The Long Goodbye

This is going to be very long, a little personal, and super spoiler-y for a 14 year-old video game.

Nostalgia is really a terrifying thing. When it boils down to it, people desperately want to feel exactly the same way about one thing or another as the first time they experienced it, even if these relapses are only brief and fleeting. I hear an old song, or catch a random scent when I walk down the hallway, and I can't help but think of an ex-girlfriend. Maybe we're eating breakfast. Maybe that breakfast was made by me, too. Waffles, butter, coffee, and of course, like the memory, I suppose, syrup. It is sweet.

But this is dangerous, this whole nostalgia thing. I'll remember that the relationship went up in flames, and more than once. I'll recall how those good times sure were good, but the bad times counterbalance it, and they’re the reason that I don't keep in touch with this person. For a second, after the ephemera of an early morning meal with someone I've once been intimate with fades away into nothing, I'm almost glad that I had the inverse reaction, this almost involuntary recoil. If I didn't, then the recollection would have caught me in its trap; I don't want to think that everything was great back then. It couldn't have been, really. If it were, then the good that I have now, and whatever positive I want to look forward to would be meaningless. Almost nothing about what you remember is perfect. Sorry, nostalgia, but I win this time.

I just finished the HD remaster of Final Fantasy X, a very formative game for me. Yes, I've been playing video games since I was knee-high, and FFX was released in 2001 in the US, but it has deeply attached itself to my sunniest, most sentimental recesses. Given as a gift by, wouldn't you know it, my college girlfriend at a time when I wasn't often playing RPGs, it reminded me of why I loved being lost inside of a video game when I was a kid, so large and deep was the game under its almost stiflingly linear outer layer of skin. Already a nostalgic experience for me at the tender, wizened age of 22. It would go on to be possibly one of the best video games I'd ever play.

But this realization came with much kicking and screaming. Let's analyze, briefly, the mindset of the early 20s college male: working hard to procure a degree in Secondary English education and film theory, it's fair to say that I actually majored in pretense with a very prevalent minor in faux-intellectualism. Oh, I've seen Through a Glass Darkly, but we all know that Bergman’s opus is The Seventh Seal. Yes, Iron & Wine is, of course, stark and beautiful; yet not so much as Neutral Milk Hotel. These current Guided By Voices albums? Fecal matter, I say! Only buffoons would challenge my unnecessarily obtuse bullshit theories and opinions, and the other undergrad intelligentsia and I would spew only the most baseless vitriol at that which we deemed, simply, less-than. Final Fantasy X, then, could only fall into this malleable and conveniently undefined column. I distinctly recall telling people during its opening hours that this straight line of a game must have been written by a fifth grader.

Time has actually been a little kinder to FFX and my own cold, black heart had melted by the final act of the game, which very nearly had me shed what would have been my first tear over a goddamn video game. Honestly, there's a lot of dumb dialog, and a few of the plot twists are outright nonsensical, but at the risk of carrying a continued pretentiousness in my old age, these are not problems exclusive to it or any one specific video game given the proclivity of bad dialog and absurd plot twists. But Final Fantasy X has a problem that other later games in the franchise have also struggled with, that of its simple-minded, point A to point B linearity. Having played my fair share of RPGs up to this point, this is something that maddened me to almost no end. Gone were the usual tenants of guys with broadswords and girls shooting magic wandering about an open countryside to uncover the next location to drive the plot. Evaporated, too, was the menial task of engaging with the right NPC to open up the specific line of dialog that would open up the current roadblock. Final Fantasy X, at least for me, was the first game that dared call itself an RPG while curbing the holy trinity of town-grind-dungeon that had been blueprinted so many years before by the likes of Dragon Quest and, well, Final Fantasy. All I had to do was make it to the next location down the line, listen to a bunch of conversations, and then keep on keepin' on. There was little deviation or distraction. Was this a game at all?

To understand this, I had to take a more significant step back to look at Final Fantasy X, and what it was at the time of its release, to really give that linear narrative a fair shake. Square Enix, nee Squaresoft at the time of the game's release, was the undisputed king of audiovisual dynamite at this particular moment in the gaming sphere. Routinely pushing the limits of the hardware they were working with since the first Final Fantasy on the aged Famicom, FFX would continue the tradition by not only representing many firsts for the series --voice acting, specifically-- but would try its damndest to make a beautiful first impression on the PlayStation 2, released only about a year and a half earlier. This meant that producer Yoshinori Kitase and his team had to come to grips with the new hardware of the PS2 somewhat quickly having started development on the project in 1999. Such a brief development period to familiarize themselves with new hardware while altering the course of their storytelling now that voice acting was a viable concern is astounding in retrospect, and would be downright miraculous by today’s modern console standards. But this was a different epoch in game development, and certainly the Squaresoft way, and one need only to look at the evolutionary leaps in technology that they afforded themselves between Final Fantasies VII, VIII, and IX to see that they were up to the challenge.

