On Final Fantasy X: Freedom within Linearity
A comparison between two approaches to level design
*Contains light narrative and gameplay spoilers*
With gaming trending ever closer towards open-world games littered with icons, Final Fantasy X spends roughly fifty of its girthy sixty-hour runtime in hallways five paces wide, so what makes Spira feel like such a vibrant and complete world compared to modern contemporaries? What are some of the merits to a more limited exploration system and where can linearity go wrong and harm an experience? In answering these questions we will explore the approaches taken in both Final Fantasy X and it’s distant sequel, Final Fantasy XIII.
The Mi’ihen Highroad, The most fascinating hallway in gaming
The first few hours of Final Fantasy X are spent island hopping between Baaj Temple with Rikku’s Al-Bhed, Besaid Island, Kilika Port and finally Luca. Each of these sections are brief, introducing you gently into the world of Spira and its culture, slowly presenting new battle mechanics and characters and giving scope to the story and world. Each section is sized and paced perfectly for a sit-down-and-complete segment of gameplay. This rhythm strikes the ‘rule of threes’ nearly perfectly, with Besaid being a simple but effective introduction to the main hook of the narrative as well as most of your party (and my favourite piece of music in all of gaming to escort you through its stunning tropical scenery!) Kilika expands upon the battle mechanics further, presenting new enemies that are a step above the last and communicating the devastation of Sin once again. By this point, you’ve seen the leviathan destroy two cities and you don’t even have a full party yet, fully implanting the idea that Sin can appear anywhere, at any time, and deliver near-apocalyptic disaster with its mere presence. The next stop on our pilgrimage is Luca, a packed section that includes a complete arc for Wakka and his Blitzball team as well as introducing us to more key characters, our sixth party member Auron, the unsettling Maester Seymour and several others that reappear throughout the narrative. In fact, not a second is wasted. This leads us to a certain notorious scene at the foot of the Mi-ihen Highroad.
This stretch is the first real unscripted section of gameplay, in which your objective is to simply traverse the road. This is a simple task in and of itself, after all, the first half of it is literally a brown strip only a few paces wide with no deviations, so why exactly is this part of the game so mesmerising?
Before we even begin in earnest, we are introduced to the Blitzball scouting system at our save sphere. This will likely lead to the player indulging in a match or two before embarking along the difficult road ahead. They may even dive back into Luca for supplies and discover that all of the NPC dialogue has changed to reflect the events that occurred there. After embarking we will enter a ‘random’ encounter in which Auron will introduce us to the piercing mechanic, a trait native to the majority of his weapons. We’ve only taken a few paces along the Highroad and we’ve already gained two brand-new mechanics, not too shabby for a brown strip of dirt in the middle of an endless sea of grass.
The next detour on our linear adventure is receiving a lecture from Maechen, a wandering scholar who we will frequently meet at intervals throughout our pilgrimage and who will deliver bite-sized chunks of the fascinating lore of Spira. He tells us the saga of Lord Mi’ihen, The Crusaders who we previously met on our travels and the history of the Highroad itself. This helps inform the player about the non-essential parts of the world but due to the scarcity of interactions with Maechen to come we begin to cherish those interactions and get excited about seeing him. As a mechanic for delivering lore, Maechen is an exceptional one. And on the subject of Maechen, ‘that, as they say, is that!’
We are then treated to a short stretch of battles with some slightly tougher foes than may be expected on such a long route. I find that on most playthroughs the Highroad is the first point where I feel I should start paying a little more attention to the random battles. The Dual-Horn enemy in this area particularly keeps you on your toes, especially when paired with a Bomb that if not managed correctly will inflict serious damage to your party.
After a handful of encounters, we meet Belgamine, a fellow summoner who challenges Yuna to a battle of Aeons, introducing yet another mechanic in this stretch of gameplay as well as a mysterious rival summoner. Regardless of the outcome, Belgamine will gift Yuna a ring for her to equip, with victory gaining her a slightly better one.
