Final Fantasy X Part 5: Blitzball!

By Shamus Posted Thursday Jul 7, 2016

Filed under: Retrospectives 166 comments

After Kilika, the party sails for the coastal city of Luca. From here the journey will continue on foot. But first, there’s a major Blitzball tournament to play in. The game drops a ton of exposition and worldbuilding on us when we get to Luca. We’ll talk about it later, but first let’s talk about the tournament.

I’m not one for sports games. But I know some folks who are, and they’re pretty well divided over Blitzball. Some people find it painfully boring. I’ve got a brother who has spent hundreds of hours recruiting, building his team, learning techniques, and totally dominating the sport of Spira.

Blitzball!

The Blitz sphere looks gigantic in this pre-rendered cutscene, but seems to be smaller in proper gameplay. In this image it looks like the people in the stands would almost have their faces up against the glass.
The Blitz sphere looks gigantic in this pre-rendered cutscene, but seems to be smaller in proper gameplay. In this image it looks like the people in the stands would almost have their faces up against the glass.

The game is basically underwater football, and not a single aspect of it makes any sense:

  • The game is played inside a transparent sphere that contains about 65,000 cubic meters of waterAssuming the field is about 50 meters long.. That’s a bit more than the mass of the Titanic suspended in a glass ball. Even if you’re willing to humor that notion, just try to imagine how a limited-technology society could make such a sphere. Imagine the lungpower of that glass blower! And speaking of lungs…
  • There’s no in-universe explanation as to how these people can stay underwater for so long. Indeed, this little mystery just seems to be part of the setting. Even outside of Blitzball, there are several times where characters end up passed out face-down in the ocean and they seem to recover without difficulty. Do they have gills? Is the water breathable with lungs? Can people hold their breath for hours like whales? Mumble mumble pyreflies space magic? Nobody knows. Which has earned the game the nickname drownball among fans.
  • Not only is the sphere a physical impossibility, but it’s also superfluous! The game as we experience it operates on a simple 2D plane and could easily take place in a standard-depth swimming pool.
  • The game involves passing around what looks like a beach ball. We can say it’s filled with water to explain why it doesn’t rocket up to the top of the sphere, but that doesn’t explain how players are able to throw it and kick it dozens of meters where it bounces off of things at high velocity instead of coming to a sad, unimpressive stop as soon as the thrower releases it.

But fine. This isn’t Final Sciency, it’s Final Fantasy, and I guess water has some rather unintuitive properties in this universe? Blitzball is far from the most ridiculous thing the storyteller will ask us to accept.

Blitzball is a kind of sports management game. As you adventure around the world you can scout out new players, add them to your roster, level up their abilities, and eventually dominate the league. I’m not sure why Square Enix decided to put 60 hours of sports sim into their already 60 hour game, but that sort of thing is apparently pretty normal for this franchise.

It’s silly. It’s optional. It tells us a little bit about the culture of Spira. And for some people it’s a fun diversion from the main quest. My only real gripe with Blitzball is that our introduction to it is unforgivably bad.

The Tournament

One of the plot threads of the first act is that Tidus joins the Besaid Aurochs, which is Wakka’s Blitzball team. As a mandatory part of the main quest you have to participate in a Blitzball tournament. The story is structured like a “heroic underdog comeback” sports story. There are only two matches in this particular tournament, but even in that short span it hits all the notes and story beats to both make you want to win and to telegraph that you should win, in a storytelling sense. Check out the tropes this story dumps on you:

Hi. We're the smug villains of this story. We even get our own dramatic camera angles and theme music, which is more than Wakka will get at the end of the tournament.
Hi. We're the smug villains of this story. We even get our own dramatic camera angles and theme music, which is more than Wakka will get at the end of the tournament.

Virtuous Underdogs vs. Arrogant Jerks: Wakka’s Besaid Aurochs are all basically good guys who try hard and love the game. They’re good sports, but not good at sports. They always lose. They’re up against the Luca Goers, who are smug, bullying, insufferable assholes that don’t seem to like the game as much as they like looking down on others. Team leader Bickson is basically cut from the same cloth as sports movie villains like Shooter Mcgavin – strawmen assholes who exist to give the audience a sense of catharsis when we finally see them taken down.

Honest Team in a world of Cheaters: In the first match of the tournament, you – the player – don’t actually get to participate, because the Al Bhed Psyches kidnap Yuna and try to use her as leverage to make you lose the match. Wakka and his boys have to let themselves get pummeled while you fight to rescue her. Waaka is even injured during the match, and that injury hinders him in the finals. You rescue Yuna just in time, and then Wakka is able to fight back and win despite this cheating. Laying aside questions of why a half-decent team would perpetrate such an audacious crimeAlthough maybe this is just their usual summoner-kidnapping plan, and they were trying to get a Blitzball win out of a kidnapping they already had planned. against a team that always loses, this crime is never exposed or punished.

Rich vs. Poor: The Luca Goers basically live at the Blitzball capital of the world. The island of Luca has the stadium and a large, apparently wealthy population. The Besaid Aurochs are a rural island team. They come from a simple villageThat doesn’t even look large enough to support a team this size. and they practice on the beach. A match between these two teams is like a game between the New York Yankees and the Toledo Mudhens. The announcers even praise the Goers and mock the Aurochs during their pre-game patter.

The Aurochs have been losing for twenty-three years straight. That's also Wakka's age.
The Aurochs have been losing for twenty-three years straight. That's also Wakka's age.

Solidifying a friendship: Tidus is our point-of-view character, and the game spends a lot of time on his growing friendship with Wakka. A big part of that friendship is Tidus teaching Wakka to fight hard / believe in himself / go for the gold / be all you can be / don’t stop belivin’. While Wakka has always be passionate about the game, he has a relaxed attitude towards playing it. He’s content to lose – or pretends that he is – as long as he does his best. Tidus drops into his life and upsets the balance of everything, and the main thing he has to say to Wakka is that he should always play to win. Tidus is always trying to whip the team into a frenzy and get them to fight for victory. He kind of acts like the coach character in your typical sports drama – he’s the character designed to facilitate change and growth in our lovable but stagnant underdog team.

If the team wins, then it feeds into Tidus’ ongoing character arc where he becomes more invested in events here and gradually lets go of his Zanarkand. It also it cements the friendship between Tidus and Wakka by having Tidus make a positive change to Wakka’s life.

But if the team loses, then this is a cynical, farcical story about a team who was told to believe in themselves only to find out they were losers all along. If they lose, it’s a story where this manic pixie dream dude whirls into his life, tells him to believe in himself, and then fails to help him achieve victory or change the course of his life at all. This cynical trope-inversion might be okay for a couple of side-characters, but it’s totally inappropriate for the Tidus character.

I AM THE ANNOUNCER AND I AM TELEGRAPHING THAT YOU SHOULD WIN THIS MATCH. Too bad the gameplay designer never got that memo.
I AM THE ANNOUNCER AND I AM TELEGRAPHING THAT YOU SHOULD WIN THIS MATCH. Too bad the gameplay designer never got that memo.

Last shot at greatness before retirement. This is Wakka’s final game. Previously, he lost a major tournament because he was distracted by the death of his brother Chappu. Chappu went off to fight Sin and died. Now Wakka is retiring from Blitzball for good so that he can guard Yuna on her pilgrimage. He was a guardian once before, but that ended poorly because his mind was still on the game. He’s spent his entire adult life divided between his passion for the game and his desire to help his people. This tournament is the moment where that conflict is finally resolved. He’s putting the game he loves behind in order to fight evil, and he’s dealing with the loss of his brother. The perfect way to tie up both of these character threads is for him to finally win his last tournament.

If Wakka wins, it’s the story of a guy who finally proved he had what it takes to win, but was still willing to give up the game to face evil. He puts the game behind him, his inner conflict is resolved, and he focuses on the heroic task ahead.

But if he loses, it’s a story about a guy who conclusively proved he wasn’t good enough, and then moved on to a heroic task of monumental responsibility anyway.

Beating the Impossible Odds: When we see a story about “the team that always loses”, then there’s a perfectly reasonable expectation on the part of the audience that something will be different this time. They don’t have to win for it to be a good story, but something new, different, unexpected, or profound ought to happen. Because “The team that always loses, loses again” is a dumb story that isn’t worth telling, and even less worth participating in.

The WHOLE WORLD is watching our heroes, just before they embark on their epic quest to fight Satan. I don't think losing at Blitzball to petty dickheads is a good way to christen that story arc.
The WHOLE WORLD is watching our heroes, just before they embark on their epic quest to fight Satan. I don't think losing at Blitzball to petty dickheads is a good way to christen that story arc.

Thematic connection to the main plot: While not really part of an underdog sports story, there’s a really interesting parallel between the main plot and this side-plot. Or rather, there’s a connection between the world of Spira and the fate of the beleaguered Besaid Aurochs. Both of them are caught in a rut. Both of them believe they can’t escape.

The the people of Spira are in a thousand-year long defeat in the face of indomitable Sin, and the Aurochs are in a impossibly long losing streak. Spira sends summoners to their death to stave off Sin, believing that true victory over Sin is impossible. The Aurochs believe they can’t win, but show up anyway to “do their best”. Spira keeps fighting, but never defeats Sin. Likewise the Aurochs never quit, but they also never win.

Tidus is here to break Spira out of this cycle. He’s here to give them final victory they believed was impossible.

But if this butthead can’t bring a Blitzball team to victory, then what business does he have getting involved with Sin? A loss here runs counter to his entire arc. If he loses here, then the story is inadvertently implying that he’s unqualified to be our protagonistSTOP. Don’t jump down to the comments to explain that Tidus is “not really the protagonist”. I don’t care if you think the Shoopuff is the True Protagonist. Tidus is our POV character and the catalyst for change, and haggling over who is the main-est character misses the point that TIDUS STILL NEEDS TO BE HANDLED PROPERLY FOR THIS STORY TO WORK..

This is the player’s first experience playing Blitzball. Ideally, you want to introduce Blitzball in a way that will show them how fun the game can be.

Winning isn’t Everything. Telling a GOOD STORY is everything.

