We&#8217;re not off the rails just yet and we&#8217;re not going to fly the airship. In fact, the &#8220;open world&#8221; part of the game is still many hours away.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;re twenty or thirty hours into Final Fantasy X and we&#8217;re still following a completely linear path. That&#8217;s thematically appropriate, since this story is about a pilgrimage, and a pilgrimage loses quite a bit of its gravity if you can just hop from one location to the next. Particularly when all of the other pilgrims make the trip on foot. <\/p>\n<p>The writer has to be very careful here. At the end of this journey, Yuna needs to reject the teachings. She has to go to the very precipice of death, and then back away. This needs to be a move of conviction and principle. If the storyteller fumbles here, then it will come off like Yuna is just an irresponsible teenager who quit because the task was too hard and she didn&#8217;t want to die. Sure, they could have Yuna say, &#8220;I am very committed to my beliefs!&#8221; over and over. But the rule of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Show,_don%27t_tell\">show don&#8217;t tell<\/a> demands that we see her comitment in action. And the best way to do that is to show that her resolve never wavers, despite how much she suffers on her journey. <\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/ffx_bikanel7.jpg' width=100% alt='Left: Tidus. Center: Cid, who is Rikku&apos;s dad and Yuna&apos;s uncle. Right: Brother, who is one of the guys who kicked the crap out of Tidus to force him to salvage the airship in exchange for shelter they never gave him.' title='Left: Tidus. Center: Cid, who is Rikku&apos;s dad and Yuna&apos;s uncle. Right: Brother, who is one of the guys who kicked the crap out of Tidus to force him to salvage the airship in exchange for shelter they never gave him.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>Left: Tidus. Center: Cid, who is Rikku&apos;s dad and Yuna&apos;s uncle. Right: Brother, who is one of the guys who kicked the crap out of Tidus to force him to salvage the airship in exchange for shelter they never gave him.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>This idea would be completely undermined if Yuna&#8217;s voyage was easier than that of the summoners who came before her. One of the recurring themes in the game is how we&#8217;re following in the footsteps of past summoner parties. This is the road that Braska walked. The road that Lord Ohalland walked. The road that Lady Yocun walked. We&#8217;re following the same path of a dozen champions of the past. Along the way we see landmarks they visited and challenges they overcame, and we find the crude graves of the ones who failed in the wilderness. We can&#8217;t do all that if we&#8217;re cruising overhead in luxury. <\/p>\n<p>We need to walk this road, which means that having an airship would undermine the story. On the other hand, having an airship is a staple of the series. Leaving it out is like having a Batman game where you can&#8217;t glide overhead because the story needs him to spend all of his time on the ground. <i>Maybe this isn&#8217;t a good story for a Batman game.<\/i> <\/p>\n<p>The game designer tries to solve this by allowing you access to the airship after Yuna&#8217;s pilgrimage to Zanarkand is complete. The problem is that the story is 90% of the way over by that point. <\/p>\n<p>This was my first Final Fantasy game, so I was never bothered by the lack of mobility. But for longtime fans this is still a sore spot, because for them it doesn&#8217;t feel like the game really &#8220;starts&#8221; until just before the ending. You can&#8217;t do sidequests until you&#8217;re on the threshold of the final boss, and that feels wrong.<\/p>\n<h3>Nuke Home<\/h3>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/ffx_bikanel5.jpg' width=100% alt='It&apos;s hard to get a sense of scale in the desert like this, but this fireball has replaced the entire city. All ten buildings.' title='It&apos;s hard to get a sense of scale in the desert like this, but this fireball has replaced the entire city. All ten buildings.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>It&apos;s hard to get a sense of scale in the desert like this, but this fireball has replaced the entire city. All ten buildings.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>Everyone escapes in the airship, and then it nukes Home as a middle finger to the Yevonites occupying the place. We haven&#8217;t seen Yuna since Sin attacked under the lake, but everyone (correctly) assumes that she&#8217;s in the hands of the Yevonites and that they have whisked her away, out of the blast radius. Nobody is worried that she broke free and went back to Home, or that she gave her captors the slip and is now wandering around in the desert. <\/p>\n<p>This is a sticking point for me because the writer hasn&#8217;t shown how the Yevonites are getting around. Sin transported us to the other side of the world map. So how did everyone else get here? So far the only modes of transport in the world are ships and shoopuffs, both of which are for crossing water. And since we seem to be in the middle of a barren desert, I&#8217;m thinking there&#8217;s probably not a lot of water around. <\/p>\n<p>So the mental image I have in my head is that the Yevonites captured Yuna (somehow) and then dragged her, on foot, across the desert towards the coast. They probably got a hundred or maybe even two hundred meters into the desert before the nuke hit and vaporized them all.