Final Fantasy X Part 18: Breaking the Cycle

By Shamus Posted Thursday Oct 20, 2016

Filed under: Retrospectives 85 comments

Lady Yunalesca breaks the bad news to Yuna by explaining that she needs to choose one of her friends to die with her. She tries to soften the blow by explaining that death is the final release from pain. We know that’s nonsense in this world, but more importantly this isn’t the first time we’ve heard someone talking about ending pain through death. I think Yunalesca’s creepy speech is the last puzzle-piece needed to explain Seymour, because he stood in this same spot and got the same sales pitch.

Seymour’s Plan

Okay, but who chose your outfit?
Okay, but who chose your outfit?

Sure, Seymour is a crazy, creepy, goofy-haired, omnicidal cult leader, but we can actually see how he got this way.

His father was a Guado who married a human, hoping to bring the two races together. This didn’t seem to work very well. Even among his own people, Seymour was an outcast. Then mom – who the story hinted was dying – pushed Seymour through summoner training.

Summoners are trained that it’s their job to ease the suffering of Spira. It’s a job for people bursting at the seams with empathy and compassion. It’s a terrible job for traumatized, isolated pre-teens with identity issues and animosity towards the world. Mom dragged little Seymour to Zanarkand so the two of them could kill themselves for the good of the world that had rejected Seymour.

The only person Seymour cared about was his mother, and she was turned into a Fayth so that he could summon her and defeat Sin. Remember the disturbing thing Seymour summoned back in part 6?

Are you my mummy?
Are you my mummy?

Yeah. That freakshow is the aeon created by his mother’s spirit. Evidently, after Yunalesca turned mommy dearest into a fayth, Seymour left without fighting Sin and set mom’s fayth up in an abandoned temple on the edge of Dream Zanarkand. When Tidus first arrived in Spira, he landed right next to it. The story never explains how a ten-year-old boy got his mother’s entombed remains to the other side of the world, but I guess we’re not supposed to notice details like that.

Some of this is revealed in visions we see on our approach to the city, while the rest of it can be inferred. While I appreciate getting some backstory on our secondary villain, we’ve killed him three times now. As far as the player knows, Seymour is done for good. Which means this feels a little late.

Once he reached Zanarkand, Seymour probably listened to Yunalesca’s nihilist pep talk about how everyone was happier in death. Seymour is no dummy, and recognized that if this is actually true, then everyone else is thinking WAY too small. If it really is his job to ease the pain of Spira, and if Yunalesca is right that death ends suffering, then obviously the goal of a summoner should be to annihilate everyone in Spira.

This means that Seymour has successfully completed the pilgrimage. He could, I suppose, go and take a shot at beating Sin anytime he wanted. His problem is that when he defeats Sin, he wants to do so as the Fayth, not the Summoner.

It turns out that Seymour’s goal is actually kind of plausible. For the last thousand years, heroic summoners and their guardians have fought their way here to Zanarkand. The guardians are turned into Fayth to create the Final Summoning, which is used to defeat Sin. Then Yu Yevon turns around and takes control of this new Final Summoning. Thus every incarnation of Sin has the soul of a guardian.

It's bad enough she drags her son to the end of the world to enter into martyrdom together, but did she need to give him THAT HAIRCUT?
It's bad enough she drags her son to the end of the world to enter into martyrdom together, but did she need to give him THAT HAIRCUT?

Yu Yevon wants to attack the fringes of society so that people will be upset enough to send more summoners. The guardian – no doubt a heroic figure with an iron will – really doesn’t want to wipe villages off the map. In fact, they gave their life to prevent that sort of thing. So it’s reasonable to assume that Yu Yevon really has to wrestle with them to make Sin do what he wants. This could help explain why Sin often seems so capricious in its behavior.

But what if Seymour becomes Sin? Yu Yevon would find himself with a bear on a leash. Instead of fighting to force Sin to destroy a small village, Yu Yevon would have to fight just to get Seymour to pause his rampage. All Seymour would need to do is stomp all over the Zanarkand temple containing Yunalesca. No more pilgrimages. No more Final Aeons. There would be nothing left to challenge him.

Yu Yevon and Seymour might play tug-of-war for a few years, but I have to imagine that Seymour would have the upper hand. It only takes a few minutes to blast a town off the map, but rebuilding cities and having babies takes decades. Even if Yu Yevon could force Seymour-SinJust imagine the haircut that thing would have. to hold still 90% of the time, his murder spree would still far outpace Spira’s ability to recover and rebuild.

Anyway. Getting back to Yuna and her friends…

Breaking the Cycle

Note the framing of this shot. Everyone on the left supports the pilgrimage. Everyone on the right is against it. Auron - who is secretly here to destroy the pilgrimage - is standing far off. Yuna, who is the one to choose between these two viewpoints, is positioned right in the center.
Note the framing of this shot. Everyone on the left supports the pilgrimage. Everyone on the right is against it. Auron - who is secretly here to destroy the pilgrimage - is standing far off. Yuna, who is the one to choose between these two viewpoints, is positioned right in the center.

Yunalesca doesn’t seem to notice that Auron is a returning customer. I bet she doesn’t see many of those in this job.

Yunalesca tells Yuna the deal and asks her to choose which of her friends she wants to use in this death-pact. Lulu and Wakka volunteer right away, and you can see how this pilgrimage might have ended if things had gone normally. If Tidus, Auron, and Rikku weren’t here trying to break the cycle, then headstrong Yuna would go through with her plan. Wakka, Kimarhi, or Lulu would become a Fayth, and the cycle of death would grind on for yet another generation.

But Seymour’s treachery has revealed the rotten core of Yevon and shaken everyone’s faith. Tidus and Rikku have never been faithful followers of Yevon, and they’re here to try and talk her out of it. Auron has been sowing seeds of doubt the entire time, making sure that when the moment came, Yuna wouldn’t just blindly act without thinking.

When most summoners get here, they think they’re going to fight “Sin”, and that maybe it will “come back” somehow. But this time Yuna knows she’s not fighting some abstract recurring monster. She’s fighting Jecht. She’s fighting the charming, heroic man who guarded her father. She’s fighting the father of the guy she loves. And when Sin rises again, it will be the trapped soul of someone she loves, dooming them to a cursed existence until the next summoner can free them, and doom the next.

Tidus, are you still there? You seem to have gotten lost in the background of "your" story.
Tidus, are you still there? You seem to have gotten lost in the background of "your" story.

The futility and cold-blooded indifference of the Final Summoning are clear to her in a way that previous summoners couldn’t see. All of this pushes Yuna over the tipping point and she’s able to refuse this deal, even though she’s spent most of her life working towards it and she’s sacrificed everything to get here.

As soon as Yuna makes it clear that she’s not going to go through with it, Yunalesca announces that she will “free you before you can drown in your sorrow”. She makes it sound like a humanitarian move, but it’s obvious she’s just murdering a group of people because they’re not doing what she wants. Is she doing this to be spiteful, or is she trying to keep them from sharing the Big Secrets she’s just revealed? If the latter, then would she have finished off the rest of the guardians once Yuna had defeated Sin? It’s hard to say.

In any case, Yunalesca attacks the party and it’s time for another boss fight.

This Fight Sucks

Yunalesca is sort of hanging from this giant serpent / tentacle monster, as if it was attached to the top of her head. Which means this entire boss monster might technically qualify as a hairdo.
Yunalesca is sort of hanging from this giant serpent / tentacle monster, as if it was attached to the top of her head. Which means this entire boss monster might technically qualify as a hairdo.

The conversation with Yunalesca is a two-stage scene. The first part ends, and you’re free to move around. You’re probably really into the story at this point, so your natural inclination will be to run forward to the next room and see what happens next. You want to see what Yuna decides to do.

Do not do this.

Instead, backtrack one room and save the game.