But a fully voiced cast also presented many, many more challenges than people seemed to realize at the time. First, that much voice acting takes up a significant amount of data space. For a game like a Final Fantasy to look like a Final Fantasy, this meant that certain compromises must be made with how much the team could build and show the player from a visual standpoint. DVDs, of course, held an ocean of additional bits compared to its compact disk brethren, but there were still limits to disk space that must be considered. For a game full of audible conversations, there had to be a tradeoff.

Another of these limits was structuring a narrative around people having spoken conversations. Now firmly divorced from the pixels of yesteryear, and taking as much advantage as Square possibly could given the graphical trade offs I just described, facial expressions were now a of mounting importance with their characters rendered in real-time, and not simply in pre-rendered cut scenes that were, at that point, typically used as a reward to the player for crossing a specific threshold of a game. This is a major turning point in console game narrative that few give Final Fantasy X the credit it's due: we no longer needed the bouncing and spinning of pixel sprites or large pantomimed gestures of crudely rendered early polygons to suggest emotion. We could see Tidus' concern for Yuna after the mid-game realization of her ultimate fate by the look on his face and the sound in the actor's voice. This made writing a scrip for these events to be a much harder balancing act than previous games, which often turned from grave to jocular at the drop of a hat. Given the complexity of some of the character’s relationships in the game, knowing that the more dramatic moments had to be sold as more realistic while also bearing a certain sense of levity, was a challenge. So basically, much of Final Fantasy X, then, had to be written as one very long movie, and was one of the first console role playing games to do so for better or worse. 

But we know that it isn't a movie, and has to have a gameplay structure baked into the casserole. Having said all of this, then, it would also be fair to say that in my estimation, no game marries game structure and narrative quite as well as Final Fantasy X. The team knew that they probably could not offer as many vast open areas as previous games in the franchise quite yet with the additional hurdles of new hardware to master and a readjustment to their writing process to clear, so they wrote a story to compensate for it. Basically, and brilliantly, they wrote a road movie, and with all of the trappings of that genre that had been laid down since It Happened One Night. Here we are. We have to get way over there. Once we get there, we'll figure out what to do next. Along the way, we'll see and meet strange and wondrous new people and places. There will be detours. There's going to be a change of heart (probably). But one thing is always going to be perfectly clear: we still got to get over there. I guess we better start walking. 

This, even now, sounds like a severe limitation. It's a box, really. A big box, sure, Square still had plenty of cash to throw around to make it the best road movie they could, but still a confined space. From this box, and this simple narrative direction, came one of the more coherent games to ever bear the name Final Fantasy. FFX took a bit of a turn away from the usual European high fantasy of the 8- and 16-bit games and the more steampunk and sci-fi PlayStation-era successes (other than, of course, Final Fantasy IX). X, though, went for more of a cultural touchstone. Inspired by Okinawan and other southeastern Asian cultures, FFX's setting is highly unusual by basically any role playing game's standard. Given Squaresoft’s insistence that the only constant in Final Fantasy development would the evolution of the story and setting from game to game, even this was something of a left turn for the property. Perhaps knowing that only a small population of its audience would be familiar with these inspirations, Square's writers took a chance on using Tidus, the main character, as a clear audience proxy, serving as both the player's eyes and ears but also their curiosity as a classic fish out of water. If something looked strange and fantastic to us, they would absolutely seem that way to Tidus, whom would often either quizzically ponder his surroundings or be told outright what was going on by the other cast members before he even had a chance to ask. 

No other Final Fantasy game before or since has used this most common narrative hook to such a degree. The early heroes of the series relied on either the blank slate nature (of the first game) or personality (4-6) to fit into the very, very common middle age European setting for most games within the RPG genre. As the series jumped into polygons, the player would often play catch up to characters and positions that needed to be explained as the course of the narrative went on. Even Squall, the high school student, knew what was up in Final Fantasy VIII, the player had to be "reminded" how things worked by his teachers and peers. Simply, most characters in Final Fantasy games had already lived and established themselves in their respective world. Any sense of discovery was generally grounded within a world that they already knew. Tidus, on the other hand, wasn't from the Spira he found himself in, similar though it may have been, and that's precisely how his story and how he fits into it works, even on the meta-level: the world is familiar enough because it's a Final Fantasy, but it's not the one we know. Someone needs to take him, and us, by the hand. 

