The Villains of Final Fantasy Week 10 [Game Overview]

Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.

With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.

It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.

Week 1 – Garland
Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia
Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness
Week 4 – Zeromus
Week 5 – Exdeath
Week 6 – Kefka
Week 7 – Sephiroth
Week 8 – Ultimecia
Week 9 – Necron

It’s time for the next generation, the next technological leap of Final Fantasy to its most recent platform, the PS2. With Final Fantasy X we finally achieved the cinematic storytelling goals Sakaguchi had been chasing so long thanks to one major innovation: voice acting. I’m not sure how well the Japanese vocal track worked, but let’s just say that some of the English voices, namely Tidus, Yuna, Lulu, and Khimari are just not that great.

Even with the voice acting of some of the principal characters being amateurish, the story really excelled. In fact, it’s the first Final Fantasy story I enjoyed post Final Fantasy VI. The basic gist of it is that Tidus has appeared in a new world called Spira where he accompanies Yuna on a pilgrimage to expel an ancient evil called Sin. Along the way Tidus learns that at the end of her quest, Yuna will have to die to complete the ritual, but that will only result in halting Sin until the next outbreak. What’s more, it seems that the person who silences Sin will become Sin after death.

There’s a lot more to it than that, namely with respect to where Tidus and his father, Jecht, come from, but it turns out that Jecht sacrificed himself to become Sin as part of Lord Braska’s ritual. This ultimately leads to a very dramatic confrontation between Tidus and his real bastard of a father during the final few bosses.

The actual final boss is Yu Yevon, the force that’s keeping Jecht in its thrall. All of this constitutes Sin, an ancient evil that terrorizes villages haphazardly, but it is not a conscious evil, it simply is and it simply destroys. The fact that the very people who have to stop Sin over and over eventually become Sin is what impresses me so much about this boss.

Evil Rating:

It does some major, major killing, but it really doesn’t know what it’s doing. It gets points for destruction, but avoids more points by being ignorant of it.

4/10

Cool Rating:

It does look like a slug that flies, but its also the reincarnated souls of the very people who stop it. Way cool.

7/10

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