Final Fantasy X is not a hard game. It’s actually pretty breezy by the standards of the series. Outside of extra challenges like the Monster Arena and the stuff to gather up the super-weapons it’s mostly light, sugary fun. But once in a while it nails you with difficulty spikes in the form of gimmicky boss fights that catch you unprepared, and it usually prefers to do this after a long, unskippable cutscene.

The Yunalesca fight has a really annoying trick. She hits characters with the “zombify” attack. Sometimes she nails one person, sometimes the whole party. Then the next turn she follows up with a huge cure spell. Cure spells are inverted for zombies, turning healing into damage. Which means this huge cure is an insta-KO. So a smart, quick-thinking player will try to use this to their advantage. When someone gets zombified, then you either cure the zombie status ailment on them or swap them out for another character. When Yunalesca’s turn comes around she’ll still use the cure spell, and you’ll get a free full heal!

Except…

It's a three-stage fight: First you defeat Yunalesca. Then she lifts up and reveals the tentacle monster. Then the tentacle monster lifts up and reveals a gigantic Medusa face. You can't see it from this angle, but bikini-clad Yunalesca is still riding atop this thing.
It's a three-stage fight: First you defeat Yunalesca. Then she lifts up and reveals the tentacle monster. Then the tentacle monster lifts up and reveals a gigantic Medusa face. You can't see it from this angle, but bikini-clad Yunalesca is still riding atop this thing.

As she enters the third stage of the fight, she casts Mega Death, which insta-kills everyone. The way to avoid this is to have someone in your party already under the “zombie” status effectOr you can be fighting with an aeon. Either way, you need foresight or luck to be in a position to survive this., since zombies are immune to Death. (No the game never explained that to you. You just need to intuit it in the middle of a complex three-stage battle.) The zombified character can then revive the others and you can continue the fight.

It’s a stupid “gotcha” moment that punishes people for clever thinking, and it pretty much guarantees you’ll have to do the fight more than once. Doing the fight more than once is fine, but you’ll also need to sit through the big cutscene where Yuna rejects Yunalesca’s deal, Auron gives a rousing call to action, Lulu says something vaguely un-hateful, and Wakka abandons his faith forever.

It’s a great scene, but viewing it twice as a punishment for not reading the game designer’s mindOr these days, the wiki. is a horrible idea that turns a great emotional moment into an unwelcome chore. And it’s twice as bad if you didn’t backtrack to save between cutscenes. If you don’t backtrack to save, then you’ll have to re-watch 13 minutes worth of movie to get back to the fight. If you backtrack and save, you can spare yourself 7 minutes of that.

The End of The Final Summoning

Note Auron, facing away.
Note Auron, facing away.

When Yunalesca falls, the world of Spira is changed forever:

  1. Without Yunalesca, there is no longer a way to obtain the Final Aeon. The cycle has been broken.
  2. Seymour now has the title of Most Ridiculous Hair in Spira.

The conversation after the fight makes it clear just how irresponsible everyone has been. They’ve broken the cycle, but they have no idea what to do about Sin.

Tidus has been fading into the background of the story for the last couple of hours. This moment was about Yuna and the end of her pilgrimage. It was about her choice to profane and destroy the faith she’s followed her entire life. To a lesser extent, it’s also been about Auron and his plans. By the end of the fight, both of them have accomplished their goals.

An earlier flashback reveals that Auron was killed ten years ago by Yunalesca. On one hand, he attacked her. On the other hand, maybe she provoked the fight when she needlessly told him that his friends had just died for nothing. This might have been part of her ongoing program to dispose of leftover guardians once Sin was defeated, in order to protect the various secrets.

It’s not clear whether he was out to end the pilgrimage, or if he was just driven by the need to get revenge on Yunalesca. Either way, his quest just ended. Now that Yunalesca was dead, he’s lost. From here his machinations end and he falls into line behind the others.

This is where Tidus begins to re-assert himself. While everyone is still reeling in shock and asking, “What have we done?”, he steps up and says their next goal is to beat Sin without the Final Aeon. He’s here as a catalyst for change, and this world is finally broken out of its thousand-year rut and is ready for that change. He’s too reckless and foolish to entertain the thought that they’ve just doomed the world by taking away the only means to beat Sin. He’s young and idealistic enough to just assume there must be another way.

This is also where Tidus seems to finally get a grip on the world. He figures out that Auron is an unsent, and even figures out who killed him. It took a while, but our whiny Blitzball player is finally developing some understanding and agency.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Just imagine the haircut that thing would have.

[2] Or you can be fighting with an aeon. Either way, you need foresight or luck to be in a position to survive this.

[3] Or these days, the wiki.



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85 thoughts on “Final Fantasy X Part 18: Breaking the Cycle

  1. Daemian Lucifer says:

    You forgot to break it on the main page.

  2. KarmaTheAlligator says:

    Funny thing is, these days I know the zombie-death trap, yet I still manage to make a mess of things by using zombie-proof armours from time to time. But yeah, if I do mess up I go make myself a coffee or something.

    Thank goodness they figured out how to make skippable cutscenes later on.

    1. Incunabulum says:

      When this game first came out the technology to allow you to press a key to skip a cutscene was too hardware intensive for that console generation.

      Even today, the PS4/XBone are pushed to their utmost limits when trying to display 900p @30 FPS *and* acknowledge a keypress during a cutscene.

      Its the only *logical* explanation why these thing ever existed and why they still persist today in console gaming.

      1. Inwoods says:

        Don’t forget that X-2 allows you to skip a lot of content, but then *punishes* you for doing so by making it impossible to get Titus back later.

        The lengths they go to to make sure you play their game in the “correct” way are insanely maddening.

        1. Ninety-Three says:

          Is getting rid of Tidus forever really a punishment?

          1. Not really, which does call into question the concept of that game’s “good ending.” The bad ending is obvious enough, since it’s a “everybody dies” ending…but the good ending might be what the game calls the neutral ending.

            This is starting to remind me of The Bard’s Tale.

  3. Grudgeal says:

    Now, imagine if every boss fight was like that; this sort of fiendish trickery you get from Yunalesca is something every boss enemy can do to you and will do to you, and yes there will be a cutscene first.

    You have just hit upon the main draw of the Shin Megami Tensei series.

    1. Ruethus says:

      But, at least in IV, which is the only one I’ve played, you can at least speed through most of the dialogue by holding X, which makes things slightly more tolerable.

      1. Ringwraith says:

        Most games have a skip function of some sort, especially these days.
        Final Fantasy X does not, in fact, Final Fantasy was very slow on the uptake.
        In X-2 you can skip cutscenes, but then then they count towards your game completion for unlocking the final post-game challenge if you’re aiming for that. X-2 also finally added the function to skip long battle cutscene-animations, but only if you go into the options and set it to skip them all, and not letting you do so via a button press or something, something many other games were already doing.

    2. Trix2000 says:

      At least the Persona games were…. somewhat more reasonable about this.

      But then, that’s like saying an explosion is more reasonable because it’s not as bad as being within the fires of a sun.

  4. The Rocketeer says:

    So, that’s done. Now why was anything about this a secret?

    The game has this logic that the sacrifice of a guardian and the eventual revitalization of Sin are total dealbreakers that no one in the world would accept if they knew about them. Or at least, Yevon and Yunalesca believe this, because they believe, truly and earnestly, that Sin can never be truly defeated, and that everyone would sort of just lie down and wait to die if they knew.

    That’s a fine view for them to hold, because it gives the party an ideal to oppose. But the game itself seems to accept that, aside from the part about Yu Yevon’s invincibility, that they’re right: if people both knew that Sin would keep coming back as long as Final Aeons were used to defeat it, and that a guardian was sacrificed to make this so, they’d immediately reject it and be left with no alternative but despair.

