In the last Mega Super Ultra Extreme Super-Sized Recap, a whole lotta stuff happened. Storywise, Tightass supposedly figured out that defeating Yu Yevon will kill Sin permanently. Of course, he only figured this out because I chose the correct option from a list. Way to go, writers. Then the party indulged themselves in a shitload of side quests. Now, armed with new aeons, as well as a few asskickin’ weapons, the crew is ready to take on Sin.
I choose Sin from the destination list on the Convenience. We can’t have our flashy FMV sequence without a cut scene that explains shit we already knew, however. After Cid reminds us that we’re going off to fight Sin, Tightass responds with, “Yu Yevon’s hiding somewhere inside Sin, and we’re gonna find him.” Check the ass. Also, this scene and onward represents the game designers’ feeble attempt to make Tightass into the group’s “leader.” Instead of doing something effective like having him grow into leadership via a series of intelligent and capable decisions, they just make him spout redundant information and meaningless statements in a cocky tone of voice. In case you couldn’t tell from my description, this is even more irritating than his basic idiocy and whining. This is going to be a fun recap.
After some more meaningless banter, Cid hits a few keys on a fancy computer keyboard, causing a professional choral rendition of the Hymn of the Fayth to blast out of the ship’s speakers, broadcasting to all of Spira. I’ve got to get me some of those magic speakers. The camera focuses on Yuna, who looks all Serious and Meaningful. And stays on her. And still stays on her. Holy shit, we freaking get it. “A singing ship in the sky,” Lulu fills us in, thirty seconds too late. Wakka worries about whether or not the people of Spira got the message to sing along, although with magically loud speakers, you’d think it wouldn’t matter if a bunch of assholes joined in. Before Wakka can get his panties in a twist, Sin makes its appearance.
After some spastic camera work to signify that this is urgent and tense, we see Sin’s giant face through the ship’s front windshield. That is one stealthy monster to sneak up on them like that. A target cursor sensor thing flails madly about, trying to lock onto Sin’s head. Cut back to Tightass, who immediately goes into Wank!Commander mode. “All right, we’re going in!” he shrieks, like anyone is really listening to him. Wakka is all, “Um…how the hell do we do that?” I fully expect Tightass to say “Through the ass!” but that would require knowledge of basic anatomy. Instead, he wanks that they’re going in “the easy way,” and by that, he means the mouth. With all the walking around inside Sin that happens later, maybe going in through the ass would have been a better idea. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Lulu and Rikku get all excited over this “plan,” and everyone dramatically runs toward the exit as the “We’re Fighting Sin And That’s So Thrilling” music starts up. Cid still hasn’t caught on to what “the easy way” refers to, so Tightass of all people has to spell it out for him. “If we can’t get through the mouth, we’ll rip open a new one! You with me?” This dialogue really would be better if they were referring to the ass. Speaking of ass, Cid kisses Tightass’s over this absolutely BRILLIANT plan. “Father! I know what to use!” Brother contributes in Al Bhed. “Aha! Of course!” Cid replies. “Of course!” Tightass repeats, although he has no fucking idea what they’re talking about. Cid assures him that they’re going to tear Sin a new asshole blowhole, and it’s the Wanker Gang’s job to penetrate it.
‘…because I don’t really WANT you to be careful.’
Before Tightass can follow the others, Brother does something absolutely shocking. He…says “Wait!” in English. Well, whatever the hell the non-Al Bhed language is called. We know this is shocking because the camera focuses on Tightass gaping like a dying fish. Of course, that’s just his usual expression. But I think overwhelming shock is what the game designers were going for here. Anyway, Brother tells Tightass, in broken English, “Rikku, you…guard.” Take note of this, because it’s the last time Brother shows any concern for Rikku — his extreme obsession with Yuna takes over his brain in the sequel. Of course you could argue that asking Tightass to watch over his sister doesn’t demonstrate a great deal of concern, but again, I think that’s what the game designers were going for. Tightass feels like a big brute man at being given this responsibility.
On his way to the deck, Tightass buys some supplies from Rin. He gets all whiny at Rin for making him pay for goods (not like that), but Rin gives him a sob story about rebuilding Home with the funds. You know he’s just out buying hookers. Tightass is totally swayed by the bullshit story, though.
Out on the deck, Rikku comments that she can hear the Hymn. She seems to be referring to the far-off sound of the Spirans singing, but for some reason they sound exactly like the professional choir on the recording and the recording is nowhere to be heard. You’d think that the music blasting from the airship would overpower the music from below, at least to the people standing on the ship. Whoops, game designers. I’m sure they did it this way so that we could all be touched and awed by the power of the people coming together to fight Sin, and I’m sure if I had a heart, it would have grown five sizes by now.
Tightass is determined not to let them down, like he’s going to have much to do with defeating Sin. Because he hasn’t made an ass out of himself for the last five minutes, he makes up for lost time by getting Yuna’s attention, then pulling her goodbye sphere out of his pocket (or his ass) and saying, “You don’t need this anymore, right?” Instead of ripping the sphere out of his sweaty hands and screaming, “What the fuck are you doing with this, bitch?!”, Yuna just blushes and acts all embarrassed, complete with coy little sounds and a rather pointless self-patdown to make sure it really is THAT sphere. It must suck to go through that much of your life without a spine.
Without Yuna’s consent yet again, Tightass throws the sphere off the edge of the ship as hard as his girly noodle arms will allow. He smiles wankily, like he just did something cool and studly instead of completely asinine. Yuna smiles brainlessly and nods in return. Tightass’s complete inability to act like a normal human being and Yuna’s complete lack of anything resembling self-respect is just embarrassing. It’s difficult for me to even look at the screen at this point.
