Some Kid Dreamed<\/h3>\n
<\/div>Here is why I think Final Fantasy X gets away with this plot device while Mass Effect 3 doesn’t:<\/p>\n
1. Clarity of purpose.<\/strong><\/p>\n In Mass Effect 3, the Star Child is being pulled in at least three different directions. He’s being used for brute-force pathos when Some Kidd dies and the game plays sad piano music. He’s supposed to represent the millions of people lost to the Reapers and he’s supposed to drive Sheppard emotionally. But he’s also the spokesman for our ultimate adversary, the evil Reapers. And finally he’s a little exposition giver. <\/p>\n These three things don’t work together. The game tells us we should feel sorry for him and we don’t. Then the game insists that we trust him and we don’t. The failure of his two main purposes means that even his expositional dialog fails.<\/p>\n For contrast, Bahamut is long dead and isn’t expected to be one of the emotional pillars of the game. He’s just a mystery child. He’s not our enemy. He’s just here to explain things.<\/p>\n 2. No burden of convoluted cannon.<\/strong><\/p>\n Mass Effect 3 wasn’t a stand alone game. It was act three of what was supposedly a single story. The Star Child didn’t just need to explain the Reapers, he needed to do so in a way that didn’t contradict either of the two previous games. Those games had made big promises, so Star Child had a lot to live up to and was greatly constrained by a great tangle of lore. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, Bahamut just needs to concern himself with the lore of a single game.<\/p>\n 3. The dialog wheel makes exposition harder.<\/strong><\/p>\n Tidus isn’t the brightest and he’s barely hanging on to this dream world. He’s just trying to figure out what’s going on before he wakes up again. We understand he can’t get all the answers, and we don’t expect him to.<\/p>\n But Mass Effect 3 had our hero in a situation where the player was supposedly free to talk. Sure, the Reapers were kicking the crap out of the Alliance, but players felt like they had another five minutes to ask questions. Which leads to the frustration of, “Why can’t I ask this perfectly obvious and reasonable question?”<\/p>\n 4. This isn’t the set-up for a decision.<\/strong><\/p>\n This is a really important point. When you ask the player to make decisions, it will naturally and unavoidably intensify their demands for clear information, leaving you much less room to leave things vague and undefined. While we can accept characters<\/em> that make bad choices based on emotional state and hunches, players themselves<\/em> are usually going to want to make the most informed choices possible. <\/p>\n The Star Child was presenting Shepard with a choice that was going to impact the lives of every single person in the galaxy. This requires that Shepard be informed and understand not just the origin of the problem, but what the result of his decision will be. When we can’t get that information, it robs the decision of its significance. We get frustrated with the dialog because it won’t let us clear this up.<\/p>\n Bahamut doesn’t have this problem. This is just exposition. We (the player) aren’t being asked to make a decision on behalf of all of Spira. If Tidus was about to push a button to either blow up Zanarkand or restore Old Zanarkand, then you can bet players would want to understand what those two outcomes meant before they made their choice.<\/p>\n 5. This isn’t the finale.<\/strong><\/p>\n In Mass Effect 3, we went all the way to the very end of the story and then the writer tried to explain everything at once. Here in Final Fantasy X, we’re being given the exposition well before the climax, so we have time to reflect on it. <\/p>\n Tidus snaps out of this vision and the party continues on, leaving the player shaking their head and wondering what they’re supposed to make of all this.<\/p>\n I’ve always found the next section to be kind of annoying. The party has to pass through some caves. To do that, they need to solve some basic timing puzzles and our swimmers (Tidus, Wakka, and Rikku) need to fight some monsters. We’ve just had a huge boss fight, followed by some major revelations, and we can tell we’re right on the threshold of Zanarkand. The story has been building up the tension as we approach the city, and now we have more questions than ever before. But instead of crossing the threshold we end up screwing around doing dumb puzzles and fighting monsters that just feel so<\/em> unimportant right now. It’s not a long sequence, but I’ve always felt like it killed the pacing.<\/p>\n I can see why the game designer put the puzzles here. We just had the pre-Seymour cutscene and his boss fight. We may have even had to go through that more than once. Then we had another cutscene after the fight. Then the player walked a short distance with no combat and got a massive expositional cutscene that “explained” Dream Zanarkand, followed by a conversation between party members as they react to Tidus passing out. Right after the puzzles is another boss fight, and after that, there’s another<\/em> really big cutscene that gives an audiolog from Yuna earlier in the story. That bit is followed by another huge cutscene as we reach the edge of the ruined city. <\/p>\n So I see why this puzzle sequence exists. You couldn’t really cut any of these dialog scenes. They are filled with revelations, exposition, and character beats needed to make the next section work. This is a big story with a lot of threads, and the writer is about to bring all the threads together. You don’t want to half-ass this. At the same time, if you removed these puzzles you’d end up with two back-to-back boss fights sandwiched in the middle of about half an hour of movie with no gameplay. That would not be an improvement, pacing-wise. <\/p>\n I’m not sure what the solution is, here. I suppose if nothing else, I wish these puzzles were more interesting.