FFX meta: Kabuki

I watched the FFX kabuki. It was very cool! I definitely felt as if I was missing out on a lot by just watching it in our wee gaming room while also attempting to grapple with certain overly ambitious handicrafts, because it was clearly meant as an Experience: go to the theatre, spend the whole day there (the full performance lasts about six hours), have some tenuously FFX-themed food, buy some official merch (I’m still disappointed that I never managed to get hold of the Braska standee they were selling at the performances).

Like Advent Children, it came across to me as a sequence of fairly discrete scenes rather than a completely continuous narrative. Everything happened, in an order of some kind, and related to the overall story, but it felt much more like a succession of parts than the game does. I think I may have got this impression because the set changes necessarily couldn’t be as distinct as the change from one location to the next is in the game, so instead of backgrounds marking the transition from one part to the next, it had to be done through some other kind of scene change. Also people don’t applaud during video games, I guess.

O’aka introduced both acts, which was a nice touch. He was much more likeable than he is in the game, haha. He asked the live audience how many of them hadn’t played a FF game before, and quite a few raised their hands, which made me wonder whether the play came across as at all comprehensible to them. A lot was left out (for obvious reasons – it was already very long and would have had to be twice as long to fit in the entire FFX story) and while they did a good job at moving stuff around to make up for it, I think some of the sense was still lost. FFX does very well, imo, in providing a coherent narrative, especially after the PS1 era of FF games where nothing made sense in the story after a certain point. The kabuki definitely wasn’t quite as clear, but I suspect that these days the whole format is meant more as an art form to appreciate than a gripping story in which to immerse oneself.

The promotional stuff centred quite heavily on the actors playing Tidus, Seymour, and Auron, all of whom get prominent roles in the performance itself: nobody else seems to be in the same league of main characterness other than Yuna. Seymour and Auron’s roles seem larger than they do in the game: Seymour gets some flashback scenes with his parents, albeit nothing that can’t reasonably be extrapolated from the original other than that he has different-coloured eyes in this, creating a very heavy-handed parallel with Yuna. Auron gets to fight Yunalesca by himself, which was (predictably) one of my favourite sequences! We don’t see his younger self getting whumped by her, but we do see Yuna’s-pilgrimage-era Auron driving his sword into a load of snakes, and it’s excellent.

There seemed to be more focus on demonstrating that certain characters were good people than there is in the game: I don’t know if this is another kabuki trait or maybe just a wish-fulfilment thing for people who’ve loved these characters for twenty years and don’t want to see them bashed (which would be fair enough). Wakka made a bigger deal about having been wrong about the Al Bhed, for example. Showing us Seymour’s backstory obviously made him a more sympathetic character, and when Yuna sent him he ended up being quite happy to go; I don’t remember the exact rationale for it, but … possibly something about realising his own death was what he really craved? Whatever it was, it seemed pretty convincing.

On the other hand, I was quite disappointed by the fact that they cut Wen Kinoc from act 1; he’s still in act 2, which seems more weird than it would have been if they’d just taken him out of the whole thing. Seymour got the “what have you been doing these ten years” lines to Auron, the part where Auron gets a gun pointed in his face just didn’t happen at all, and then the whole Via Purifico sequence was skipped because, wait for it, Kinoc turned up at Tidus and Auron’s cage (😏) and was like “oh, Auron, you’re my old friend, I’m actually going to let you all go free.” I assume this was to avoid the logistics of the Via Purifico and the Evrae Altana battle, but I’d never realised before how Kinoc’s sneaky villainy and weird friends-to-possibly-enemies relationship with Auron is apparently one of the features of the game that I don’t seem to be able to do without. Similarly, Shelinda’s character growth was completely lost because she was only in the scene that happens after she’s been made captain of the monks, so all we see is “young woman in a position of authority” rather than “young woman who has previously been seen to be very self-doubting and is only in a position of authority because Yevon is falling apart”.

On the subject of onnagata, Yuna was so impressive. Her actor just nailed it.

The English subtitles were very close to the lines in the game in places, but not all the time; perhaps they reused the official game lines where the Japanese ones were the same, perhaps it was a coincidence. There were a few odd lapses of register, such as Auron describing his own death as “I ran outta oomph.” On the other hand, when he was about to depart he said “I’ve kept Braska waiting for ten years,” which made me very happy. During Braska’s sphere for Yuna he said, “Jecht and Auron are doing great, and my pilgrimage is going wonderfully,” – which made me laugh a lot, thinking about my WIP where both Braska and Auron are now on the verge of breakdown about fifty percent of the time, and Braska has given serious thought to giving up his pilgrimage and throwing himself off a bridge or something on two separate occasions …

There were a few songs during the performance: here are the words from the one that was sung while Yuna summoned all the aeons before fighting Yu Yevon.

Valefor of the wind, blowing ever forward.
The maiden fayth, with breezes as kind as a smile,
but when it angers, its storms topple the mightiest of trees.
Hellfire erupting from the earth.
The perfervid flames take bestial form …
… in Ifrit of the flame.
Thunder strikes heaven and earth from blades of lightning.
A single stroke from its horn to pierce the sky.
The ancient fayth, Ixion.
A chilling light, diamond dust.
A strike from the heavens.
Shiva, the aeon with dominion over the cold.
Yojimbo, the howling shadow,
and his faithful companion Daigoro.
And his favourite thing … is coin.
The youngest fayth, pure of heart,
is Bahamut, ruler of all natural phenomena.
His flares turn these wheels of fate.
The wyrm king stands tall.
Flowers, their petals scattered to the winds.
Flowers, springing from the ground after the rain.
The heavens, spouting sparks and calling forth clouds.
The heavens, filled with light shining to the ground below.

I like how the non-elemental aeons were given elements, although “all natural phenomena” seems a bit of a copout for Bahamut … having said that, he’s best boy as of a couple of months ago, so give him all the elements he wants, I guess.