Bickson offers a handshake and then tries to sucker-punch our lead at the start of the match. The Goers laugh, nobody boos, no foul is called, and even the announcers are amused. IN WHAT UNIVERSE DOES LOSING TO THESE CLOWNS MAKE FOR A SATISFYING STORY?
Bickson offers a handshake and then tries to sucker-punch our lead at the start of the match. The Goers laugh, nobody boos, no foul is called, and even the announcers are amused. IN WHAT UNIVERSE DOES LOSING TO THESE CLOWNS MAKE FOR A SATISFYING STORY?

Basic storytelling justice demands that our team win when we’re the victims of so much blatant, unaddressed cheating and physical abuse. Genre tropes demand that we win this match when the story spends so much screen time establishing what undeserving assholes the opposition is. Wakka’s unfulfilled character arc of inner conflict demands that he retire with a win. The main plot demands that this is where Tidus shows himself to be a catalyst for change who enables victory against impossible odds. The fact that this is our introductory game demands that the game designer should go easy on the player.

Barring all of that, the game should at least be remotely fair.

But this match is not fair. The Luca Goers have absurd stats. They’re basically unstoppable Blitzball gods. There are special techniques and moves that make the game interesting, but your team doesn’t have access to them at first. Not only is the match ridiculously hard, but it’s shallow and there’s not much for you to do except try and fail.

The match can be won. If you…

  1. …turn off the default auto-movement controls and learn to play the game manually. And also you…
  2. …succeeded at a little mini-game to unlock the special Blitzball move for Tidus on the boat ride here, even though you didn’t know what that game was for or how important it was at the time. Also you should probably…
  3. …look online for some tips, since your first match is literally the most important match you will ever play. Even after all that, you might need to…
  4. …quit and reload until you learn to play well enough to get ahead, and then use a cheap AI exploit to retain your lead. Although, this match is 10 minutes of cutscenes with 3 minutes of gameplay, so that option is really unattractive.

So yes, victory is “possible”. It’s just really bloody unlikely for first-time players, who are also the ones experiencing the story for the first time and are likely to be the most frustrated by a loss. You might defend this by saying that facing a foe of vastly superior stats is thematically appropriate for the type of underdog sports story they’re selling here. Except, that’s not how those stories work.

Tidus benches himself so Wakka can play. Really? We don't want our two main characters to play together in the finale?! HEY IDIOT, HOW ABOUT DATTO TAKES THE BENCH? IN THE STANDS. WHERE HE BELONGS. FOREVER.
Tidus benches himself so Wakka can play. Really? We don't want our two main characters to play together in the finale?! HEY IDIOT, HOW ABOUT DATTO TAKES THE BENCH? IN THE STANDS. WHERE HE BELONGS. FOREVER.

If this was a proper underdog story in a mechanical sense, then yes, for most of the game the Luca Goers would be unstoppable. But then late in the game some character – preferably Wakka – would go through a turning point. He’d have some personal epiphany that would change his view of himself, the game, or the world around him. Maybe he’d think of Lulu, or Chappu, or something said earlier would take on new depth and meaning. Maybe he’d suddenly realize that he really wants to be a guardian, or that the world needs him to be a guardian. He’d resolve some inner conflict, and suddenly his stats would go through the roof and he’d be an unstoppable scoring juggernaut that allowed you a last-minute comeback. The Goers would magically become doormats and the Aurochs would win every face-off, make every pass, and humiliate the Goers in their own hometown. The clock would quietly vanish or slow down to give our heroes time to win, perhaps simply ending the game the moment the Aurochs get ahead in score. That would make it feel like you won at the last possible second.

That would be an underdog sports story.

But instead, your team just sucks for the whole match. In fact, the game gets harder in the last section when a lingering, tedious cutsceneAnd completely nonsensical. Tidus sort of swims away from the game and the clock just stops for no reason. pulls the adequate Tidus out of the game and replaces him with the underwhelming Wakka. Really, both of these guys ought to stay in, and one of your no-dialog, no-skill loser teammates should take the bench. This is particularly true if this is supposed to be a sports drama, since you’d want all your major characters to be present for the finale. Not only do our leads not propel us to victory, but their inexplicable decisions make it even more difficult for the playerAnd then the game contradicts itself. There’s a battle after the match, and Tidus is mysteriously in the pool, even though he should be in the locker room..

So even though this match is supposed to be the moment that solidifies the friendship between Tidus and Wakka, the two are never on the field at the same time. They don’t actually play together!

All Buildup, No Payoff

No rousing speech? No dramatic payoff? No character change? After all this buildup, the story ends with WHELP. BUH BYE.
No rousing speech? No dramatic payoff? No character change? After all this buildup, the story ends with WHELP. BUH BYE.

And just to make this as unsatisfying as possible, the game doesn’t really react to the result of the match. It spends a couple of hours building up to this tournament, and in the end there’s just a few lines of dialog spent acknowledging the outcome.

What the game designer has created here is a situation where you’ll really want to win. Not just because it leads to a much happier ending, but because it makes for a much better story. Then they stack the odds against you. Then they dump you into this unfair match without letting you learn to play the game first. Then they bury you in unskippable cutscenes to punish you for replaying to get the proper outcome. And then after all your struggle the game barely acknowledges the result!

After all the time the game sinks into this match, it should at least give us a big punch at the end where Wakka comes to some profound change. Given the build-up put into this, even the defeat cutscene should have some dramatic camera angles, inspiring dialog, and musical swells to convey that all of this screwing around meant something to Wakka. Instead he’s either momentarily happy or sad. He shrugs, and the story rolls on.

We don’t even get a moment of closure with the Luca Goers. We don’t get to see the smiles wiped off their faces or see their fans turn away from them, which means the cutscenes devoted to them were a build-up to nothing. The Al Bhed are never called out on their cheating or the kidnapping, and they’re never made to pay for brazenly beating the shit out of the Aurochs during the first game. This further builds them up as villains, and creates yet another team that wrongs us and never gets their comeuppance in the end.

This is our introduction to Blitzball? This minigame intrudes on the story, frustrates us, is used to tell a pointless story that fizzles out at the end, promises character arcs it never delivers on, and then doesn’t show us any of the mechanics that make the game itself worth playing. This entire arc is practically engineered to create frustration and disappointment.

What a disaster.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Assuming the field is about 50 meters long.

[2] Although maybe this is just their usual summoner-kidnapping plan, and they were trying to get a Blitzball win out of a kidnapping they already had planned.

[3] That doesn’t even look large enough to support a team this size.

[4] STOP. Don’t jump down to the comments to explain that Tidus is “not really the protagonist”. I don’t care if you think the Shoopuff is the True Protagonist. Tidus is our POV character and the catalyst for change, and haggling over who is the main-est character misses the point that TIDUS STILL NEEDS TO BE HANDLED PROPERLY FOR THIS STORY TO WORK.

[5] And completely nonsensical. Tidus sort of swims away from the game and the clock just stops for no reason.

[6] And then the game contradicts itself. There’s a battle after the match, and Tidus is mysteriously in the pool, even though he should be in the locker room.



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166 thoughts on “Final Fantasy X Part 5: Blitzball!

  1. Lame Duck says:

    My experience with the larger Blitzball minigame is that it was decently fun but the rewards came way too slowly to justify bothering with it; the matches were 10 minutes long and you had to win multiple matches before you got a prize, which was often underwhelming. Add on the fact that there’s no additional story or world-building attached to it and it really didn’t seem worth the time to me.

    That being said, I still think it’s one of the best sidequests in the game, simply because the vast majority of the other sidequests are so aggressively terrible.

    1. mechaninja says:

      In VII, if you did all the chocobo mating and racing and got your gold Chocobo, the reward was Knights of the Round, the best possible summon – if ultimately an almost unneeded one because by the time I get my gold Chocos, I’m approaching level cap and BIS weapons and everyone has all the spells and etc.

      Does anything great come out of drownball? he asked, skeptically.

      1. Tizzy says:

        A weapon for Wakka, if I remember correctly. Not that I bothered myself…

        1. Abnaxis says:

          You also get a bunch of overdrive slots for Wakka as well.

        2. Writiosity says:

          Yup, you need to play the game to get his Celestial.

        3. DanMan says:

          Yes, you have to win a blitzball to unlock Wakka’s legendary weapon.

      2. KarmaTheAlligator says:

        All of Wakka’s overdrives, his Celestial Weapon (although not directly as prizes like the others), and the sigil required to power up said weapon. Without Blitzball, Wakka is pretty much useless in the postgame.

        1. Syal says:

          The Return Spheres can also be nice. You don’t have a good alternative for those until endgame I believe.

          1. galacticplumber says:

            Let’s not forget items that are rare or unavailable for a while through tournaments. Some of them are handy for customizing gear, while others make stupidly overpowered effects with rikkus overdrive.

      3. Kalil says:

        Wakka’s Attack Reels overdrive and his ultimate weapon, which together allow for a reliable 12-hit 99999 damage overdrive, for a total of nearly 120,000 damage. It’s nearly the most powerful attack in the game (under certain circumstances, Magus Sister’s Passado can be more powerful, but it’s situational and random, and Tidus’s Slice-and-dice is comparable but usually slightly worse). Sadly, if you’re playing honestly, it requires playing two tournaments and four leagues – 44-46 games. If you use the reset trick, you can avoid having to do two of the leagues, so it’s a ‘mere’ 24-26 games of blitzball. That’s somewhere between 3-8 hours of play. It is pretty much necessary if you want to fully complete the game, though – the Dark Aeons and later Arena bosses are pretty hard to beat without Attack Reels.

  2. Abnaxis says:

    To add to all this, I’m about 99% certain that the Blitzball AI has some advantages that the player doesn’t, which (I’m guessing) are meant to make the game seem more interesting but just come off as frustrating.