Of course, this someone turned out to be Yuna --at least, in her way since she barely utters a whole sentence through 50% of the story-- which is maybe one of the best subtle bait and switch moves in video game writing. Yuna and Tidus clearly and neatly reflect each other's stories, and are set up to be each other’s counterpart throughout the game. Often these differences are seen as opposites, but that would suggest they would be at odds with each other, maybe like Batman vs. Superman through the eyes of Frank Miller, which is never the case within the game. Rather, I see their differences more as inverses. Their names roughly translate into “moon” and “sun” in Okinawan. Tidus wears bright, somewhat warm colors while Yuna's are cool and subdued. Tidus’ personality, chipper, impulsive and optimistic to an actual fault, is divergent from Yuna’s calm, though morose level-headedness. Most important to the story, though, is their significant shared Oedipal issues, mostly having to due with their own self-imposed expectations But Yuna's individual narrative is the driving force of the plot in that it's her job to kill the super monster that devastates her world time and again. Tidus, though certainly woven into the tapestry of these events, is merely bystander and outside observer until the game's largest, and perhaps most absurd twist hits near the end of the game. But even still, in the grand scheme of a world building, dying, and rebuilding, the spiral of death that is Spira (which is a line even used in the game), Tidus' motivations are pretty low on the totem pole, all things considered. Yuna's job is to save us, to literally sacrifice herself so that others may live. We know after getting roughly 75% through the game that this certainly won't be the case, also part of the walking plot twist that is Tidus (as he is, basically, his own deus ex machina), but without Yuna fulfilling her duty and freeing Spira of routine, though still imminent destruction, nothing would have mattered. She is the star of the show. 

Still, it's unfair to call Final Fantasy X's story in totality a masterpiece. The up-front villain, Seymour, is laughably stupid in his motivations, which turned the "I'll cleanse this imperfect world by destroying it" schtick into a legitimate video game trope going forward. Worse, the main antagonist of the game is barely a villain at all, which makes the impact of the final battle slightly anticlimactic. Here's how it works, paraphrased from the Final Fantasy wikia page: over a thousand years ago, two city states were at war. As a way to bring some brutal finality to it, the leader of one of these city states, Yu Yevon, forced all of his summoning wizards to, essentially, go into a mass dreamlike state to always preserve the memory of their home, what we can call city of Dream Zanarkand. Knowing that his history will be preserved, he forges a giant, living armor around himself using the summoned magic or a loved one. This living armor, now called Sin (or Shin in the Japanese version, which can translate into "true" or "truth"), mindlessly destroys all that it sees, starting with the city it was born in, what we'll call the Ruined Zanarkand. Now the populace has a reason to rally together, this Sin monster, as it can be killed (the means of which passed down for countless generations) but will always come back, and will continue this destructive behavior time and again. The major problem with all of this? Almost none of it is clearly explained in the game. Through conversations with major characters during turning points in the plot, we find that this Yu Yevon entity exists within Sin and uses summoned monsters as hosts to continue to live and destroy for a millennium, but the motivations for which are never entirely clear. We just know that he exists, that he is a being of significant power, not the whys and wherefores. This cripples the narrative and reduces it into a very basic setup. There's the bad guys, let's go get them. The revelation that Seymour isn't the main antagonist is telegraphed early in the game, but makes it almost unfair that this clown of an enemy, in all of his absurdity, gets less of a fair shake than the limp Yu Yevon, which is just that thing that you need to fight to end the game.

