Introduction

Hi! I'm Consuelo, a Chilean-American ex-Mormon ex-woman illustrator who got into the Final Fantasy series after picking up FF7 Remake and realizing I needed to play the original FF7 in order to make sense of it. I have not been able to escape Final Fantasy ever since, as my friends should know. I have like 4 different Final Fantasy MTG commander decks. Three are made from scratch, but the one that isn't is a modified version of the Final Fantasy X precon, because out of all the Final Fantasies I have played so far, X has soared to the top of my tier list.

You see, the story of Final Fantasy X resonated with me in multiple ways. The story of Yuna and her family members discovering the hypocrisy and lies told about her religion's history, and how it perpetuates extremely harmful attitudes such as racism and sexism, resonated powerfully with me as an ex-Mormon. Especially since, like Yuna, I never questioned my beliefs until I was 18, only one year older than Yuna is in-game. I also resonated with Tidus' storyline, which directly portrayed and addressed verbal abuse and toxic masculinity that resonated with my own failures at being trans-masculine nonbinary. Because really, why would anyone just accept that an emotional person with a high pitched voice is a man?

So when I finally finished my first full playthrough of FFX, the HD Remaster on my PS5 had a whole slew of videos and games lined up for me after it was done, elaborating on what happened after the ending. I was most excited to see FFX-2, because it seemed like it was all about Yuna growing into a new person after the events of FFX. I think that's great! An adventure of a woman who dares to have desires, dares to be unchaste, dares to move heaven and earth to break the rules of the world and do something truly miraculous? Sign me the fuck up! I wanna see that story be told!

That is not the story I got. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about it ever since I played it. It's sexist, it's shallow, it misunderstands everything I loved about Yuna, it disrespects almost everyone in Spira, and it doesn't even have a coherent throughline that I can chew on because the priorities are fucked and things Just Happen. And you know what, I would really like to stop thinking about it.

That's why I've made this video essay. I knew that by writing it all down, gathering evidence for why I think the way I do (shout outs to all the feminists and cult survivors I will be citing throughout this video), reading it aloud, making the video element, and sharing it with others, this stupid fucking game will no longer have any power over me and I never have to think about Final Fantasy X-2 ever again.

With the disclaimers out of the way, let me present to you all my video essay:

I Wish I liked FFX-2

or,

How the Pee-pee Poo-poo Song Inspired Within Me a Seething Rage

Part 1: FFX Recap

Final Fantasy X-2 is the first direct and numbered sequel to a Final Fantasy game, and thus a lot of it relies on X's context and lore to make sense of what's going on. I'll need to do a big recap of the plot for the sake of context, because the world of Spira is lifted wholesale from the original game complete with reused assets. As details become relevant I will bring them up there as well. This is going to take a while to explain, but if you're already familiar then feel free to skip to this timestamp/chapter in the video (TIMESTAMP).

Lore You Need to Know

In the world of Spira, where FFX and X-2 take place, there exist these mysterious balls of light called pyreflies, which are connected to the souls of the dead. When you die in this world, your soul needs to be Sent to the afterlife, called the Farplane, otherwise you assimilate with other peoples' pyreflies and form into a fiend, though sometimes if your will is strong enough and you have Unfinished Business of some kind, you can retain your form and memories as an Unsent, though your existence becomes limited as an Unsent cannot stray from the business they sought to finish.

To make a very long story short (picture of my playtime in my main FFX save file) and get closer to the point, Yuna is a Summoner who has the power to bring these creatures called Aeons into the world. She went on a big pilgrimage to multiple temples so she could Summon more Aeons, but unbeknownst to literally everyone, even himself, Tidus is also an Aeon. Or more accurately, a piece of an Aeon: the city of Dream Zanarkand, which is being constantly summoned by an Unsent Summoner named Yu Yevon. To defend his precious city (the real one was lost to war 1000 years prior) Yu Yevon captures the Aeons of other Summoners and warps them into a giant space whale known as Sin.

At the end of Final Fantasy X, Yuna's team defeats Yu Yevon, permanently destroying Sin, but also puts the Fayth to rest and eliminates all the Aeons, including Dream Zanarkand. Tidus, being a part of Dream Zanarkand, disappeared alongside all the other Aeons, and this devastated Yuna. In the cutscene movie Eternal Calm, Yuna is shown pining for Tidus in her home island of Besaid and getting harangued by political factions in the world who want her hand in marriage for their own power plays. Ultimately she gets out of this funk when her cousin Rikku shows her a sphere that Yuna's guardian Kimahri found while exploring Mt Gagazet. The sphere implies that Tidus might still be alive! And so we lead into FFX-2, as Yuna leaves her home island of Besaid in search of clues to bring Tidus back into her life.

Thematic Shakiness

From what I've encountered talking to people about Final Fantasy X-2's premise, a lot of people take issue with Tidus being alive or returning to life after FFX's ending. Sometimes you have to let go of dreams that cannot exist without harming others. If it were possible to defeat Sin without sacrifice, I think that's what would be the most thematically cogent. But personally, I think Tidus fading away to stop Sin for good is the exact same problem as killing Summoners. When Tidus discovered that Yuna was going to sacrifice herself and all his promises and hopes were put into painful perspective, was it because Yuna, specifically, was going to die? If Tidus dies instead, Yuna will feel the same pain as he does, won't she? These are Romeo and Juliet tier teenagers right here, both willing to die for one another but refusing to let the other one perish, it's kinda funny. The point is supposed to be "don't sacrifice the few for the many."

For the entirety of Final Fantasy X, Yuna was a self-sacrificial girl who lived for her country and wanted nothing more than to alleviate its suffering. She believed with all her heart and soul that the best way to defeat Yu Yevon's giant evil space whale was to become a Summoner, take the pilgrimage to each Fayth in Spira to gain the power to Summon their Aeons, attain the Final Summoning in the ruins of the real Zanarkand, and then die fighting Sin with the Final Aeon. Much of this directly echoes the way Imperial Japan and modern Japanese Nationalists used loyalty to their country as an excuse to grind people down to nothing. In her book Nationalism and Gender, Japanese-American feminist Chizuko Ueno discusses how "the noble self-sacrifice of giving one's life for the state" would valorize them forevermore in the eyes of the oppressive Imperial Japanese regime⁴. This is precisely what Yuna and other Summoners are encouraged to do, and even the people who became Fayth as well: to knowingly walk into danger and die for the sake of others, without questioning how or why the danger is there in the first place. I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the Summoners we see on this current pilgrimage are women, while the leaders of the religion are all men.

