Originally posted here on 2022-10-25.
Today in “questions only I would ask”: how tall, exactly, is Braska? The FFX Ultimania apparently tells us that Auron and Jecht are 182cm and 190cm respectively. But there’s presumably no information on Braska, although fortunately in the spheres from his pilgrimage we do get a couple of shots where he stands beside one of his guardians. Based on these, we can measure Braska against Auron, or against Jecht, or indeed both. We have to make sure both characters’ feet are in shot, firstly so we can be sure they’re an equal distance from the camera and that there aren’t any proportion issues; secondly, to calculate the relative difference in heights.
If we add some guidelines to the image, we can see that Auron is 200 units (pixels, I guess) tall here, and the top of Braska’s head is eight units lower than Auron’s, including a little tiny bit that I added to account for his headdress.
This means that if Auron is 182cm tall, Braska is (200 – 8) × (182 ÷ 200) = 175cm. It’s worth triangulating against Jecht, though, if we can.
We can indeed: Braska and Jecht spend some time standing next to each other during the Chocobo Eater sphere. Braska spends a lot of this sequence visibly tilting his head back to look Jecht in the eyes, which is already a sign that Jecht is significantly taller, and makes it a bit harder to measure Braska’s actual height. However, Braska has the decency to nod during their conversation, which means that if we pause it at the right time, we can get an image where his head is level.
Like Auron was, Jecht is 200 units tall here, and Braska is now 12 units shorter than him. So, if Jecht is 190cm tall, Braska is (200 – 12) × (190 ÷ 200) = 179cm.
So there’s a small discrepancy here in that the relative heights of Auron and Jecht don’t match up with what we’re told are their actual heights. This may indeed just come from the fact that the measuring does require a little bit of subjectivity, as well as my inexplicable insistence on doing this using tiny images, but it does raise the not entirely new question of whether we should take Ultimania or the game itself as our principal source of canon. My preference in cases like this is always to believe the game over any other kind of information, and to use the Ultimania stuff as and when it fits in. In this situation, Ultimania has the advantage of actually telling us Auron and Jecht’s heights in figures (even if it now turns out that one of these has to be wrong), but the game has the advantage of showing us Braska’s height, which would be completely unknown otherwise.
Of course, it would be great to be able to fill in the third side of the triangle using Auron and Jecht’s relative heights, but unfortunately we don’t get a scene in the game where the two of them stand next to each other on the same level. Using Braska as the link between them, though, we can calculate each of their heights according to the other: if Braska is 192/200 of Auron’s height and 188/200 of Jecht’s height, this means Auron is 188/192 of Jecht’s height. So, if Auron is 182cm, Jecht is (182 ÷ 188) × 192 = 186cm. Going from the other direction, if Jecht is 190cm, Auron is (190 ÷ 192) × 188 = 179cm.
So if we go with the lower end of the scale, we have the following heights, rounded to the nearest inch:
- Auron: 6'
- Braska: 5'9"
- Jecht: 6'1"
And if we go with the upper end, we get these:
- Auron: 6'1"
- Braska: 5'10"
- Jecht: 6'3" (The difference is a bit bigger here, partly due to rounding and, I think, partly because Jecht is at the top end of the relative scale so the differences increase.)
The sensible thing would probably be to split the difference, although as a huge fan of small men I can’t resist imagining that Braska is as short as possible, which means I ought to keep the others at the lower end as well for consistency. I bet Jecht’s not happy about losing those two inches … sorry, Jecht.