Thankfully, the camera shifts to Wakka. I never thought I’d type that sentence. The ship begins shaking, making Wakka all, “I have a bad feeling about this.” For some ungodly reason, Tightass has an overdramatic triple take that is supposed to look all action-movie-y, followed by an extreme close-up on his eyeball. Obviously, the game designers are trying to cram as many ways to make me insane into this scene as possible.
At about this point, the game designers throw all pretense out the window and decide that the “laws” of “nature” no longer apply. Not that they really did in the first place in this land of blitzball and summoning and magical airships, but at least there was some semblance of order to the world. Now, as we proceed to the final sequences of the game, I will be forced to describe a whole bunch of crackheaded shit. I’m warning you so that you can take the necessary precautions concerning your sanity. Because I care. Also, when my sanity finally unravels and I become a drooling vegetable, you will know why.
Cut to Sin’s face. It summons up this sphere of shadowy and glowy things and sends it outward in a wave. This makes the ship shake some more. Everyone falls to their knees instead of being flung into the sky. Also, Sin is floating in mid-air, surrounded by what seems to be a giant water bubble. I almost wrote “butthole” instead of “bubble,” which says a lot about my sick mind. I know we’ve seen Sin in a similar situation way back in Tightass’s Zanarkand, but so far its only appearances in Spira have been in a large body of water of some kind (even in that bizarre scene under Macalania, from what I can tell). I guess the people of Spira are lucky that Sin has thus far stuck to the ocean instead of floating around in the sky, spreading its waves of destruction everywhere. Maybe it only does that when Spirans unite to sing the Hymn, even though the plan was to make Sin calm down by singing it. And yet again I’m trying to make sense out of this. When will I ever learn?
The next part is confusing and bizarre. I will try to describe it to the best of my ability, but I don’t know what the fuck is going on, so I don’t really expect you to follow along. Sin, still inside its water bubble with the glowy shadowy sphere in front of its face, opens its mouth. The ocean, far below Sin, starts roiling up. The camera focuses on Sin’s gaping mouth again, then pans slowly from Sin’s head to the tip of its tail. This is a turn-on for someone somewhere, I just know, and that makes me sad. Suddenly, the camera pulls back and up, through the clouds, through the atmosphere, and we’re in outer space. No, really. The clouds have a circular hole in the center, sort of like the eye of a hurricane. A brief shot of the moon lets us know for sure that we are, indeed, in freaking outer space. Cut to Sin’s gaping mouth and glowy shadowy sphere. It opens its mouth wider, and several spheres shoot out along the surface of the ocean. The camera pulls back to follow one of the spheres as it cuts its way through land and water, leaving a giant trough. Okay, there’s creative and then there’s just fucked up. I guess they were trying to show that Sin is destructive without resorting to explosions and fire.
The tense music suddenly stops. We cut back to Yuna and her freakish amount of eyeliner as she sways slowly to her feet. Fancy overhead shot of Tightass rising to his feet. Then Rikku. FMV mode — everyone becomes Asian. They all look around in tense silence broken only by Rikku making “What the fucking fuck?” sounds. We see another view of the sky and sea, showing the large tunnel cut through the clouds and the water. Rikku screeches as the walls of water start to collapse, a la The Ten Commandments, starting from the outermost point and moving inward toward Sin, throwing huge amounts of water into the air. As this reaches the land, dirt and fire shoot up, exploding toward the ship. Yuna and Tightass jump out of the way just in time. Fuck. And scratch what I said before about not using the explosion cliches.
And Moses parted the Red Sea…
Still with me? Then something must be terribly wrong with you. Now we’re back in outer space, but even further away from the planet. There are at least six of those collapsing tunnels, like spokes in a wheel, throwing fire skyward, even in areas that are just ocean. I don’t even know where to start with the confused nitpicking here, so I give up. End FMV mode. The camera does an overhead shot of Tightass lying on the deck of the ship. He looks dead. I think this is the happiest moment of my life. Alas, as the camera does a close-up on him, he lifts up his head, only to find himself face-to-face with his ginormous dad. “Damn you, old man,” he whines.
Cid screeches over the loudspeaker about a shiny spot in Sin’s armpit that may just be a weak spot. Once again, leave it to someone else to discover the useful information. The Convenience shakes some more, and Brother informs everyone that Sin is pulling them in with its magical tractor beam. Rikku translates. Cid calls everyone back inside, but as a retreat would be totally anticlimactic, it turns out to be too late. Sin, in the last few moments, has gone from staring directly into the deck of the ship to floating magically nearby. It moves sideways toward the ship, exposing its weak spot (which is on the shoulder, actually) to the group of people with weapons. Battle time!
Like the airship battle against the Squally Dragon, this one involves moving the airship around in order to reach Sin with the short range weapons. Of course, I start out with Tightass, Auron, and Yuna, which does me no good whatsoever. Wakka and Lulu prove useful until I can have Tightass or Rikku tell Cid to pull the ship closer. Of course I use Rikku to do this, because duh. But first, I discover something that will serve me well until the end of the game — Yuna can do over 9999 damage with her Holy spell because of her awesome Break Damage Limit weapon. Said weapon causes all of Yuna’s spells to cost only 1 MP. I think Yuna just became my new battle buddy, as much as it pains me to say that. At least the game designers bothered to make up for her insipid personality by making her kick ass in battle. Too bad the same can’t be said for Tightass.