Tidus isn't just Yuna's dream of a perfect boyfriend, he's a person who had a life of his own, thoughts, feelings, joys and struggles, all of them just as real as those felt by Yuna and her other guardians. He had a richly complex and painfully human estrangement from his abusive father, he had interests and ideas outside of what Yuna and even the other main characters could imagine. The fact that he thinks outside the box as brazenly and simply as he does, so much so that he pushes others to question things they thought they knew, is how they start unraveling Yevon. I believe Yuna should get Tidus back in her life. Tidus is the one who helped Yuna question what she's decided to do in ways nobody else in her life had been able to. (SCENE: Lulu says 'don't you think we tried to stop her?' / Tidus' questions leading Yuna to reconsider) After many obstacles, Yuna decides that she must stop Sin because she genuinely wants to help the suffering people of Spira. But she draws the line at the last step, where one of her beloved guardians must become a Fayth for her to summon their Aeon. (SCENE: Yuna would gladly die for Spira, but no more)

But Tidus hides that he will die from her, so that she'll continue and finally send all those pyreflies to the farplane. He's doing the same thing that was done to him, lying to the one he loves about his upcoming death because he thinks his death is necessary. The best solution he could come up with was "the same thing but aimed at me"? I hope this makes it understandable why I find all of this counter-thematic to the controlling ideas of FFX. Yuna didn't lose her life, but she did lose the boy who inspired her to live again.

And that's not fair! Yuna went through so much, experienced such deep betrayal, made an intimate connection with someone truly unique, and she can't keep it? She broke every other rule of this world, she defied the teachings of Yevon, she confronted the hypocrisy of the maesters, she played at marriage for a chance to kill this piece of shit Seymour, she has stood firm with a backbone of steel to do what is truly right and change the world to be better than it is. So why can't she do it again?

God I wish this was what the story was focused on.

Part 2: You Just Lost 100% and Must START OVER!

(This title will include a montage of all the Stupidest Moments from FFX-2, such as the opening sequence, chasing the chocobo, the monkey puzzle, Rikku falling on her ass, etc.)

I played this game to see how Yuna brought Tidus back into her life. In order to accomplish that, I must 100% complete the game. It even gives a handy dandy completion tracker in the world map for me to reference as I play! This is the most aggravating thing to do in the world because I must do all sorts of inane, random, and very specific things in order to get the proper 100% completion. Big thanks to Polarthief's GameFAQ that walked me through each individual step with highlights and checklists to make sure I did it all⁵. It's awful. I hated it! Here's the top 10 things I didn't want to do but had to in order to make my OTP canon:

1. Comfort Yuna's blood-relative named Brother (he's actually her cousin) who openly thirsts for her and is fishing for sympathy on the ground after he did something stupid. (misogyny radar pings, some in-game scenes of Brother moaning creepily on the communicators)
2. Be a Salesperson! Do marketing for a gambling ring in the Calm Lands. Sell tickets for an event in the Moonflow. Try to convince random women all over Spira to marry the heir to that gambling ring I mentioned. (radar ping) There is probably at least one more that I'm forgetting.
3. Speak to Tobli (a little penguin-dressed guy) before helping his business associate get his merch safely to their event venue. If done in reverse order I forfeit 100% and can't make Tiduna canon! What's that Past Me? How does this side quest contribute thematically or logically to Tidus coming back to life? (cut myself off and jump to the next item on the list.)
4. Be absolutely certain to do the steps during the Chocobo Chase mission in the correct order, including ignoring Rikku's in-game advice and picking up a certain number of feathers, because if I don't see Rikku fall on her ass then I have forfeited 100%! This is not the only example of a very specific set of things you need to do to get something you need in a later chapter, it's just one of the stupidest, if you ask me. There are many other examples I could point to, like needing to double back into a boss room to pick up something you wouldn't know is there without a guide, which is permanently missable and the only way to get it if you forgot about it is to start from an earlier save! (screaming noises muffled into a pillow)
5. Do horribly designed minigames, everywhere, all the time, such as:
   1. Quick Time Events to fix the towers in the Thunder Plains.
   2. Shoot fiends because some jackass insulted you, your family, your religion, and your hometown and you need to show him who's boss! But you don't actually convince him of anything and he keeps getting away with being a piece of shit despite managing to beat him at his own fucking challenge (misogyny radar pings)
   3. Sphere Break is a math-based minigame where you
   4. Shitty rehearsal minigame before a giant concert that stops a war with a non-sequitur song about people the attending audience doesn't know about.
   5. Give an erotic massage to a woman who stole from you.
   6. Shoot at the fucking baby cactuar who are scattered throughout the world. Literally just. Just fucking shoot at them, find them and shoot at them, shoot at them it doesn't even MATTER if you hit them or not you just have to go in the airship, teleport to where they are, and shoot at them.
6. Stoke malcontent among the survivors of the Ronso genocide that happened in Final Fantasy X, encouraging them to go retaliate against their attackers because if you don't do that you miss a dressphere and, you guessed it, forfeit 100%! (Party popper noises)
7. Watch specific "optional" cutscenes that are actually required and not optional at all. This means you gotta watch footage taken by card-carrying bad guy Logos where he openly points the camera at the girls' butts rather than at the giant mechanical puzzle thing they were working on (misogyny radar ping).
8. Wait at least ten seconds and swap around to multiple cameras in the Mi'ihen Highroad so that a specific culprit for a crime is discovered not by Yuna, but by the hotel proprietor Rin. (radar ping)
9. The shit I had to watch. At the fucking hot springs. I will need to go into more detail about this later as it's related almost exclusively to my misogyny argument. In brief, you must watch dozens of people disrespect a sacred Ronso hot spring by bathing in it, with one scene being the main camera and the rest being an in-universe hidden pervert camera that nobody knows is there except Yuna. (misogyny radar blares an alarm rather than pinging, adds 10 whole points to the counter)

And at number 10, the WORST thing I had to do to make sure I got 100% and could make my OTP canon!

