Final Fantasy X is a very special game. The setting, characters, systems, music, and everything in-between are just a labor of love and a joy to experience. It will always be among my favorite Final Fantasy games, and among my favorite games of all time.
FINAL FANTASY X
Spira is a continent and a people drowning in the infinite spiral of death that is Yevon. Endlessly ravaged by Sin, a monstrous and eternal creature, the inhabitants of Spira have only a single hope to, for brief periods of time, exist without constant fear and the need to look over their shoulder: Summoners. These Summoners embark on a pilgrimage to learn and practice the ability to call forth entities of great power called Aeons. They learn this power by praying at various temples sprinkled around Spira. The experience of praying to the Faythe in each temple is incredibly taxing on the Summoner, and thus most people are not cut out for the task and responsibility. It takes a great amount of determination, dedication, and selflessness to become a Summoner, and it is not a journey to tackle alone. Guardians aid their Summoners for the duration of the pilgrimage, protecting them from fiends and otherwise hostile entities so that the Summoner can eventually make it to the end goal, Zanarkand, where they obtain the Final Aeon with the strength enough to defeat Sin.
For this story, our focus is the newly-appointed Summoner Yuna and her Guardians: Tidus, Wakka, Lulu, Auron, Rikku, and Kimahri. Not the largest cast in the world, but diverse in gameplay and personality, and all are rich with lore. None are strangers to tragedy or sacrifice, and they’re all willing to put everything on the line for the sake of Spira, except for one:
Tidus is among the most interesting because his story is ripe with mystery. For a good while you’ll believe he’s simply a star athlete thrown into an unfortunate circumstance because of some time travel shenanigans, but if you pay close enough attention you’ll see the cracks in that story grow as you dive deeper and deeper. Eventually you learn that he doesn’t exist at all, and is conjured into existence in the same vein as Aeons; his life and his world a mere dream. Everything he experienced is false and inconsequential but his persistence, will, and refusal to give into the lies that keep the people of Spira corralled like sheep is ultimately what saves everyone, most especially the one he loves.
Yuna is such a real character, and a wonderful one at that. She’s my absolute favorite, and I hope I can explain why. Before you even properly meet her, you know she’s important– the daughter of a High Summoner and the weight of the world on her shoulders with the responsibility to defeat Sin, bringing the Calm to Spira. Yuna is a true product of the world she inhabits, marinating in a sort of resignation that you’ll later discover just permeates throughout all of the Yevon religion. For a good chunk of the game, she’s honestly kind of a doormat, letting anyone and everyone walk all over her. Every obstacle she faces, whether as a result of something she did or did not do, she takes as her own personal burden and responsibility with the ultimate goal of bringing happiness to everyone around her. What’s interesting about her relationship with the people of Spira isn’t that she necessarily wants to make everyone happy (which is not to say she doesn’t care about their happiness, because she does), but that she feels she is obligated to as a Summoner. She is willing to sacrifice anything of her own person in order to make people happy, and it takes a heavy toll on her well-being throughout her pilgrimage. Something happens to her, though, that she never expected: she falls in love. I have to say, and I mean this sincerely, that I think her love with Tidus is some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a game. Let me be clear: I am not saying that the relationship between Yuna and Tidus is some untouchable piece of writing that’s never been achieved before, but the nuance therein is wonderfully subtle and genuine, and Yuna’s half of that relationship is stunningly brilliant in its execution. I want to take a moment to analyze a small example of how their relationship is just unquestionably beautiful, and how that was achieved. Around the midway point of the game, Tidus teaches Yuna how to whistle. It’s a simple exchange that ends with her being unable at the time, so he insists that she practices so that if she ever needs him, she can whistle and he’ll ‘come running’ for her. This is sweet on its own, and is a pretty obvious reflection of how Tidus feels about Yuna, but there’s a sort of second half to this interaction that really makes their relationship feel so wholesome. Later on, Tidus is going through a bit of a rough patch after discovering his father is Sin. He can’t help but wear this pain on his sleeve, and the group is reasonably concerned. In an attempt to cheer him up, Yuna shows off that she’s been practicing her whistle. She then goes on to explain that when she’s feeling sad, she forces herself to smile and laugh anyway, implying that while it’s mostly for appearances as a Summoner, it does help her stay happy along the way. She ends with, “If we should get separated, just whistle. I’ll come running,” her voice cracks, “I promise.” In this moment, we see the full circle of their relationship, where they have both accepted not only each other, but their laid out feelings for one another. This is not a relationship built off of infatuation, it is actual love founded upon compassion and care, and looking at all of their interactions knowing this brings tears to my eyes every time. Yuna is more than just her romance with Tidus, of course. She actually has some wonderful growth as she goes from being a doormat to being the final nail in the coffin for Yevon– the punctuation to the corrupt practices that perpetuated the spiral of death tormenting Spira for over a thousand years. She had always been a strong person deep down, and by the end is the strongest person. She sets aside her pride, the expectations, a thousand years of tradition and faith, even her friends; she gives Yevon the middle finger, says ‘no more’, and succeeds in her newfound goal of putting an end to the corruption, destroying Sin and Yu-Yevon forever, which is more than what any before her ever hoped to achieve.