    Specifically, I think the game pre-rolls it’s actions whenever it takes an offensive drive, then makes decisions on what to do based on results that are “random,” but which it already known to the computer. The AI can do this, because the player doesn’t actually have any input on what players do while defending (at least at first, though input is always pretty minimal on defense)

    For example, as I was replaying this exact session last night, one of the Goers’ forwards took a shot. Even against the paltry Aurochs’ goalie, this shot had no chance. For one thing, the guy who took it was a defender. For another thing, he was all the way across the sphere from our goal. The action itself made absolutely ZERO sense…

    …except, the goalie didn’t catch the ball he only blocked it, and the ball bounced into the Goers’ strongest offensive players hands. Right in front of our goal. With absolutely no defenders next to him. Basically, the computer just made a pass by way of a absurd failed shot that no reasonable player would have ever taken.

    The AI does crap like that all the time! Passes that have no way of completion, shots that have no business scoring, and breaking through defenders that vastly out-muscle are the usual order of business for the AI. When I first played I used to think the computer was nudging the probability to make matches more even, but now that I’m playing and paying attention, I think ti just knows when a long-shot, ape-shit crazy tactic will work before it makes the attempt.

    All of this REALLY sucks for that first Goers game, because they won’t just steamroll your team through absurdly higher stats, they do it through plays that would never in a million years work for the player, even with the absurd stats.

    1. Mintskittle says:

      On top of that, from what I can see, the computer gets something like a half second of extra movement whenever a conflict should start. If you have the ball, the ai gets to move just slightly closer to potentially get more defenders in on the play, while the ai with the ball gets to move slightly farther once conflict is initiated, and can potentially move far enough to prevent a defender from getting in.

    2. Retsam says:

      I’m kind of doubtful, because the AI also regularly just does entirely boneheaded things that just make no sense.

      I’m pretty skeptical. I think the AI just does a lot of boneheaded things, and Blitzball seems to have a high factor of randomness on its rolls, so naturally a couple of those terrible plays actually pan out.

      This seems like classic confirmation bias, where you don’t notice all the times where the AI does something stupid and it predictably fails, even if that’s what happens 90% of the time.

      You don’t see it happen as much for the player, because players tend not to even attempt those sort of plays. If players took as many terrible shots as the AI did, I suspect you’d see an equal number of “successes”.

      Plus, your “success story” here is underwhelming. A shot being reflected instead of caught isn’t even that unlikely, and when it’s reflected, it usually goes to the nearest players… so yes, it would end up in the hands of that undefended shooter.

      So yeah, I don’t think the AI is “cheating”. It’s just a mostly inevitable pitfall of randomness that confirmation bias (and other factors related to our intuition on randomness being actually really terrible) tends to leave players frustrated, even if it’s technically fair.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        I dunno, it might be the tin-foil-hat-wearing side of me, but even when the AI does something that makes no sense, it makes so little sense that it seems like it must be the result of some sort of minimax algorithm. For example, having a player with a 4 PA try to throw a pass across the sphere even though it clearly has no chance of completing–either the AI is deliberately trying to throw the game, or it has determined that none of the tactics it’s searched will succeed in a goal, so it’s picking the most “optimal” failure.

        I mean, maybe it’s confirmation bias, but the things it does are just so off the wall and yet still succeed (they most certainly don’t succeed as often as a human), and the failures are just so blatantly “this had literally zero chance of succeeding,” that it strikes me as though some sort of shenanigans are happening under the hood.

        1. Trix2000 says:

          I had many more times where the computer got up to where I thought they’d shoot (having maybe a defender with crap stats to stop it) and then proceed to pass it BACKWARDS, or at best sideways, and proceed to lose the ball. Bickson in particular did this several times, leading to me almost pissing my pants on several occasions where I thought he’d score… and then didn’t.

          But then there were so many times where the AI did perfect passes that I really just don’t know what to think. They were so much better at predicting when to stop and pass/shoot so that my defenders couldn’t do crap, regardless of RNG.

          1. Abnaxis says:

            That’s exactly the situation that makes me think the AI is pre-rolling outcomes when it makes an offensive drive. By my theory, this is what’s happening is something like this:

            AI looks at branch SHOOT versus branch PASS BACKWARD:

            Option SHOOT: No defenders will be in range for a tackle. There will be calcShoot(distance,SH=14)=8 SH by the time the ball reaches the goalie. The goalie’s random CA result will be rollCa(CA=6)=9. Therefore, goalie will block the shot, will rollCatch()=catch the ball, and will pass the ball to goaliePassToPlayer()=Tidus.

            Option PASS BACKWARD: There will be no defenders in range for a tackle. There will be calcPass(distance,PA=4)=0 PA by the time the pass reaches target, therefore the pass will fail. The ball will be picked up by freeBall(x,y)=AI Teammate 5 after the pass fails.

            evaluateResult(PASS BACKWARD) > evaluateResult(SHOOT), therefore takeAction(PASS BACKWARD)

            Note that the human player will have no input at any point during this sequence, because they get minimal input on defense. All the results above can be determistically calculated as soon as the computer gets possession of the ball.

            1. Syal says:

              They do it when their SHOOT is triple the goalie’s CATCH, though. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for that shot to fail, considering I make it five times a game and it’s never failed.

              1. Abnaxis says:

                According to the tutorial, all the randomly rolled stuff which gets subtracted (AT, BL, and CA) varies from 50-150% of the relevant statistic. So for level 1 Keepa with 6 CA, the rang of SH that he can block is between 3 and 9–anything outside that range will either always fail or always succeed at scoring. That’s not counting Super Goalie or any other skills like that, nor is it counting the water resistance drop-off in SH between the shooter and the goal–which seems to go up exponentially with SH.

                I’ve never actually had a situation (after the first match against the Goers) where the AI had a “guaranteed success” shot (because goalie is always my highest priority position to fill with a decent player) so I can’t really speak for the AI’s behavior when they should be taking the guaranteed score. Broadly speaking, if the AI uses the algorithm I described above it will have a method by which it will narrow down what actions it’s willing to entertain so it doesn’t spend hours exploring eighty different variations of SHOOT and PASS, so maybe its heuristics have already eliminated the guaranteed success by the time it decides to throw the ball backwards?

                1. Syal says:

                  Whereas I never noticed the Luca goalie and replaced Keepa with Yuma Guado, who is pretty much worse in every way.

      2. Mintskittle says:

        From what I’ve read, it seem the randomization factor can be as high as 50%, so that your tackles, blocks and catches are wildly different from one play to the next. So the really awesome 50 catch can be anywhere from 25-75, making for plays that, based on the shown numbers, should never have happened. Which is really frustrating for players trying to make plays based purely on the stats shown.

  3. Abnaxis says:

    My understanding of the Al Bhed is that you’re really, really supposed to see them as villains for the first half of the game, and it’s supposed to pay off later when you find out who the real bad guys are. It’s supposed to be part of the twist that the Al Bhed are kidnapping summoners not because they are evil, but because they are trying to protect the summoners from themselves.

    I’m pretty sure a lot of this “is the game trying to tell us they’re villains or good guys” is deliberate–they’re supposed to look like mustache-twirling jerks until you understand why they do what they do.

    I think a lot of your issue come from the difficulty in making a character look bad without going into mustache-twirling territory in the FFX setting–I mean, in a world where you get attacked by fiends twelve times while walking to and from drownball practice on the beach, bad guys have to be really bad to stand out from the crappyness that is the rest of the world. What we would call a cruel beatings is like a day in the spa to Spirans

    1. Adalore says:

      Eh, I think the stuff leading up to the reveal that they are not bad guys and instead get hit by oodles of racism is just mishandled.

      There are certainly better ways to show that the characters think they are bad guys and everything they do is seen in the worse light, the problem is that instead of having that filter in place about the WORLD thinking they are evil instead the player is DIRECTLY shown that they are evil before the reveal.

      Just needed the opening to be far more neutral and less player abuse and I think it would have been fine.

  4. CrushU says:

    Huh. You know, I remember playing FFX, but I don’t remember the conclusion of the first blitzball game… Or anything after that…

    I kinda suspect I got bogged down in this game trying to beat it, precisely because of all the story queues you gave, and I think after like the 10th try I gave up and went on to ATV racing. (My Aunt’s Playstation/library. It was interesting.)

  5. Galad says:

    If I had played this game, this first match would have been ragequit material. Just curious, are there drownball cheats?

    1. mechaninja says:

      Yep, that was exactly my experience. “Oh, this is the BS minigame for this one? I’m out.”

      1. Richard MacDonald says:

        Same here. After the mandatory drownball garbage, I never touch the thing again.

        There is one cheat that seems to be the only worthwhile way to make any real progress to me, which Shamus linked to in the article above. Essentially, when your team is in the lead, switch to manual control, swim behind your goalie, and watch as the other team go back to their net and swim around in circles until the time runs out.

        1. galacticplumber says:

          You don’t even have to do that. Just swim all over the field and make passes before you would start a confrontation. It’s EASY to complete most passes unimpeded and you can maintain possession while spreading experience. This is also the best way to safely get a commanding lead. This game isn’t hard. The AI has good stats sure, but it’s also rock stupid.

          1. Trix2000 says:

            This would work better if the defenders weren’t faster than you, had extra time to get on you whenever you initialized a pass, and half your players had crap for PA.

            I tried to play keep-away like that, but most of the time I’d be stopped by magnet-like defenders and horrible RNG.

            1. galacticplumber says:

              That’s because you initiated too late. Your pass can cover roughly a quarter of the field even with the worst examples on the team and like half with the better ones. Also no one can move while your pass is airborne. The only relevant people are the thrower for their pass number, the receiver for necessary travel distance, and any defenders you made the mistake of allowing to get in the way. You don’t even have to pass to people who are in position to score. Literally anyone that isn’t right next to someone is fine if not optimal. You get experience for possession and ball hogging like this gets the most consistent team wide XP and the least likelihood of enemy goals without straight exploits.

    2. Mintskittle says:

      Ingame, no, there are no cheats. Hiring all the Al Bhed Psyches players is about the closest you’ll get because that is a beastly team.

      Out of game, though, there are always third party cheat programs. For PS2: Gameshark or Action Replay were the go to hacks. For PC, you can usually find a decent trainer over on Cheat Happens. No idea for PS3/4/Vita though.

      1. newdarkcloud says:

        I remember when I played this game way back on the PS2, that I used Gameshark to get godly Blitzball stats and literally nothing else with it.

