"The Wire" will always be the best show of all time. But the one form of media that I grew up with, that's always been there for me, was the RPG Final Fantasy series. Naturally, the best Final Fantasy for every person is the first one they played because that's where nostalgia lies: for my brother, it was Final Fantasy 7, but for me, it was Final Fantasy 10.

I've been talking the series with some people more often recently and bringing back parts of my childhood, and one scene in Final Fantasy 10 struck a chord with me in particular.

Also, I'm going to spoil a pivotal scene in the game and very important details. I have low expectations that any of my friends reading this article are going to play Final Fantasy 10 if they haven't already, given that my friends are already college-aged and the target audience of most Final Fantasy games are teenagers in the 12-15 age range, I don't think I'm giving away too much.

Tidus is a newcomer to the world of Spira, mysteriously placed in the world by strange forces. In Spira, Sin, a gigantic whale-like beast, terrorizes the world and comes to various densely populated areas and kills a lot of people in its wake. But Tidus, in waking up in Spira, finds a motley group of companions who are trying to defeat Sin through a traditional rite of passage known as the "final summoning."

This plotline is incredibly dense, but short story short, there are two important people for the final summoning: summoners and guardians. Summoners are the main players: they acquire summons, known as aeons, all over the world of Spira. Ultimately, they acquire a final aeon that will eventually help them kill Sin. Guardians are those that protect the summoners from monsters and other forms of interference until the summoners can cast the final aeon.

Unfortunately, defeating Sin is only a temporary respite: after several years, he is re-born. No one knows how this happens, but these moments of calm and piece in the world of Spira are cherished, known as the "calm." The journey that the summoners and their guardians go through is called a "pilgrimage."

The group that Tidus joins is that of the summoner Yuna, the daughter of the last summoner who defeated Sin. In that, she is somewhat of a celebrity around the world. But she is constantly chastised by other summoners for having too many guardians: Kimahri, a member of the Ronso tribe, Auron, a guardian of Yuna's father, Rikku, Yuna's cousin and a member of the ostracized Al Bhed tribe, and two others named Wakka and Lulu.

Yeah, it's pretty complicated. But Tidus and Yuna obviously hit it off, in young adult fantasy style. Clearly in love and on a mission to secure the final aeon, Tidus constantly talks to Yuna and the group about what life will be like after they defeat Sin, and talks about how he can bring Yuna and the rest of the crew back to his hometown.

As an immature teenager, he raves about it constantly, but he doesn't see that everyone else tenses up awkwardly and gives no acknowledgment of his post-Sin plans. They're keeping something from him that is pretty important.

So somewhere midway through Yuna's group's journey, she is kidnapped by the Al Bhed. They believe that the final summoning is inherently wrong, for some reason, and want to prevent summoners from going on their pilgrimages. Everyone acknowledges this feeling, besides Tidus.

They are in the Al Bhed home, trying to find Yuna, when Tidus finally lashes out in his confusion.

Tidus: "Why couldn't they trust guardians to protect them? Al Bhed had no right in stopping their pilgrimage!"

Rikku: "The pilgrimages have to stop! If they stop and get to Zanarkand, they might defeat Sin. Yunie could... but then she..."

"Yunie will die, you know!"

"With the Final Aeon she can defeat Sin...but then, if she calls it, then the final aeon is going to kill her! Even if she defeats Sin, it will kill Yunie too, you know!"

Tidus, naturally, is enraged. He starts to question the rest of the guardians about why they kept it from him.

Lulu: "It was just... too hard to say."

This encounter has rung in my mind in thinking about these games recently, because even though it's a video game in a fake world, the phenomenon of keeping very serious issues hidden from people we love is a very real thing. I have much more mature eyes and perspective to see the significance of this now than I did when I was 10. The most common example of this I can think of is family members hiding illnesses from each other.

I came home for winter break a couple months ago to find out someone close to me had a tumor and had to get surgery for it, and I wasn't told because they didn't want to bother me while I was at school. I was pretty mad at first, but it makes sense that we do this. It makes sense that if I were in that position, I might do the same thing.

So why is that?

The thing is that people hide things because they don't want the pity, and they don't want want to bother others. I have pride. The last thing I want for people is for them to feel sorry for me, and that was Yuna's reason for keeping it from Tidus. The rest of the guardians kept it from Tidus because he was naturally a very upbeat and positive dude who lifted the spirits of the rest of the squad. For him to know that Yuna would die would have been an insurmountable burden on his spirit.

And while these reasons are all defendable, natural, and human instinct, the negatives will still outweigh the positives. At some point, things can't be hidden anymore. I guess that was the main takeaway I took from this scene, and that the longer you wait on these things, the more difficult they'll be later down the line. If the guardians or Yuna told Tidus at the very beginning of the pilgrimage, the part about it being "too hard to say" wouldn't have been as hard.

And that is where I found this game the most compelling, because even though they kept it hidden, they showed that in a lot of cases, this is what most people would do. It's their lives and their choice of whether they want to open that can of worms.

As the state of affairs, maybe that's just the way life runs sometimes, and then it's about deciding what to do or how to feel after.