    I don’t buy that. I have bad news for you all: you’re all going to die. I mean, probably not today (Except YOU! Sorry.), but someday. Most people carry on regardless. In the context of the game, this conspiracy created a tiny kernel of hope that this one major threat wouldn’t specifically kill them one day, even though they probably don’t live long past middle age in Spira anyway. Even though that hope is dashed every time Sin actually does come back. What’s the suicide rate after the end of every Calm, I wonder? 50%? What’s our net hope gain/loss, year over year, if Mika puts on a jellyfish mask, goes on TV, and says, “I’m Yevon! I, uh, forgot how to unmake Sin! It’s just, uh, been so long! So he’ll be around. Also I’m not real. Sorry!”? This was always a stupid lie.

    Of course, in keeping with the motif, it directly parallels real-world practices of rituals, including sacrifice, to prevent disasters, or promote prosperity, but also corresponds with concepts like Biblical salvation and promises of a life after death, given the aesthetics of Yevon and the cultural background of most people who played this game. But unlike those counterparts, fighting Sin isn’t totally preoccupied with the prevention of disaster (though there is that, of course), but the opposition to a very clear and present disaster; nor wholly with a metaphysical, spiritual salvation from death, but again, with a wholly physical, personal danger.

    Sin is a foe that, though overpowering, can be effectively fought- the Calm is real, if only temporary. And outside of its direct defeat, means do exist to mitigate its threat, by luring it away from population centers and fastidiously clearing its spawn. The idea that people would give up if they found out Sin couldn’t be permanently destroyed is, especially to a modern audience, more akin to the idea that humanity on Earth would have given up and let themselves die out if they found out hurricanes would never stop happening. Or earthquakes. Or locusts. Or sunburn. Or smog.

    And of course, the false hope in Sin’s banishment through Spiran’s ultimate personal redemption and a moratorium on accurate knowledge of Sin and Yu Yevon prevented any sort of effort to produce an alternate means of fighting Sin. In a Spira where Sin’s nature, and the nature of the Final Aeon’s relation to it, was common knowledge, endless resources would be poured into finding a permanent solution- which takes ten minutes for Team Yuna later on. Wasted resources, if, like Yunalesca, you think it can’t be done. And it’s fine for Yunalesca to believe that, and fine for mainstream Yevon to think that, over the years. But it strains credulity that unerring compliance and secrecy of a matter very much open to debate would endure a millennium of this shit.

    But belay that. I’m not even going to bother pointing out how stupidly impossible it would be to keep the conspiracy going for even a month. It’s already been raked over the coals in the comments and you’re either willing to swallow it or you aren’t. But it’s worse that a pill that large needs to be swallowed in service of something so ultimately tedious.

    The idea that Sin will always keep coming back seems to be trying to channel the revelation that there is no light at the end of the tunnel when you die. It’s trying to channel that cold, nihilistic epiphany that those good things you were taught as a kid were meant to pacify you and control you and keep you from asking too many questions. But Spira isn’t actually capable of supporting anything with that kind of depth; it went out of its way to demonstrate both that Sin itself is an entirely physical threat in a world where life is otherwise still cheap, and that the afterlife- in the form of the Farplane- is both entirely real and apparently not a bad place to end up. There’s always the risk that you’ll end up unsent, but preventing that fate is a real service that Temple Summoners actually do provide.

    And what’s this about the guardian’s sacrifice being secret? Why? It’s pointless. So the world’s squared itself long ago to the idea that summoners march to their deaths en masse to fight Sin, but the idea that a guardian also must sacrifice themselves is the tipping point? Even though hardly anyone ever comes back from these trips anyway, win or lose? Even though, by the logic that this stupid conspiracy has to run by, no one ever comes back from these trips alive to blow the lid off? Nevermind the idea that the Final Aeon becomes Sin; assume that part stays a secret. Who would care that a guardian has to sacrifice themselves to become the Final Aeon? It literally doesn’t move the needle on Annual Pilgrim Deaths. The game hinges somewhat on a reflexive abhorrence of religious martyrdom, long after it premised itself on an ironclad popular acceptance of it.

    And it’s arguably not even death! Well, I mean, becoming Sin sucks, sure, but if you’re Yevon, why not say:

    Pope: “Yes, Guardians, one of you has to die, but you get made into, like, some super rad spirit animal. You, what’s your favorite animal?”
    Guardian:“Bufal-”
    Pope: “Forty foot tall winged buffalo with, like, chains and shit hanging off of it and lasers just coming out of everywhere. You fight Sin as that.”
    Guardian:“But I-”
    Pope: “YOU. FIGHT SIN. AS THAT.”

    You know what that gets you? Volunteers. My application’s in the mail.

    Do people that became Sin in the past show up in the Farplane once a new Sin takes their place? Nevermind. Forget that.

    Really, everything about the conspiracy is counterproductive, even for the stated goals of Yevon. I mean, it couldn’t make too much sense, or some players might agree with it, and you can’t risk that in this game. The only purpose this served, all of it, is to have something, anything, to hang over the heads of the party, so that you can snatch that lie away at a pivotal moment and torment them. It’s just like every other plot beat in this game; this one just happens to be the biggest, the one that’s underneath all the others.

    Which is… fine. Yeah, fine, actually. It serves that purpose expertly. Hell, I was totally sold on it when I played this game… what, thirteen years ago? Fourteen? Jesus. But this game isn’t a bottle of bourbon, it’s a bottle of soda. The appeal’s not in the drink, it’s in the fizz. You snap the top open, you take a swig”” aaah! Love it. You go back to it the next day? Still great. Next week? Eeehh… Next month? Revoltingly flat. That doesn’t mean soda’s no good, it just means there’s a right and wrong way to enjoy it. I exhausted the right way increasingly long ago, and now I’m just shaking this game up and spraying it all over the room just to see the mess it makes.

    1. Grudgeal says:

      Bu-but if this wasn’t a silly implausible cover-up then the party wouldn’t have to have a big third act shock about it that redefines their character and views on life and the fairness of the whole system and writing character development without sudden dramatic twists is haaaaaard~~…

    2. Shamus says:

      Shit. This stuff is objectively more insightful than what I’m posting.

      1. Corsair says:

        I don’t think the big, nasty revelation is that a Guardian must die to create the Final Aeon and defeat Sin – I think the big, nasty revelation is that the Guardian -doesn’t- die to defeat Sin, that they become the newest host body for the abomination. The Summoner gets off easy, they just die, but the Guardian as Final Aeon is trapped in what can only be reasonably described as Hell.

        As for pouring resources into defeating Sin – they tried that, it was called Operation Mi’ihen, and it was a miserable failure. They didn’t have a chance in Hell. It had to be Tidus and had to be Jecht, or engaging Sin was hopeless. Without the knowledge of what was needed to pacify and distract Sin, and a Sin using every iota of willpower he had not to attack his son they would have been massacred. Bear in mind, Sin annihilated the Machina Civilizations, the ones that the Al Bhed scavenge all their fancy tech from, including the WMD they used to destroy Home. If Bevelle and the other Machina Civilizations didn’t deploy their biggest weapons against Sin I’d be shocked.

        1. krellen says:

          IIRC, X-2 reveals that the Machina Civilization didn’t deploy their Ultimate Weapon (the plot revolves around an angry spirit trying to take control of it), because they decided it would destroy too much for it to be worth it.

          1. Syal says:

            And Yuna’s initial reaction to finding out about it is “well, that’s not my problem”. X-2 is super non-canon.

            1. Will It Work says:

              Despite X-2 being dismissed by many as “ËśFF for girls', I really thought it had some interesting things to say.

              Yuna especially at this point (I never saw the intervening Before Calm thing) is firmly into rebellion, a young adult with multiple forms of Traumatic Stress. She’s basically the soldier who came home and is trying to find a new way to live.

              As such, her reaction felt pretty earned to me, but I can see where it seemed strange.