        I love FF 10, and I even enjoy Blitzball to an extent, but HOLY SHIT is it nearly impossible to win that first match.

    3. Von Krieger says:

      If I remember correctly there’s a pretty big AI flaw, where if you have the ball and position your character IN the opposing team’s goal, the players don’t come after you.

      So if you’re ahead in points you can just sit in the enemy goal and run down the timer.

  6. mechaninja says:

    When I tried to play FFX, this first encounter with Blitzball broke me completely out, and I was done.

    Of course, Square already had my money, so what do they care?

    (I played II and III, aka IV and VI, and VII for countless hours. I couldn’t get back in after that until X, even though I have a copy of VIII and IX kicking around the house somewhere.)

    1. Dev Null says:

      The question is; did you buy any more after X?

    2. Richard MacDonald says:

      That’s a shame, because the non-Blitzball game is really good, and after the mandatory Blitzball crap in Luca you never have to touch the thing again.

      1. Hector says:

        I completed every last one of the other minigames, including the Lightning Dodging. It was still more fun than Blitzball. Actually, people whine about lightning dodging, but it wasn’t that bad and I succeeded beautifully after a few warm-ups. You’d think it would be boring, but it’s actually pretty tense and exciting in the same way as Dark Souls for me: it’s hard, but there’s no randomness in reality and no real penalty for failure. And I actually liked Chocobo Racing! Achieving a negative time was a fun challenge.

        Blitzball was just a slog, and that’s probably down to how much ludicrous cruft exists in the sport. In real life, various public ball games are certainly overdone affairs with lots of downtime, which is sometimes cut out on television. But something like 90% of Blitzball is useless time-wasting. If the games were tight, two-three minute blasts, it would have been far more popular.

        Also, random fact that some people sort of alluded to but I think didn’t quite notice: all of Wakka’s team become absurdly powerful players in you level them enough. For whatever reason, they gain more stats in the 90+ level range than most characters ever get. Tidus and Wakka are actually not great in comparison. I have no idea why it would be designed this way, since attempting this would be frustrating and ultimately pointless.

        1. Syal says:

          That’s the Onion Knight legacy. Worst class becomes best class in the stupidly-late-why-are-you-even-still-here game.

  7. Tizzy says:

    All very reasonable expectations. This is exactly how I went into that game. Only to see my hopes crushed, to the point that I chalked it up to it being my fault. Maybe these tropes are not as universal as I thought, and shouldnt be expected in a non-western work? Anyone knows?

    My disappointment aside, I dont remember much about blitzball apart that I hated having to play that one game. I really wished they’d made the whole thing optional. My heart sank when I realized I would have to grind blitzball to get Wakka’s best weapon. And I can’t fathom why the only game that has a bearing on the story doesn’t have a fixed outcome, but rather stacks the deck against you so hard while making a win technically possible but un-bloody-likely.

    1. Syal says:

      I’m wondering if it would have worked better to build up the Al Bhed Psyches instead, then have the same cutscene victory against them.

      Actually, the best thing would probably have been to have the Goers seeing them off on the next stage of the pilgrimage as an “everyone unites in defeating Sin” kind of thing. Lots of ways to fix it.

  8. Alderman says:

    I actually liked blitzball, but every part of your analysis here is spot on.

    1. Tvtim says:

      I honestly really enjoyed the game too…on the PS2, I got Wakka’s celestial and all his slots. On the PS4 remaster, I just couldn’t hold onto it as much for some reason; it just didn’t feel as good to me, and I don’t know why.

      Maybe it’s because I had a more memorable experience on the PS2 in my first game: going into quadruple overtime to win over the Luca Goers was a good experience in the game. It was a hell of a lot better than it was on PS4 where I knew about the exploit and just camped behind the goal after scoring once to win.

      The utter randomness of the blocks/tackles didn’t help either…says does 9 does 3 WTF?!

  9. cloudropis says:

    You’re gonna talk about the Al Bhed kidnapping next episode right?
    Please talk about the Al Bhed kidnapping

  10. Abnaxis says:

    I’m pretty sure the writers do explain the abilities of humans to survive underwater in the game. One of the Aurochs talks about how the best blitzball players can “hold their breaths for hours” and “even sleep while holding their breath.”

    I think the debate among fans comes from the fact that the explanation given is so patently absurd that there must be something else going on to make sense of it, not because no explanation is given by the developers.

    1. Taellosse says:

      I…don’t think that qualifies as an explanation. That’s just stating the absurdity, not providing justification for it. Even a bad explanation purports to provide a reason for why a thing is the way it is: “Superman can fly because he’s an alien that absorbs solar radiation to give him superhuman abilities.” This fails to explain how an organism that is not only apparently as dense as any human, but actually seemingly many times more so (for him to suffer no injury from most things that would kill a human), can fly without apparent means of propulsion or lift, but it at least removes the reason a further step away from the simple observed fact.

      Here, what we have is “blitzball players don’t drown because they are not breathing.” …Okay, how are they doing that? Even something absurdly hand-wavey like, “they train intensely to extend the amount of time they can hold their breaths” would be better than just, “because they can.” These are apparently normal humans, in a world that seems to loosely obey the physical laws with which we are accustomed, at least when it comes to basics like “humans can’t breathe underwater,” but no attempt is made to explain how this is possible. And this in a world that is clearly deeply steeped in “magic” – it’d be dead easy for the explanation to be “a spell is cast on all blitzball players before a game begins that enables them to breathe underwater for the duration of the match.” And yet that is not ever said or even implied.

      1. KarmaTheAlligator says:

        Actually, it is said that they train to be able to hold their breath for so long. Can’t remember if it’s in FFX or just X-2, though (it’s definitely mentioned in X-2 when Yuna says she trained herself to do just that).

        But even without that, doesn’t the fact that only the “best players” can “hold their breath for hours” indicate some sort of skill? You don’t become good at a sport just because you can master one aspect of it. It’s one of the many things in X where players need to think a bit.

        1. Taellosse says:

          Well, I never played X2, and I don’t remember any such thing ever being said explicitly in X. Though, to be fair, I played FFX within a year of its original release and have never gone back to it, so my memory is fuzzy.

          Still, that remains a pretty piss-poor explanation, even if it is explicitly present.

          1. newdarkcloud says:

            In the Eternal Calm movie that bridges FF10 and FF10-2, Yuna is shown to be training on holding her breath underwater.

            After a few months of practice, she managed to hold in for almost 3 minutes.

            In universe, Blitzball players literally train to be able to hold their breath underwater for long periods of time. It’s one of those “skip the details” things.

            1. Taellosse says:

              See, holding your breath for 3 minutes is actually doable. I think the real-life world record is somewhere in the range of 5 minutes, in fact. I can totally believe months of intense training yielding results like that.

              Blitzball matches last twice that long on the clock (and of course always longer in total), and some of the underwater battles last a LOT longer than that.

              1. Syal says:

                Breath-holding world record is actually over 20 minutes.

                1. Daemian Lucifer says:

                  Yeah,but all those real world examples are people who arent doing anything other than holding their breaths.If you were to actually do something that burns a lot of oxygen,say play a sportsball game,youd hardly last for longer than a couple of minutes.

                2. Taellosse says:

                  While Daemian is not wrong, that is nevertheless legitimately astonishing. I had no idea the human body could go that long without air and survive – never mind remain conscious – even if it is completely at rest.

      2. Cozzer says:

        Well, it’s the kind of anime logic where if you train hard enough you get to be able to punch mountains away or jump over buildings.

        1. Abnaxis says:

          Right. It’s the same sort of logic that has a character wielding a thirty-pound sword in one hand (“I hope you know how to use it”), only applied to breath-holding.

      3. Shoeboxjeddy says:

        In a lot of fantasy games, being really good at martial arts or whatever IS a magical skill. Like, in FFVI, your guy who knows wrestling moves can complete them in ANY CONTEXT. As in, if the boss you’re fighting is an evil possessed train (paging Stephen King), then he can do a Suplex to the ENTIRE TRAIN. The only way to reconcile this is that high intensity training creates impossible feats in any discipline. So the magic guy can create fire from nowhere, the wrestling guy can suplex a train, and the sword guy can cut a boulder the size of a mountain in half.

        Hence, in Spira, Blitzball players can break the laws of human biology and just continuously function without fresh oxygen. After all, if you can hold your breath for 1 minute, why not 20?

      4. Abnaxis says:

        I think “how far does a fantasy author need to go in justifying their fantasy?” is an interesting question to pose. I mean, the writers didn’t need to even hang the “they hold their breath” lampshade on the underwater activity (which includes many segments of non-blitzball adventuring as well, such as deep-sea salvaging with no diving gear). Or, the writers could have said “it’s magic.” Or, the writers could have concocted some ritual that blitzball player engage in that gives them their magic so they can hold their breath. Or, they could have talked about wondrous alchemical reagents that alter the properties of oxygen and are often used in rituals performed by blitzball players to imbue themselves with magic so they can hold their breath…

        What I’m getting at, is that no matter what, the fact that you have humans existing comfortably underwater means there’s something fantastical going on somewhere in the world of Spira. It’s just a matter of how deep you need to go into justification before you can introduce the fantastical element without rubbing the audience the wrong way.

        1. Taellosse says:

          I’ll agree it’s an interesting question to pose, and different authors answer it in a variety of ways. The point here seems to be that the writer(s) of FFX answered it with, “HAHA, we don’t care!” Which, it seems to me, is the worst of all possible responses that question.

      5. NotSteve says:

        And weirdly, this is one of the bits of worldbuilding that showed up in the mechanics. We know the underwater breathing isn’t a spell, because we know that only Blitzball players (and Rikku, who does underwater salvage) can do it. There are underwater fights and dungeons, and only these three characters can participate in them. Everyone else in the party can’t hold their breath for that long.

        I find it to be a really amusing discrepancy. They’re not going to explain it, but they go a little out of their way to drive home the point that this is an in-setting ability.

  11. Orillion says:

    People get kicked out of the blitzball sphere in the first cutscene. It’s not glass, it’s suspended as a sphere in midair by magic.