1. Mash the interact button during a cutscene late in the game to make sure Tidus' ghost appears and whistles for Yuna so that it makes sense when she gets out. And if you don't do this, not only do you forfeit 100% (quick party popper noise), you also actively make the scene more incoherent. If you don't mash, then Yuna just kinda falls asleep and phases back onto a platform with no explanation. By the way, you have never needed to mash a button during a cutscene before, and in fact, you must let various other cutscenes in the game play out without any input at all in order to get 100%! The guide I follow recommended I put my controller down every time Maechen went on a long yarn about Spira's history to make sure it didn't get accidentally skipped! This is a counter-intuitive, uncommunicated, and honestly kind of insulting thing to do. Guess what, Yuna! Your boyfriend doesn't exist unless you

   stand in front of him and press A!!!

(Dramatic shaking of things in the scene, audio quality gets worse and I yell harder, until eventually doing an Always Sunny titlecard cutaway)

Happy Break Time
The Job System Combat

Alright look, it isn't healthy to get this angry about a video game. At any time I could decide to stop playing it and have a better day doing something else. However, there are elements of this game that I do enjoy and appreciate, and I don't want to let those things drown in the flood of shit that I hated. So here's the first of several Happy Break Time segments where I discuss something that I do like about this game, starting with the Job System Combat.

One common failure of a game made with dress-up mechanics in mind is a failure to understand the appeal of that kind of play. This gets reflected in a lot of bad "girl games" that either prioritize the act of shopping or the stress of being judged for what you're wearing without recognizing the avenues for self-expression, aesthetic cohesion, or the elements of role-play that draws a child into playing dress-up⁶. This is something that I can say, with confidence, that Final Fantasy has always been one of the best at.

Final Fantasy games have a unique method of combining or switching between character classes known as the Job System. This mechanic is present in Final Fantasy X-2 but is also in III, V, Lightning Returns, and XIV. And from the very beginning, this system was integrated with the fun and appealing elements of dress-up, and specifically in Final Fantasy V and X-2, they express character in everything they wear. The job itself stays the same, for example, Black Mage or White Mage is the same job with the same abilities and outfit no matter who takes on that job. The fun of dress-up appears in how the characters wear the job. (Fashion show runway style demonstration of the designs)

For example, Rikku's version of the White Mage outfit sacrifices the iconic red-trimmed hood in favor of giving her a huge red-and-white headband so that her crazy hairdo is maintained, because her hair is an iconic part of her design that reflects who she is. With her tons of hair and tiny braids, it indicates "wacky" or "all-over-the-place," but not messy, because it's all stacked on top of her head to keep it out of her way, simultaneously keeping her eyes clear and drawing the attention of other to her crazy hairdo, all reflecting who Rikku is: a bubbly but shrewd thief. And it's why her crazy hairdo is present even in outfits that have something that would cover it, like the Samurai helmet becoming a headband, Beserker losing the mantle entirely... really, the only times Rikku's crazy hair isn't visible is when she's either in her mascot outfit or wearing the Black Mage witch's hat, which I can forgive because c'mon. If you're gonna dress up and roleplay Black Mage you gotta have the jumbo witchy hat!

And yes, I am focusing on her hair and not on her bikini, because here's something a lot of people don't realize. Sexiness is taught. Cultural differences will shift one's perspective of what counts as a sexy outfit, and how one "should" respond to it when they see it⁷. The reason someone wants to dress a certain way could be because they are proud of the work they've put into their physique and want to show it off, like a bodybuilder wanting to show off their arms, a dancer wanting to show off their legs, etc. It could also be that it's just hot outside and they want to dress lightly. Dressing sexily or lightly can and should reflect something about the character. And that's why I'm focusing a bit on Rikku here, because she's the most lightly dressed in her default outfit, but her sexy bikini is not the only thing she wears.

While some outfits I find are better designed than others, that mostly comes down to my own taste and preferences for character design. I think the swiss-cheese holes in some of the outfits are kind of ridiculous and ill-suited to some roles. Yuna's Warrior outfit doesn't really look like anything, Rikku's drowning in mustard in the Lady Luck outfit, and Paine's Thief doesn't flatter her at all. Other outfits I think are certified bangers, like Rikku's Gun Mage with the psychedelic color scheme, Paine's epic popped collar on her Songstress outfit, and Yuna's Psychic outfit resembling the Japanese cultural idea of the sukeban, a delinquent girl who leads her own gang of other delinquent girls to do crime. And everyone looks fantastic in Alchemist, Samurai, Black Mage, Gunner, Dark Knight, White Mage, and especially Festivalist.

The Festivalist outfit is an important one to point out, because it's a set of Summer Festival outfits designed by an 8-year-old girl who won a contest⁸. The dress-up game elements of FFX-2 are explicitly and proudly made for the kind of little girl who noticed that every character had her own style, and maintained it in her own designs too. They're so proud of it they included designs made by that kind of little girl! Self-Expression and Roleplay are the key elements to a fun game of dress-up, both virtual and among real life kids.

And it is a role-playing game, so let's play a role! Each outfit (or Dressphere) has unique abilities and bonuses that can be unlocked the more you use them. The most obvious is the ability to cast spells with Mages, but you can also rapid-fire and rack up combos as a gunner, hit extra hard as a Samurai, or summon an animal companion to contribute to the fight as the Trainer. Some jobs have auto-abilities that can prevent status effects, automatically cast some spell when certain conditions are met, and so on. These jobs can synergize with one another as well! The White Mage and two Dark Knights synergize so well I was able to turn the final battles into cakewalks: if you only heal a little bit of health at a time with the White Mage's Pray ability, the Dark Knights continue draining their own HP to deal more damage, since they have abilities that deal damage based on the difference between their maximum HP and their current HP.

