These days I feel like I've been zombified too.

[yati]

There's a masterlist of fanworks posted for ff_exchange compiled here. I shall be spending many, many hours reading through things in that list. ♥

Also, the list of Chocobo Down (prompts that weren't fulfilled for the round) is here, and it's a pretty awesome list as well. I might try write something! Maybe!

---


So. I decided to randomly open a save of Final Fantasy X I had on the memory card, just for the heck of it. It also had something to do with all the research that went into the FFEX fic -- it made me realise how much I missed the game.

The save was inside of the Zanarkand Dome, before meeting Yunalesca. I had turned off the subtitles, so this time I was just watching the cutscenes. (Subtitles always distract me. Even when I know what's being said, or I understand the language that's being spoken, I still try to read them.) All the ones with Auron, Braska and Jecht were great. I had forgotten how desperate Auron was at that point.

I had also forgotten how much I hated the Cloister of Trials. There was no "You see a sphere-shaped recess" here, but the tetris blocks made go argh.

Went against the Spectral Keeper -- not too bad. Got the Game Over screen once -- Kimahri got beserked and was the only one left standing, so I couldn't revive the other two. Re-equipped everyone, sent them back in, managed to kill the wyrm. Hooray. Went to see Yunalesca.

Ended up giggling when I first saw her because my first thought was that she had just came back from a beach party -- she obviously was still wearing her bikini when she went to fight Sin. Watched the cutscenes. Yuna's very brave. Cheered at Auron's speech. Went against Yunalesca.

The first two forms weren't that hard. She kept zombifying everyone and I just fixed them up. And then came the third form and . . . Mega-Death! (haha megadeath) and everyone died. Sigh. There was a reason for all that zombification. The end. Only not, because I got annoyed at this point (the characters were not levelled up much -- Yuna didn't even have Holy at that point and didn't even need Mega-Death to keel over) but I wanted to beat Yunalesca so I went and re-equipped everyone (Yuna's ring had something that made her immune to Death -- how about that for irony) and listened to the speech again and let Auron become a zombie so he doesn't die when Death is cast on him (how about that for irony -- oh, I already said that) and everyone survived and Yunalesca . . . disappeared. It's funny she doesn't think herself as dead. "If I die," says Yunalesca, "so does the Final Aeon. And with it, Spira's only hope." She obviously didn't go to the Farplane; I think she was hanging around in Via Infinito in X-2.

So. Boss battles done. I didn't really want to go back to Bevelle, so I had the characters walk back from the Zanarkand Ruins towards Besaid (though when I stopped, I was only at Mushroom Rock) and talk to NPCs. It was interesting!

There's a man standing at the gorge, near the thorn, and he's there even when you first arrive at the Calm Lands. If you talk to him, he tells you -- I'm paraphrasing, I didn't jot this down -- since summoners rarely ever make it to the Calm Lands there is no one to send the dead, so the villages in the Calm Lands throw their dead into the gorge and they turn into fiends that roam the gorge bottom. Made me shudder, that. Someone should write a fic about this!

I went to Djose Temple and the party got chased away by a bunch of Crusaders. It was rather funny -- Tidus just gets pushed towards the edge of the screen. I never realised that this would happen! In Macalania Temple the party was chased away by Guados and you'll have to engage in battles with them like the time when you ran away after first killing Seymour. I haven't visited the other temples yet. I guess this gets triggered if you try to visit between escaping Via Purifico and coming back to Bevelle and talking to Shelinda and Mika later. I know if you visit later, you'd be able to talk to the fayth. Guadosalam's sequence is pretty much the same whether you visit before or after you go back to Bevelle, I think -- you have Tromell dispairing and the Guado being all gloomy.

There's an NPC couple on the banks of the Moonflow. They said they moved from Kilika to Bevelle to get closer to Yevon but then realised it was all chaos and they've decided to go back to Kilika. I'm pretty sure the same couple was in Kilika earlier in the game -- they said something about trying to find a place without Sin.

And that's it! Maybe I'll continue playing this later.

