Warning; Spoilers for SH and FFX/X-2 From Here On In
Shadow Hearts focuses on Yuri and Alice. It begins when Yuri saves Alice from Albert, and continues with their journey together. Yuri is tormented by the fusion monsters inside him, and Alice bargains with them to rescue his soul. In the bad ending, which is canonical, Alice dies and Yuri lives because of this deal. In this canonical ending, Yuri doesn't know that Alice is going to die until it happens.
Final Fantasy X focuses on Yuna and Tidus' journey. Yuna is attempting to attain the final summon, which will kill her. Everyone but Tidus is aware of this. Once he does find out, he vows to find a way to prevent it, which he does, sacrificing himself. Final Fantasy X does not have any alternative endings.
The parallels here are obvious. Both Yuna and Yuri would have died without Tidus' and Alice's interventions.
Shadow Hearts II and Final Fantasy X-2 focus on Yuri and Yuna coming to terms with the death of Tidus and Alice. Shadow Hearts II focuses more on Karin and her feelings for Yuri, so his feelings are purposefully obscured, for the purposes of fucking with us. However, what we do see of Yuri involves him not getting over her death. Of course, she's been dead for less than six months, if I recall correctly. Furthermore, Alice's ghost lives deep inside his mind, like his father did in the first game. That makes sense - that's where her grave appeared once she'd made the original pact. This is most likely not helping him to recover, at all.
Yuri himself has been cursed, yet again. This time, his soul is going to dissolve, leaving him an empty shell with no memories. That on top of everything else gives him a reason to cling to Alice's memory even more.
In the good ending of Shadow Hearts II, Yuri evades the mistletoe curse by dying. His soul goes back in time, to the start of the first game, with the implication that the good ending becomes canonical the second time around. This is confirmed in the third game, when Roger Bacon claims he's never performed the Emigre ritual before. If that's the case, then this Roger Bacon cannot have lived through the events of Shadow Hearts II, indicating that, in this timeline, they never happened.
Anyway; Yuri's journey in Shadow Hearts II can be described as him striving to keep Alice. In the first game, he told us he'd rather die than live without his soul. This game is him coming to terms with the fact that that is his choice; he can lose Alice and his soul, or he can die.
Final Fantasy X-2 has a number of endings. The two best endings involve Yuna reuniting with Tidus. The mechanism for this is not her dying, but rather his being brought back to life.
Yuna's journey is entirely focused on searching for Tidus. In the other endings she longs for him still, despite building a new life without him. In one notable ending, she can choose not to revive him, despite attaining the ability to.
Looking for parallels, we can see that in both sequels, the pairs are reunited. In Shadow Hearts, it's by Yuri dying. In Final Fantasy it's through Tidus being brought back to life.
It is worth noting that both games included mechanisms by which Tidus and Alice could be revived. The entire Shadow Hearts series is built around the Emigre maniscript, a document which explicitly explains how to revive the dead. We later see it work successfully, in Shadow Hearts 3.
Tidus was a creation of the fayth the entire time; he was never real in the way that the rest of his world was. However, the entire mechanism for his imagining was destroyed during Final Fantasy X, which is why he disappeared in the first place.
In short, you could find a lot more justification for Alice being revived than for Tidus. So why did Yuri die while Tidus lived?
I feel that the reason for this difference, and the contrast, is because Shadow Hearts is darker and edgier, and more realistic. Although it has fantastical elements, it is more firmly rooted in reality. The first world war is a major plot point, and real world people and locations are used. In that world, Alice couldn't come back to life. Her death was real, it meant something. She couldn't be revived for the same reason Aeris couldn't be revived; because her death was real to the players, and it hurts too much when fictitious deaths that feel real are revoked. It highlights how it can't happen in real life.
In Yuna's world, Tidus could be revived. X-2 was happier and lighter than the first game, while, in contrast, Shadow Hearts II was often darker than the original - see Yuri brutally beating the politician who'd caused the deaths of both his parents for example. I feel that X-2 departed further from reality to the point where we could accept Tidus' revival. It felt like it made more sense within the plot and the tone of the story.
No comments:
Post a Comment