And here is the best part. Unlike Final Fantasy III or V, the previous iterations on the Job System, X-2 allows you to swap jobs mid-battle using the Garment Grid system. All your jobs are little dresspheres on this grid, and you move along the grid like a sliding maze. And guess what! Some garment grids have special abilities on the way to changing clothes. This encourages and resonates with the whole point of dress-up, and even slots in nicely to the super-spy elements. It reminds me of Sailor Moon, Totally Spies, and Secret Agent Barbie. Their adventures often or always included infiltrating somewhere suspicious, which meant dressing up in a new outfit and playing the role of whatever you were dressed as to gather more information, and even switching outfits on a dime to avoid detection. And even better!! Final Fantasy X-2's garment grids are accessed mid-battle, so what happens when you switch dresspheres? You do a magical girl transformation sequence!

Everything about this system screams magical girl and super spy, power fantasies for little girls, all popular in girls' media from the early 2000's, all making me grin from ear to ear. It's easily the best part of the game, no notes, I don't even know how the system itself could be improved. For every outfit design I'm not the biggest fan of, there are way more that are executed well. I am so unimaginably stoked that Final Fantasy X-2, for all its other faults and problems, absolutely nailed their combat.

Part 3: These Characters Can't Carry This Story

Okay. Let's solidify what we know so far. Tidus disappears at the end of Final Fantasy X, which I personally think undermines the controlling idea of the game about not sacrificing the few for the greater good. The Eternal Calm cutscene movie gives Yuna (and myself) hope that Tidus can truly return somehow, and Final Fantasy X-2 is thus entered as the direct sequel to Final Fantasy X where Yuna goes on an adventure to bring Tidus back into her life. The girly pop super spy power fantasy of the combat system is phenomenal and top tier, I can't think of any way to make it better beyond "do it more" which is the best problem to have. However, the rest of the gameplay is unfun busywork and poorly implemented minigames that I hated playing through. So... why do them? Why did I bother with ALL of the minigames and try to get 100%?

"To get the OTP back together!" you shout in your mind at the screen. And you're right! For me, that was the whole point of playing the game in the first place. But like I mentioned back in the FFX recap section, not everybody agrees with my feelings about Tidus' loss and think it makes more sense for Yuna to process her grief and move on without him. If that's the case, then really, the only thing you "need" to do in the game is the main story quests, which are signposted pretty clearly. So, what exactly is the main story?

Yuna Causes Problems on Purpose

The Yuna we see in Final Fantasy X-2 is an incoherent character that I don't recognize from FFX. The clearest example I can point to is the way you need to talk to the Ronso in order to get the Trainer dressphere for 100% (party popper gag). To certain Ronso you must preach peace, and to others you have to stoke their ire. You basically say the opposite things to different people for the sake of the gameplay, which reflects that Yuna is playing some kind of 4D chess manipulation game to make the Ronso fight each other for some reason, which is weird!

I wouldn't claim that Yuna is some kind of pacifist, not at all. She has always been a heroic figure who defies what everyone expects from her, and her ultimate goal was always to kill a giant monster that caused problems for everyone. (Lulu lamenting that she couldn't stop Yuna from becoming a Summoner. Yuna heroically vowing to defeat Sin while cradling an injured Tidus. Yuna confronting Seymour about how he killed his dad. The Ronso praising Yuna's backbone in the face of being actively excommunicated, which flows back in to her interactions with the Ronso in FFX-2). I really cannot understand why she would want to deliberately cause infighting on purpose, to the Ronso of all peoples, by walking up to one person and saying the opposite of what she said to another guy in the same damn room just a few moments ago.

So, no. Yuna has not become some hokey manipulator. She has become something a little worse.

Yuna Lost Her Spine

One of the worst lines in the whole game, in my opinion, is this one. (Yuna says "I didn't want to get involved, not like when I was a Summoner." Then she growls and asserts she's a Sphere Hunter now.) Now, that scene seems fine, right? Well, not in context. Because the thing that she's saying she doesn't want to get involved in is the investigation into a sphere with a clue to Tidus.

In Eternal Calm, Rikku shows Yuna a sphere (basically a video tape) with what appears to be Tidus in it, stuck in a cage, arguing with the person holding the camera. This started the entire adventure, and what had Yuna become a Sphere Hunter in the first place: to get spheres and gather clues as to who is in that video, why it looks like Tidus, and if it might help him come back into her life. It is for that reason that she decided to take a really old Sphere discovered by a temple for herself, because this second sphere also had the Tidus Lookalike in it! And this is what happens after seeing it.

(Brother whines about how he doesn't want it anymore. Yuna makes no protest at all, then suddenly decides she wants to hold a solo concert. The rest of the cutscene plays on mute while I talk.) Yuna gives the sphere away after this cutscene, by the way.

Sadly, this is just one of multiple examples of Yuna making no resistance to people who instruct her to do something that goes against her goals. And most of the time, it's instructions from people she doesn't know who assert authority over her in either clumsy ways or sneaky ways. Even when being surprise-interviewed in the city of Luca by Shelinda, a girl from the first game that Yuna should recognize, Yuna fails to make any proper statements and keeps getting steamrolled or even talked over by every other character in the scene. There are more examples, but I'll have to get into those more in the Misogyny Section because, sadly, every other example I have is of a man pushing her around (radar ping).

Yuna is not who she was in X

During one of the most climactic and epic sections of Final Fantasy X, the main antagonist character Seymour Guado essentially kidnaps Yuna to force her to marry him. And while at first it seems she's forced to go along with it and does so demurely and passively, it is revealed that Yuna had a secret plan all along.

Seymour Guado: "You would play at marriage just for a chance to send me?" This is only one of many examples of Yuna in FFX deliberately disobeying people and having a backbone of steel. She maintains her beauty, her politeness, her integrity, and her drive. In FFX-2 Yuna is a pop idol celebrity who is pushed into the sidelines literally all the time.

The Idol stuff sucks because it misunderstand FFX's reasons for dropping that concept in the first place. Yeah, did you know that FFX had this idea of the Summoners being the idols of Spira as well? Yeah, they dropped that from the original game, and for a damn good reason if you ask me! Making Yuna into an idol now cannot work at this point, because when Yuna danced in FFX, it was a dirge. To quote Tidus: "People die and Yuna dances." Why does she enjoy singing and dancing now when it was a grim duty for her in X? Does the game do any work at all to bridge that gap and make it make sense? No! We do not have any understanding or connection to her feelings despite her being the narrator of the damn game. I hate it here.