Along the road we meet Shelinda, a young woman who devoutly preaches the graces of Yevon (More on that in my previous article on FFX) and speaks about the impending operation Mi-ihen, which will see The Crusaders, the militarised faithful of Yevon, cooperating with the Al-Bhed to attempt to lure Sin into a trap. Her dialogue is intriguing because although the player may not yet be totally on-side with Yevon she is and still expresses scepticism, leading to the player also questioning this plan as well. Her dialogue adds additional context to the Crusaders and the teachings of Yevon as well as Machina.
Our party then arrives at the Rin’s Travel Agency, an Al-Bhed chain across all of Spira that provides the party with safe harbour and resupply. Here we are treated to several excellent scenes, including one of the most iconic in all of Final Fantasy X.
After this beautiful scene, we are met with one of the stand-out bosses in the game for me. Chocobo Eater. This Fiend involves a unique mechanic involving the Highroad’s landscape Chocobo Eater is a very tough boss for this point of the game, with a wide health pool as well as a ticking clock on the battle preventing you from spending too much time healing. There are three outcomes to this battle. The first is that you win by depleting the boss's HP like in a conventional encounter. The second and third utilise the unique mechanics of the fight. Chocobo Eater can rush our party, knocking them back toward a cliff’s edge if you aren’t outputting enough damage, but if you are, you can in turn knock the boss down and push it over the cliff instead.
Whether you defeat the boss using conventional methods or the unique encounter mechanic is entirely up to you. Winning nets the player a free ride on a Chocobo through the next section, allowing you to acquire some extra loot along the way and introducing yet another mechanic. If the Chocobo Eater knocks you off of the cliff though, the game does not consider this a fail state, it simply means that you must now traverse the low road instead. This serves two functions, it presents you with an alternative route that you can come back and explore later and also serves as a benefit to the player who failed.
Why is that you may ask? Because the Chocobo Eater serves as a level-check to ensure the player is ready for the coming battles. If you can beat this boss you get to ride a Chocobo, which is fun and all, but it also means no more random encounters and a faster trip to the end. If you fail however you’ll be subjected to more random encounters to increase your experience and prepare you for the much more difficult challenges to come during Operation Mi’ihen.
Finally, we have several interactions with familiar faces. We see Luzzu and Gatta from back on Besaid, here to participate in Operation Mi-ihen, rival summoner Dona and her partner Bartello who we met on Kilika, and finally Maester Seymour, all while gleaning more details about the operation to come and getting to know our party better through their reactions to the information they receive here.
And so to recap we are introduced to a total of:
- Four new mechanics
- Four new characters
- Several optional cut scenes
- A boss battle with bespoke mechanics that prepare you for the coming fights or reward you for having been prepared.
That’s a lot of valuable content to fit into a single zone with a map that looks like this:
And for those who hadn’t realised just how narrowly focused the High Road is, that image may come as a bit of a shock, that it can contain so much within so little and never feel cramped, packed or ever at all boring.
Nautilus, Final Fantasy XIII’s un-amusement park
Final Fantasy XIII is a game I have a lot of fondness for, and that I feel has always been unfairly maligned by fans for many reasons, one of which is the linearity of its world at a time when Assassin’s Creed 2 was forever changing the gaming landscape. For the sake of comparison, I have to select one of the many, many examples of linearity within Final Fantasy XIII’s first twenty hours. But the one I decided to select is Nautilus, home to the Pompa Sancta parade as well as an amusement park, which sounds like the natural home of a mini-game hub akin to FF VII’s Golden Saucer, right? …right? Well, the answer is unfortunately far more disappointing than you may expect.
While the Mi-ihen Highroad is a stellar example of containing the depth of the ocean within the span of a puddle, the very same team was harshly criticised for taking a similar approach in the next game released by the ‘FF VIII’ team (who worked on VIII, X and XIII back to back, later taking the lead on the FF VII Remake project as well). This team is led by director Yoshinori Kitase with heavy involvement from Square veterans Tetsuya Nomura (character designer and later director) and scenario writer Kazushige Nojima.
This map of Nautilus is no more or less linear than the Mi-ihen Highroad, so why does it feel so much more restrictive at roughly the same amount of playtime? The answer lies in four elements.