Auron is the coolest cat in all of Spira. You do not fuck with this man unless you intend to die, and even the most powerful in the Yevon hierarchy know this. He doesn’t relish in his cool, either, instead keeping all of his cards close to the chest. He has a lot of secrets and chooses his words very carefully, obviously withholding knowledge he shouldn’t have in the first place. Auron was one of two guardians to High Summoner Braska, Yuna’s father, accompanied by Jecht, none-other than Tidus’s father. Together, they defeated Sin and ushered in a new Calm for Spira, but this was not without repercussions. Auron was unable to cope with the loss of Braska and Jecht after they sacrificed themselves to defeat Sin, so he attacks an ancient power that allows the Summoners to call forth the Final Aeon, for reasons I’ll delve into later. This ancient power swiftly strikes Auron down, putting an end to his life. Auron does not give up there, though, because death is not quite so final a thing in Spira. He had promises to keep, and intended to keep those promises. To fulfill his promise to Jecht, he would watch over Tidus in Dream Zanarkand, and in the meantime tasked a close friend to fulfill his similar promise to Braska.
Kimahri watched over Yuna since she was a little girl, and has a great deal of true compassion and caring for her. His devotion to her is unyielding and unflinching; he will not hesitate to put Yuna’s life before his own and he demonstrates this multiple times throughout the story. Kimahri has a big heart, and most of it is dedicated to Yuna and her well-being. This dedication is an absolute constant, almost blindingly so– if Yuna herself ended up being the villain of the setting, I have little doubt he’d continue to follow her.
Wakka and Lulu, on the other hand, do their best to be the voice(s) of reason for Yuna and the group. They’ll continuously cite the teachings of Yevon and its importance in guiding them down the ‘proper’ path for Yuna’s pilgrimage in an effort to balance Yuna’s sometimes unorthodox and rebellious tendencies, usually to no avail. On a more personal level, it’s interesting to see the two of them cope with the same loss in very different ways. Lulu was set to wed Wakka’s brother, Chappu, who was tragically killed by Sin some time ago. Wakka attempts to push through it by giving himself to the teachings of Yevon. Lulu, while also faithful, reacts far more emotionally, often being actively irritable and cold towards those around her. She will say things that come off heartless and until you understand the nuances of her relationship with Wakka and Chappu, you could see her as simply being unreasonably mean and rude when in actuality she says the things she does in an attempt to believe her own words so she can move on. This lasts the majority of her arc, and with her past experiences of loss, you could say that Lulu is always running away from her feelings.
Rikku plays a very important role for the party because she ultimately becomes the glue that keeps everyone together through her individual relationships and beliefs. Her mysterious and brief interaction with Tidus after he first arrives in Spira, her familial tie with Yuna, her personality contrast with Kimahri, her experience contrast with Auron, and her being Al-Bhed which opens up some conflict between herself, Wakka, and Lulu. Rikku is among the most sensible in the group, alongside Auron, as a result of her being Al-Bhed and not drinking the Yevon kool-aid: “Memories are nice, but that’s all they are”, “… that doesn’t mean you can’t think for yourself!” It’s through characters like Rikku and Auron that we get a taste for the corruption of Yevon, and how it intimately influences everything in Spira.
Allow me to be blunt and say that Yevon is truly disgusting. It is a religion that controls most all aspects in Spira, and does so with absolute intent at keeping that control regardless of the means. It spreads and upholds lies as law, using scare-tactics to keep its unyielding grip over the populace. Sin? Unbeatable, it can only be mildly deterred by sacrificing Summoners and their Guardians. The Maesters? Most have been dead for years now, in secret. Machina? Strictly forbidden with the exceptions we strictly deem so. The prayer? It’s the celebration of victory for Blitzball before the war Between Zanarkand and Bevelle; using it as a prayer is Yevon’s behind-closed-doors way of mocking Zanarkand’s defeat and simultaneously praising the stronghold over Spira. There are some people integral to the structure of Yevon that truly believe in the dogma, whether they had become corrupted over time or were always blind to it. One such individual is Yunalesca, Yuna’s namesake and the first Summoner to defeat Sin. When she did so, her husband, Zaon, had sacrificed himself to become a Faythe and therefore an Aeon. Their powerful connection made the Aeon strong enough to defeat Sin, ushering in the first Calm. Zaon’s Faythe eventually lost its power, and became unusable during Summoners’ pilgrimages, and thus Yunalesca proposed the same situation to them from that point on: the Summoner must sacrifice a guardian with whom they have a strong connection in order to call upon the Final Aeon and defeat Sin. This detail is not commonly known, because it is already rare enough that a Summoner reaches Zanarkand in the first place, but rarer-still that anyone present to that discovery would be alive to tell the tale. It’s details like this that show Yevon’s true colours and emphasize how corrupt and wrong it is as a religion.
When you look at the story with the knowledge of what Yevon really is, who Tidus is, and what the end of Yuna’s pilgrimage was destined to be when she first took it on… it is incredibly sad. I fight to hold back tears during a great number of scenes and small bits of dialogue between characters. It’s this ability to really make me feel that convinces me of its incredibly powerful and wonderful story. I love Final Fantasy X; the intrigue keeps you going, and the depth keeps the moving parts from stopping. I love the story, the setting, the characters, the mystery, the secrecy, the hypocrisy and the politics. FFX does so much right that, quite frankly, who cares about the few things it gets wrong?