    1. MichaelGC says:

      Aye, I was thinking this. The water just kinda forms an orderly spheroid on its own, doesn’t it? There’s no container or anything. I guess there was a law of physics not being broken, and clearly that couldn’t be allowed.

    2. KarmaTheAlligator says:

      Probably gravity magic.

    3. Ardis Meade says:

      I had assumed it was Diamagnetic Levitation. It would take unthinkable amounts of power, and might not really be healthy for the people inside it, but it would be acceptable technobabble.

      1. Decius says:

        You only need to levitate the water at the bottom of the pool, not all of it ;)

        1. Munkki says:

          Nah, you’re not thinking schneakily enough – you just levitate the water at the top of the pool and bring the rest up via surface tension. Just make sure there’s no detergent in it.

          (Also, unrelated and more seriously – I hadn’t heard of diamagnetism before and using it to push things around looks really cool, if expensive.)

          1. Felblood says:

            Welcome to the world of railguns.

            For the rest of your life, about 5% of your brain’s processing power will be dedicated to thinking about ways to make bits of diamagnetic aluminum go fast. It’s not so bad once you get used to it.

  12. BeCeejed says:

    Final Fantasy has the bad habit of following this pattern with their minigames. You start out terrible, its incredibly grindy to get better, the first game is usually mandatory and after that you’ve got to find the NPCs here and there hidden on the side streets who pull open their trenchcoats to reveal the hidden pieces that will help you win…if you can beat them. Success in the later part of the minigame’s arc leads to main game rewards like cool weapons/powerups.

    Most of the time, this is relatively harmless – The minigame is fun in and of itself and doesn’t detract too much from the story. IX’s card game is a fun diversion. Games usually take less than a minute or two to complete at best.

    Blitzball has to be the WORST manifestation of this ‘design trope’ Squeenix has ever made. For the length of the matches, for the calling on sports tropes even in the later minigames where player change-outs are treated to mini cutscenes. I can see the game designer discussion now.

    “So the minigame for this one will be a sports game.”
    “Oh great! My son reads Sports Shonen all the time, I know all about it. I’m so excited for the FIFA world cup, too!”
    “Yeah I’m excited, I think players will really have fun grinding their team up from the bottom rung to be the CHAMPIONS!”
    “LOL but our engine is going to have to render all the play on a single plane…The concept document describes this as a 3 directional movement game in a sphere…”
    “That’s okay I’m sure we’ll have the artists render an amazing cutscene that will really sell it. And we’ll give the AI the ability to swim up or down to catch the balls in the animation so it will LOOK kinda like its being played in 3 dimensions instead of 2. The player controls will be more limited on a plane so it should be more accessible.”
    “So we’re really starting these guys out at the bottom rung, right?”
    “Yeah, its no fun if the player isn’t directly responsible for every good thing that happens to the team. We want them to really make a huge difference!”
    “Baller. Lets get to work. I am SO EXCITE.”

    Meanwhile, in the room next door:
    “Okay so the Concept Document describes Blitzball as this deeply symbolic thing to the people of Spira. Its almost as important to them as Summoners. Blitzball and Summoners: The lights in the darkness of the Spira people’s lives.”
    “Wakka is supposed to be the guy who is always trying to do his best to help everyone. Maybe we can do something with Blitzball and the Summoner’s journey?”
    “Oooh, yeah, maybe, like, he’s torn between those two ideals. Be a beacon of hope for people in the Sphere or risk his life to help bring the next Calm. He’s supposed to be a physical ranged character, right? Maybe he fights with a Blitzball…”
    “Oh, I like that. Tidus’ motivations are already pretty well described…He’s the optimist that plays to win instead of accepts his fate. We know we’re going to have him spur everyone to try to find a way to bring the Eternal Calm later instead of sacrificing themselves for a temporary Calm. We should definitely foreshadow this with Wakka and Blitzball.”
    “The players have to play at least one game, right? Maybe that will be Wakka’s ‘Retirement’ game. We can signify the end of his career as a Blitzball player and his focus on bringing the Calm.”
    “Yes! Then the players can be responsible for helping him! They’ll feel invested in this change they’ve wrought in Spira by how they’ve changed Wakka!”
    “I love it. Make it so.”

    And these two parties never talked to each other. Ever.

    And while we’re talking about Blitzball, is there a way to get the existing Aurochs to be good at the game? Most strategies I see involve “Recruit all these new players at these locations…” How is it an underdog story if you just replace all your players with naturally more ‘gifted’ ones?

    And while we’re talking about Blitzball, why Blitzball? What part of Spira is Pseudo-germanic? What part of the game is like lightning? or are they trying to recall the frequent bombings? because the game is such a cascading explosion of failure?

    1. Darren says:

      Tetra Master isn’t FF IX’s primary minigame, Chocobo Hot ‘n Cold is, and it’s essentially a super addictive slot machine that showers you with treasure over the course of the game. Going from IX’s simple, rewarding miniquests to X’s bloated, tedious chores is one of the series’ most dreadful turns.

      1. Orillion says:

        Chocobo Hot & Cold is entirely skippable, I think. Tetra Master isn’t, with the tournament in Treno that you have to do. Basically, they don’t line up particularly well with later minigames, in that they don’t follow the typical formula, and in that they’re actually both fun.

      2. Merlin says:

        Choco Hot and Cold gets pretty tedious since the Chocograph find rate – ie the stuff you’re actually looking for – is so low. I just replayed FF9 (via the Steam re-release) and I don’t think I’d have been able to stomach it if not for the fast forward cheat, which wildly accelerates your movement and animations but doesn’t affect the in-game timer.

        Regardless, extensive mini-games were kind of how you marked a AAA RPG as being different from a low-budget one. I get the impression that that’s been dialed back a fair bit since the PS2 era as costs mounted, but pretty much every Final Fantasy has had one or two big mini-games and a slew of small ones.

        1. Trix2000 says:

          I always skipped it. You don’t need any of the rewards to be brokenly overpowered for the main game anyways (auuuuuto-haaaaaaste).

          1. Merlin says:

            You certainly don’t need it, but there are some nice goodies afoot, and FF9’s items-as-abilities shtick means that keeping up on sidequests often puts you dramatically ahead of the curve. Performing well in the swordfight minigame nets you a Moonstone whose Beast Killer ability helps a bunch in the forest you go to next. Catching a bunch of frogs as soon as you recruit Quina nets you a robe that teaches silence immunity right before you fight Gizamaluke, a difficult boss that spams silence. It’s a nice way to encourage traveling off the beaten path without hard-locking you out of most of the goodies.

            Even Auto-Haste is achievable earlier by chocographs than the main story, I’m pretty sure.

    2. UnwiseTrout says:

      Yeah, it’s totally possible to make the Aurochs a good team, although maybe not a great team. My beginning strategy revolved around using Tidus and his special ability to get some scores in and then use the other players to just pass the ball back and forth, tackle, and so forth to increase their passing, interception, and tackling scores. They honestly got pretty good at busting through the opposition and passing the ball across the field.

      1. Syal says:

        Yeah, that’s the key, just pass between all your players for the first few matches, and they’ll get high enough stats to not be terrible. Tidus and Letty can steamroll most other teams by themselves once you get some levels in.

      2. Hector says:

        I mentioned this above, but IIRC the players get massive stats, but only at super-high (90+ levels).

    3. Syal says:

      A blitz in American Football is when everybody rushes the quarterback. It’s a speed word.

      Not that Blitzball is actually speedy. It’s turn-based for heavens sake.

      1. tmtvl says:

        It’s not turn based, it’s real time with pause.

    4. Retsam says:

      > And while we're talking about Blitzball, is there a way to get the existing Aurochs to be good at the game?

      The existing Aurochs are fine, really. If you play and level the team up a bit, they’re more than competitive and once you figure the game out, it’s not difficult to win consistently with them. I pretty much never bothered with much recruitment, myself. I dropped Datto for Wakka when I could, but otherwise left the team mostly untouched.

      There are players with better stats out there, but the difference seems negligible enough that the advantage of being a human player over the often-dumb-as-rocks-AI is more than enough to make up the difference.

    5. Grudgeal says:

      Well, blitz means ‘lightning’ in German. I imagine a big ball of water that’s the highest point in the town would attract lightning strikes pretty well… Probably spruce the game up a bit too.

  13. Darren says:

    I’m fairly sure that Rikku claims later that the kidnapping was part of the Al Bhed scheme to save Yuna. That doesn’t explain why they were so brutal towards the Aurochs, although you could justify this as trying to weaken one of Yuna’s guardians to make it easier to snatch her later or as payback for Wakka’s bigotry, which they’ve undoubtedly experienced in the past.

    1. Ronixis says:

      Last time I was playing, I started to wonder if the Al Bhed even really did make a ransom demand. It seems like all the Al Bhed there only speak Al Bhed, and nobody else understands it, so how would we know what they want?

      1. Syal says:

        They dropped a blitzball when they ran off and everyone just assumed.

  14. ccesarano says:

    I actually had a different read of the drama of this moment, but I was viewing it from a different angle. Rather than this being an isolated underdog story, I was viewing it from the perspective of wounding Tidus’ pride and damaging his fragile ego. He’s in a world where he watches Yuna get showered with the attention he once enjoyed, in a world where no one cares who he is and may not even want him around, and continues to live in the shadow of others. He was already living in Jecht’s shadow, and now he’s living in the shadow of Chappu, even.

    For my recent play through this section, I failed the Jecht-shot mini-game. I think it’s appropriate at the time, but I confess the greatest reason I lost was because the mini-game has explained in an opaque fashion and then immediately begun, at which point it’s like not realizing the light just turned green. If you take that failure and combine it with Tidus’ failure to win the game for everyone, PLUS hearing everyone cheering for Wakka instead, it combines to a sufficient beating down of Tidus and all of his conceits.

    This is assuming that Tidus gradually does learn and grow. I don’t remember enough of the story, just that I thought Tidus was a smacked ass in high school. My current read on the series is that it’s primary theme is that of loss and mourning, an additional theme of legacy and tradition, and for Tidus to have a character arc in which he lets go of his pride and becomes a real selfless hero rather than an impulsive and selfish brat.

