I hear it whenever I close my eyes. Please help.
Those who have followed some of my previous articles know that I have my opinions about voice acting in videogames (although I respect voice actors, I feel that the presence of voice acting in most RPGs have been watering down the games).
Those who have been following me for a while may ALSO know that I'm into tech (I code on the side, when I'm not working my soulless 9-5 or lamenting about how poor I am).
So, while writing my last article, I stumbled upon this article by the Daily Dot, from all the way back in September of 2016.
Picture this. You're a modder. You enjoy changing game code to sculpt worlds out of the shells of games made by big fancy studios. It's 4 AM. You're tired, but you're on a mission. Are you creating new gaming skins in Skyrim? No. Maybe making a new weapon to use in Portal 2? No.
No, instead, you're subbing in Tidus' laugh over all of his dialogue in FFX. Not only that, but you've remixed every piece of the original soundtrack, originally crafted by the renowned Nobuo Uematsu, so that many of its notes are, in fact, distorted versions of Tidus' laugh as well.
Are you insane? Maybe. But there's a fine line between genius and insanity, and perhaps you're in the midsts of riding it.
Who are you? Who are you, to do such a thing like this?
Johnny fucking Mac. That's who.
Are you ok? Are you still here? Ok, good.
Why am I excited about this?
The modding community gets pretty intense for certain games. Sure, we've all heard of a nude mod or 2 for Skyrim, but have you actually spent time on the Elder Scrolls modding forums? Have you seen the work those brilliant weirdos put into modifying gaming skins, improving graphics, or even adding areas to the world? It's intense. Modders practically CARRY Bethesda (in all of their glitchy glory).
But that's just Bethesda. That's Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. They have kits made specifically to help the modding community.
FFX (remastered) doesn't. At least, not to the extent of the others.
It means SOME GUY decided to rip into the gaming files with the rudimentary equipment available to him, and modify basically every single line spoken by Tidus, and every single damned music track in the game, so that Tidus' laugh was subbed in there, somehow. That's hilarious.
He even released a soundtrack.
It's 3 hours and 30 minutes long.
3 hours and 30 minutes of modded music.
Some of the music is even from other games that he included in there as easter eggs (Donkey Kong Country fans, rejoice). The absolute madman.
We're not talking about some Skyrim mod that recreates some locations from FFX. While time consuming, that would not be nearly as hard. No, we're talking about individually editing dialogue to include different audio in FFX.
I mean, just look at this guide to just RUNNING a mod. LOOK AT IT! Do you see how damned difficult that looks?
If that's what running one of the mods is like for this game, what do you think making one of the mods is like?
How did he do it? Well, I researched for hours, and I just don't know. There's not a lot of information about the FFX modding community online.
Hex editors can be used to change character/enemy stats, and do a whole slew of other things. But to change a language?
Changing the audio language itself to or from english is easy, but that's not changing specific dialogue pieces, and it doesn't require anything fancy aside from moving files around.
Having the last laugh: serious business.
I can't even begin to figure out how specific lines of audio are edited in this game. There are thousands of lines of spoken dialogue by Tidus throughout the game. Thousands. My bet is that he either edited portions of the audio individually (perhaps he was able to break down the sound files?), or he found out some other technically diabolical way to sub in that laugh whenever Tidus went to speak.
I'll never know the true answer. The official mod files linked in all articles seem to have gone missing. Perhaps Squaresoft decided to pull the plug with a cease and desist, or perhaps something sinister is brewing. For now, the only way you can experience the awe and majesty of this mod is by viewing lets play videos of it on YouTube (like this one).
If you know how Johnny Mac was able to pull this off, let me know. I've reached out to him, but have not yet gotten a response.
Thank you for reading all the way through! I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this mod, or anything FFX related.
All images are linked to their sources (click away!).