        2. Muspel says:

          I think that the nasty revelation is that every time that you beat Sin, he gets a newer, stronger form, which means that someday, no Summoner will be able to create an Aeon powerful enough to bring him down– at which point Sin will probably just wipe out all of humanity, because there’s no reason to leave them alive anymore.

          The revelation that the church has been intentionally feeding and strengthening an extinction-level threat might not play out so well, ESPECIALLY if it becomes common knowledge that the extinction-level threat is the being that the church has been telling people to worship for centuries.

          1. Syal says:

            Yunalesca seems to imply the cycle is endless, so I always assumed there was a damage cap for Sin, like Yu Yevon can only make it so strong before diminishing returns bottom out. So it wouldn’t become stronger, though it might get strong faster.

          2. Ninety-Three says:

            That was the impression I’d gotten as well, but the more you think about it, the less sense it makes. If it’s true, Sin has received hundreds of upgrades. The current Sin is ultimately defeated when three random JRPG protagonists ask “But what if we punched it, like, really hard?” (yeah yeah, the song, it’s still ultimately defeated by the martial prowess of three not-superpowered humans ). Sin Version 1 must have been orders of magnitude weaker than this thing, so how the hell could it have wiped out the majority of a once-thriving civilization?

            FFX is so full of holes that you can’t make sense of it when you get this deep, every explanation relies on willingly ignoring numerous major facts, and coming to an interpretation is a series of choices about which plot holes you’re going to accept in order to patch up the others.

            I’m being harsher on it than Shamus because I firmly believe that “Stories should make sense” is not an optional design principle, but I’m forced to admit that FFX kind of works anyway. There’s an art to writing not a perfect script, but a Spielbergian script where the audience doesn’t notice the holes until they’ve already enjoyed the thing. How did the T-Rex sneak up on them in Jurassic park? It doesn’t make sense if you think about the world as a whole, but it’s dramatic and it sweeps your brain up in the emotion of the scene before you can notice any problems.

            1. Scimitar says:

              Perhaps the first Sin didn’t fight back as much as the next ones, if at all since it had been made for the purpose of war. So the first Sin could have been pretty powerful, but when Yu Yevon decided he would start hijacking new summons they got weaker due to the guardians fighting back.

              Which might’ve also encouraged the formation of the faith in the first place, if the initial power decreases were great enough (seeing the new Sin being weaker than the last being a false positive).

            2. Locke says:

              “If it's true, Sin has received hundreds of upgrades.”

              Sin has received five upgrades. The Ultimania Guide gives us an exact number, but even ignoring that explicit statement, there is a very small number of high summoners mentioned in the game, and each one gets their very own giant statue. Assuming that Sin has been beaten more than a few dozen times is unreasonable.

              Also, no one ever seems to create a final aeon and then not kill Sin, so Sin might be throwing the fight to anyone who gets as far as Zanarkand.

              1. RCN says:

                I don’t think so. Seymor can’t be the only exception. For one, Yunalesca herself is a barrier of entry, she might just eat people she thinks are too weak to become a powerful enough final aeon.

                Also, we are never explicitly told of people a final aeon losing to sin, nor the opposite. I think each generation the fiends become more powerful and thus the guardians themselves become tougher, but at some point this is going to break down.

                1. Fred B-C says:

                  I suspect that Yunalesca may not be so much a participant in Yevon’s scheme as honestly wanting to find a weapon to beat him. It’s not guaranteed a priori that some Summoner/Guardian combo might come along that’s so powerful, or does something unorthodox, that they could win. Maybe two Summoners could find a way to melding their Guardians into one super-Final Aeon that could actually defeat Yevon totally, killing him before he could play Body Snatcher? If that’s the case, this is all an extremely long-lived plan to get vengeance for her husband, and she’s inherently going to select people she really thinks has a shot.

      2. Henson says:

        Something tells me The Rocketeer’s been holding this all in for YEARS. This series is therapy.

      3. It’s actually a good point of separation between FF as a whole and Dragon Quest, the other major JRPG series that actually defined a large part of FF1; religion in that game is important (at least the two I’ve played) since it’s how you save, resurrect party members before you get the spell to do so, or remove status effects you don’t have items/spells for or when you equipped a cursed item. There’s never any of the killing God stuff that FF had, since religion never really played that much of a part in the stories.

        The closest I’ve seen was in DQ8, and that was a tangent to the resurrection of the game’s actual enemy, when the head of the unnamed religion was killed in order to do the aforementioned event. Even then, it’s portrayed as generally good within the world with only some of the people within it being asshats.

      4. Fred B-C says:

        Not at all! You’re dissecting each moment and pointing out the character dynamics. What he just did is noting the world around it.

        I’d point out a few things. First: Your ability to have a ruling elite in such a society would be pretty tough, if we knew that the Yevonites were basically making this long-term acquiescence to the devil. It could be that the people in Yevon itself wanted a conspiracy for reasons that are common in some cults: a desire to take a situation and use it to further amplify control, whether or not that’s a literal reasoned intent or just kind of emerges from the opportunity and gets rationalized.

        Second, Japanese cultural artifacts often remark on the idea of being able to break conceptual cycles with optimism. Gurren Lagann has the strength of the human spirit literally conquering entropy and also conquering the black holes that would emerge from a conquest of entropy. I think YuGiOh 5DS also plays with that idea. In Fairy Tail, heroic sacrifices made by people like Erza and Gray are repeatedly averted, by the idea that life should be so important that we should always seek a better way rather than finding a scapegoat.

        I don’t know if this is a reaction to martyrdom trends in some non-Japanese religions or a cultural reaction to the bushido mentality of embracing death that went out of vogue after World War II: I suspect both. In any instance, the game has to set up precisely a reasonable situation where you could very easily see people making this choice rationally and instead setting up a situation where the idealist comes up with a different approach entirely, finding a win-win that no one had considered.

        Moreover, I’ve always thought reading Shamus’ description that this dynamic with Sin does inherently seem to be an unstable equilibrium. It strikes me that, eventually, there never will be a stronger body. Eventually, Yu Yevon will lose patience, realize no new body is coming, and decide to end the world. In particular, it’s important to remember the context of the war that produced all of the destruction. That’s another common theme in Japanese cultural artifacts: the aftermath of apocalyptic wars and the psychology thereof. From Godzilla to Metal Gear, you see that there’s this idea that these broken people replicate the cycle endlessly. Yevon was effectively an ultimate weapon derived from a person, a doomsday weapon that got out of hand (a very Star Trek-like plot device). And if he was the only thing that could take down Bevelle,

        Notice, too, that Sin has a counterpart: Vegnagun. In X-2, we learn that Bevelle had its own apocalypse weapon, and it too would have trashed the planet. In an alternate timeline, presumably Bevelle would have gotten desperate enough to release Vegnagun (or some psycho like Seymour would have released it just to spoil the victory) and the planet would have been destroyed. So it’s actually important that these seemingly spiritual threats are mundane: FFX is taking a stab directly at some kinds of religious dogma, arguing that in a sense some of the spiritual threats being noted are actually derivations of physical threats that religions might themselves cause or exacerbate. It’s illustrative that Spira’s problem with a nasty, corrupt cult came about after something like a Cold War situation turned hot and both sides had a doomsday device ready to go, and one side just lucked out and got theirs out first.

        I think when you take into account what the story is saying about institutions, mutually assured destruction, and other factors, some of these issues go away.

    3. Ninety-Three says:

      As you’ve described it, everything about the Pilgrimage is a total nonsense mess. And that’s fair, because everything you’ve said is accurate. However, I think there is a fix to this problem you’ve not considered, in the form of “If you grant a specific plot hole A, holes B, C and D go away and it at least sort of works.”