Comments

I love FFX NPCs

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

The Djose Temple Crusaders are hilarious when they're apologizing (sometimes) while pushing you away. They say various things. I think one of them is Kyou, who can be recruited for blitzball at times.

But WAIT!

I think... maybe... you MAY have found a tiny bit of NPC dialog I don't have in my obsessive compulsive Complete Script!

After every major plot point, if you backtrack, the npcs around the world usually have new things to say. If you talk to them you start to get an idea of larger events happening in the world, like Luca under military occupation for a while, or the warrior monks pulling back as Bevelle descends into chaos, or various people hunting for Lady Yuna and the villagers of Besaid shielding her. (In my personal headcanon, to explain the sudden disappearance of Lucil and Elma after you reach Macalania Temple, and their reappearance on Besaid in the final cutscene, they must've stayed loyal to Yuna and fled to Besaid rather than obey orders to hunt her down.)

Annnyway. Checking script now.
*peers*

OH! I think that's Svanda! The lady with the pom-pom hat and the long yellow coat. She will also drive you nuts in the chocobo mini-games. I had forgotten that bit of worldbuilding. Useful for fanfic!

*peers some more*

For what it's worth, the woman and man from Kilika, who are hanging out at the Moonflow, are not dressed (i.e. aren't the same sprites) as the Kilikan couple in Kilika temple's forecourt who were saying they were going to leave the island much earlier in the game. The second couple are no longer on Kilika by that point in the game, though, so they did leave. I think it's probably meant to be two different couples, as FFX is generally fairly diligent about keeping the same backstory with the same sprites, although there's a limited pool of about 30 no-name npc sprites which tend to get reused in each major location (Besaid, Kilika, Luca, Moonflow area, the Calm Lands).

There IS one family that you'll see wandering: a woman in an orange tunic, a man in orange and green (I think?) and a little boy in a reddish-brown poncho. You see the woman looking for her son in Luca during the tournament. Later they're the scattered family you have to help in Macalania Woods. They finally end up at the Calm Lands Agency being helped by the Al Bhed.

Yes, I adore FFX. :)

Re: I love FFX NPCs

[cyrnelle.livejournal.com]

LOL. I'm glad to see the love for NPCs! They're what make the details even more interesting. I should have remembered to try to recruit people for blitzball -- then I would've learned at least a few names!

I went back to Djose a few times, just to cackle at Tidus as he gets pushed off-screen. I think the Crusaders said something like "It's for your own good", and "Please understand". I think I backtracked after most of the other major plot points, but I just never thought of going back after this particular event. I really don't know why; perhaps it just struck me as odd that they'd want to wander around just after being called traitors. Videogame logic obviously doesn't match mine.

Oh god chocobo minigames. I keep avoiding those.

You must be right about the Kilika couple -- my memory was from ages ago (and probably a different save from this one). I did notice the couple and kid at the Calm Lands though -- I remember thinking, "Hey aren't these the people in Macalania?"

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

There was another "Complete Script" floating around out there which had most of the npc dialog. However, after I began to notice the same sorts of things you did -- "hey, I swear I've run into this npc before!" -- I wound up making my own script, noting down the actual sprite for each npc (e.g. "man in white and blue tunic"). Someday I need to make a synopsis, with relevant quotes, of 'what happens around Spira during Yuna's pilgrimage," because there's a whole lot of things from the warrior monks imposing martial law in Luca to the Al Bhed starting to become accepted after news gets out about the Guado attack on Home. You can see a lot of the set-up for the political mess in FFX-2 already happening.

Plus I love all the villagers in Besaid. I've got names for most of them in my head, since they all have a bit of backstory and remain consistent through the game. (E.g. the guy with no shirt and a fish necklace is, in fact, a fisherman, married to Vilucha the weaver, with a son who wants to grow up and join the Aurochs.)

By the way, if you ever replay the part in Macalania Temple, the INSTANT Auron yells "run" and you wind up outside the temple doors -- BEFORE going off onto the ice bridge and being chased by a gazillion Guado -- try running back inside the temple. You won't die. Auron just gets tetchy. I usually do it 3-4 times until (I like to imagine) Auron bonks Tidus over the head with his sword and drags him off. :)