Yuna's experience as an idol seem very negative and stressful for her, too. She isn't listened to - another pin for the misogyny section. The Macalania woods are dying, but Yuna doesn't even TRY to do anything to help keep it alive, or investigate why it's dying. She was pretty damned determined to defeat Sin for many heroic reasons! Now Yuna just hates the tourists she finds in Zanarkand and Yojimbo's cave. But she bathes in the sacred Ronso hot springs without permission anyway.

Disrespecting Kimahri and the Ronso

The way the Ronso were treated in Final Fantasy X-2 is very thoughtless and sloppy. I've already gone into detail about how Yuna is being a big hypocrite and saying the exact opposite things to different people to make them fight each other for no reasonable reason (100% party popper noise, but quietly). But more broadly, the Ronso are victims of a genocide who have a genuinely meaningful conflict to discuss amongst the survivors of said genocide.No, this is not explored in a thoughtful or nuanced way. So let's back up a bit.

Back in Final Fantasy X, Seymour Guado becomes an Unsent and kills the Ronso on Mt. Gagazet. These are the same Ronso we have seen praise and support Yuna in spite of her being labeled a heretic by the church. This includes the leadership of Kelk Ronso, a Maester: part of the main power structure of Yevon at the time. Seymour is also a Maester, and his betrayal of Kelk is a sign that he's completely off his rocker by now. The only people left behind after his genocidal attack were the Ronso Fangs blitzball team that was out of town, Kimahri Ronso who was one of Yuna's guardians and thus protecting her, and literal children who were hiding in caves. One of the worst parts is that this was not the only genocide committed by Seymour Guado in his horrid pursuit of Yuna.

Home Lost

Before the genocide of the Ronso, Seymour Guado and his butler Tromell worked together and organized an attack on Home, the homebase of the Al Bhed. At this point in the story Seymour leveraged his leadership position not just among the Yevon Maesters, but also as the leader of the Guado people. This attack against Home was directly meantto kidnap Yuna and force her to marry Seymour for his harebrained schemes that don't matter and never work. So, destroying Home and kidnapping Yuna and forcing her to marry an asshole sounds like something anyone would be madabout! However, strangely, the Al Bhed do not seem to have any desire to kick the shit out of the Guado for theirattack on their home base on Bikanel Island. Despite a single small scene early on in Zanarkand where Rikku brings it up, the loss of Home doesn't have much weight to the Al Bhed characters we interact with. But the Ronso do.

Now, if this was the game that I wanted it to be, the game would pay attention to and flesh out the difference in response between the Al Bhed and the Ronso toward the genocide of their peoples by the Guado. They would have some kind of discussion, it would be dramatized in a very engaging way, perhaps included in the gameplay! Maybe they would have like people who refuse to help them, or some Al Bhed who're trying to enact revenge against the Guado at the same time, maybe have some kind of revolutionary group form between the Al Bhed and the Ronso to do attacks on the Guado home, or the Ronso are demonstrated to be in the wrong 100% because the Al Bhed are willing to forgive and forget, somehow, I don't know!

Unfortunately, this game does not even realize that there is a connection between the Al Bhed and the Ronso at all. In fact that was a connection I made completely independently with the power of my imagination and talking about it with my friend Sam. It's not something the game put effort into dramatizing or implementing as part of the Main Story Quest. Ultimately, the only dramatized element of the story that we get is one guy, Garik. He is the mouthpiece of the unsettled Ronso Youth who is so enraged that he wants to do a retaliatory genocide on the Guado people. Kimahri has been elected leader of the Ronso since he was part of the team that defeated Sin once and for all, and he has said no to Garik and the other Ronso Youth repeatedly. But Garik still really wants to kill the Guado, he's mad, he's got no outlet for his rage, and apparently nobody has found anything else for him to do but stew in his feelings unhealthily.

Let's not know what to do TOGETHER!

You might expect that Yuna would be a person that comes in, and with the power of, the outsider perspective, I guess… she facilitates some kind of proper communication between the Guado and the Ronso, right? Or at the very least her two-faced advice she shares when she visits is going to do something to influence the story right? Well, it does! Depending on what you say to all of the Ronso, you get some slightly different sequences. If you decide that you do not care enough to visit Mount Gagazet very often, the Ronso Youth go forward with their genocide of the Guado in Macalania Woods. But what about if you do care about this shit? What if you need to care to get 100% (high speed party popper) and bring Tidus back to life?

Ultimately, there are only three scenes that you get to see about the Ronso sub plot. Establishing the conflict with a short visit where you do your Politicking. Fighting the Ronso Youth who wants to do a genocide at the top of the mountain. Then finally, you watch as Kamahri and Garik admit that neither of them know what they're going to do and decide to not know what they're going to do, together. (The scene itself, unedited). This leads to the Ronso people building a giant statue of Kamahri and praising him for everything that he has done to help the Ronso find their way. (Unedited scene of Kimahri statue reveal) If Yuna helped then she gets a statue too (said dejectledy).

And you know what? What about the Guado? How do they handle all of this bullshit?

Tearing My Hair Out Over the Guado

For whatever reason, the Guado have decided that they are actually weak little babies this entire time, and they have chosen to run away from Guado Salam, and hide in the Macalania woods from the Ronso. However they also state multiple times that they fully expect the Ronso to come and kill them, and even seem eager for them to come and do so. You might remember that I mentioned the Macalania woods are currently dying, and nobody knows why nor doing anything to stop it. Not even the Guado themselves!

This is weird. In fact, it goes completely counter to the Guado attitude from Final Fantasy X! They were reluctant to join with Yevon until the arrival of Jyscal Guado. They rejected Seymour until his return as an adult where he killed his dad and became leader by right of conquest, I guess. And also, they have the ancient and sacred duty to maintain the Farplane! (cutscenes from FFX explaining that the Guado are the Farplane groundskeepers basically). However, during the events of FFX-2, they are no longer in their ancestral homeland taking care of the Farplane. Yuna is rebuffed when she tries to enter, the guard at the gate saying that the Farplane is unstable, and only the Guado could know how to fix it.

