I finally earned the PlayStation platinum trophy for Final Fantasy X today. More than completing the Sphere Grid for every character, the challenge I feared the most was “Lightning Dancer” which requires you to dodge at least 200 lightning strikes in a row in the Thunder Plains. I had tried to do this in the PS2 days without success. I spent couple of hours at it a few months ago and still failed. Today, I finally did it, and here’s how:
First of all, there is a certain ditch in the Thunder Plains that will spawn a lightning strike when you run into it, which eliminates the usual unexpectedness of the strikes. This is demonstrated in the following video:
However, this knowledge alone was not enough for me to succeed. Here’s what I think can make the task more manageable:
Develop a sense for the reaction time needed to dodge
I went to the ditch and would deliberately press the dodge button slower and slower each time the lightning flashed in order to gauge the absolute limit for when Tidus had to dodge before being struck down. What I came to learn is that you don’t have to press the dodge button while the screen is flashing; you have a small window after the initial flash to press the button. After getting a feel for it, you understand that you don’t need to be so jumpy and on your toes to beat the bolt.
Develop a rhythm with the joystick, but not with the dodge button
The pattern you should be following when dodging the bolts is to run into the ditch, lightning flash: dodge, then run in a circle out of the ditch and then enter the ditch again at the same spot as last time. While developing this habit, you will probably be inclined to try to add the dodging itself into your rhythm, like sensing the timing of the strike and preemptively dodging it. This is a mistake. You may miscalculate when the flash will occur, and if you press the button too soon, you will be punished by the game. As mentioned before, there is enough time to wait for the flash and then press the button. You should always wait to react to the flash, not try to time it or sense when it will happen.
Don’t count the lightning strikes
My first couple of hours attempting this challenge, I counted the dodges. I think this was my downfall, because it divided my attention between the game and keeping track of my count, and my anxiety would increase as the count did. If you are able to develop a steady rhythm of moving into, out of, and back into the ditch, then you can estimate the amount of time it will take for you to successfully dodge 200 bolts. If it takes six seconds for each maneuver, then you can multiply that number by 200, and then estimate that it will take 20 minutes to dodge them all. Just add a handful of extra minutes to make sure you account for deviations in timing. In order to make myself less anxious, I created a music playlist that was about 25 minutes long to listen to while I dodged. When the music is over, I could be confident that I would have the required number of dodges.
Here’s a handy formula to calculate the minutes required for your pace:
n * 200 dodges / 60 seconds
n represents the number of seconds it takes you each time to perform the ditch, dodge the bolt, and loop back around maneuver.
Without counting and using music, I got the trophy on my first try. And that was immediately after attempting to count my dodges and getting less than 20, haha.
What a relief to be done! Despite getting all the way to the end of the PS2 version, I’ve never beaten Final Fantasy X before. On PS2, I stopped right before the final boss because I had the naïve notion that I would collect all the Celestial Weapons and other endgame content, but I ran out of interest in the game before I moved on to other things. With PlayStation trophies as motivation, I finally did it.