- Direction
- Space
- Variety
- Mechanical depth
Nautilus opens with a beautiful CGI cutscene, the Pompa Sancta parade, which is deeply evocative and memorable. After that, we are thrust into the throng of park-goers enjoying the scenery and attractions. Apparently, the player wasn’t invited to partake in those same attractions or to even actively talk to them as in most JRPGs. All dialogue from the FF XIII NPCs is ambient and plays as you walk by, meaning that there is no intentionality to its presence and thus is missable and never special or memorable. When you see Maechen’s point little hat sticking out you get excited because you know you’re about to get some interesting lore about the world, but in Final Fantasy XIII, this task is relegated to the annals of the datalog in our menu instead of being actively discovered within the world. (FF VIII also used a similar mechanic, making its absence from FF X all the more fascinating as all three games were developed by the same core team.)
While the Mi-ihen highroad is set in a broad, open field creating the illusion of a vast space littered with fascinating ruins, people to meet and lore to learn, Nautilus is the worst possible iteration of itself, never allowing us to freely explore or interact with the park and instead being forced to stick to a few paths and hallways with a few idle NPCs. The first half of our stay in Nautilus doesn’t even contain battles.
The closest thing to mechanical variety we are blessed with is a brief ‘minigame’ in which the player is tasked with finding Sazh’s Chocobo chick, although given the game shows us exactly where it goes and the space is very small, this is essentially filler for time. There is no challenge in the design of this and there’s nothing new learned in this activity. Usually, with this sort of scenario, you may be sent around a town to learn the lay of the land and meet the locals while chasing a cat or something but XIII renders no such intrigue in this brief and forgettable moment.
The theme-park city doesn’t have a single game or amusement or even ride for the player to interact with. It’s all just set dressing. While along the Mi-ihen highroad the player is introduced to several new mechanics and a unique boss encounter, Nautilus gives you nothing new to do. While XIII’s sequel would go on to rectify this to some degree, its omission from XIII is glaring when after so many battles up till this point in the game, the player’s desire for a reprieve goes unmet. The visual similarities to the Golden Saucer casino of FF VII do it no favours either, establishing an expectation that goes unfulfilled.
Conclusion:
In summary, Final Fantasy X’s Mi-ihen Highroad is the more successful of the two because it stimulates the player through engagement. The Highroad adds three more mechanics than Final Fantasy XIII’s Nautilus that help keep gameplay fresh and engaging, ensuring that the player never quite goes into auto-pilot. The Highroad introduces new characters along the route that expand the lore and reappear frequently where Nautilus only introduces one at the very end in a cutscene, meaning you aren’t actively engaging as much or as often. The locale of the Highroad creates an illusion of vast space whereas the tight corridors of Nautilus feel claustrophobic and only serve to further taunt the player’s lack of interaction with the fascinating location it presents. Where the camera is fixed for the player along the Highroad, sweeping to points of interest as you progress, the free camera in Nautilus can often result in the player meandering and looking at the interesting set design instead of pursuing the objective before them, one that is narratively time-sensitive.
The opinion on which the community prefers isn’t hard to find, with nearly any conversation about FF XIII on the internet inevitably returning to its linearity as an issue. But as FF X proves that linearity isn’t always a burden, and utilises its linearity to preserve the narrative pacing and sense of wonderment and exploration in perfect harmony. If it wasn’t already abundantly clear, I love both of these games and both have justified approaches to their storytelling.
While the linear nature of a level limits a player’s freedom in some regards, it helps to focus a player and prevent distraction from non-critical tasks for longer than is absolutely necessary. Many modern open-world games constantly struggle with this issue as players check every nook and cranny for potential collectible items. The solution most open-world games have come to? Restricting the layer to a linear gameplay set-piece. If designed well these side attractions should feel just as important as the events of the main quest. Never in all of my many FF X playthroughs have I failed to talk to Maechen whenever I see him. There is such charisma and charm to the presentation of Final Fantasy X in its linear hallways that it never feels like a chore to pass through.
With modern gaming trending ever more toward an open-world structure with enormous maps covered in icons, with even Final Fantasy XV moving more in this direction, it is extremely refreshing replaying Final Fantasy X and having such a designed, directed and crafted experience.
If you enjoyed this piece, check out the first entry in my Final Fantasy series here.
Sincerely,
Blake Walden.