      The problem is that as the game depicts it, Sin is a hurricane: a bad thing that occasionally wipes out a town and that’s a real shame. Shamus, and pretty much everyone in the comments seemed to be operating under the assumption that the world was capital-D Doomed without the Pilgrimage (at least until our protagonists punch God in the face because that’s how JRPGs work). The facts depict Sin as more of a hurricane than an apocalypse, but the characters in the game act like the Pilgrimage is about saving the world, and most players seem to pick up on this.

      I propose that Sin is an apocalyptic threat, and the only plot hole is how the world survived a thousand years without completely collapsing. If you hand-wave the question of why a walking Armageddon is taking millennia to do its job, everyone’s reaction to Sin starts to make sense.

      I think an awful lot of FFX’s plot problems could be solved by cutting down the thousand-year cycle to say, one hundred. It makes the conspiracy ten times less implausible (which is still far from plausible), it explains why civilization has been knocked back but not exterminated, why a church ruled by unaging dead people hasn’t been noticed yet, why no one has figured out that summoners and Guardians always die (few enough of them that everyone else could maybe believe they just got unlucky), fixes the implication that Sin V1.0 was a huge wimp if what we’re seeing is a hundred generations of Aeon-stealing improvement…

      Imagine that Sin has only been going for a hundred years, and humanity is steadily losing ground. In a hundred years, Spira will be dead, Pilgrimage or not. Instead of maintaining the steady state of civilization, now the Pilgrimage is merely a means of buying time, a white lie the church tells people in order to ease the passing of humanity. Instead of simply lying to people a bit before asking them to become martyrs, the church is propping up an increasingly shaky and ultimately doomed civilization on the back of human sacrifice. It paints them as a well-intentioned evil instead of a needlessly dickish conspiracy attempting to cover up the precise mechanics of the Pilgrimage.

      I’m not sure why the narrative needed it to be a thousand years, other than because breaking a stable thousand-year cycle is more impressive than a faltering hundred-year one.

      1. The Rocketeer says:

        I think an awful lot of FFX's plot problems could be solved by cutting down the thousand-year cycle to say, one hundred.

        I agree. But aside from putting hypothetical words in Yevon’s mouth (which I find I enjoy immensely) I don’t spend as much time trying to “fix” games as I do poking holes in them. Especially not this game, since”” and I wanna keep reiterating this”” this game works as intended. I’m just running against its grain the way a first-time player couldn’t, and shouldn’t; if a new player is thinking of the game in this critical fashion, it means FFX blew its shot with them out of the gate.

      2. GloatingSwine says:

        Sin originally had one purpose, protecting the summoned Zanarkand.

        It’s not an apocalyptic threat, it was never intended to wipe anything out, just to keep people away from one specific place.

    4. potatoejenkins says:

      Love the soda comparison.

      Never got the impression Final Fantasy tries to be more than that, actually. Entertainment/Drama first. (Open) Social criticism or criticism of an established political/religious system was never really a thing in any Final Fantasies I have played. There are hints, maybe even attempts, but it always boils down to “doing what is right because we all want to live in a happy place” innocent kindergarten logic. Let’s all hold hands and everything will be alright. Sometimes that is enough to tell a good story.

    5. Syal says:

      Hiding the guardian sacrifice does serve a purpose, in that the bond between the summoner and the guardian are what give the Final Aeon power so someone travelling just for the sake of power won’t be nearly as effective as someone travelling purely for the sake of the summoner. (The fatal flaw in Seymour’s plan is that even if he’d become a Final Aeon he would have just ended up as “Seymour A Few Inches Taller” and Sin would have stomped him anyway.)

      Although it does lead to the really awkward situation where a summoner’s guardians heroically stay behind to hold off Sanctuary Keeper while the summoner runs ahead alone, and then Yunalesca’s like “wait you’re alone, no that doesn’t work, nothing I can do for you”.

      1. The Rocketeer says:

        Hiding the guardian sacrifice does serve a purpose, in that the bond between the summoner and the guardian are what give the Final Aeon power…

        That’s a fair point. More than fair, come to think of it. It’s a fascinating hypothetical, really: how would knowledge of the Final Aeon’s origin and fate alter the makeup of likely Pilgrims themselves, and how would that change affect the overall viability of the Pilgrimages?

        Honestly, it’s a bigger question than I’m equipped to grapple with at the moment.

        1. Locke says:

          Also a bigger question than the game is equipped to handle, evidently. The game stumbled over its length as it is (Bikanel and Bevelle were a hatchet job), so I guess they lacked either time or budget to answer these questions even if they noticed them or wanted to bother with them.

      2. Ninety-Three says:

        So this actually exposes another problem with the Pilgrimage. The summoner and their guardian need a strong bond, or the Final Aeon won’t work and Sin will continue to rampage. No one knows this needs to be the case until the final moments of the Pilgrimage. It’s a miracle that across a thousand years, every summoner either brought along a loved one, or fell in love with their bodyguard along the way. Maybe the real reason the Pilgrimage is so dangerous isn’t the random encounters you fight along the way, but the fact that most summoners reach the end only to learn it was a mistake to hire mercenaries for protection while leaving their wife and kids at home. A summoner with no good sacrifice would either try to fight Sin and fail, or get murdered in order to keep the Pilgrimage conspiracy under wraps.

        1. The Rocketeer says:

          Depends on whether you need a wuvvy-wuv sort of a bond, or whether devotion, comradeship, that kind of stuff is worth more than the paper it’s printed on. I took it that it was, but the game doesn’t say explicitly, so interpret it however.

          When I said once that that was the flaw in Seymour’s gig, someone suggested that Yuna’s intense revulsion for Seymour would serve just as well. You can make your own judgment, I guess, but from me, this got the vanishingly rare simultaneous groan-eyeroll-shrug-upward palms.

          1. Ninety-Three says:

            Even if devotion and comradeship count, how many pilgrims simply get a group of sellswords (or noble fighters whose purpose in life is to protect eligible summoners) instead of close friends?

            The exact value of that number is up to speculation, but there must be a lot of summoners who died because no one told them that the most obvious solution to this problem was invalid.

            1. Guile says:

              That’s presumably the reason it’s a very long pilgrimage. A lot of time and battle and hardship to forge a bond meant to power the Final Aeon.

          2. Syal says:

            Yunalesca does explicitly say the bond between friends works.

            I assume there’s a known religious doctrine against hiring sellswords for a pilgrimage. Buuut, the Maesters did build the stairwell to one of the Fayths out of “forbidden” technology, so maybe they just don’t care.

            …it’s also possible the Fayth don’t let those people become summoners in the first place.

        2. MrGuy says:

          Alternately, it’s possible Yunalesca simply party wipes any Summoner party that doesn’t have a strong candidate to become the Final Aeon.

          Plenty of summoner parties fail. It’s not like we know how they all died.

          1. Felblood says:

            Or maybe she just lets them summon a shitty final aeon and Sin mops the floor with them.

        3. Fred B-C says:

          I think it’s a matter of the numbers. It doesn’t matter if hundreds of these pilgrimages fail: enough will produce a person with a bond, by sheer chance, that it works. Remember that this all seems to be Yunalesca, acting sort of as Zanarkand’s last ditch effort to try to undo their own creation: While from our perspective this all looks like a great plan, it’s actually the result of a lot of tragic mistakes. Yevon, former leader of Zanarkand, took their summoning magic way too far and became a monster doing it. Yunalesca, trying to stop the genie they had released with their doomsday weapon, becomes a monster. Bevelle became monstrous enough to pursue their own doomsday weapons in a war that seemed to be becoming genocidal. Then Bevelle creates a religion as a last-ditch effort to use whatever weapons they’ve got, ironically adopting the weapons of their opponent. It’s all haphazard choices with limited information that create an unstable equilibrium that manages, against all odds, to last a thousand years [yeah, making it a hundred to two hundred years would have been smart]. That’s why the schemes of Tidus, Auron, Jecht, etc. can all throw enough of a spanner into the works to achieve victory: the situation was nowhere near as fixed as it looks from the outside. I think it’s actually kind of cool how the game uses the trappings of religion to imply a fixed dynamic that was actually the result of a lot of people making terrible decisions thanks to war, hatred, etc.