<\/p>\n At last the party reaches the edge of ruined Zanarkand. They stop at the edge of the city for some sad piano music and one last somber moment before the final push. Everyone gathers around a campfire. Their weapons are piled up nearby. Everyone is together, yet nobody speaks. Tidus stands up, pats Yuna on the shoulder, and then climbs a little hill to look at the remains of his civilization.<\/p>\n A funny story about this cutscene:<\/p>\n When this game was new, these cutscenes were spectacular. Even 15 years later, they still look pretty good. The music here is powerful, and perfectly sets the melancholy mood of the scene.<\/p>\n When you first start up the game, it automatically plays this sequence. You can press a button at any time to start the game, but the scene is so impressive that in 2001 I watched it all the way through before I dared touch the controls. Then I began the game, only to discover it begins with the exact same scene<\/em>, except with a voice-over and no option to skip it. So that was an annoying (but I suppose fitting) introduction to JRPGs for me. <\/p>\n Then I reached the ruined city of Zanarkand, eagerly anticipating what was going to happen next, only to find I had to sit through the scene a third time. <\/p>\n Everyone believes Yuna is going to her death. Tidus and Rikku have been trying to think of some way to prevent this. Lulu and Wakka have already accepted this fate, although their hearts have been getting heavy as the end approaches. <\/p>\n But Auron has nothing to say. Like I’ve mentioned before, Auron watched his two best friends go through this a decade ago, and it’s a safe bet he didn’t come all this way just so he can watch their children die the same death. Auron has an agenda. He’s been telling some things, hiding others, and speaking in riddles. <\/p>\n Let’s look at the personal timeline for Tidus again:<\/p>\n You can argue that “many days” pass when the party rests at an inn, but that’s all headcanon. The story clearly depicts a day-night cycle as you progress, and the various areas are locked to a specific time of day. It’s always morning on the Highroad, day at the moonflow, sunset on the approach to Zanarkand, evening in the forest, night in Zanarkand.<\/p>\n If we go strictly by the depicted day \/ night cycle, then the story will end tomorrow on day 12. This is, of course, completely disconnected from how the player experiences time in the game. Day 3 probably takes about half an hour, while day 11 might take ten hours. The player might spend a few dozen hours on day 12, gathering super-weapons, playing Blitzball, exploring the optional Omega Dungeon, completing the Monster Arena, and otherwise dawdling on their way to the finale.<\/p>\n Rather than resting, the party decides to press on into the city, which is now guarded by ghosts and ancient machina. <\/p>\n It figures that the final “temple” is inside of a ruined Blitzball arena. I’ve known people who got their religion confused with their sports, but this is ridiculous. In any case, after one last round of busywork puzzles it’s finally time to meet…<\/p>\n And so we meet the ghost of Lady Yunalesca, the first summoner to defeat Sin and the current title-holder of “most ridiculous hair in Spira”. I think she’s also the only person to have battled Sin in a bikini. <\/p>\n Is she a ghost? Maybe she’s an unsent? Look, I don’t know how it works and the game isn’t forthcoming. The point is that she’s here at the end to act as the bearer of bad news \/ spiritual guide.<\/p>\n She explains that Yuna must choose a friend to die with her, and tries to soften the blow by saying that once they die, they won’t have any more pain. That’s an interesting argument and might work in another universe, but in this one it is demonstrably not true. This party has run into lots of dead people who seem to be in an awful lot of pain. More to the point, every time Tidus has a brush with Sin, he can sense his father. And he knows<\/em> dear old dad is miserable<\/em> as Sin. Death isn’t the end of suffering, it’s just the end of you being able to do anything about it. Lady Yunalesca is full of shit. <\/p>\n I wonder if she knows?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tidus is still stuck in a dreamworld, and a ghost kid is taking a huge exposition dump on him. I think it’s interesting to compare this kid (while he isn’t explicitly named in the story, I’m going to call him Bahamut from now on) to Some Kidd from the end of Mass Effect 3. In […]<\/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-34585","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\/34585","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=34585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51857,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34585\/revisions\/51857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Back to Reality. Sort of.<\/h3>\n
<\/div>
<\/div>Zanarkand<\/h3>\n
<\/div>The End of Yuna’s Journey<\/h3>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>Lady Yunalesca<\/h3>\n
<\/div>