“Blitzball and Sin” – Final Fantasy X

**Final Fantasy X** (Square, PlayStation 2, 2001/2002)

Last year, Japanese public broadcaster NHK held a poll to determine the nation’s favourite Final Fantasy game. It was won by Final Fantasy X. Sadly, the BBC have not yet taken it on themselves to run something similar; if they did, it would be a surprise if anything but Final Fantasy VII won. Plenty of Western sites reported on Final Fantasy X’s victory with some surprise, as if it were an established universal fact that Final Fantasy VII is objectively The Best Game. This is despite the Japanese popularity of Final Fantasy X being an established phenomenon; I discovered the poll when looking for an older, smaller one which I remembered having a similar result. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that opinions differ around the world in this way. We are, after all, not really playing the same game.

I’ve only touched on this in passing before, but it’s fascinating to me that so many people here play video games in translation from Japanese. So much of our popular culture is in English from the beginning (mostly British or American), and while K-Pop indicates that may yet be broken down, I can’t think of any other form of popular media where translations into English have been such a huge part of the story as video games. It stands out even more acutely here in the UK, where Japanese comics and manga have historically had much less success than in the US or our near European neighbours. (Personal theory: this is due to a combo of lots of our own culture and dominant and similarly Anglophone American culture readily filling the available space for alternatives). And when it came to translation, Final Fantasy X had a new issue, because one of its big technical breakthroughs was voiced dialogue.

In retrospect, the Final Fantasy games of the PS1 era hit a translation sweet spot. They didn’t have the same big issue with text size constraints as the older ones, but still only had text to deal with. They had their own translation issues, of course (or should that be off course!), but the task was easier. The translators, voice actors and other localisation team on Final Fantasy X, on the other hand, had to work within the constraints of animations not just built for the dialogue in Japanese, but reliant on its timings. The solutions for this ranged from rewriting dialogue and speaking at different speeds right up to manipulating the speed of the finished sound files to make them fit the correct length. As localisation editor Alexander O. Smith explained in an interview with US Gamer, this could cause problems with even the simplest of lines: “You can say the Japanese word “hai” in twelve frames, but you can’t say “yes” in twelve frames, because the “s” sound drags out.”

It’s easy to hear the results of these challenges everywhere in Final Fantasy X and all of its rushed responses and awkward, halting speeches. Mouth movements not matching up to the speech is the least of its problems. It’s not surprising that its voice acting got a bad reputation so much as it’s surprising that, in the circumstances, it wasn’t much worse. And that’s on top of a transition that was already going to need some adjusting for players used to reading the dialogue. It’s a terrible place to have technical issues because voice acting isn’t something bolted on to Final Fantasy X, but central to its entire design.

Final Fantasy X is a purer, more concentrated version of Final Fantasy’s narrative side, with a strong focus not just on story but on the idea of stories. Most of the game is told as a campfire story, with occasional voiceover interjection reminders of the fact. Characters tell stories, and reminisce, and reminisce about past storytelling. It’s about what happened ten years ago, and a thousand years ago, and what stories say happens, and what it takes to break out of that.

Its main character Tidus gets catapulted into a world very different from his own so that the player can learn about things along with him, but from relatively early on the direction and purpose of the journey that makes up the game is mostly clear. The game gets some disaster-movie destruction and spectacular visuals in early, and from then on its dramatic twists are small-scale by previous Final Fantasy standards. The improvement to the depth of its character drama brought about by being able to see and hear its characters so much better was intended to compensate. There had, after all, been a Final Fantasy film in cinemas since the last game setting new heights for realism in computer-generated animated characters, bomb though it was.

This approach is reflected in the gameplay as well, which takes out much of the freedom of previous games, world map and all, to direct you down the path of its pre-ordained journey whose only significant diversions available are if you want to play a water polo RPG instead. The combat is pared back, dropping realtime elements and replacing them with a mid-fight character-swapping mechanic which encourages making use of the full party and getting to know them all. The levelling system gets you to advance each character’s skills and attributes on a board called the Sphere Grid which, for all its rings and junctions, mostly reinforces the impression of a visible set path. Even the game’s puzzles are regimented, into a series of ‘Cloister Trials’ of uniform format that play out like the world’s most constrained point and click adventure.

I first played Final Fantasy X fifteen years after my teenage epiphanies with Final Fantasy VIII, and it felt right for a different time in my life. It didn’t mean as much to me as Final Fantasy VIII or Final Fantasy VI, but I enjoyed it a lot, as I did again my time with it now. At one level it is the story of the relationship formed between two teenage celebrity children of celebrity fathers, with much of the brattiness that implies, but it also gets to deeper and more subtle explorations of faith and duty and dealing with loss. It makes the most of the length of time you spend with the characters to draw out quietly moving moments. Would it have been a better experience without Paula Tiso’s Lulu sounding so boringly bored and without John DiMaggio’s choice of island accent for Wakka being so bad on multiple levels? Probably, though with lowered expectations I didn’t find any of it got in the way of the story too much. And, ultimately, the voice acting isn’t everything.

In the UK, we didn’t come completely late to Japanese video games (the legion of ports of arcade games to Spectrum and other home computers say otherwise), but they tended to be ones with little emphasis on text, and we didn’t have a console boom until the PlayStation. Final Fantasy VII’s impact here was magnified by just how much of it was new. In Japan, while putting Final Fantasy into 3D was a big deal, it was merely a big step forward for an established series. In that sense, Final Fantasy X’s impact was closer to being at least of the same order of magnitude.

And any translated text, voiced or otherwise, is substantially the work of its translator(s) and their best efforts to bridge different cultural contexts. There are lots of reasons Final Fantasy X might not have been as widely loved here. Perhaps the themes and character archetypes didn’t have the same impact here. Perhaps its South East Asian-inspired setting didn’t come resonate in the same way as previous funhouse-mirror European ones. Most likely there is no simple explanation at all. Even if the translation is imperfect, there is magic in the beauty and emotional impact of something so complicated being translated at all.