FFX Replay: Macalania, Bikanel, Bevelle

[owlmoose]

This, to me, is the heart of the game: from the Guardians arriving at Home through leaving Bevelle. The revelations large and small, the growth experienced by every single character, Auron finally starts to let his hand show, my favorite cut scene ever: I could play it again and again.

• Update to a previous thought -- so the bodies of the Al-Bhed in the Summoner's Sanctum do disappear after Dona and Isaaru send them, in contrast to the bodies that stay on the beach after Operation Mi'ihen. On the other hand, a fiend (a wendigo) comes to life before they've finished, so maybe that's the difference. And in Bevelle, Seymour uses Kinoc's corpse as well as four living people (one warrior monk and three Guado) to create his armor for the battle with Yuna and co. So I have to call the results of this study inconclusive.


• Also in the Summoner's Sanctum, I was really struck by Tidus's interactions with Valefor when he gets upset about Yuna, and the way Valefor bowed her head and wrapped her wings around Tidus, as if to comfort him, to share in his sadness. The bond between the summoners and the aeons must go both ways. What if the aeons grieve every time a summoner dies? What if they're tired of losing tiny pieces of themselves, of crumbling slowly over the centuries? Just another reason they, too, want the cycle to end.


• One of the things I always look forward to in this bit of the game are the interactions between Auron and Kinoc in Bevelle. The moment I noticed this time: when Seymour orders the warrior monks to stand down, and Kinoc pulls the gun away from Auron's face, he has a strange expression, like he's both disappointed and relieved that he won't be pulling the trigger.

After this, we have a little bit of falling action, as the party crosses the Calm Lands, plays the Monster Hunting game (easily my favorite sidequest), explores Yojimbo's cave, and heads for Gagazet. Good times.

Comments

[lassarina]

....aeons grieving

I think you just bunnied me

;;

[auronlu]

I love it when a fellow meta-lover checks things out carefully. I think that Square isn't entirely careful with some of the dead-body pyreflies mechanics; they're pretty danged complicated. (If you kill a chocobo by accident in X-2, pyreflies. Either Spirans are vegetarian, or SOME animals must not turn into pyreflies on death.)

Valefor seems to have a particular bond with Yuna, as Justira illustrated in Clarion (which I'm rereading yet again). Yuna's first aeon, temple fayth. If it's a spiritual and mental bond, then Valefor not only loves Yuna, but may also feel the bond with Tidus a little. I like to think that different summoners become attached to different fayth more or less along the way.

I can't wait to see how they're going to redo Auron's and Kinoc's models. Just a tiny tweak on Kinoc to make him a little more expressive would be great, for those interactions, although in that one they conveyed a lot with body language, as you say.

[jerkface]

Okay, can I just mention first that I really love that w'ere both playing this game at basically the same pace?

Macalania, Bikanel, Bevelle: This is easily the best part of the entire game. Ugh, so many feelings. I actually totally forgot about the part with Tidus and Valefor and when it happened, when she wrapped her wings around him like "It's okay, little human, I understand your pain. It hurts, it sucks, it makes us sad too" and I legit CRIED, like a tiny little baby. And Boyfriend is next to me on the couch, blowing up pandas on Wow or whatever and he's all "OMG, babe, calm down, it's just a video game" and I'm just "FUCK YOU, THIS IS BEAUTIFUL."

I love the idea that the bond between summoners and their aeons have a deep emotional connotation, particularly where Yuna and Valefor are concerned. You can see it in Yuna's summoning sequences, how she interacts with each aeon before sending them off to battle (how she pats Valefor on the beak, how Ifrit catches her mid-air and sets her down gingerly before he gets all SERIOUS BUSINESS, how she just stairs awe-struck at Bahamut like "I summoned this? He's fighting for me?").

She grieves for them, and I like to think that they grieve for her too.

[cumuluscastle]

Oh! Yes, of course the aeons experience grief! I simply hadn't thought it through. Bahamut clearly has a vested interest in stopping the sacrifices of the summoners, but I hadn't really considered that they might grieve each individual summoner in quite the way you've mentioned.

[stealth_noodle]

I love this Aeon grief idea. I am going to be paying close attention to that scene with Valefor when I replay later!