But killing him, finally, is less a challenge than a war of attrition against your free time. The actual final boss of the game is Tidus erstwhile alcoholic pro athlete father, or rather, the monster that he had become within Sin. Before cathartically throwing down with him, as most immature little boys only dream of doing, Tidus has an opportunity to make peace with him, but forgiveness is not in the cards, which is also something of an uncommon move at this point in a video game's story. It is certainly contrived that Tidus and his father, Jecht, will have to battle each other for narrative dominance (again, something telegraphed within the first third of the game when it's revealed that Sin is, in fact, Jecht), Tidus takes the final moments of Jecht's lucidity to remind him how much of a dick cheese he was to he and his mother, even telling him, twice, how much he hates him. I would argue that without the work of a competent voice actor or the technology to render semi-believable facial expressions that this conversation wouldn't have the gravity that it does. This the detonation point for a complex relationship, something that Jecht concedes to. He never argues his case or pleads for forgiveness, he literally can’t as he stumbles his way through the conversation, but this lack of excuses makes the conversation more impactful for it. But Tidus doesn’t even want to hear it; once Jecht finally does apologize (for nothing really specific, though there are probably bulleted lists Tidus can refer to), Tidus loses his cool and kick starts the fight.After the actual battle, though, is series of un-losable encounters against once-friendly monsters that were with you for the entire game and our friend, Yu Yevon, represented by a small, floating parasite. For the player, there are certainly lists of metaphors that can explain away each encounter from Jecht to the monsters to Yu Yevon, but after the first domino falls, the game will always keep you ready to fight going forward, making the killing your father, and not your gods, the point of no return. This is a perspective change for the player, actually. Most of the game sets up Seymour as the first main enemy, then reveals that Yu Yevon is really the architect behind it all (a narrative trajectory that many, many, many video games take), but once you realize that you literally cannot lose to Yu Yevon, you find that Jecht was, as far as the game is concerned, the only enemy that really mattered, something that was just under the surface the entire ride.

But all of these twists and turns of the story, strange and questionable as they tend to be, lead up to a surprisingly brief and emotional coda that few gaming stories achieve and fewer replicate with as much precision. Really quick, try to count how many video games you can think of where one character tells another that they love them. In my mind, there are very few. The ballad of Yuna and Tidus, two sides to the same coin, is perhaps one of the most believable in game history. Take Yuna: young, innocent, and impressionable, her story was one of singular devotion. She was going to kill Sin, like her famous father before her, and free her world of the suffering the giant monster brings. Yuna's life had no room for love, something that Wakka points out from basically the second we meet her. Even if she could let herself be attracted romantically to someone, her endgame was never in question, and by sheer force of will would she fulfill her duty (basically she is Batman, then). Meeting Tidus was pretty much like every story you've ever heard about two people falling in love; she never intended to have as many guardians as she had to complete her mission, and this rando loudmouth that just happened to find his way to her island was more a series of happenstances than divine providence (Tidus, after showing up in Spria, first appeared floating above Baaj Temple, after all). She never saw it coming. Tidus, on the other hand, was a stud in his Dream Zanarkand. Confident, jovial, a pro athlete in his own right and a famous figure to the people around him, it’s easy to infer that Tidus knows his way around the ladies. But as Yuna's was a story of duty, Tidus' was one of maturity and acceptance. When she tells him that she loves him before he fades away into ether, it carries the weight of a young girl saying it for the first time, something Tidus knows as he does what he can to embrace her before finally drifting away to the afterlife. From here, the pre-rendered cut scene, state of the art at the time and still fairly moving wastes no time trying to explain away where each major character ended up or how their lives were changed after the final death of Sin. It didn't need to. Yuna loved Tidus, and now he's gone. This is the price of happiness, and that while Yuna ultimately never needed to call a final aeon and sacrifice her life for Spira, what she did have to lose was arguably much greater. If only other video games, and especially more Final Fantasies, were as poetic.

Surprisingly, this moment came down to localization, which is often the opposite case. In the original Japanese, Yuna runs through the now ghostly Tidus and falls over, standing to stoicly thank him for his help and service. The English localization team saw this moment and chose to exert some controlling by changing the line to "I love you." While, given the moment, this would have meant something very similar to a Japanese audience, had they kept the simply "Thank you" in English, it would have robbed the ending of its emotional crescendo. 

Compare Tidus and Yuna’s relationship to that of Final Fantasy VIII’s Squall and Rinoa. Squall, sullen and standoffish, is the diametric opposite to Tidus in every way, right down to the color motifs of his clothes. Rinoa, charming and outgoing as the leader of her resistance movement, is just as different to Yuna in her quiet and often timid nature. Though the roles are somewhat reversed in FFVIII, the relationship between Squall and Rinoa is often forced, so much of a dick is Squall to just about anyone around him. While he also goes through a similar emotional maturity that Tidus receives, his love for Rinoa is something an emotional knee-jerk decision driven by the situations he finds himself in. He often keeps her at arms’ length through the first half of the game, and then wakes up to realize that he loves her via some random inspiration. Tidus and Yuna got along from the jump, often relying on each other for stability throughout much of the game, as the famous laughing scene in Kilika temple proves. Their affection was a natural evolution of their relationship, even with the extenuating circumstances that they found themselves in. Luckily, it was also told in a story dozens of hours long. As they finally kiss under the moonlight in Macalanea, there's some narrative payoff for there for the player.

