12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 1There’s a scene about halfway through Final Fantasy X where the pope and cardinals of the game’s central religion reveal themselves all to be ghosts, revenants a thousand years into a planned eternity of subjugating the scattered vestiges of society. The traditions of dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living, and so on and so forth. This is perhaps the closest the game gets to doing something interesting, so it’s pretty damning that it’s so far removed from the main cast of the game. I’ll try to work backwards from there.Summoner Yuna is a lamb for the slaughter. Every part of her, from her parentage to her religious indoctrination, was deliberately crafted in preparation for her eventual self-sacrifice. Like Jesus Christ she is here to take on the sins of the world, but since this is an RPG the concept of sin is rendered literal in the form of a giant leviathan named…. Sin. Final Fantasy X takes the form of Yuna’s pilgrimage across the continent of Spira on foot, visiting holy sites and gathering power in preparation for freeing the world from the giant whale calamity until it comes back in like ten years.a pox on square enix for watermarking all my switch screenshots, although I’m glad they at least took the opportunity to… credit the character designer?It’s not a terrible premise, and I do love a good narrative about this specific flavor of doomed priestess (see: The Tombs of Atuan, Baldur’s Gate 3, Harrow the Ninth). But this particular kind of story demands interiority, to be able to understand her thoughts and empathize with how she’s handling the impossible weight placed on her from birth. And unfortunately, we’re not playing as Yuna, instead interacting with her from the perspective of Tidus, a Zanarkandian yankee in Yu Yevon’s court.Tidus is one of those protagonists where you take one look at him and can immediately infer the thousands of message board wars that have been fought over him through the decades. He’d be a weird protagonist in any game, seeing as he’s essentially a football player who gets shunted into the far future where society has been torn to pieces and the only organized entertainment left is football. Knowing this, you’d expect his arc to play out as a form of wish fulfillment isekai, but he throws that all away pretty quickly to pledge his service as Yuna’s knight, taking with him only the question of what brought him to this land and an unfulfilled grudge against his abusive dad.This may come as a scalding take, but the central relationship between Tidus and Yuna is fine. Sweet, even, in a few moments such as the infamous AH HA HA HA HA cutscene where the extreme stiltedness is the point and they break out in genuine laughter about it shortly after. Since it’s supposed to be the emotional core of the story, it’s truly unfortunate that the game’s presentation actively works against it much of the time. The voice acting situation is dire in ways I could not have imagined, having grown up slightly after they had sorted out the awkwardness of the early PS2 era. Every line in the English dub of the game is tuned to the Japanese lip flap, resulting in unexpectedly fast or slow line reads constantly taking you out of whatever mood the game intended. It comes off as a shockingly amateur production, especially when compared to games from the prior generation where the characters didn’t even have moving mouths to orient dialogue around. The cutscene direction is also fairly uninspired, refusing to take any cinematic inspiration even though Metal Gear Solid had already set the gold standard there. And as if Square is afraid that you’ll fail to parse the intent of the dialogue because of the failed execution, they resort to fucking Wonder Years voiceovers at the end of cutscenes as well. Unfortunately, I have taken on Tidus’ begrudging delivery of “my old man”. It’s just too much fun to say.I’ve only really been talking about Tidus and Yuna so far, but Final Fantasy X has a seven-person party, which is thoroughly overloaded from both a gameplay and a narrative perspective. To lighting-round my thoughts on them: Lulu is genuinely good and I wish we got more of her, Auron is mostly there for vibes and aura(on) but that’s fine, Kihmahri is the classic “why are you here” pick but Rikku is the one with the real startling lack of moments (she’s really only there as a conceptual bridge between Yuna and the Al Bhed), and it’s really cool that Wakka’s whole arc is about how you shouldn’t be racist and also he’s voiced by John DiMaggio doing a Jamaican accent.I do love the occasional pre-rendered rooms, charmingly vestigial from the PS1 games Most of this game’s immediate plot beats fall apart upon the lightest examination, leaving the characters and their interactions with one another pretty weak. You want a strong cast for your 40-hour JRPG, and FFX simply does not have that. Being haunted and tortured by the past is probably the best of its broader themes – it’s neat how those pope-ghosts from earlier are trying to reify their control over Spira’s people at all costs, in direct opposition to Yuna’s job of sending away the dead, even though they are both different arms of the same church. They turn out to be directly backed by Yu Yevon, the religion’s founder who is even more of a ghost haunting the living. He chose to become a millennia-long calamity on all of Spira rather than accept the loss of his city, preserving it in a dream as he forced the real world to crumble to ruin. This is, straightforwardly, the original sin! Of course, this sequence of events is told in the most haphazard manner over dozens of hours because it’s a square jerpig.Yuna’s pilgrimage manifests as a series of discrete maps that all happen to be near-straight lines stitched together. Spira is