    To that end, I wasn’t thinking of this as Wakka’s arc at all. I’m curious how I’ll feel about it in the grand scheme of things, but you’re very much right. Not even narratively, but in terms of game design this whole segment is screwed up. You go through the tutorial on how to play the game only to go do something else immediately after. Even if the odds are stacked against you, if they wanted players to be interested in Blitzball then they first needed to go up against some other scrub team and earn a victory. But their first introduction is against a team where the odds are intentionally stacked against them, and whether it works thematically or not, you’re just asking players to get frustrated and give up on the mini-game.

    Which is a shame, because when I went through the tutorial I was struck with a major desire to own Blitzball as a board game (it’s on a flat 2-D plane, after all, so it’d work). Theoretically I should enjoy it in digital form, but that first match just made me wonder why I should even bother. Introducing the player in an easier match would give them a sense of how the game works and an understanding that the Goers are someone to build up to. “Here’s where you are, here’s your goal”.

    Which, in terms of Shonen Sports mentioned above, actually does work narratively for sports. The Mighty Ducks had to lose to the Hawks before facing them later in the playoffs. However, none of the players were retiring or quitting or moving away after that first game. To that end, you’re right, Wakka’s retirement makes no sense here. His underdog story is truncated, but truncated unfairly and in a manner where a loss doesn’t feel emotional or meaningful, but instead like a cheap rip-off.

    Perhaps Wakka stepping down to become the team’s coach would have worked better, indicating it’s not really his story or that his career can continue to exist. But as far as I’m aware that’s not what happens.

    1. KarmaTheAlligator says:

      Tidus does grow, and it really starts from right after the tournament, when he has his talk with Auron. He goes from the annoying teenager who just wants to go home and rejects everything to accepting that he’s probably stuck in Spira and he better make the best of it. He does sulk for a bit longer, but not that long.

      1. Syal says:

        And of course the laughing scene is immediately after this, the undisputed high point of Tidus’ development.

        1. KarmaTheAlligator says:

          I really don’t get people’s beef with that scene. It’s meant to be goofy and weird because he’s doing something he never did before (force a laugh when he’s depressed) and he’s really exaggerating it, which turns it into a nice bonding moment with Yuna. Personally I am amused by the scene.

          1. Syal says:

            I think it’s probably got to do with everything Shamus said about this tournament. We’ve been spending a whole lot of time with Tidus up to now, watching him fumble through Spira, and we (probably) just watched him fail at the Sports Movie, and the laughing is another thing that he Doesn’t Get ,TM. It’s also the last big Tidus scene before we start moving into Auron land, if I recall.

            And of course it’s really easy to use out of context.

          2. Abnaxis says:

            I…didn’t know people had issue with that scene. I actually thought it was a really great scene. People actually have that much bile for it?

            1. Zekiel says:

              It is trotted out as a wonderful example of poor voice acting. If you watch it divorced of context it sure looks that way. In the context of the actual scene its in, my memory is that it works fine. Its touching, and its a bit awkward – kind of like actual teenaged romance.

              1. ccesarano says:

                It’s bad intentionally, but it’s not funny bad from my recollection and rewatching of the scene. I’m about to get to that section on my next play, so we’ll see how I feel about it, but there are ways to fake a laugh and not sound like …well, that.

                Of course, there are other moments of earnest voice acting that are worse, so yeah, that moment gets an undue flogging when there are far better samples of God awful voicework to be used.

    2. Henson says:

      While it’s clear that the designers botched the handling of Blitzball at this point, I will agree that winning doesn’t strike me as a necessary result for storytelling purposes. All I would need is some acknowledgement from the team/Wakka that even though they lost, they feel like they could have won. In this way, it’s less a story of beating unbeatable odds as it is about finding courage and determination even in a seemingly hopeless situation. In that way, I think it still ties quite nicely to the main plot.

      In other words, it’s Cool Runnings.

      1. Isy says:

        Likewise. I lost the first time through and while disappointed, I didn’t feel like it hurt the story. It seemed to fit into the melancholy atmosphere of Spira and paid off later on – we did try our best, we lost anyway, and failure here didn’t mark us out as failures later in the story. We just had to pick up and keep trying.

        But Shamus is absolutely correct that the gameplay is a profoundly unfun experience. A bit of a problem in a game.

      2. Felblood says:

        Yeah, you could have made both stories work, by giving sufficient pathos and attention to the result. That would actually have been a cool nod to player agency, in a largely fixed story.

        Instead, neither of the possible results got the attention it deserved and they both feel flat and unfulfilling.

  15. Is it possible this is down to a difference in how Japanese narrative tropes work? I'm no expert (or even amateur) here, but I've read that Japanese movies are often structured very differently, and have very different story beats, than American/Western movies. Could the something similar be happening here, such that all this is satisfying (or at least expected) for Japanese players, and totally frustrating for Western players?

    1. GloatingSwine says:

      I don’t think so. There are plenty of sports manga where an underdog hero comes out on top.

    2. guy says:

      Nope. Underdog team usually wins in sports manga. They may lose at the start, but eventually win in a rematch.

    3. Trix2000 says:

      If anything, I feel like it’s even MORE likely for the underdog team to win in that case.

  16. KarmaTheAlligator says:

    Shamus, in that first image, the actual playing field is a smaller sphere inside that giant sphere. You can see it in the cutscenes that the stands are inside the bigger sphere.

    (On a somewhat related note, I’d like to thank the Spoiler Warning crew for messing me up. Now every time I type “sphere” , I first type shphere. Thanks a lot, guys.)

    As for the matter of the tournament, no matter what happens with the Goers, Tidus’ speech about going for the win already gave some results: the Aurochs won against the Psyches (even with the Al Bhed cheating). That had never happened before (they had never gone past the first round before), so it’s not a complete loss (just a partial victory). Sure, it sucks to lose to the Goers, but maybe that was there as incentive to play more Blitzball and get your revenge. You also get a Strength Sphere for winning.

    (To be fair, Wakka isn’t that bad a player, and starts with a shooting tech, so he’s a good replacement for Tidus. Glad you mention how bad Datto is, though).

    For those interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/finalfantasyx/comments/4ltz8l/well_well_well_if_it_isnt_the_besaid_aurochs/

    On the note about not getting anyone to comment of the Aurochs’ victory, while it’s not in cutscenes, most NPCs in Luca will congratulate you, or accuse you of cheating (seriously, there’s a couple of them who want to stop the fiends investigation and focus on proving that the Aurochs winning is foul play), or just comment on the match.

    1. MichaelGC says:

      Poor Datto. He turns out to be lightning fast if you stick with him and grind your face off level him up!

      1. Guile says:

        Don’t forget Keepa, who for some reason gets the best Shoot score in the game if you grind him up to level 99 as a subpar goalie!

    2. Trix2000 says:

      That would work better if you actually had any input on the first game, but it happens entirely in the background while you fight dudes. Rather lessens the impact, I think.

      1. KarmaTheAlligator says:

        Dunno, I never felt it be lessened, to be honest, because everyone (from the fans to the commentators) really hammers in how bad the Aurochs are, so seeing them win the game (the first in 23 freaking years) was still a happy moment.

  17. Ardis Meade says:

    Am I the only person who had no problem winning the first blitzball game? I never played a second game since I found it kinda boring, so maybe it was a fluke, but it didn’t seem that hard to me. I had won the minigame earlier because it was a minigame and this was an RPG. Better than even odds that it would matter later.

    1. KarmaTheAlligator says:

      I’m gonna say it was a fluke. The odds are really stacked against you in that first game, and your players really suck (and usually a first time player has no idea what they’re doing).

      1. Felblood says:

        I dunno, if he got Jecht Shot and then milked it for a lead in the first half, it’s pretty easy to win that match.

        Neither team has any other special moves of significance, so it’s basically a matter of stunlocking the other team with Jecht Shot to get a goal, and then ensuring that the rest of the match is completely swamped in needlessly long animations.

        1. KarmaTheAlligator says:

          Thing is, you can’t milk it that much. At best you get 2 shots (and only in the second half, Tidus is only level 2 in the first half, so he can’t equip shooting techs… Not that you’re given the option to do so anyway) with it due to its HP cost and Tidus’ level. Not even mentioning that it wastes about 40 seconds if you take the shot with 2 defenders, and the game stops at 3:00, no matter what, for the cutscene where Tidus leaves to be replaced by Wakka (which then leads to another blitz-off where the Goers can get the ball for free).

          1. Felblood says:

            I see the attack animation as the biggest advantage of the Jecht shot.

            Until you get some decent back fielders, it means less time for the bruisers on the other side to score.

            Again, get ahead, and then stall like a madman.

    2. Decius says:

      I did. Mostly because I scored quickly and then instantly realized that running the clock out was all I had to do.

    3. krellen says:

      It’s been a long time since I played, but I seem to remember winning the game as well.

      I also remember kind of liking Blitzball, though not enough to grind out superWakka.

    4. Guile says:

      It’s pretty easy if you get Tidus’s ‘rebound ball off defender’s face’ skill. I think I ended my first match 5-0 mostly on the strength of that one thing. As long as you only have 1 defender and the keeper in range when you shoot it off, it’s basically unstoppable.

      1. Syal says:

        …in the first game Tidus only has the hp to use the Jecht Shot once. If you got 5 goals in the first game you were extremely lucky.

  18. Dev Null says:

    “because the Al Bhed Psyches kidnap Yuna…”

    Wait. The badguys are really called the All Bad Psychoes?

    Subtle as a half-brick in a sock.

  19. Daemian Lucifer says:

    pulls the adequate Tidus

    Wait,adequate?Isnt he supposed to be the best player in the old world?The drownball god?This is akin to pulling Lionel Messi into a football match against the ancient greeks and have him be just ok.

    1. Orillion says:

      No, he’s just the biggest Blitzball celebrity (and even then, maybe just one of the bigger ones). Expecting him to be the best player is like expecting David Beckham to be the best Fake-Injury-Ball player.

      1. MichaelGC says:

        I’d say both Tidus & Messi derive their celebrity from their sporting ability, so I think the original comparison is pretty apt. (Beckham did too, to begin with – probably the best crosser of a ball the world has ever seen – it’s just that other factors ramped things up to superstardom in his case.)

