2024-11-10

I was just playing the Guadosalam part, and wanted to note a few things:

• I love the wedding scene so much that I don’t pay this bit enough attention. The interactions between Seymour and Yuna are great! Her delight at the images of ancient Zanarkand, then the way he creepily leans in and tells her he wants to marry her, it’s all fantastically awkward. I’m sure watching the non-HD version would give a different insight into it as well.
• I’m developing the headcanon that Seymour goes around with his tattooed chest on display all the time because that’s what Jecht did, and he wants to pay performative homage to Braska’s pilgrimage in order to reassure everyone that he has good intentions. Of course, the “why are you still here, sir?” exchange shows that he doesn’t actually care about respecting Braska’s guardians at all.
• “[Yuna’s] parents”, says narrator!Tidus, “they looked so happy together” – cut to Braska and his wife on the Farplane with completely blank expressions … looool.
• In the Zanarkand flashback scene, Jecht’s wife gives him a wee kiss on the cheek, which is cute!
• Playing this part made me finally realise that we actually see Auron in that flashback, which is really interesting; we see him in the “your team lost because of you” scene, but I think that’s a dream and even if it did really happen it was clearly very close to the present day. But the Farplane flashback is to not long after Braska’s pilgrimage, and the Auron model we see (very briefly) in that scene is his older version, which suggests that his inexplicable aging process happened all in one go when he went to watch over Tidus, not gradually over the course of those ten years. You’d think that when Tidus saw the spheres from Braska’s pilgrimage just a few weeks before he first met Auron, he might have wondered why Auron’s appearance had changed so drastically in that short time … I’d say something like “I should write a fic about this”, but I touched on Tidus’ reaction to Auron’s earlier appearance in one I wrote two and a half years ago (?!?), and I don’t feel like there’s much to add at the moment.
• What is Rikku fiddling with when the others come back from the Farplane? I thought it was an apple because she brings it to her mouth as if she’s about to take a bite out of it, but it’s pretty big. I wondered if she might have nicked one of the pieces of fruit from Seymour’s big fruit table, but nothing that’s on offer looks much like it. It does look very like a sphere for the sphere grid, and while that has amusing meta implications, I suppose it’s likely that she’d be the one carrying them at this point, now that she’s demonstrated all the useful things she can do with items.
• While heading back from the Farplane, you get to decide whether or not to speak at one point during the conversation. I don’t know of any other point in the game where this happens, and I’m not sure what the point of it is. If you choose to have Tidus speak, he says, “He wasn’t sent, so he became a fiend, right?” and then does what sounds to me like a strange two-tone laugh. I assume the intention was for him to say “aha!” in the sense of “I worked it out, go me!” and this was therefore a failure of voice acting direction (just like when characters say “your Zanarkand” – I think the emphasis is meant to be on the “your”, i.e. “your Zanarkand, as opposed to ours”, but it’s usually on the Zan, at least when Auron says it, which doesn’t really make any sense).