Okay… uh… This one is…
Today’s sermon was supposed to be about acceptance. See, Fei and Elly have just started a relationship of sorts, and now along comes Emeralda, who is a child that immediately identifies Fei as her father. This is a surprise to both Fei and Elly, and is further exacerbated by Emeralda apparently immediately loving Fei, but rejecting Elly. Elly, like many “stepmoms” in such a situation, literally does not know what to do, and, obviously there were now more troubles ahead for the young couple.
But…
Well, Emeralda is Fei’s daughter. Unfortunately, Fei doesn’t know that thanks to Emeralda being the daughter of Fei when Fei was experiencing another lifetime some 4,000 years earlier. Additionally, Elly is also effectively Emeralda’s mom, though with the same caveat. And what’s more, Elly and Fei in these earlier incarnations literally died so Emeralda could live. And “live” is a complicated descriptor here, as Emeralda is in no way biological, but a nanomachine colony. And she has a pet giant robot for some reason, too.
So, apparently, Elly is expected to accept Fei’s daughter from another marriage, but Fei wasn’t really Fei, and he was really married to Elly in the first place, and their daughter barely remembers any of this. She cannot even get her dad’s name right.
Oh, and a music box “Fei” gave to “Elly” four millennia back is somehow sitting in Citan’s workshop now. That doesn’t really complicate matters any further, but it does make the whole thing even weirder.
So today we still preach about acceptance. Accept that sometimes life is too complicated to convey with words.
Even Worse Streams presents Xenogears
Night 12
Original Stream Night: April 27, 2021
Night of Puzzle Bobble 4
Random Notes on the Stream:
- Abby Denton joins us from her home in Silent Hill, and then Caliscrub joins shortly thereafter. We have a full party tonight!
- Do you pilot or steer a dolphin? The Elements attack, which raises all sorts of questions.
- And then Kishi joins Xenogears party chat.
- Skyghene, the flying Gear piloted by Tolone, looks like Transformers Cyberton’s Brimstone (who I misidentify as Terrorsaur on the stream). Take a look:
I’m not crazy, right?
- “What the fuck is a Mercury Melon?”
- Somehow seeing the TV Orb leads to references to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and squirrel-based deaths. It all makes sense in context.
- “Being the victor, I merely said ‘this game’s stupid’.”
- Welcome to being underwater in a Gear. It involves a lot of jumping. So these are Super Mario Bros rules, not Mega Man rules.
I… may have gotten turned around in this cave. At least it leads to discussion of the imaginary Final Fantasy 7 Saturday Morning Cartoon and the Squaresoft Afternoon.- We are all squares on the stream according to BEAT. Please ignore any moments where BEAT claims I am the only square. This must be a lie.
- As we find Crescens at the gate generator, we inevitably discuss if the robot masters of Mega Man are truly sentient. My vote is yes, because it is the only thing that makes Elec Man make sense.
- Solaris is unfurled! Why does it do that? Who knows.
- Fei is a 10,000 year incel. It is canon.
- We visit a restaurant as Jeannie is invited on the stream for the first time. She’s an official member of Even Worse Streams as of this writing, and I literally forgot she ever wasn’t.
- Let’s all get excited about the dark wings that will carry them all to their death.
- “What? So he dropped upwards into the sky?”
“Don’t worry about it.” - Male Wife and Girlboss is going to be a CBS comedy in ten years.
Kishi leaves a little early as we Metal Gear Solid through the vents of Solaris.- Was I the only person who ever pretended there were save points in my real life? I guess so…
- And we break for the night noting that Solaris is a picture of decadence that coincidentally echoes the 80s.
Next time on Xenogears: What could have been Part 1’s thrilling conclusion!
Final Fantasy 10 was a brilliant deconstruction of its franchise. And that statement is firmly past tense because it was immediately undercut by capitalism.
As is stated from literally the beginning, Final Fantasy 10 is the story of Tidus. And, since you are holding the controller that keeps that story going, you are meant to be Tidus, too. Tidus is good at playing games in a technologically advanced world, but his life is turned upside down when a tragedy transports him to Spira. Spira is a much more rural, primitive spot, and something very foreign to our “modern” Tidus. Ultimately, everything you see of this world exactly matches to the time Tidus spends in this strange place. You experience every second of his journey there, and you know exactly what you know of Spira exclusively through his eyes and what he learns from others. Tidus only discovers new things about Spira if you choose to talk to more people or see more places in Spira. And even though Tidus has his own issues to work through, you wholly inhabit his view of this alien world, complete with leaving Spira exactly when he exits. You are a strange visitor from an advanced (and implied to be more enlightened/less superstitious) society, here to save the world with ideas that could only belong to an outsider. When your job is completed, everyone is going to miss you to the point of tears, but despite their protests, you literally disappear.
Magical memory whammies or whatever is happening aside, Tidus apparently comes from a world where the afterlife is an unknowable mystery. But Spira has a concrete answer to this age-old question: if you die with regrets, you are likely to either become a fiend, or live on as some manner of ageless zombie. A summoner may “send” the dead to the Farplane (a magical but firmly visitable place), but if some undead avoid this fate, they will stick around for literally eternity and continue to make a mess of things. At best, the living dead of Spira are perpetuating endless spirals of destruction, and at worst they are literally monsters. So, in short, a huge theme of Final Fantasy 10 is “don’t wear out your welcome”. You died, get over it, move on. If you stick around, you are going to hurt everybody still alive. 