    6. The Rocketeer says:

      Oh, before I forget. For those of you following along with this series, who knew little of the game beforehand, or for those who missed the prior article when it went up and have remained luckily oblivious to vague allusions to it since:

      Prior to the beginning of this series, one of Shamus’ Tuesday articles served as a sort of forerunner to this series of dedicated Final Fantasy X articles. This provoked heaps of discussion, including a comment of my own detailing why I had come to see Auron, a standout fan favorite among the cast, if not the standout favorite, as a cruel and sinister man, due to (my interpretation of) his methods and motivations. That comment provoked heaps of its own discussion, and has occasionally warranted a cryptic callback from myself or others as pertinent events dribbled out over the course of this series.

      That comment is here.

      I link it here now because this moment, the fight against Yunalesca and the abolition of the Final Aeon, is the clinching moment for that interpretation, as it is for so many other important things in the game. If you managed to steer clear of it up until now, firstly I congratulate you, and secondly, you now have all of the context and background for that can of worms if you’ve been following along with this series.

      However, this is principally for posterity and for informational purposes: I have no appetite to dig back into it myself, and twitch at bringing it up yet again, begging, as I am, the appearance of grinding this axe much more keenly than I intend to. To that, I exhort that there’s already quite the body of retort”” some of which I actually read! If anyone can exhaust that heretical hatchet job, and its contenders, and still want more, well, bless your hearts.

    7. Veylon says:

      The main benefit of this conspiracy for Yevon is to keep idealistic would-be heroes from trying to screw up the cycle. A conscious villain motivates people to do something in the way that a senseless act of nature doesn’t. If all hurricanes were caused by some asshole sorcerer living on an island in the Caribbean, you can bet that there’d be hordes of overly-optimistic youth hopping into boats to go murderize him and lots more of less-courageous people supporting them through logistics and theorycrafting.

      Keeping his own role secret makes sense (though I don’t know what Yunalesca gets out of this). Keeping the secret about the guardian dying doesn’t. The same idealistic youth who’d want to kill him would happily die to stave off hurricane season for another year if they didn’t know there was a villain behind it.

      1. Alexander The 1st says:

        IIRC from the wiki, Yunalesca first used Yu Yevon’s backdoor to remove Sin because she didn’t want her father’s name to be stained, which is why she grants the Final Summoning.

        And given that Yunalesca is from Zanarkand, Yevon’s might’ve been forced into the agreement that she would give the Final Summoning technique on the grounds that the exact mechanism is kept secret, especially to prevent Summoners and Guardians to find another solution or to investigate further.

        Yunalesca can probably get away with this power grab because as she’s an Unsent Summoner, she can kill her opponents and then send them, whereas without other summoners, Yevon can’t send her. Which is a problem before the issue of Sin still being around.

        So keeping the Guardian clause secret probably helps in a “You can take my solution after your long trek to temporarily remove Sin, or you could spend more time trying to find a different solution…while Sin ravages your villages.”

        So it could very well be Yunalesca’s hold on the Yevon church (Not to mention as nobody else can replicate her skill she provides, they might not know about the Guardian clause until Auron or Seymour return and make a big deal about it.)

        That, and her ability to kill and send anyone who defies her, probably makes it a little easier to deal with.

    8. Gilfareth says:

      I’ll grant that the conspiracy is genuinely untenable (she provoked Auron before, sure, but how has she managed to covertly off every single previous guardian without one of them coming back as an unsent like our red-coated friend?), but I’m curious where you got the idea the game thinks people would fall to despair if the conspiracy was blown.

      The events after Zanarkand would seem to point the exact opposite way, with people willing to come together and aid a crazy, stupid sounding plan from all across Spira. People in the next game tell Yuna they sang, it’s a courageous and hopeful moment that sticks out in everyone’s minds.

      Yunalesca and Mika both believe despair is the only options, yes, but both were also active and knowing enablers of the Pilgrimage and Mika in particular stood to benefit from the continued prosperity of Yevon as a Maester, so his despair doesn’t necessarily speak for everybody.

    9. Felblood says:

      I agree with your second point, but disagree with your first point.

      From Yevon’s perspective, the whole conspiracy makes loads of sense. The less people know about how this actually works, the less chance there is of anyone realizing that the cycle is actually making him stronger, and/or finding another actually effective way to kill him.

      –But yeah, there is no reason to cover up the fact that the Fayth are forged from martyred guardians. I mean, they already treat them much like holy saints, so why not venerate them.

      “Ah, this blitzball is a relic of Saint Jecht, patron of professional athletes and heavy metal album covers.”

    10. tremor3258 says:

      Wow – that’s an amazing piece.

      And of course, even ultra-cynicalJecht reached the point of wanting to sacrifice himself – most of Spira seems pretty happy with the idea their death will save perhaps hundreds of lives, let Spira rebuld a little, and provide some period of peace that may measure in decades. There really is no reason to keep it secret on the surface.

      I suspect unsent get stuck in a loop – Yuna and her crew can change and grow – Seymour has the exact same plan throughout – Auron has spent a decade getting the pieces together to stop the cycle without considering how to end the current iteration of it. And Yu Yevon of course, spends all his time driving monster-whale.

    11. John the Savage says:

      I always got the sense that the priests of Yevon, even at the very top level, didn’t know the secret about the Final Aeon being made from a guardian. I mean, it’s not like Maester Mika has met Yunalesca, or been to Zanarkand. Sure, Seymour could have told them, but if he takes the whole “end Spira’s sorrow” thing to heart, than why would he?

  5. natureguy85 says:

    The Yunalesca trick reminds me of the boss at the top of the Magic Tower in Final Fantasy 3 (6). It has a teamwipe attack so you need to have pre-emptively put a Life 3 spell on your characters, which resurrects them when they fall. (I don’t know if it’s survivable if you’re high enough level.)

    I hadn’t saved in awhile and didn’t want to replay what I’d just done so I stopped playing for awhile. To this day, I haven’t gone back and finished the game.

    1. Ruethus says:

      Magic Master was a PAIN. I managed to beat him by using the Esper that makes the whole party do a Dragoon Jump, so only three if my characters were onscreen when the Ultima went off. However, that took WAY too many tries to pull off.

      1. Max says:

        I just cast osmose until he ran out of MP and is no longer able to cast Ultima. Although that was probably one of the more time consuming ways to beat Magic Master. Interesting to see that there are actually a few different ways to beat the boss that I hadn’t thought of.

        1. Fred B-C says:

          I seemed to remember they fixed this in the Advance version, but I guess they didn’t. It does make some sense: the whole dungeon can be heavily blunted if you use Rasp and Osmose, and that’s also a good way of beating Ultima Weapon.

    2. Mephane says:

      I deeply hate bosses that can only be defeated by such gimmicks. It’s tolerable when the gimmick is something you can figure out and adapt to during the fight, but not when it essentially means that unless you read a guide or wiki beforehand, you have to fail the fight at least once just to learn that “to defeat, you must prepare gimmick X”.

      Imho a boss fight should allow you to utilize the very skills (both in term of abilities of your character and player skill in using those abilities) you have practiced so far, and be successful.

      Yes, I mean that any strategy got you through the game so far, should also be viable to defeat the bosses. It need not be the most efficient method, but it should be viable.

      For example, imagine if you can defeat all common foes either by overpowering them with sheer alpha damage, by weakening and slowly wittling them down with debuffs and dots, or you can out-survive them with life-stealing or self-healing effects in a prolonged war of attrition. Which of the three methods you choose depends entirely on the play style you prefer, and all three of them get you throug the game. And then there comes the first boss fight (or the final one) and it has a hard enrage timer, i.e. if the fight lasts longer than N minutes, the boss suddenly becomes so strong that it becomes essentially unbeatable, and wipes out the party. Up to this point, the game had established that whichever options you chose to fight your enemies was no longer valid, and you are forced to play in a very specific way now.