Quick tangent. You may think that the reason the Main Story Quest gets so wibbly wobbly and full of possessions and ghost drama is because the Farplane is left untended! After all, we see ghosts try to escape the Farplane in FFX, and our current antagonist is also a ghost. That's a great connection! That would tie in this subplot to the main story and give a great reason for Yuna to want to interact with the Guado and get to the bottom of this mystery. You know what I'm gonna say: that's not how it happens. The ghost in question, Shuyin, has been jellying up peoples' jams since an event in Final Fantasy X, so it has nothing to do with what the Guado have chosen to do.

Who's Running This Clown Show???

This is Tromell. He was explicitly complicit in everything that Seymour Guado did, and helped cover up his crimes by destroying evidence. (cutscene from FFX) Even in this game itself, you get a chance to see a cutscene if you do 100% (party popper), where you see a recording from FFX where Tromell is scheming with Seymour to entrap Yuna in a marriage. Tromell is now the only person left to lead the Guado, and he has chosen to hide in the woods and every time you talk to him he's just like “oh I am so sorry for everything I did, we must die alongside the rest of these woods. I'm sorry, Lady Yuna, but I have developed the same stupid bitch disease that you have also contracted and I cannot do anything at all to govern my people or leadthem anywhere except to die for our sins.”

This really fucking irritates me!! First of all, you're not taking any responsibility at all by hiding in the woods and waiting for death. I mean, what about the children? I see a child literally right there in this screenshot (screenshot) and you still say that you all deserve to die? No, you don't deserve to die, you deserve to give reparations to the people whose homes you destroyed, and families you ripped apart! Hiding away like this, whining and crying about how hard you have it, is reminding me of the DARVO acronym. You're taking the role of the victim, pretending that you had no choice in what you did, that what happened to you now is a surprise and it's going to be so sad because you did not mean to do anything bad, but also you deserve to die because of your actions? God fuck this is so stupid. What is wrong with you people!?

Yuna cannot influence any of the Guado decisions the same way she could poke the Ronso and get them to fight her. You just talk to Tromell a lot in Chapter 1 and then he walks off and you don't have anything to do with them anymore until the final chapter. Anyway, if you got 100% (popper gag) you are able to watch as the Guado return to their ancestral homeland of Guadosalam and have a music party with the spirits of the Macalania woods. The woods are in fact still perishing as we speak. But now Tromell is made the official leader of the Guado. There's some dialogue that tries to smooth this over among the wood spirits, but. Yeah, that's all. That's all we got.

Time to talk about the LeBlanc Syndicate

So who was it that kicked the Guto outside of their ancestry homeland in the first place? Because based on the context clues and the power of my imagination to make connections that probably are not intended or not clearly thought out in this game, it was probably the LeBlanc syndicate. Now we've been putting up with the LeBlanc syndicate for the entire game: Ms. Leblanc, right here (picture), Logos, and Ormi, they are essentially Team Rocket and are obnoxious ineffective villains. (cutscene of LeBlanc Logos and Ormi dangling precariously from a building).

At one point you have to infiltrate the ancestral palace of Guadosalam that LeBlanc has taken over. She didn't even take down the illustrations of the previous Guado leaders from the walls or anything. There are a lot of very unfortunate implications and very confused metaphors going on here. LeBlanc being a blonde human woman kicking out the non-humans Guado to steal their fancy palace gives some right-of-conquest vibes. However, the Guado, as made clear with my previous paragraphs, are not innocent peoples in the first place, so it's like... how am I supposed to respond to this? Am I supposed to be sad that the Guado have been kicked out of their ancestral homeland the way that's so many humans in real life loser land? Or am I supposed to assume this is a good thing? And hey, wait a minute, in the world of Spira people with naturally blond hair are usually members of the Al Bhed, who are also an oppressed group. Is LeBlanc Al Bhed? I don't think so, it doesn't ever come up as any relevant detail to her backstory or something that she seems to care about. I don't know. I don't know how to take this.

Anyway, at one point (specifically that point where Yuna says she doesn't want to get involved in the main plot), Yuna insists on getting back a sphere that Leblanc stole from her while she was away giving the Awesome Sphere to whoever you chose to give it to. So LeBlanc has stolen your stuff and you want to go get it back so you need to get the goon outfits. You need to steal their clothes so that you can infiltrate and get to the thing that you needed back.

One of the places you go to get these outfits, is a hot spring in Mt Gagazet. That hot spring, that I've been teasing out and pointing at this whole essay. It is now finally time to talk about the misogyny in this game.

Part 4: Misogyny in FFX-2

Once upon a time, a woman named Laura Mulvey wrote an essay that is often cited as the origin of the concept of the Male Gaze in cinema and television: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. When I went to read it myself, I found it had a major flaw: it was using Freudian Psychoanalysis, a technique that I find distasteful today for a whole host of reasons that are beyond the scope of this essay to explain (we would be here all day). That doesn't mean I'm throwing the Male Gaze out of the window though, because considering who is making any piece of art and who they are speaking to is a critical element of any successful communication. And in my opinion, art is always in communication with somebody, even if only the artist by their lonesome. So instead, I would like to reframe the concepts of the Male Gaze into something a little more complex and more broadly applicable.

Narrative Dissonance

This idea is rooted in the work of some popular video essayists you may have heard of: Lindsay Ellis, Dan Olsen, and Contrapoints. I'm referencing their work because I admire them and appreciate their assistance in helping me articulate what I'm talking about.

In Lindsay Ellis' video Framing Megan Fox⁹, she explains how the actual plot of the first two Transformers movies, if taken seriously and deciphered beyond the noise and fury of the actual cinematography (this is important), is about bad girl Michaela Banes who loves dressing sexy and fixing up cars going on a journey to discover that Sam Witwicky, like many other men in her life, does not actually love her. Despite having this interesting and meaningful plot right there in the movies, that's not what anybody remembers about the films or about the character Michaela Banes because the film doesn't have an interest in framing it that way. Instead, the cinematography is dedicated to taking tons of photos of her gorgeous figure.

