Preconceptions Going into Final Fantasy X

At the point of this writing, Final Fantasy X is a 21-year-old video game originally released on the PlayStation 2 on July 19, 2001, in Japan and on December 17, 2021, in North America; later released in May 2022 in Australia and Europe.  Even during the years I owned a PS2, I did not really have much interest in Final Fantasy X, primarily because I had developed some preconceived notions about the game, and I was still feeling a little salty about the game going back from the fantasy setting of Final Fantasy IX (similar to the older NES/SNES era Final Fantasy games) and back to the realism of Final Fantasy VII and VIII.  Then last year after Dr. Potts gifted me Final Fantasy XII on the Switch and as I was getting back into JRPGs, I thought I would give the game a chance, and since the Switch version (as well as all Final Fantasy X HD Remaster versions) also contained Final Fantasy X-2, all neatly packaged for $19.99, I thought I might as well.

On Sunday night and Monday morning, I started Final Fantasy X HD Remaster, a Final Fantasy game that I had never played before and only knew very little about the characters and the game from various sources such as commercials, the Theatrhythm games, and the first Dissidia game, memes, and the Final Fantasy X soundtrack.

So really, all I knew was the following: 

• Tidus and Yuna are the primary main characters.
• There is a game called Blitzball.
• There is a city called Zanarkand that has that iconic piano song.
• At some point, someone fights someone named Seymour.
• Tidus' dad may not be as evil as he is depicted in Dissidia, but maybe he is?
• There are tropical islands.

That was it before I started the game up on Sunday, and even after only 58 minutes, I feel like I know less now but that is because what I have experienced from the game is so much different than where I thought the game was going to start out and what has been currently revealed to the player.

Before I started, based on the aforementioned list, this was my general thought about the story and course of the game.

• The game starts with Yuna on her island doing whatever a summoner on that island does.  Similar to a lot of Squaresoft/Square Enix games, an orphaned person in a small village finds out that there is more to their powers/life/destiny than they had thought and are exiled/banished/willingly leaves their island to save the island/planet; think Chrono Cross, which came out two years before.
• Somehow Tidus gets involved with Yuna and the overall story, something to do with Blitzball.  Maybe his team is shipwrecked on the island or the islands are a stop-off point, or there is a smaller Blitzball team they are playing.  Maybe Yuna gets caught up in a crowd going to a Blitzball game and meets Tidus that way?
• More characters join the party along the way to wherever they are all going.
• At some point, Tidus and Yuna end up in Zanarkand where romance blooms.  
• An evil Shinra-type corporation is introduced and is the main antagonist.  Maybe with environmental themes about ocean pollution and greater polluting the earth themes, kind of the inverse of Mako Reactors from FFVII, instead now it's putting things into the planet (garbage, nuclear waste, fracking).

There is obviously more stuff going on, but that is what I thought the basic gist of the game was, or at least maybe the first quarter of the game.

58 minutes in, and I have very little idea what is going on.  Tidus is introduced as a pretty-boy Blitzball player in the metropolitan city of Zanarkand that ends up being destroyed by a giant sphere-thing that Tidus' friend/family friend? Auron seems cool with.  I thought Blitzball was going to be a mini-game of sorts but like a good 60% of the first hour, you just watch the game happen while you move from Point A to linear Point B.  I was fully expecting a Blitzball tutorial when Tidus signs the balls (Blitzballs?) for the kids.  But instead, you just watch Blitzball happen, then the city is destroyed while Auron and Tidus are sucked up into Sin (giant-world-eating-sphere-thing) and then Tidus wakes up somewhere aquatic by himself and is conscripted by a group calling themselves (I think?) Al Bhed and there is a foreign language that will periodically be understood and the game progresses, or until Tidus finds a translation dictionary.

And apparently, Tidus can breathe underwater without any kind of apparatus.

(This was after being underwater for a good 10 minutes of real-time play, so no clue how many in-game-world minutes passed by).

As previously mentioned, this version of Final Fantasy X HD Remaster is packaged with the sequel Final Fantasy X-2, but it also has a bridging story, Final Fantasy X: Eternal Calm, and an epilogue for FFX-2, Final Fantasy X-2: Last Mission.  Because FFX feels like you are being thrown into the middle of a story with characters in a world that you have no information about, I genuinely felt that I had accidentally selected not FFX, but one of the other games instead.  The way that Auron's lack of reaction to Sin arriving and destroying the Zanarkand felt like I was already supposed to know who these characters were and the destruction of this city, whose music is just something else entirely, felt like it was supposed to have more of an emotional impact.  Instead, I was just confused and lost.

The last conversation I watched before starting this article was between Tidus and the newly named Rikku, and that did offer a little bit of explanation as to where Tidus found himself, but there are still a lot of questions that I hope will be answered as I play through the game.  The most important question being about the lung capacity or ability to breathe underwater.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

P.S.  I am also a little annoyed that I feel like Tidus' design looks a lot like Sora from Kingdom Hearts, with the asymmetrical shorts and the large yellow shoes.  I know his original character design was that of a plumber, hence the overalls, but I'm still seeing Sora, and that bothers me.