      A few examples come to mind immediately:

      * WoW dungeon and especially raid bosses. They all end up revolving around multiple gimmicks, and are designed so you have to fail again and again not to practice playing your character well, not to practice working together with your team mates well, but to practice just the gimmicks and mechanics of this specific boss fight.
      * The Wardens in Saints Row 4. Not only break they the established gameplay from previous titles, but from SR4 itself. At some point in the game, if you get the heat to maximum, all enemies despawn and a mini-boss, a warden, appears. Not only are you now forced to fight it (ending your rampage), but to defeat it you must first play their very annoying gimmicks and then finish them off with a series of quicktime events. This essentially removed all replay value of the game for me, and whenever I feel like some Saints Row, I just play 3 and never touch 4 again.
      * All the bosses in Deus Ex Human Revolution. The game lets you happily play stealthy and non-lethal except for the bosses which allow one and only one play style.

      1. Felblood says:

        Yeah, but redesigning your party to be some kind of cheezy combination of abilities, for the task at hand, *was* the core gameplay loop, for FF 3-5. The games were more like puzzles, where you tried a particular challenge until you beat it, and were then presented with a new one.

        In a way these cheese bosses exist as a way to throw a bone to lovers of that bygone era, but I understand why they can be frustrating when they pop up in an otherwise “breezy” game that let’s you solve every problem with your First Order Optimal weapon of choice.

      2. Fred B-C says:

        Back in the day in Final Fantasy, one of the reasons to talk to people in towns was to get clues as to how to avoid specific attacks. Chrono Cross was really good about that. They should have made some easy clues, like “Only those who survive in both life and death can defeat Yunalesca” or something.

      3. Alex says:

        There are certainly some bosses like that in WoW, but less than I might have otherwise assumed before I played my free month. The first boss of Deathwing Descent is an obvious perpetrator, as is Deathwing himself in Dragon Soul, but in most cases the “Hit it with a sledgehammer until it stops twitching” strategy is perfectly viable, if you’ve got a big enough sledgehammer.

      4. Will It Work says:

        I’m actually replaying Saint’s Row 4 now (the Re-Elected version), and it’s surprising how much I have to disagree with your point about Wardens. They’re supposed to be gatekeepers in the simulation, when it is unable to escalate any more, it brings someone with powers like you. In the Re-Elected version, enemies will stay on the board, supporting the Warden, too.

        Freeze blast + Black hole, or Explosion blast + Anything is enough to stunlock a Warden until you do the stupid button mashing minigame. So… I never really felt greatly inopportuned.

    3. Fred B-C says:

      It’s 100% survivable. It’s just Ultima, and while it does break Magic Defense, I think it CAN be Magic Blocked and it’s DEFINITELY susceptible to Runic. I’ve never done that before: I should try it!

    4. Anthony says:

      You can get around the teamwipe by using rasp until you’ve exhausted all of its MP, which kills it. That takes forever though, Life 3 is way better if you have it. I personally used the rasp method because I came in a little underleveled.

  6. Matt says:

    I’ve never played a Final Fantasy game all the way through and, up until this article, I wasn’t sold on this game. The story seemed overly complex, filled with characters and strange nouns, yet also quite simple in what actually happens and folks’ motivations. However, as of reading this, I’m now much more interested in how it all plays out. I finally “get it,” I guess.

    Is it funny that it had to be (mostly) spoiled for me to enjoy it? Weird.

    1. Henson says:

      Unfortunately, the answer of ‘how it all plays out’ is a very short one. The story is essentially over by this point, all that’s left is to wrap it up, defeat Sin, yada yada yada. This section here is the main story if FFX; the ending is just tying up loose ends.

      1. potatoejenkins says:

        I found Yuna having to kill all her aeons and Tidus disappearing in her arms to be more than just a “wrap up” and “cleaning up loose ends”.

        Sure, the characters have come into their own at this point, but now we get to see the consequences. Yuna’s pilgrimage isn’t over at this point.

  7. potatoejenkins says:

    But Seymour's treachery has revealed the rotten core of Yevon and shaken everyone's faith.

    I’d totally forgotten about that. So he is important after all. Observations like that are the reason I really like this series. FFX itself isn’t even my favourite Final Fantasy. It was strangely cheery after FF9. Even though the story is quite tragic.

    Then came FFX-2, of course, and the “temple of revelations” became a tourist attraction for treasure hunters. KEY-MON … whatever could that mean? Who knows!

    I agree on sitting through cut scenes more than once being annoying. The fight against Yunalesca however, that was one of the best fights in this game for me (unlike the fights against Seymor). It kept me on my toes, required quick thinking, resource management and rewarded me for paying attention in older entries of the series.

    Players new to FF do not immediately get how to tackle and handle the status “zombie” in these games – understandably so – but it is worth noting that “zombie” and “phoenix downs” are a staple of this series for several entries now. Death lvl. 5/3 is another spell worth keeping in mind.
    Enemies can wipe whole parties with these spells and status effects, but in the hand of the player these spells can trivialize the hardest boss fights. Why grind if you can just wipe a boss with one or two phoenix down? An enemy constantly casts a powerful poison spell? How about casting zombie on yourself? – et voila! HP regeneration on the house.
    Can’t defeat this optional boss guarding a powerful optional item? Try some zombie or another spell combination and see what happens. Some enemies are immune, some of the most powerful aren’t.

    That was always the best of Final Fantasy enemy encounters for me. Trying different strategies always paid off in one way or another.

    1. Decius says:

      Why use Phoenix Down when you can suplex a train?

      1. potatoejenkins says:

        Sure. Unless you still need the train. Or want to summon a train. In both cases, zombie included.

        Yes, these statements are all valid. Final Fantasy, ladies & gentleman.

    2. Syal says:

      The fight against Yunalesca however, that was one of the best fights in this game for me

      I’d say that’s a pretty true statement. It’s a fight with a gimmick where the gimmick actually creates interesting tactical tradeoffs. Most of the boss fights in 10 have gimmicks but most of the gimmicks can be ignored.

      The problem being it’s one of the only fights that will kill you out of the blue, and it does it in the third phase of a three-phase boss fight preceded by one of the longest and most unskippable cutscenes in the game.

      1. potatoejenkins says:

        The problem being it's one of the only fights that will kill you out of the blue, and it does it in the third phase of a three-phase boss fight preceded by one of the longest and most unskippable cutscenes in the game.

        Can’t deny that. Even if you really know what you are doing a little bit of bad luck and you are dead.

        Never been angry at the game for that though. Fighting her and most of all defeating her was too much fun, the latter an accomplishment. Can’t say the same for the end boss in FF9. No good memories of that one. Not many bad ones either, only that I felt no motivation to fight the guy after being killed a few times. Those bosses are the worst.

        1. Fred B-C says:

          Yeah, for me having been raised on JRPGs I don’t mind when a super-tough boss is also a plot boss, like Yunalesca, because it makes the fight seem so much more epic when I have to load and try again. In Chrono Cross, fights against Garai, Dario, Miguel, and others that are brutal and that you can easily lose on ring out in my mind because they’re so important.

          1. Syal says:

            I’d much rather have a tough boss be a plot boss like Miguel* than a boss-outta-nowhere like Mini Dragon**, but if there’s plot beforehand there really should be a way to skip it on the second try. My first time through FF10 I had to fight Seymour Flux and Yunalesca four or five times each; that’s like an hour of just watching the same two cutscenes.

            *Although Miguel’s pretty easy when you realize you should actually use the thing they give you in the previous room.