Of course, an RPG, even one of the heights that Final Fantasy X, is only one part story. In truth, it equates into perhaps even a third of the overall game when boiled down for time. Close to the end of the game, the player acquires a means of transport that, essentially, cracks the game wide open, giving them ample opportunity to revisit past locations and to scour the world for hidden secrets; which is something of a console RPG mainstay. The linear structure carefully built in the main game make this new found freedom all the sweeter in that it finally lets you lift up the hood and see much of what was underneath, and the various minigames and side distractions that were barely noticeable when you first passed them yield both great rewards for the player and a monstrous time sink that can dwarf the story by a wide margin. But it's still a linear structure, and after obtaining the airship to go wherever they want, players will be fully aware (as if they weren't already) that the whole game was, as current Final Fantasy critics are quick to point out when discussing later entries, a series of corridors with few actual mazes to get lost in. The vast majority of the game can be played looking solely at the minimap in the upper corner of the screen, and objectives are clearly defined from the moment that Tidus enters into most locations. 

But this is another moment when nostalgia is dangerous, and it can take the average player --me included-- quite a while to realize it. Now that you can see the trees for the forest, as it were, it's nice to know that there's so much more to do after being dragged, kicking and screaming, through the vast majority of the game. The knee jerk reaction is to say that earlier games in the franchise did not do this, that vast, open world maps were available for the player to wander about and explore. Upon reflection (or replay if you've got the time on your hands), this is to be only a half truth. While it is certainly so that there are large, easily explored regions in earlier Final Fantasy games, most are either partitioned off for story concerns, or contain dramatic spikes in difficulty for random encounters that a player is punished for being curious. FFX called shenanigans on the latter, and lifted the curtain enough to make it clear that most of the Final Fantasies you've played and loved where basically built the same way; though, perhaps less deliberate in its execution. 

The HD Remaster, released last Spring for PS3 and Vita and again in May for the PlayStation 4, though, is nostalgia at its most duplicitous; equal in its syrupy serenity and horror. So taken was I with FFX, and perhaps even reflective of my own mangled relationship with the on again- off again girl that gave it to me, that I played it once a year during the winter holidays, much to the consternation of my rapidly depleting free time. Every time I would fire it up, I would make absolutely sure that something that had been previously uncovered or purposely left alone (200 lightning strikes, everybody!) would be taken care of. Straight line though it may be, there's a whole lot of game in Final Fantasy X, and I still have yet to actually see it all myself, even after this seventh (or maybe eighth?) time through it. Sure, a lot of it had to do with the fact that as an RPG, it was something of a larger value proposition to a broke college student turned broke post-grad, and the $50 I could spend on a PS2 game at the time would purchase me scores of hours of gameplay that I might not receive from any given action adventure. But this game was a literal product of a failed relationship. Perhaps watching Tidus and Yuna, love and lose each other spoke to me at some subconscious level. Maybe it was just a really good, finely built video game. Whatever. At some point down the road, notably after I had finally let go of this person, I had enough of Final Fantasy X, leaving my own spiral to end. Whenever I would even consider playing it again at that point, it felt like re-opening the wound. It was best to move on.

However, those years PlayStation 2 years with FFX defined how video games became so integral to my adult life. Though it sounds exaggerated, it's not unfair to say that without Final Fantasy X, I wouldn't have played the dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of other role playing games since. Because of its sublime brilliance (along with its successor, Final Fantasy XII, but that's another story) I eventually became burnt out on its JRPG progeny. Without having gone through even that, though, I would never have found my way to games that mean more to me than I can even say, like Demon's Souls. Final Fantasy X, really, was something of a defining moment. Turning on my PlayStation 3 and hearing the opening music of the loading screen nearly made my knees buckle. I have a certain gratitude for that.

 But this will be the last time. What everyone said about growing up turns out to be irritatingly true. I've got too much other stuff to do; games to play, work to do, a child to rear, people that depend on me. Real life, even compared to the timelessness of the Dream of the Fayth, will always win out. I can't drop 50-70 hours on this any longer, routinely, lest other things more important slip by me. But, honestly, I can’t keep running back to this game after only remembering the good, and I have to, at last, let this go.

I went deeper into the sphere grid this time than any other. I nabbed more celestial weapons than I ever have. I was surprised by the challenge of some of bosses I had never seen in this, the International Version that I never played (and a little huffy over the changes of ones that were already there. If you think you're going to walk all over the traitor Omega like you used to, get ready for a shock). But, now that I've done all of this reflection, like Yuna and Tidus, my ending to Final Fantasy X isn't so unlike theirs at all.

This is maturity. This is sacrifice.