Like I promised, a FF9 musing. It's very short but really, there's not much that needs to be mulled over in that game.
WARNING: The following content may contail spoilers for the game Final Fantasy IX. Read at your own disgretion.
The game is actually pretty self explanitory. There's only one thing that's bothered me ever since I've played it.
In Memoria, towards the end, your party crosses a bridge and below there is a door/dock and moored there is a boat with (I think) a child crying and a dead person. Dagger comes out and says she thinks that it is her, when she was found with her dead mother as a child. She exits the screen and leaves Zidane alone. Then Garland comes in (telepathically) and says that it wasn't Dagger's memory that was being shown, it was Zidane's.
Wait....What?
I figure it could go two ways. 1) the child is actually Zidane and not Dagger. 2) Zidane is actually seeing Dagger as a child when she is found. Neither really are very satisfactory. If theory 1 is correct, who is the dead person? Or is it perhaps Kuja? Or Garland? If theory 2 is correct, how could Zidane forget something like that and why would he be in the area at the time of her arrival? There's no real answer in the game, and if there is, I've obviously missed it.
I'd love to hear any thoughts or theories on the matter, so feel free!
EDIT: So, playing that game for the third time or so, I think I've finally solved this mystery. Basically, Memoria is this large set up for the final plot line, you could say. At the end of the game, you are supposed to save the Crystal from destruction via Necron. What is this Crystal? Why, it's the crystal of life. As I figure it, the Crystal is sort of a collective memory of life and also seems to keep the cycle of life going. That's why when you reach the one room that's an ocean everyone's like, "Gaia started out as an ocean. How do I know that? And how do you know that too?"
So, in the end, does that make Memoria and the final battle rather jarring? Definitely. And make Necron a completely random bad guy? Yes indeed. But everything works out because the defense of life and the idea of collective memory and that even when a person dies, they live on in memory, fits in very nicely with the overall message of the game.