            **Been a long time since I last played Chrono Cross but I’m pretty sure that’s the name of it.

  8. Decius says:

    Zombieproof deathproof armor.

    I actually like games that give you a toolbox and challenges that don’t try to tell you how to navigate those challenges. Sure, it would. Be nice if there was a better glossary or if whenever an attack was done there was a way to learn all about it (what element is this, what status effects can it inflict, what are the hard counters?)

    1. Will It Work says:

      Well, digging, and the wiki for one. I remember spending a lot of time on GameFAQs with this one, since the NA version didn’t have Ribbon.

      Ribbon protects against all status ailments, and was available in the International version. I hope that means it’s in the Steam release as well.

  9. Crystalgate says:

    There’s one big flaw with Seymour’s plan as I see it. I don’t think this article mentions it, but Yunalesca strongly implies that the final aeon has to have a strong bond with the summoner to be sufficiently strong. I’m assuming this means an emotional bond, so a forced marriage that makes Seymour and Yuna husband and wife should not work. If so, then aeon Seymour would be way to weak for the job.

    This is not a problem with the story though, Seymour may well be the kind of person who has lost the ability to tell the difference between an emotional bond and a bond in title only.

    1. Syal says:

      The upcoming final encounter with Seymour confirms he’s phenomenally unrealistic about his abilities.

  10. ChrisANG says:

    One thing that hasn’t been much mentioned is that there seems to be legitimate doubt in FFX about the existence and nature of the afterlife. Auron says of visiting the Farplane “Searching the past to find the future… this is all that is there” and Rikku says “You’re not really going to see the dead, more like your memories of them […] They take on the form of the dead person-an illusion, nothing else” and “memories are nice, but that’s all they are.”

    And, indeed, the scene that plays out inside the Farplane is pretty clearly the Spiran equivalent of the “speaking to the gravestone” scene. The images of the dead are passive, they stare straight ahead and do not emote. Maybe the souls of the dead really are present in the images, and can hear what their visitors are saying. Or maybe death is absolute, and the images are just memories.

    Yunalesca and Seymour seem to believe that death brings peace. Rikku seems to doubt that the afterlife exists. There’s little that anyone can point to that supports their view. The unsent can cling to their memories and a semblance of life for a time, but they (almost?) invariably go insane, and lose themselves in the process. A proper sending spares them from this, but what happens to the person? You can’t tell; the images on the Farplane are inert, the pyreflies are just pretty lights. The boundary between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ may be a bit fuzzy, but ultimately death is still a mystery.

    1. Syal says:

      Might be bad form to keep referencing TheDarkId’s LP in Shamus’ retrospection, but he points out that Jyscal walking out of the Farplane kind of kills the Al Bhed “it’s just an image” theory.

      1. ChrisANG says:

        Well, yes and no, right? The shocked reaction that everyone has to Jyscal emerging shows that sort of thing happening is rare-to-unheard of, which means that in-universe characters would be completely justified in believing as the Al Bhed do. If we’re looking at an event that has never happened before, or has only happened a few times in recorded history, you’d have a heck of a time proving to a skeptic that it actually did happen.

        You could also argue the incident a couple of different ways. You could argue that the apparent difficulty that Jyscal had emerging, coupled with the rarity of the event, suggests that the souls of the departed don’t usually hang around the portal, and that the images there are just images. You could argue that the fact that Jyscal had to leave the farplane to communicate with the party, rather than approaching them within it, suggests that the inside of the portal is not the true afterlife. You also could argue that Jyscal, as a high ranking member (one of the heads, right?) of the church knows special techniques to preserve the soul after death, which enabled him to partially resist the sending and persist as a very weak form of unsent limited to the region around the portal.

        Not arguing that any of the above are true from an out-of-universe perspective, just that the characters in the story would have a heck of a time drawing firm conclusions from such a rare and ambiguous event.

        1. Fred B-C says:

          What I suspect is that death may be sort of fitful dreams, maybe unpleasant maybe pleasant maybe neutral, but to emerge takes a lot of effort. In Order of the Stick, after Roy dies, they establish quite clearly how easy it is to lose time in a heaven, and that’s in a world where your consciousness is retained quite perfectly after death.

      2. potatoejenkins says:

        I’m confused. Why does it kill the “it’s just an image” theory?

        If it’s the pyre flies projecting the image the image would be able to go wherever pyre flies could go.

        1. ChrisANG says:

          Jyscal’s image is self-willed and carries out a goal that would have been important to the real Jyscal, strongly suggesting that this image is the real Jyscal. He also doesn’t seem to have been called up by the party, suggesting he was able to sense them entering the farplane, and either sense or overhear what was on Yuna’s mind. These things together strongly suggest that you can indeed use the farplane portal to contact the conscious spirits of the dead.

          On the other hand, Jyscal is also the exception that proves the rule. Yuna didn’t go the the farplane expecting to have an actual conversation with her parents about Seymour’s proposal. Wakka’s monologue to Chappu contains at least one question but no pause for an answer; clearly he’s not expecting one. Overall, the scene plays out as though the party visited a graveyard, chatted to some headstones for a while, and then were contacted by the ghost of the antagonist’s father on their way out. Clearly the experience proves that existence can persist after death and sending, but overall it reinforces the characters’ ignorance on the subject more than anything else.

          1. potatoejenkins says:

            What if the pyre flies are (magical) beings projecting images/memories of people who died. They are a part of Spira like air, but the farplane thingy the party visits is their realm, where they come from and where the concentration of pyre flies is the highest (everything we see is a giant compressed image of all kind of memories).

            Jyskals desire to reveal Seymors treachery was so strong the pyre flies had no way to not create an image of him to indulge this desire.

            But the pyre flies do not understand emotion and with time projecting memories and images of people and emotions they don’t understand turns them into monsters.

            The sending summoners do calms the pyre flies and forces them to go back to their realm or leave the places where many people died and the grief and thoughts of grieving loved ones fills the air.

            The Auron we travel with is not Auron. Auron died and the pyre flies created a likeness to fulfill his desire for revenge (?).

            Maybe the pyre flies themselves are kind of sick of Sin and the whole circle and try to aid the party with projecting just the right images to keep them going, give them hope.

            1. Syal says:

              Jyskals desire to reveal Seymors treachery was so strong the pyre flies had no way to not create an image of him to indulge this desire.

              But this involves pyreflies reacting to the will of the dead,; the Al Bhed theory is the dead aren’t involved and the Farplane flies are reacting to what the living visitor wants to see.

  11. Jarenth says:

    …and it pretty much guarantees you'll have to do the fight more than once.

    ‘More than once’? I should have been so lucky. You’re right that this fight is hard because of the tricky zombie/cure/death interplays, but in my fifteen-year-old memories* it’s also just hard, aside from that. I had to do this fight five times.

    *’Fifteen-year-old both in that this game came out fifteen years ago, and that I was fifteen when I played it, as it turns out.

  12. John the Savage says:

    I know that these posts are written to highlight the bigger picture, and so certain things are omitted, but I wish the flashbacks of Braska’s party had been discussed more. The brief glimpses we get into these three character’s lives are so captivating that their journey is almost more interesting than Tidus and Yuna’s; I would watch the shit out of an animated spinoff of these three. The summoner who was exiled for marrying an Al Bhed, the monk who was shunned for refusing to marry the priest’s daughter, and the drunk who claims to come from a dead civilization, banding together on a journey to defeat Sin, all the while gaining respect and admiration for each other.

    The cutscene with Jecht telling Braska to make him the Fayth is one of the most powerful in the game: every time I watch it, I get choked up at the orchestral swell when Jecht says “I ain’t gettin any younger, so I might as well make myself useful”. When it’s over, Auron loses his composure and physically attacks the image of his younger self, revealing a ton about his character. And the way that Lulu and Wakka practically echo Jecht’s sentiments paints a clear picture of how this has been going on for a thousand years.

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