This dissonance is what most people mean when they notice and talk about the Male Gaze. And my personal favorite term for this comes from Dan Olsen expanding upon a concept first defined by Errant Signal's The Debate That Never Took Place^{10 11}. Narrative Dissonance on the whole (or at least, as I see it) is a worthwhile piece of the criticism toolkit and a wonderful muscle to develop for anyone wishing to cultivate a better sense of Media Literacy (tm).

When combining different elements of a complex piece of media like a film, they can either be made in concert with one another by people who are all on the same page and all working toward the same goal, or they could be veering off in wild directions by people who aren't talking enough to one another. That second form of creative work tends to create something I'm probably not going to like very much. Like Final Fantasy X-2.

A Young Girl's Power Fantasy

The opening of FFX-2 is full of girly-pop super spy pop idol power fantasy, where you use your magical girl outfit swapping powers to defeat someone impersonating Yuna. This is pretty out there and a big surprise in comparison to the tone of FFX and even the Eternal Calm cutscene movie, but if I kill the part of me that cringes, I can instead admire the effort they went to in making something that rocket-launched me back to singing karaoke with my only two friends who were girls in the mid-2000's.

This is explicitly stuff that little girls were interested in back in the 2000's! Pop Idols and teen celebrities (Hannah Montana, Victorious, iCarly)! Superheroes and super spies (Totally Spies, Secret Agent Barbie)! Magical Girls (Magical Doremi, Tokyo Mew Mew, Winx Club, W.I.T.C.H.)! They have the pink and purple color palettes and lean in to each girl having a different sense of style. This game's first impression is about being a light-hearted game made for young girls who dream about being a magical pop star super spy when they grow up.

But this game lied to me.

A Grown Man's Sexual Fantasy

I don't have a more coherent way to frame this right now so I'm just going to list out all of the times the game stops dead to objectify the main characters as well as every other woman in the game. Starting with the hot springs on Mt. Gagazet.

Kimahri tells Yuna that he's worried the Sphere Hunters (i.e. the LeBlanc Syndicate) are defiling Mt. Gagazet (scene of him saying so word-for-word). Yuna promises to go up there and stop them. When they get there they find the LeBlanc Syndicate goons bathing in a secluded hot spring and gossiping about how old LeBlanc herself is. This establishes, to me, quite clearly, that the LeBlanc Syndicate goons are in fact defiling the sacred Mt Gagazet by bathing in it. However, if you want that goddamn 100%, you have to run them out of there first and then get "treated" to a cutscene where you defile the hot spring by bathing in it.

And then Rikku gropes Yuna's boobs and tries to grope Paine's as well.

This isn't the end of the pain I felt relating to this goddamn hot spring. For you see, Yuna herself decries people all the time throughout the entire game for doing things to defile sacred ground. She is mad at Cid and Isaaru for "turning Zanarkand Ruins into a tourist trap," which doesn't really land for me because I don't see the problem with creating a heritage site out of a graveyard. Literally no new buildings or attractions are made or anything due to the re-used assets being completely unchanged, so it just looks like a fun tour of an ancient ity. Isaaru's youngest brother Pacce and his friends have a fun little scavenger hunt through the ruins, which is. Kinda dull? But not excessively disrespectful for a children's activity at a historical site. So what's the problem???

Yuna also gets upset and considers not helping people who are trapped inside a cave system with Yojimbo, one of the most powerful Aeons ever, and just leaving them to die! And yet, when she finds the sacred hot springs on Mt. Gagazet, in order to get 100% and fucking revive Tidus, Yuna hypocritically jumps into her bathing suit and has hot-girl summer locker room talk that I've literally never heard any girls say in an all-women's space personally. This is a crystal clear example of men's sexual fantasy creating dissonance with the actual characterization of Yuna and her teammates, and in the same game where it was also quite clearly made to appeal to young girls... it doesn't feel great!

I'm not done complaining about the hot spring. For you see, this is not the last we have to see people bathing in the sacred hot spring, which as I mentioned before is established as something these people shouldn't be doing because we first see antagonists doing it after Kimahri himself tells us he's worried they're defiling his sacred ground. Because it looks like nobody gives a shit about what Kimahri thinks at all! There are so many people who sneak into the hot springs to bathe! Other Ronso! Members of the Youth League! Members of New Yevon! Fucking Tobli bathes in the hot spring.

And you wanna know how we get this footage of all these characters in the hot spring? A pervert camera sneakily installed by Shinra, a child genius who has invented video calls for Spira. In order to get 100% and save Tidus, you have to look at the pervert camera and watch at least eight cutscenes. And because of how the game is made, you have to watch them in order. And they're not all one after another either. You watch the pervert camera who-knows-how-many times to finally bring Yuna's boyfriend back, because this is critical information apparently! If you don't get it then it won't make sense how and why Tidus returns!

Oh wait! It doesn't make sense anyway! This is completely irrelevant sexual fantasy included because I don't even know why! But you gotta do it! You gotta indulge in someone else's peeping tom fantasy in Final Fantasy X-2 because that's how they made this game and if I want to make my OTP canon I have to 100% the game and I hate it!! I hate it so much!!

Belittling of Women

There are more examples of misogyny beyond just this one locus of annoyance, though. It runs deeper than just one location being full of creepy pervert shit that I don't like. Because nobody, and I mean nobody, respects Yuna as a human being.

You saw Rikku groping Yuna in that cutscene, but did you know that Brother also wolf-whistles at her, moans when seeing video of her, talks about her ass with the barkeep? Did you know that at one point Paine says that Yuna "must be getting old" when Yuna is only 19 years old? Did you know that Gippal, Baralai, and Nooj (the new characters created to lead the factions, all men) all have the same excuse for keeping Yuna away from the main Vegnagun threat? All of them insist that Yuna stay out of their business as they deal with Vegnagun on their own, despite Yuna being the most qualified to deal with world-ending threats because she already defeated one before. They couch it as "Yuna's already done so much for Spira" but their point is that Yuna shouldn't be there, even though she clearly wants to be there.

And why are there no women in positions of leadership in Spira? In Final Fantasy X, it was part of the plot that the leadership of the world was exclusively old men, a literal patriarchy that is defied and overcome by a group led by a woman. But in FFX-2, any opportunity for women in power after the fall of the original regime is explicitly defied.

