Continuing my nostalgic journey in Final Fantasy X

After embracing the nostalgia of Final Fantasy X, I've been spending most of my spare moments in it.

It's the perfect time really since the next season of World of Warcraft mythic dungeons is still a couple of weeks away (as of writing this — mythic dungeons actually start up again tomorrow). Hence, my nights are free from repetitive dungeon grinding and I can fill all that time with repetitive Final Fantasy battles instead! 😁

When writing my last post, I had just arrived in the desert where the Al Bhed call Home. The whole group was scattered and had to be found amongst the dunes, and then it was to "Home" to hopefully find Yuna.

"Home." Where Tidus discovers the truth of the summoners and their journey and how Yuna is basically travelling the road to meet her death. It's an emotional moment and, even knowing the story and what's going on, still brings me to tears — it's a very emotion-driven scene.

This whole section of the story is the moment of realisation for many people. Tidus realises just what's happening when it comes to Summoners, Wakka realises the Al Bhed just may not be so bad after all, everyone's faith is shaken as they discover how corrupt and hypocritical the power structure of the religion is.

And after all that emotion, it leads on to possibly the most irritating Temple in the game. The Temple of Bevelle. The temple where you have to ride an automated line and mash a button and hope you go the direction you want to go.

After all of that though — and the most beautiful scene in the game — ...

We arrive at the Calm Lands.

This area is where I consider it a timely time to start working on everything else as well as completing the game. It's in the Calm Lands where you can obtain Yojimbo, the best aeon, start levelling up your aeons properly, and start participating in the capture of fiends so you can participate in the monster arena.

At the same time, while beginning to work on these things, it's also a good idea to complete the trek to Zanarkand so you can unlock personal usage of the airship.

It costs around 200,000 gil to purchase the services of Yojimbo, so I focused on levelling up my people and capturing fiends in the area for the arena so I could make more money. My people are regularly hitting critically for 9,999 at the moment so I'm looking forward to finishing their celestial weapons and unlocking their limit breaks.

You don't need to unlock their limit breaks to finish the game, but you do if you want to be a completionist and do everything — which I am, and am doing. 😅

I completed the chocobo training with flying colours — it only took about half an hour before I got lucky and won with a time of 0:0.0, the time required to get part of a celestial weapon.

I maintain from my younger years that the race is completely luck-based. You need to rely on rolling the correct balloon formation and you need to hope that the seagulls don't decide to wreak terror upon you. Sometimes they're utterly ridiculous and will just plough into you 6 times in a row before you can even move, other times they decide to wreak their terror upon the competitor instead.

Another thing of importance in this area is unlocking the Cloudy Mirror, which you transform into the Celestial Mirror in order to, also, obtain the celestial weapons.

Now that I'm doing this all over again, I'm wondering how I knew all this stuff back in the day. I didn't really use the internet back then except for chatting on MSN and downloading music off Kazaa. I guess that's just the thing with games back then. We were more likely to explore and make discoveries. Now we are handheld and told what to do.

Approaching the ruins of Zanarkand, the end of the game nears... and along with it, the knowledge that I can soon do whatever I want, whenever I want, before I choose to end the game.

It's almost time to play all the Blitzball, capture all the beasts for the arena, find all the hidden secrets, craft all the ultimate weapons, and defeat all of the dark aeons. Basically: prolong the story for as long as possible. 😅

In saying that, while I have lived and breathed Final Fantasy X for hundreds of hours back when I was a teenager... I have never played FFX-2. I know that the story is meant to bring closure to Yuna and Tidus, but I was kind of scared away from it due to Yuna apparently becoming a popstar, singing, and wielding guns?

It just seemed weird and completely wrong, so I never bothered playing the second part of the story. Now that I'm nearing the end of the first game, part of me wants to try the second part of the story at last and see what happens. Apparently there are two possible endings for Yuna and Tidus depending on if you 100% the game or not... I guess we'll see how I go.

It won't be soon though — I need to accomplish my goals in this one first! 😁 If I can bring myself to get through the grind, haha!

 

Until next time! ✨⚔️

 

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_{All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci and are from the game: Final Fantasy X HD Remaster.}