    2. Mintskittle says:

      Everyone on your team starts at level 1, while the Goers have their center start at level 3. If he gets the ball on the toss up, he drives down the middle and your two forwards move to the center to tackle him. The problem is your forwards, Tidus included, have really bad tackle numbers, so they can’t take the ball from him. This usually leads him to make it to about 3/4 field and shoot before your actual defenders can get to him, or a pass to an open forward to shoot uncontested since they were moving on the center.

      It’s not uncommon that by the time you get the ball and can actually do something, your team is already down by one and your playing catch up.

      EDIT: This has the consequence of making your team, Tidus included, look bad, when Tidus is really good when he’s doing his actual job of scoring goals.

      EDIT2: Jecht Shot is OP, allowing you to ignore two defenders entirely when making a shot, and its upgrade, Jecht Shot 2, ignores a third, making Tidus a scoring god that can straight up negate half the opposing team.

      1. Syal says:

        Tidus starts at Level 2. Skills unlock at level 3 so beating the Goers is basically all about getting Tidus the xp to level up in the first half and make a shot in the second, and never ever letting the Goers touch the ball.

    3. Syal says:

      He’s the best player of the Zanarkand Abes, just like Wakka is the best player of the Besaid Aurochs. Abes, Aurochs, you see? He sucks.

    4. Decius says:

      Tidus is pretty sweet, being able to shoot and score even when some entire teams are blocking him.

    5. Xeorm says:

      This is also Final Fantasy, where everyone starts low and levels up. Everyone in your group starts out with about the same combat ability as some guy who was handed a sword, even though they’ve spent years fighting and should presumably be much better.

      1. Daemian Lucifer says:

        Huh.That sounds like some kind of ludonarrative dissonance.Ohh,damn,I forgot who came up with that term.

  20. Paul Spooner says:

    I feel like, as with so many other things in modern Japanese culture, understanding this sequence requires illumination from real life geo-… um… never mind.

  21. Hal says:

    I don’t remember too much about Blitzball, despite how much of it I played back in the day.

    Mainly what I remember was grinding out with players I had no interest in using because they only gained XP when they were used in the match.

    I’m not sure I’d have the patience for this if I played it again today.

  22. Micamo says:

    This is a perfect dissection of the reasons why I ended up hating this game: The blitzball setup completely destroyed my trust in the writer and, combined with the earlier blunders with the Al Bhed, just made me say to myself “Oh. So this whole game is going to be a farce that’s interested only in insulting the audience.” It made me see everything that came after this in the most negative possible light, and made any enjoyment of anything impossible.

  23. Guile says:

    I know at least one writer whose biggest goal is to create a living, consistent world. If he were writing FF10, he would absolutely be the sort to give the Goers awesome stats, because they’re the top of the league. They SHOULD have stats worthy of that position. His go-to line is that the world will not scale in difficulty to the reader/player; hard things are hard, and dangerous things dangerous.

    Of course, you’re absolutely right that as a narrative it’s an awful, terrible choice. Hard to imagine what they were thinking, considering how otherwise linked to the story every aspect of the game is.

  24. Locke says:

    This isn’t the first time Final Fantasy X’s mechanics and its story have failed to line up.

    Wakka: This was the sword of my brother who looked kind of like you before he tragically died fighting Sin. I want you to have it.

    Tidus: +5% Strength, huh? I guess that’ll tide me over until I can get the hunter’s sword in Kilika.

    1. Corsair says:

      On the other hand except for his ultimate weapon Brotherhood really is Tidus’ best weapon. It improves as the story continues, and by the end has +15% Strength, Waterstrike, and Sensor.

      1. Syal says:

        Elemental strikes are liabilities in Final Fantasy though. It just makes it so your sword can’t hurt some enemies.

        1. Felblood says:

          FFX lets you swap weapons during battle quite cheaply, so having a bag of elemental swords is actually a good idea.

          It’s swords that have Petrify that are a white elephant. Petrified enemies give XP, but they don’t drop gold or spheres, so you can expect to arrive at the next own without enough gold to buy the gear, which might otherwise compensate for the fact that you’re weaker than you should be, at level.

      2. Trix2000 says:

        Yeah, it’s a pretty awesome weapon once it upgrades a bit. Pretty much used it for 80-90% of the game myself.

  25. Mikey says:

    Fun fact: do you know who provides the voice of that asshole announcer? Spongebob Squarepants! No, seriously, unless they finally got around to redoing the English dub (Although I don’t expect modern Square “Let’s just port the iOS versions of V and VI to Steam” Enix to put that much effort into an old FF that isn’t VII), the announcer is Tom Kenny, who voices Spongebob, in addition to a few thousand incidental characters in countless other cartoons.

  26. Abnaxis says:

    Even if you're willing to humor that notion, just try to imagine how a limited-technology society could make such a sphere. Imagine the lungpower of that glass blower!

    I realize now that I’m reading a little more info what the characters say than what is maybe there, but my understanding is that the sphere itself is a pre-Sin relic which has the full resources of the city of Luca–one of the largest cities in Spira–dedicated to the sphere’s maintenance and protection.

    1. KarmaTheAlligator says:

      Yup, all the technology they have is from the era before the war a 1000 years back, and yes, everything goes into that stadium, because it’s literally the only entertainment most of these people have.

    2. Trix2000 says:

      One thing that I always wondered, though… Sin’s got to have attacked Luca sometime before, right? I mean, if it hadn’t, wouldn’t people notice the lack and all try to move there?

      And if it indeed has, how the heck did anything like the sphere survive? Did they get lucky, or have to fix it up a whole bunch?

      Just seems a little weird to me.

      1. Locke says:

        There’s a cutscene conversation between Tidus and Yuna where he asks exactly this. According to Yuna, the Crusaders really love Blitzball, so they commit a lot of men to defending the Blitzball stadium. It is evidently possible to deter Sin through nothing but force of arms. Considering how Operation Mihen turned out, I’m not sure how this is managed.

        1. Syal says:

          They really don’t explain how the Crusaders actually function. But, it’s possible Operation Mi’ihen isn’t the only instance where they’ve gathered Sinspawn to draw it somewhere. Maybe they’ve got a ship full of them that they sail around to draw Sin away from Luca so everyone can sports in peace.

          Or maybe Sin is a blitzball fan and deliberately murders around the stadium.

          1. Shoeboxjeddy says:

            Considering Sin’s true form… uh yeah, it actually REALLY IS a fan of Blitzball. That’s hilarious.

          2. KarmaTheAlligator says:

            Well, Chappu died in a Crusader operation, so yeah, Mi’ihen wasn’t the first operation like that. It was the first to use massive machines, though (the others just had rifles and other firearms, I believe).

  27. Retsam says:

    So, regarding the Luca tournament, I absolutely understand that it’s a deeply frustrating experience for a lot of people… but at the same time to me it’s something special and rare that I really love, and it was pretty much my favorite part of FFX. It’s a rare case where the actual challenge of something in gameplay matches the supposed difficulty in story.

    So many games would make a big deal about this team and how they’re super great and undefeated and so much better than you, and then you’d fight them them and they’d be fairly easy to beat and it’d be a letdown. Or, actually, you probably wouldn’t notice because that’s just how the genre usually works and it’s expected at this point. But I love that the actual difficulty of the gameplay matches the advertised difficulty in the story; that it actually feels like you’re facing a team that’s much better than you, and if you win it actually feels like you won an uphill battle.

    As a kid, I spent probably an hour or two doing the stupid Jecht Shot mini-game alone, and then probably another two or three hours doing the tournament… and when I finally won, it was a really great moment for me. Not because the cutscene was great, but because I finally managed to win.

    Yes, in order to allow this difficult, it has the unfortunate story consequence where losing is a common outcome, despite being the “wrong” outcome for the story, for all the reasons outlined above. And that’s not ideal, but I don’t think it’s game-breaking either; and for me, the benefit from the decision outweighs that consequence.

    I’d actually make a comparison to the Suicide Mission from ME2, which Shamus defended in principle if not in execution. Obviously having one of your teammates take a rocket to the face and die at the end is the “wrong” outcome for that story, too. But, again, by allowing “wrong” outcomes to be possible it makes the “right” outcome more satisfying. And, unlike the suicide mission, the Blitzball game doesn’t have that issue where Team Member X fails to dodge a rocket because he “wasn’t loyal enough”.

    It really comes down to how you approach games and your expectations going in, I think. For me, I’ve always just taken the view where, if I spend hours and hours retrying something optional until I get it right, that’s my choice, not the game “forcing” me to do it; so I don’t resent the game for it. I get that not everyone thinks that way; a lot of people come into games with the expectation that they shouldn’t have to do that, or that it’s the games fault if they do… and they’re not wrong to have that expectation, but I don’t think they’re right either.

    I think what I’m really trying to say is that Luca Blitzball tournament is the Dark Souls of FFX, and Shamus didn’t give Dark Souls enough of a chance. ;)

    1. Syal says:

      I've always just taken the view where, if I spend hours and hours retrying something optional until I get it right, that's my choice, not the game “forcing” me to do it; so I don't resent the game for it.

      I’ll agree, with the caveat that FF10’s superweapons are pretty much mandatory for a lot of the optional bosses so choosing not to do the stuff that unlocks them is giving up a lot more content than it should be.

      1. Abnaxis says:

        True, but blitzball outside of the introduction is a far cry different than blitzball for the rest of the game. As soon as you can replace the TERRIBLE Aurochs goalie (there’s a guy sitting on a bench in Luca with 14 CA compared to Keepa’s 6 you can sign immediately, though he’s a bit expensive) you’re golden. I won my last match against the Goers 6-0, and I haven’t left Luca yet.

        People complain about Datto, but Keepa is the real lead weight in the team.

        1. Syal says:

          I was thinking more generally, about Chocobo Racing and Butterfly Collect. Those are things I would absolutely never do, except superweapons are behind them and optional bosses are behind superweapons.