truly fractured – Sin has destroyed any possibility of large-scale society and forced almost everyone into small, isolated villages. But this game is not particularly concerned with having the areas you’re travelling through blend neatly into one another, leaving some very stark transitions. Why are the Thunder Plains in the middle of a larger forest area? Why is Bevelle essentially just a cutscene rather than the fortified temple city-state it’s implied to be? All of this adds up to Spira not feeling particularly “real”, and this is a story that only really works if the world coheres. The Calm Lands are the biggest joke of all – a gigantic and completely flat plains area with the camera wayyy zoomed out, that cannot even be appreciated as a set piece because the random encounter rate is just as severe as the rest of the game. In the lore it was the site of a previous Sin battle, and that’s just… never followed up on. It’s an empty, useless area that is chewed through and never returned to rather than a site of reflection. They should have discarded it entirely – the Zanarkand ruins already have that covered!xenoblade has really spoiled me on JRPG vistas, but even then this one is so roughMuch of FFX feels similarly wasteful. This can be a very pretty game (especially the HD remaster), but you just kind of burn through area after area, which results in most failing to leave a real lasting impression. I understand that the spectacle is part of the appeal (hence the 45-second summoning and boss animations, which I do adore), but this design methodology doesn’t do it for me. The bosses early on are genuinely neat gimmicks, the midgame bosses require some strategizing and team composition tweaks, and then the endgame bosses are largely nightmares that must be grinded through, whether that’s getting specific equipment that counters them or breaking through a DPS check. Of course, none of the pre-battle cutscenes can be skipped, so be prepared to watch that five-minute scene where Seymour tells Kihmahri that he’s genocided the Ronso at least half a dozen times.Speaking of, Seymour is our midgame fake-out antagonist, a store-brand Sephiroth from his hair to his plan. He wants power at all costs and is in on the game, planning to become the next incarnation of Sin in order to destroy the world and remake it in his own image or whatever. He’s goofy as hell, painfully obvious, and I am not a fan of whatever they were trying to imply with his mixed-race heritage. Nothing this game has to say about race is good – they never completely drop the ball with them, but the Al Bhed are still a nothing diaspora metaphor.The roads of Spira contain few NPCs and even fewer sidequests, contributing to the feeling of an unceasing march forwards to Zanarkand (the less that can be said about the arcane temple puzzles that exist solely for padding, the better.) It makes it all the stranger when in the final hours of the game you are granted an airship and the opportunity to fast-travel to all of the previous areas, which are suddenly peppered with side-quests, bonus dungeons, and all sorts of other additional content. You’re literally about to enter Sin itself when this happens– both you and your party are prepared to see things through to the bitter end, whatever it takes, not to breed God Chocobos or hunt down the Ultima Weapon or whatever else is on offer. The tonal whiplash is nigh unbelievable, and while I’m glad that they ran with this idea for X-2, it’s completely unwelcome here. Back on the main path, the plot ultimately boils down to extremely simple terms: everything bad is Sin. Yu Yevon is Sin. The illusion of Zanarkand is Sin. Seymour wants to be Sin. The super-weapon from the ancient Machina war is Sin. Yunalesca perpetuates Sin. And of course, your old man Jecht is Sin.Perhaps my favorite example of FFX’s unintentionally hilarious voice acting is when Tidus finally confronts his dad’s lingering spirit at the very end of the game. He’s choking up, trying to get across his impossibly conflicted feelings towards Jecht in the little time they have together before he fully loses himself to Sin. “I hate you” would be a difficult line read here even in the best of circumstances, and what do we get? “Ihateyou.” Poetry.I’m making it your problemJecht’s battle theme, by the way, is dire early-2000s growly metal performed by a hardcore guy who was scouted by squeenix as he was touring Japan with the explicit intent of spreading straight edge culture. That’s why it’s unintentionally the perfect score for fighting against your evil dad who has willingly become the fuel for continued religious subjugation – it spells out all too clearly how the natural endpoint of sXe is just missionary work. 180,000 points of damage later, the fight concludes and Tidus dies, Yuna lives, roll credits.what mixing puritanism and punk will do to a mfUltimately, I harbor little love for this game, as it fails at the bulk of what it sets out to do. But the worst thing is that even just five months out from beating it, I can already feel my mind trying to twist it all into a positive and fulfilling experience. The soundtrack definitely helps. Even as I write this post, Spira Unplugged is playing on repeat in my head, smoothing over all the plot nonsense and miserable gameplay to create pleasant oceanside memories. I think that’s why FFX is regarded high in franchise retrospectives – it’s a game that holds up extremely well in your mind, far better than actually playing it. The stars aligned to make a nostalgia monster, and I think that’s actually incredibly fitting. We have to lay Final Fantasy X to rest. We cannot let it continue to rule over us through nice memories and dreams. We have to send it away, and move on with ourselves.
Dec 14, 2025 • Subscribe
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