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On replaying FFX
I've been thinking about replaying FFX again for awhile, and being at home sick for the last week ended up being a good time for it. (I'd also thought about playing along with
moogle_university, but I decided I couldn't hold out until October. :) I can always replay again then if I'm inspired.) I haven't played FFX at all for several years, and I hadn't done a top-to-bottom replay in even longer; then again, I know the game so well by now I doubt there will be many real surprises. But that's not the point of a replay like this. It's more about sinking back into the world and spending time there, reminding myself of the voices and the faces and the story. I'm about twelve or so hours in, just reached the Thunder Plains.
A few stray thoughts:
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A few stray thoughts:
- The Jecht Shot is ridiculously hard. I think I reloaded seven or eight times before I got it to work. FFX was the last game before the ability to skip cutscenes was introduced to the series, and there's also no way to reload besides restarting the PS2, so that was also annoying. I don't intend to play much blitzball, so I didn't really need the Jecht Shot. But I so much prefer the way the characterization works if Tidus is able to make it work that I decided it was worth it.
- The other choice I really care about: who dies at Operation Mi'ihen. Nothing against Gatta, but the scene with Luzzu and Wakka at Djose Temple is one of my favorites in the game, so when I accidentally kept Gatta alive I found myself going back to a previous save.
- One thing I noticed at Operation Mi'ihen: after Yuna performs her Sending, there are still bodies on the beach. I remember having a discussion about that issue either here or someone else's journal a few years back: do human corpses disappear after death the same way that dead fiends do? At least based on this evidence, the answer is no. I'll have to keep an eye out in future scenes.
- Tidus's voice acting is better than I remember. Yuna's, sadly, is worse. Maybe it only seems that way because she gets so much better in FFX-2, so that's the impression that remains in my head.
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Oh PS2 and unskippable cutscenes. I believe we've been spoiled by current gen hardware capabilities where we can reload stuff by going back to the main menu without having to shut off the console.
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Honestly, a lot of people are too hard on him for venting and being frustrated, yet they're totally okay with Cloud, Squall and others throwing hissy fits.
And Tidus wasn't military. He was just this kid thrown into another world, trying to find a way home. His voice tries to convey that "ordinary kid, full of bravado and uncertainty, trying to fake his way through it." And sometimes he breaks down and whines, but that also makes sense.
It's just that awful laughing scene. And the Japanese is just as bad. The point was "sound as stupid as possible," and unfortunately both voice actors succeeded.
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I think when I'm actually playing the game, I often feel the way you do. It makes sense. It's supposed to sound awkward and crazy -- hence Wakka's comment!
There are certain Yuna lines that trouble me far more. The laughing scene doesn't throw me out of the game; it's Tidus being a dork. Whereas Yuna's "But first, we have to pray at the temple of Djoooooseeeeeee!" makes me think, "Ack, UR DOIN IT WRONG, Hedy!"
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I can't remember -- I know that I make fun of Tidus, but with a certain sneaking fondness, the way I mock Wakka for being a lovable lunk. I think I used to hate Tidus' voice acting, but I've gotten used to it. I feel a great deal of sympathy for the character. As Wakka says, he handles himself pretty well for a newbie (and a 17-year-old). Cloud, Squall and pretty much anyone in FFVIII could take lessons from Tidus on "how to roll with the punches during difficult circumstances."
I wish I wrote Tidus more often, but he's so blasted normal. I think I've only written one longer story with him as a side character.
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I've also mostly written him as a side character, and only as the main character in shortfic. Partly this is a side effect of being mainly an FFX-2 writer, where he doesn't figure nearly as much.
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I actually didn't like Lulu when I first started playing FFX, oddly enough. The fanservice initially rather distracted me from her intelligence, which is hardly fair, but there you are.
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See, what I like most about Tidus was that he asks the right questions. Because he's trying to figure things out that were seen as "common sense" things in Spira, that it makes people like Lulu and Wakka start re-examining their own beliefs. He actually reacts to things in his environment, and unfortunately some people interpret that as him being stupid. Sorry other people, but if being stupid means asking questions and reacting to weird-ass things that you've never encountered before, then I guess we're all idiots.
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Basically, I think the voice acting in FFX gets a bad rap and I will defend it to the death (except for Yuna who so often sounds stilted and wrong, and I think that's largely because she was trying too hard to make her speech patterns match the Japanese mouth movements).
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There are several characters in FFX I love despite their choppy voice acting. In Hedy Burgess' case, the lip synching attempts are a little distracting. I wish someone had told her to stop doing that before X-2.
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Also, a lot of people I know blame the voice actors, which is very unfair because the ones who decide the quality and the overall sound of the acting is the voice director, and so that's really their responsibility. James Arnold Taylor is a very good voice actor, and it's unfortunate that because of Union rules, I think, that he doesn't voice in anime that often, because in other incarnations of Tidus he's actually very good. Hedy Buress as well, in X-2 and in Dissida and KH where she reprises Yuna. And X-2 actually got the lip flaps to match the English dub, as a well to assist the actors.
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