And this would have been the ideal moral for a Final Fantasy title that matched every Final Fantasy that came before 2001. Sure, Seymour, Kefka, Sephiroth, and every villain that wanted to destroy their world had technically won by virtue of dying and leaving behind a world no longer requiring a player to defend it, but outside of the meta-narrative of the player living on, these were games with happy endings. Yuna, Terra, and Cloud would live to see a happily ever after, and we were left with only our imaginations to guess what happened to these heroes after we left them alone. Did Terra truly find love in her new family? Did Cloud and Tifa decide to settle down? Did Yuna become a pop idol cross treasure hunter?
There will never not be new Final Fantasy 10 media for the rest of our lives. Any given “HD rerelease” of FF10 will inevitably stoke the rumors of a Final Fantasy 10-3, and we may eventually see such a product “because the fans demand it”. In the meanwhile, Tidus will appear in any game that requires Final Fantasy cameos, and any of those “cameos” could be excuses to foist new pathos or backstory on our intrepid Blitzball player (depending on how serious anyone wants to be about a game where a clown can fight a tree). In 2001, it was reasonable to assume that Tidus’s story was one-and-done, and we would never see anything further to elucidate his limited life beyond the odd Ultimania release. Now? Now our grandkids are going to be learning that the third lizard that Tidus curb-stomped was secretly the fiend-reincarnation of the dude that founded the Yevon chapter of the Boy Scouts, and further information will be available on a cell phone-based lottery game released to promote Final Fantasy 19.
And is that all bad? Well, truth be told, if I had the choice between Final Fantasy 10 having a more focused message, or being able to play Final Fantasy 10-2, I’d choose Final Fantasy 10-2 every time. Morals and lessons are all well and good, but Wakka can come out of Blitzball retirement anytime Square wants, because there is at least a 30% chance a game including him will be good (just so long as no one actually plays Blitzball). Finality in a videogame may be impossible for Square Enix nowadays, but the world doesn’t really need videogames to be final. We like videogames, SE, so feel free to keep churnin’ ‘em out.
Level Up: After years of leveling systems in Final Fantasy titles trying unique things like Esper customization or 
Goggle Bob Fact: I have always considered myself fairly… Woke? My parents are liberal and raised me in a fairly progressive fashion, but I… kind of didn’t notice Wakka when I first played Final Fantasy 10 back during my freshman year of college. But now when I play the game? Holy crap is he racist! It is fantasy racism, but the fact that he is a religious zealot that takes every spare moment he can find to denigrate the Al Bhed is exceptionally concerning. And I did not observe it at all twenty years ago! I guess I wasn’t as “woke” as I thought back then. Maybe I still have more to learn now…
This is important: how gay is Asellus?
Let us consider a few things of note. Japan did have some significant, deliberately queer JRPGs in its past (Eternal Filena comes immediately to mind). America, however, did not. If something was remotely “gay”, it did not make it across the Pacific. In fact, any and all queerness was ironed out of any Japanese imports across media, so Japan appeared to be some kind of shining bastion of acceptance thanks to gay 
But even beyond her “stealth”, the most obvious reason other games did not make it while Asellus was able to be imported was simple… and it is the same color as Asellus’s hair. Squaresoft had a gigantic, once in a company’s lifetime hit on its hands with 
There is nothing like an old friend stopping by to remind you of who you were.
SaGa Frontier was directed and produced by Akitoshi Kawazu. And, while the SaGa franchise was familiar to fans in Japan, over here in America Town, Kawazu had only shown his hand in the 
I mean, I did deserve it, right? I played the game wrong, and my punishment was an incomplete experience that could only be rectified by starting over. Memory card space was at a premium at the time, so it was not like I could simply reload from an earlier point where maybe I could have constructed a more useful party or learned a more useful skill. There are a thousand options in SaGa Frontier, and I chose the wrong options. And, in a way, this was not a big deal. SaGa Frontier was likely to be my “big JRPG purchase” to last me until Christmas, so I had time. This would be “my game” for the next few months, and if I had to restart, I would simply do that. Start all over armed with the knowledge I had sparked from an aborted playthrough and do better this time. Hell, the multiple characters/scenarios seemed to even encourage this: I failed with Emelia, and I could go back to her, but why not try Asellus this time? And, if I was really trying hard, I could hit the generally accurate advice of Gamefaqs, or shell out a few more precious dollars for a strategy guide. Now I was on the right track! I could handle seeing at least one aqua-colored sorcerer’s ending (or what passed for such). I might never see that all important dev room that required the full dedication of a player and memory card, but I could come close.
SaGa Frontier was once the only game I purchased within a whole season. Now, SaGa Frontier Remastered is one of many games I purchased within that same time period. Hell, it’s not the only game I purchased within one month. Double Hell, it’s not the only 
When there is the possibility that you can explore 90% of the whole game with one scenario, there is the distinct danger that the player is going to become too exhausted/frustrated trying to play 630% of the game. And never mind “knowing” that, like, one goofy NPC or dungeon is going to be a silly diversion in six scenarios, but absolutely essential in scenario seven…
SaGa Frontier is a good game. SaGa Frontier Remastered is a good game made even better. But playing the two games at two very different points in my life has reminded me how much things have changed over the last few decades. A game that was once “difficult” can now be safely judged as “difficult to understand”. And, while this does not detract from the experience, it may impress upon this player that, at an age when time is valuable, maybe learning the ins and outs of an extremely unique JRPG is not the best use of the day.
So are you still just super bitter about being locked out of the Emelia “good ending” because you decided to follow a lead when you should have just immediately given up? No, of course not. That would be silly. That is totally not the reason I harbor resentment against the entire SaGa franchise. I don’t know why you would ever think such a thing.