While the purpose of remasters is to update older games for modern platforms and new audiences, they are also supposed to preserve the essence of the source material. Square Enix’s Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster does a good job of this, but it also appears to accidentally turn what used to be an Easter Egg into ordinary room decor.
Boundary Break – a YouTube channel dedicated to finding out-of-bounds secrets in video games – unearthed what was once an obscure Easter Egg in Final Fantasy X. In the original game, Tidus’s room in Zanarkand contains a picture frame displaying artwork from “Seventeen Angelic Impact x Devil’s Shock” – the working title of a prototype that later turned into Final Fantasy X.
According to early concepts and a past interview with Final Fantasy X director Yoshinori Kitase, Seventeen Angelic Impact focuses on a character who travels the world in search of a cure for a disease that kills people once they turn 17 years old. A healer character similar to Yuna joins the protagonist to heal those afflicted with the disease. One of the game’s big twists is supposedly that the healer’s efforts are what cause the disease to spread.
While Final Fantasy X tells a different story, its main protagonist Tidus looks like a mix of the concept art of Seventeen’s protagonist and the character in the Final Fantasy X beta footage shown at the 2000 Square Millennium Event. As such, SquareSoft likely found it fitting to include a nod to the early Seventeen concept art as a photo frame in the finished game.
Unfortunately, the image in the photo frame is very blurry in the original game, to the point that you can’t tell what exactly is on it unless you’re already familiar with the Seventeen artwork. This might be what caused the remaster’s artists to misinterpret the Easter egg and replace it. Instead of using a higher resolution image of the Seventeen concept art in the remaster, a new image featuring two men armed with weapons stands in its place. When looking at the original asset, you can see how one might mistake the image for a photo of Tidus standing beside another person.
The rest of the Boundary Break episode is just as entertaining. While there are no other nods to Seventeen in the remaster aside from the replaced photo frame, it is interesting to see the different techniques Square Enix used to remaster Final Fantasy X.