        2. KarmaTheAlligator says:

          Nah, the problem with Datto being worse than Keepa is that most of the time your goalkeeper will do absolutely nothing if you play well and have good players. Datto, with his AT in the single digit until level 40 or so, is absolutely useless at tackling (which is a big part of the game if you score a lot).

    2. Trix2000 says:

      Narratively, you expect people to die on the suicide mission. That’s why they call it a suicide mission.

      While logically it makes sense for the Goers to win, as Shamus pointed out the narrative suggests anything but. Narratively, them winning doesn’t work at all – it feels like a let down, like the story saying “sorry, you don’t get a payoff.” Maybe there was a way to make the loss work, but they didn’t manage it at all.

      And retrying a bunch to win wouldn’t have been so bad if there weren’t a MASSIVE set of cutscenes to wade through before each try. I could maybe understand having to replay the game itself, but having to repeat watch that over and over to try is… maddening.

      1. Syal says:

        Blessedly, the Steam version has an autosave at the halfway point, so if you can make it there without falling behind you can skip a lot of them. You just have to quit immediately when something goes wrong so the next cutscene doesn’t save over it.

    3. Locke says:

      If beating the tournament was supposed to be a difficult, uphill battle, it shouldn’t have been the introduction to the Blitzball game. Having the Luca Goers be an ungodly powerful Blitzball team who the player learns to dread facing off in tournament and league matches would be fine if you weren’t given one and only one attempt to beat them when it mattered in the story (and it’s the very first Blitzball game you actually play, no less).

      Ironically enough, in the actual extended Blitzball game you can play to unlock Wakka’s stuff, it’s not the Luca Goers who are the scary team. It’s the Al Bhed Psyches. You know, those guys who cheated their asses off and still got beat at the last minute by the Auruchs in a cut scene? They’re the monster team you have to look out for in the actual game.

      Related irony: Datto is complained about in the post and in the comments and his stats are genuinely abysmal, but he happens to be the only guy on my team to learn Nap Shot so far, so my entire strategy against the Psyches revolves around him, making him second only to Tidus in importance to my team.

      1. Guile says:

        And the Ronso who can push your team around with their ungodly strength and HP scores, and… I think it might be the Guado who have fantastic pass, shoot and block scores?

        It’s a good point that in the rest of the blitzball minigame the Goers are probably the guys you hope to go up against. They’re good at everything but they’re not deadly in their specialties like the other teams.

    4. Shoeboxjeddy says:

      Problem being, Suicide Mission was not used as the Tutorial, for obvious reasons. If there was a Blitzball league where this difficult match was the ultimate test of skill, that would be one thing, but STARTING here? Dark Souls doesn’t insist you beat the toughest area five minutes after starting the game, it has a difficulty curve.

  28. Cardigan says:

    I actually liked the Blitzball mini-game as a kid for some odd reason, so I was my older cousin’s go-to task monkey for grabbing all the tournament prizes. I wasn’t allowed to play the rest of the game (blame the elaborate politics of childhood), and I haven’t actually played a Final Fantasy game since…

    1. Syal says:

      It’s pretty fun if you just like punching dudes. There’s something magical about your three forwards blocking an opposing player, followed by poisoning him, crippling him and knocking him unconscious.

      1. Cardigan says:

        Huh, maybe my early love of Blitzball explains my obsession with punch-punch in video games.

      2. KarmaTheAlligator says:

        My favourite part is the Jecht Shot(s), where Tidus just destroys the face of the defenders he’s against (I always imagine the defenders saying “not the face, not the face!”). I abuse it to the point I’m surprised to see anyone willing to try and go against him.

        1. Syal says:

          Mine is throwing a Nap Pass with three blockers and putting half their team to sleep.

  29. Grudgeal says:

    Welp, that’s just about the second silliest ball game I’ve ever seen.

  30. natureguy85 says:

    I’m surprised that winning wasn’t required to advance. I wonder why they bothered except maybe because they saw it as just a mini-game you can play on the side.

    I wonder if having Tidus step aside was supposed to be Wakka’s chance to step up, but this is the first game you play and Tidus was doing other things during the earlier game. In a sports movie, you’d have the “pro” character carrying the other guys and then take him away for the last game, but he spent the whole season teaching them. That doesn’t happen. So they needed to play together to have learn teamwork and grow closer. Wakka could still end up being the hero of the game. But as a player, the jerks not getting beat up would be the worst. I also notice they give you even more reason to be “an Al Bhed hater.”

    1. Scerro says:

      It’d be worse if it required you to win, it’s much better than it lets you just move on from the poorly designed setup.

  31. Scerro says:

    I was one of those who replayed it until I won the two blitzball games.

    To me it was something of a challenge that needed to be done. It just didn’t seem right to move on without winning it.

  32. Zaxares says:

    Really? This goes against just about every single other RPG I’ve played, both Western AND JRPG, in which you get roped into an unavoidable minigame which serves as both a mechanism to drive the story forward as well as introducing you to the minigame. In FF7, for instance, you get introduced to Chocobo racing as part of escaping a prison, in which it’s more or less impossible for you to lose. It’s a similar story in pod racing in KotOR, as well as the gladiator matches in both Jade Empire AND Dragon Age. In all of these games, you can go back and play the minigames (and often, there’s some really neat loot and unique items you can win for absolutely dominating these minigames), but they’re otherwise not integral to the plot.

    1. Shoeboxjeddy says:

      Being familiar with those examples suckers you into thinking that this game will be the tutorial for Blitzball, instead of an intensely unfair challenge that only experienced players can figure out how to beat. It was a bizarre design choice…

      1. Felblood says:

        I think that might be over selling it. I beat it on my second try.

        1. Scerro says:

          It took me a half dozen tries at least, and I’m not a slow learner. Figuring out how to get a point and not get scored on takes a while, especially since your defense is so poor.

  33. RandomInternetCommenter says:

    I don’t understand why it should be preferable for games to follow predetermined tropes you already know the outcome to. Where’s the suspense?

    Losing the Blitzball game goes well with the everything is doomed theme so far, with an added touch of hope before reality gives you a harsh reminder. Winning with little fanfare adds to the feeling of meaninglessness as well.

    From a gameplay perspective, this is also motivation for your second playthrough. FFX was obviously designed with this in mind, between the Al Bhed alphabet and several such cases.

    Bottomline, frustration is good sometimes… Much like Twenty Sided. ;) Great analyses of bad writing, which makes it dumbfounding when good writing is complained about on the basis it isn’t “bad” (unoriginal) enough.

    1. Daemian Lucifer says:

      No one says that you should.But these things became tropes for a reason.They work.And of course you can subvert them.South parks stanleys cup subverted this trope brilliantly.But thats because they were going for comedy.

      Here,Shamus describes precisely why using the trope straight would work for this particular story.

    2. Syal says:

      The problem isn’t necessarily them not giving the payoff the player expects, but… they didn’t give any other payoff either?

      They could have subverted it with the Goers giving Yuna a sendoff and a “we’re all rooting for you” after the tournament. The monster attack could have happened halfway through the game, ending it early and reminding everyone there’s real stuff to deal with. They could have had a postgame conversation about how the Goers are all Luca has to look forward to and they actually need the victory more than you.

      Even the Goers just gloating afterward would work. But if you don’t win, it just… ends. The Goers disappear from Cutscene Land into Minigame Land, never to return.

  34. Phantos says:

    Factoid: I didn’t know you could even win The Big Game against the Goers until I read Shamus’ old writeup. I thought it was a “you’re supposed to lose” kind of thing.

    Blitzball itself makes no sense at all, and it totally cheats, but I love it anyway. I am not into sports games in general, but this mini-game sunk its’ hooks into me.

    Ditto to Chocobo Racing in 7, and Tetra Master in 9. Square used to be good at making one humongous mini-game that threatened to overshadow the main product. The lack of that in more recent titles is something I miss.

  35. Zackary Romblad says:

    Hey, I know this is late, I tend to visit the site in larger spurts (since content comes relatively slowly compared to how I gorge on online stuff). But yeah, I’m so excited by FFX. I’ll probably post more with up to date comments (like thx so much Shamus). That said, I have to differ on opinions with how I viewed the Blitzball tourney. The storytellers set it up as this generic underdog tale because it really does NOT compare to the main underdog story. Sure, there are parallels, but win or lose it gets interrupted by y’know SIN! Like it speaks to the complacency of the city and this section of the world that they would put so much effort into a sports tourney when there are more important things going on in the world. And Wakka needs to accept that Blitzball (like his religion) are less important than understanding the problem the world faces that he is about to dedicate himself to. And this relaxed attitude is such a great foil to Titus who also needs to let go of the past. Win or lose his former blitzball prowess is just a distraction from his true role (we’ll also see this with Jecht later).

  36. Theodore MacAulay says:

    The writing surrounding the situation is dumber than you’ve given it credit for. My apologies for writing this before reading the rest of your thingy here but my attention span is short.
    During that initial match against the Luca Goers, one of the commentators declares “But who could have imagined… A championship game between these two teams? Our legendary Luca Goers against…the horrendously ill-fated Besaid Aurochs!”
    in a tournament with six teams. I understand the limitations of the game doesn’t allow for more than 6 cities or whatever but it really is just one of those lines better unspoken/unwritten.
    Also I’m surprised I haven’t seen you bring up the bizarre direction of some of the cutscenes up til this point. The one where the Al Bhed knock out Tidus and then it cuts to his viewpoint and they walk away only for two of them to immediately come back and pick him up without word is somewhat baffling. I think it speaks a lot of the general lack of attention it making the actions of the actors look coherent that there’s so much little stuff like that.
    Also why are there so many damn cutscenes that require 2 seconds of walking in between them? It’s infuriating thinking I’m done a cutscene then being forced to walk forward into the second third of it

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You can enclose spoilers in <strike> tags like so:
<strike>Darth Vader is Luke's father!</strike>

You can make things italics like this:
Can you imagine having Darth Vader as your <i>father</i>?

You can make things bold like this:
I'm <b>very</b> glad Darth Vader isn't my father.

You can make links like this:
I'm reading about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader">Darth Vader</a> on Wikipedia!

You can quote someone like this:
Darth Vader said <blockquote>Luke, I am your father.</blockquote>

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