Before writing about a game for a big website, drawing parallels to other media, make sure you play it to completion. This is what Tom McShea of Gamespot blatantly failed to do with this piece, where he draws parallels between FF10 and the "Noah" movie. Having never seen Noah, I won't say a word about it, but it's very clear, reading this, that he hasn't gotten far enough into FF10 to know the truth about the overarching plot. Heck, even his wording, "a game I'm now playing for the first time", is a dead giveaway.
Indeed, the religious parallel between Spira and real life does exist, however it's not as the author of the article depicts it - rather, it's the story of a religious organization that holds vast amounts of power, and lies time and time again to its followers about technology, about the Al Bhed, about the eventual demise of Sin, about everything. The people are kept in total ignorance, and are blissfully unaware of that fact. The second half of the game utterly destroys the entire point the author was trying to make - FF10 (along with many other Japanese games, such as Tales of Symphonia) depicts religion in such a negative light that any game that would dare do the same, but identify a real-life religion, would get burned at the stake.
So why did he write this, again?
It's pretty great whenever that happens. The best part is that he should have known better. Religion in JRPGs is more often than not an organization that the main villain controls to spread lies, or some similar variant of that. What can you do, though? You can't expect reviewers to actually play through more than a few hours of a game, not when there's so many bribes to take! A little bit of research would have been welcome, though, since it's not like the plot of this game is generally unknown.
ReplyDeleteYou're wrong! Ghetsis never lied and he's our savior! Free all the pokemon!
ReplyDelete(going along with your sarcasm) Sign-ups for Neo Team Plasma are that-a-way...
Delete... Clickbait?
ReplyDelete