<\/p>\n<p>Which doesn&#8217;t happen, of course. I guess the Yevonites have access to the transporter room on the starship Enterprise, because they managed to come all the way around the world to reach Home before we did, and now they&#8217;re going to drag Yuna all the way back to Bevelle &#8211; the capital city and home of Yevon. They will arrive there well before the only known airship in the entire world. In fact, they arrive so far ahead of us that they will plan and stage a state wedding before we can catch up with them. <\/p>\n<h3>The Wedding Crashers<\/h3>\n<p><a href='https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BdKj86SEAoU'><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/ffx_bevelle9.jpg' width=100% alt='Even 16 years later, this scene still looks amazing. But no matter how much time passes, nothing will ever make Seymour&apos;s hair look anything but stupid.' title='Even 16 years later, this scene still looks amazing. But no matter how much time passes, nothing will ever make Seymour&apos;s hair look anything but stupid.'\/><\/div><\/a><div class='mouseover-alt'>Even 16 years later, this scene still looks amazing. But no matter how much time passes, nothing will ever make Seymour&apos;s hair look anything but stupid.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>The party crashes the wedding. The CGI bits of the cutscene were featured heavily in the pre-release materials back in 2001<span class='snote' title='4'>Which I assume means TV spots. I mean, this was 2001. We were still a long way from having video advertising on the internet.<\/span>. It&#8217;s a ridiculous scene where the airship swoops in and hooks the wedding platform with massive steel cables, like the kind that might hold up a suspension bridge<span class='snote' title='5'>I suppose it&#8217;s not worth asking why an airship would be carting around huge cables like that.<\/span>. Then Yuna&#8217;s guardians &#8211; all six of them &#8211; slide down the swinging cables and throw themselves at the enemy. They don&#8217;t even talk about it first.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s classic Final Fantasy cutscene: A ridiculously implausible yet visually stunning spectacle. It&#8217;s silly, but in a lot of ways it&#8217;s also kind of the point of the game. <\/p>\n<p><div class='imagefull'><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/ffx_bevelle1.jpg' width=100% alt='I&apos;m impressed that Seymour actually found a hat stupid enough that he can wear it without diminishing the overall effect his haircut has on the world.' title='I&apos;m impressed that Seymour actually found a hat stupid enough that he can wear it without diminishing the overall effect his haircut has on the world.'\/><\/div><div class='mouseover-alt'>I&apos;m impressed that Seymour actually found a hat stupid enough that he can wear it without diminishing the overall effect his haircut has on the world.<\/div><\/p>\n<p>Seymour seems to have recovered from that whole death thing, and he&#8217;s having another go at marrying Yuna. Yuna is playing along because she&#8217;s looking for a chance to perform a sending on him. The party jumps out of the airship and assaults the wedding party, which seems to be made entirely of forbidden (by Yevon&#8217;s teachings) robots and soldiers carrying forbidden firearms. I suppose that&#8217;s lucky. They would feel like such assholes if they stormed in here waving their weapons around and saw the wedding party was all weeping bridesmaids and smiling little old ladies.<\/p>\n<p>I wonder how plausible Yuna&#8217;s plan was? It seems to take a minute to send someone if they don&#8217;t want to go to the afterlife, and in the meantime the summoner needs to do some fairly conspicuous dancing around. It&#8217;s certainly not something you can do as a sneak attack. <\/p>\n<p>Yuna tries to send Seymour here at the wedding ceremony, but it&#8217;s possible Tidus and company forced her hand. When they show up a huge fight ensues, and Yuna tries to send Seymour in the confusion. Maybe she would have waited for a more opportune moment if the wedding had gone as planned?<\/p>\n<p>While the audience doesn&#8217;t know it yet, Seymour&#8217;s plan is to finish the pilgrimage with her. Maybe he would have done so with a large entourage to protect him. Then again, he constantly acts surprised that Yuna continues to oppose him. Maybe sooner or later he would have let his guard down. It&#8217;s hard to say what he&#8217;s got going on underneath all of that pokey blue hair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The airship Tidus helped salvage at the start of the gameThe Al Bhed don&#8217;t acknowledge this or thank him, which would really go a long way to smoothing out that whole unfortunate slavery &#8220;misunderstanding&#8221;. is parked here, and it&#8217;s been cleaned up and is ready to fly. Wait. How Long Has it been? If you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[612],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retrospectives"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33995"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51861,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33995\/revisions\/51861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}