Spoiler alert: spoilers may appear without warning! (Including for later games in the franchise.)
I still claim that Final Fantasy X is my favorite console / single-player game. For one simple reason: it’s all about the story. It’s the main reason I play games. Even for MMOs, at least initially. There was some nice lore in EQ2, fifty thousand years of history in WoW, a complex and satisfying intro to Rift, and it’s definitely why I’m excited about The Secret World. Katawa Shoujo is all story.
A few days ago I realized that FFX turned ten years old last year. The central song, “Suteki da ne,” is never too far from my active iPhone playlist. It doesn’t have quite the emotional impact that it once did, but I have always found it moving.
I still haven’t played a game with a better story than FFX. Building on great writing in earlier games, it was beautiful and melancholy. The mythology may not have held up if examined too closely, but the idea of the Fayth was poignant. Humans would volunteer to be sacrificed, their captive souls giving rise to aeons, beings that could work with the living (summoners, such as Yuna) to defeat darkness.
Hundreds or thousands of souls in Zanarkand had given their lives to become the most powerful aeon of all, Sin, but the summoner was insane and terrorized the world, Spira, while the Fayth of Zanarkand dreamed, recreating the ancient city.
I read somewhere that the game was built around “Suteki da ne.” I don’t know how true that is, and I doubt I could find the reference now, but it seems right. Nobuo Uematsu wrote the music, and Kazushige Nojima, Scenario Designer, wrote the lyrics, so it was certainly created with the story in mind.
At the point of the Lake Macalania love scene, Tidus has finally come to understand that the summoner’s pilgrimage to defeat Sin is one of farewell. It is made to remind her of the land she is defending; to give her the courage to sacrifice herself in the final battle. As every summoner has done since Sin came into being, Yuna will give up her life in the final conflict, to buy a few years of peace.
And so the whole scene is heartbreaking, as they talk about the future, of Yuna’s visiting Tidus’s home in Zanarkand, which is a place she doesn’t understand. Both of them knowing that it can’t happen, because there won’t be a future. (English version of the long cutscene below.)
And then the song, beautiful and full of grief. From the translation at animelyrics.com:
Isn’t it beautiful,
To walk together in each others hands
I do so want to go,
To your city, your house, into your arms.
That heart,
held within your body
In those confusing nights
I dream
Even if the home that Tidus remembers does exist somewhere, she can never go there. This pilgrimage will be all that they will ever have together.
But why I’m writing about this now is that for years, this is as far as I’ve understood the relationship of the central song to the game. Then a few days ago I listened to the playlist that includes it, and thought about the words again.
Of course, in the game Yuna doesn’t die. Goaded by Tidus, she takes a third option, uniting the planet to defeat Sin permanently. There should be a happy ending – and for Spira, there is. But not for Yuna and Tidus. The Zanarkand that Tidus remembers exists, but only in the dreams of the Fayth. Tidus himself is part of that dream, and with Sin destroyed, the Fayth have no more purpose, and their dreaming ends as they finally go to their own rest. Against expectation, Yuna lives to save the world, but Tidus fades with the dream, and the game ends with her guiding the people of Spira into the future, alone.
Which is bittersweet; brilliant but devastating, and until a couple of days ago, which I’d never associated with the song. But in fact “Suteki da ne” fits Tidus at the end as well as or even better than it fits Yuna earlier – especially the long version, played over the closing credits. Yuna wants to go to his city – Zanarkand – to his home, but that was a dream, as was he. The saddest moment of the entire game is where Yuna runs to Tidus, and falls right through him. As he continues to fade, she stands, and, with her back to him, declares her love.
The wind, its halting words are a gentle illusion
The clouds, the broken future like a distant voice
The moon, a heart flowing in the clouded mirror
The stars, broken and swaying, like tears unable to be hidden.
Isn’t it beautiful,
To walk together in each others hands
I do so want to go,
To your city, your house, into your arms.
That face,
A soft touch,
Dissolving into morning,
I dream.
(Lyrics from the ending version.)
And I realize that Uematsu and Nojima fully intended for the song to encapsulate not only Yuna’s expectations, but Tidus’s fate. I understood that the game was supposed to be every bit as painful as it was, but not that the lyrics formed a boundary around their love. There can be nothing more, and there should be nothing more. And I think that is completely perfect.
The original Japanese game left the story there. My belief, based on this interpretation of the song, is that’s what Nojima intended. But the characters were too popular, and by the time FFX came to the US, there was a short epilogue – just a few seconds of Tidus swimming to the surface of the sea. No clue as to whether this is in Spira or in Dream Zanarkand. Then the International version had Yuna finding traces of someone who seems to be Tidus in ancient spheres, which became the foundation for FFX-2.
I don’t think that was supposed to happen. Extrapolating from the lyrics tells me that the story found an end, and that pushing it into a sequel violates its integrity. Which might be why X-2 wasn’t that great. While I’m sure that commercial considerations for every game to this point had been primary, this would be the first time Square allowed fan reaction to dictate artistic content, in my opinion to the detriment of the series.
Reworking the ending of Final Fantasy X, then, is what caused the series to jump the shark. Since then, every story has been somewhat open-ended. FFXII had a sequel announced before it was even released. Which means before you even start that you know the interesting characters are going to survive. At the end of FFXIII the two girls from Gran Pulse sacrificed themselves to save all of the other humans – but only by turning to crystal, which we’ve seen by then isn’t always permanent, and sure enough their voice actresses have parts in FFXIII-2, so presumably they’re back. (Their sacrifice was also marred by badly overdone special-effects, so had far less impact than it ought to have.)
In the post-FFX world, even FFVII was revamped with additional games and Advent Children. While in the original Aerith’s presence helped influence the Lifestream, in Advent Children she and Zack are shown to be somewhat involved in the world’s affairs. Aerith’s death was one of the great tragedies of RPGs when it happened, but now its significance seems diminished.
Bittersweet endings are good, when the story is powerful enough to carry them. But players want “happy ever after,” and it seems that Square will cater to them more than to artistic needs. Does that sell more games? Perhaps, but since sequels are cheaper to produce than originals I’m sure it’s better for the bottom line. I wonder when I read articles about the Mass Effect 3 ending whether fans’ demands are spoiling a good story – but I believe that the issue with Mass Effect is more that all of the time a player invests in the game and all of the choices he or she makes have very little effect on the outcome. Not necessarily that it isn’t a happy ending. I don’t think in general I want to see fan-pleasing endings becoming the norm.
I have complained before about FFs XII and XIII losing their potential for dramatic emotional impact by planning for sequels up-front. As in a conventional novel, it’s hard to believe that Seriously Bad Things will happen to a series character (unless the novel is written by Jim Butcher). Maybe it’s going out on a limb and overreading the implications of “Suteki da ne.” Maybe Square had planned all along to bring Tidus back if the reception was good enough. But it seems to me that the song speaks to a more pure vision than the eventual FFX franchise, and that in subsequent games integrity of the story has given way to the need for more product. I wonder if it’s a coincidence that FFX is the last Square console game that Uematsu was part of.
It’s all about the story.