The ex-Crusader Captain Lucil explicitly refuses to lead because she believes Nooj is better. It's implied she wants him to be the leader because she loves him. That's the only reason that I can understand, because Lucil has experience in leadership! She should run the Youth League! And if not Lucil, then what about Dona? Dona was the second most powerful summoner who quit her pilgrimage after seeing the Al Bhed Home destroyed with her own eyes by the Guado in the name of Yevon. You can even ask her why she isn't leading, and all she says is that it's "too much of a hassle" when in other parts of the game it looks like she's managing the entirety of the town of Kilika in the absence of Nooj.

Lastly, there's Cid's very explicit misogyny. He's the leader of the Al Bhed from FFX, and here he's claiming that young girls shouldn't be going on big dangerous adventures. In spite of him allowing Rikku to go on scavenging missions in FFX, and even making her the leader of the scavengers that found Tidus in Baaj Temple (as proven by Rikku being the one who forbids the gang from killing Tidus and everyone obeying her command). This can be agreed with by Yuna, but regardless Rikku and Cid get into a verbal altercation while Yuna muses to herself about how Spira is her family. I do not understand how that has anything to do with what Cid just said.

It Hurts More Because Final Fantasy Is For Girls

In the 90's and early 2000's it was tough as hell to be a gamer and a girl at the same time. My friend Lillian shared the sentiment too. (quote:"It annoyed me as a kid being handed games "made for girls" because it usually was just some variation of Dress up, Janky Horse Game, or Pet or cooking simulater. Now, I do like these games in a vacuum, but damn did it leave me irritated that it was immediately assumed those were my type of games"). Tama Hero ("does there not being any games made for me mean that I'm not allowed to like games?" "these games don't really understand what's fun about dress-up"). Jaiden Animations ("I had a Barbie game as a kid not because I liked Barbie, but because I was a girl who played on my gameboy all the time"). My own experiences!

I remember trying really hard to be taken seriously as a tomboy but being invalidated by other girls because my DS happened to be pink which somehow meant it didn't count as being tomboyish (maybe a gag about the trans flag coming into view as I say all of this?). Games that appealed to girls, or that noticed the women in the audience and leaned into it were rare and hard to find. One of the few places that did so was Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy 2's badass princess Hilda who ran the rebels against the Emperor. Final Fantasy 4's deep and meaningful women characters who refused to be left behind when the men tried to abandon them on Earth while going to fight the final boss on the moon. Final Fantasy 5's Dress Up Job System (see the job system I gushed about in FFX-2), the mostly-female cast, the presence of nonbinary gender nonconforming Faris, Princess Lenna being the leader and also loving to wear sexy clothes, Cara dressing like a little girl playing dress up. Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 9 all having strong romantic subplots and leaning in on the pretty boys. 9's inclusion of gender nonconforming women (Freya) and men (Vivi) and an explicitly, unambiguous nonbinary character (Quina). All the nice things I said about FFX already.

Final Fantasy has done better after this as well. FF13 and its sequels are all about the relationship between Lightning and her sister and the people whose lives they touch. Hope is the first male white mage in the series since FF2's clutch character Minwu. 15 is about princeliness in the same way Revolutionary Girl Utena is about princeliness, and just LOOK at these tall drinks of water got damn. 11 and 14 have gorgeous slutty outfits for all genders they don't care. These games all lean into the Female Gaze, they all respect women no matter how they dress or what their temperament is. (FF15, Prompto gushes about how Cindy was willing to do something dangerous for their sake while Cindy dresses like a Racer Babe. In contrast to FFX-2, where Cid whines about how Yuna and Rikku run off on dangerous adventures and should go back to the kitchen).

Conclusion

I wish I liked FFX-2. It has some stuff that I do really appreciate, but unfortunately that's almost entirely isolated to the combat system. Everything else makes me miserable or angry because I want to take the game seriously, engage with it where it's at, and see my OTP get together at the end. Instead I get a bad story that isn't even about the characters on the box, as those characters instead spend all their time peeping into a hot spring and playing shitty minigames while the real main characters, who are all men who constantly push me away from the main plot, get to do the actually consequential things. All of the cutscenes are shallow with stilted pacing, the worldbuilding gets outright broken in places, and despite being promised a super spy young girls' power fantasy in the introductory scene, I got an older man's teen idol sexual fantasy instead. And if I don't do every little thing in the correct order, my OTP doesn't even get together.

So you know what? Whatever. Fine! I won't play this game anymore. Because at the very least, I know that the canon ending is about Tidus coming back and they lived happily ever after. And there's even one extra tidbit included in the HD Remaster version of X and X-2, an audio drama made to set up a potential plot for X-3. In English, too! I wonder how Yuna and Tidus' relationship develops after they reunited--

(The scene where Yuna breaks up with Tidus because she's "in love with someone else." Dramatic fade out. Then fade in to me, irl, standing dramatically at this one viewpoint for the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge as Radical Highway Act 2 from Shadow Generations fades in.)

For my OTP... I promise you... Revenge!

(Epic Montage of me putting together a wedding scene for Tidus and Yuna out of whatever I have. Crochet dolls in the book nook. 3D models I print out. A big dumb illustration of some kind.)

(Credits roll during this montage)

Credits and Special Thankses

Feedback

• Dascha Cher
• Sam Drake
• Kaylessa
• Lillian
• Taure Rockett
• Evan Stanley
• ThreeJane

(I will need to learn how to make in-site citations like on wikipedia so that this section looks better.)

Footnotes

1. [1]: Spoiler-Free Conclusion.
2. [2]: Nationalism and Gender, Chizuko Ueno, p 167
3. [3]: Final Fantasy X-2 HD | A "Hopefully Correct and Mostly Comprehensive" 100% StoryGuide, Polarthief.
4. [4]: Video Games for Girls: Then and Now, Tama Hero.
5. [5]: Final Fantasy X-2 Ultimania Omega. p 576–577.
6. [6]: Framing Megan Fox: Feminist Theory Part 3 | The Whole Plate: Episode 7, Lindsay Ellis.
7. [7]: Ludonarrative Dissonance, Dan Olsen.
8. [8]: Errant signal - the debate that never took place, Errant Signal.