Final Fantasy X’s war on organised religion

Final Fantasy X has a real problem with organised religion.

Circa 2001 when it originally came out for the PS2, no one was paying attention to that. The games media of the time focused on what would appeal to the everygamer: It was all “Amaaazing graphics” this, and “The first fully-voiced JRPG ever” that (actually untrue – the little-known Septerra Core beat it to that historic punch by almost two years).

What a difference over a decade of retrospect makes.

The infamous laughing scene now seems more meta than absurd. Mentally Photoshop Final Fantasy X director Yoshitori Kitase’s bobbling head on top of Tidus’ body for that part and he’s now howling with atheistic glee. At a blood moon.

FFX is set in a world called Spira, and at base, FFX is a picaresque story from the point of view of someone (Tidus) who is technically from the place he is supposed to be a stranger to.

Kitase’s laughter begins about here.

Day to day life in Spira is characterised by the omnipresent dread that comes from having a million-ton flying sea beast of doom cruising the ocean floor at all times. They called it ‘Sin.’ More Kitase laughter: It looks a lot like the biblical scourge, Leviathan. Maybe it’ll do a barrel roll on your island community this weekend, maybe it won’t.

Sin, eh? Subtle...

The only thing keeping people together, curiously, is the church of Yevon. ‘Church’ is a misnomer seeing as Yevon is Spira. Spira is a theocracy, and despite how colourful and carefree its archipelagos and cities might seem, it is also a fascist theocracy. That kind of dualism is intentional, and represents FFX’s broader Buddhist subtext. Hey what? We’ll get to that. In the meantime, if you go against Yevon, you’re gonna have a bad time.

You Just Gotta Have Fayth

Unlike the fantastic concept of something like Satan, Yevon’s devil is a real and present danger. They’ve even christened it what they want it to represent: Sin. The presence of Sin equals the promise of potential salvation, even though Sin always reappears, even when a summoner like Yuna manages to destroy it. Always.

Yevon placates the masses and maintains their power structure by insisting that Sin will only truly disappear once everyone has properly atoned through following their teachings to the letter. There is no rationale given for why this would work, and especially not when it will work. Nobody questions it. They are too afraid. The absence of technology and education creates a vacuum where “you just gotta have faith” can flourish. Faith in the powers-that-be.

Water is one of the recurring motifs of FFX.

In truth, Sin is no divine punishment. It is the desperate creation of a man, different to machina in form but not function. ‘Machina’ is what FFX calls technology, and it is a massive point of contention. Of little direct mention in the game itself is the Machina War, seemingly the only major event in Spira’s history. It is why scenes of verdancy and ruin coexist so frequently they define the landscape. It’s why Yevon is what it is.

Spira’s saviour is Yevon, and Yevon is Sin, Spira’s oppressor. This cycle is entirely godless. People made it. People sustain it.

1,000 years BT (Before Tidus… this is not an official quantity), the city-states of Bevelle and Zanarkand warred with each other for reasons unknown. Bevelle had advanced technology – machina – on their side, Zanarkand had the ancient magics of its summoners. Bevelle’s weapons were going to win and win easily, so Zanarkand’s leader sacrificed the city’s remaining populace to create Sin. Sin promptly and undesirably rolled over onto Zanarkand and smushed it, ending the Machina War. Sin’s creator? Zanarkand’s leader – a man called Yu Yevon. It’s later revealed that Sin is just armour, and that he is the driving force inside it.

How he came to be Spira’s own Christ figure is a subtle parallel to the many different arguments surrounding who exactly Jesus was. FFX’s point is: Nobody knows, and it is too late for those questions. The more overt parallel is sharp and deliberate: Jesus’ martyrdom created something misunderstood by many and misused by many more. Yu Yevon’s martyrdom did the same. Spira’s saviour is Yevon, and Yevon is Sin, Spira’s oppressor. This cycle is entirely godless. People made it. People sustain it.

Yu Yevon - quite the friendly chap.

It’s important to note that FFX does not take issue with the concept of creationism. Spira itself doesn’t even have a creation myth. Instead, it is hugely critical of what people do with what gives rise to creationism, and under what unique and powerful social circumstances organised religion finds the opportunity to rise in the first place.

In this case, the end of war creates a desperate hope that war will not happen again. Fear is Final Fantasy X’s answer, and fear is exploitable. This is hard to argue with, and we have seen religion-as-regime over and over throughout history. It’s easy for that to happen. Some more radical thinkers even claim that Christianity was designed specifically as a system of control. FFX contends that the entire thing – Yevon – is an accident; a strange turn of events seized by opportunists and culturally ingrained as quickly as possible. In only 1,000 years, the majority of an entire world is indentured to its church. This should, fittingly, be ringing some bells. Clang clang.

He moonlights as Wang in the Tekken games.

FFX even speaks of organised religion’s virtues – in this case, a strong sense of community – as an indictment of its hypocrisy. All races on Spira are united under Yevon, but only so long as they follow the teachings. Being that those teachings seem suspiciously engineered to favour the Dark Ages, the progressive Al Bhed are outcast as heathens for their interest in the technology that defined the Machina War. Machina is aggressively banned by the church.

All races on Spira are united under Yevon, but only so long as they follow the teachings.

That was the wind-up, here’s the pitch: Upon visiting Spira’s holy epicenter Bevelle, machina are to be seen in abundance. The mere suggestion of using them is enough to condemn an entire minority, it seems, but machina “officially sanctioned” by Yevon that fulfill identical and even warlike roles to the ones Rikku and co. go diving for are fine. Yevon’s word is law unlawful to itself: “Machina started our troubles,” is their excuse, “so machina is not allowed. Except for us.”

Machina also gave Bevelle such a decisive advantage during the Machina War with Zanarkand that it forced Yu Yevon to create Sin. They are right and they are wrong, but they are right for the wrong reasons. God vs. science has so far been a losing battle for the former. Take away the people’s means and command their minds. Clang clang.

Anima - a blunt instrument of the game's subtext.

This Is Your Story

Throughout Final Fantasy X, Tidus – and later, Yuna by way of Tidus’ example – periodically insist that, “This is my story.” They do this suddenly, sometimes apropos of nothing. Final Fantasy has long traded in esoteric storytelling, but this line of dialogue never seems to make a lot of sense. One narrative designer, Kazushige Nojima, was insistent the player establish a strong relationship with Tidus for a reason: When Tidus and Yuna say, “This is my story,” they are not talking about themselves. They are insisting that everyone feel the same way about their lives.

This is my story... I guess.

Which is not an easy thing to do when you are being told how to live by other people – people who are people just like you, yet claim to represent something holier than thou. Anything can be dressed up in pomp and ceremony and called divine, says FFX, but what is it really?

All of Yevon’s iconography is based on the Siddham Script used in Shingon Buddhism...

Yevon’s ritualised practices and inescapable doctrine are a patchwork of Shintoism and Catholicism. Even Buddhism is not spared, but here’s the thing: FFX’s treatment of it is organic instead of critical, maybe in recognition of the fact it was never intended as dogma and neither, maybe, were those theologies that preceded it. The kanji that represents the very first aeon Yuna encounters (Valefor) is mu. This is the key Zen Buddhist concept of complete ego suspension; the “total negation of the self.”

In fact, all of Yevon’s iconography is based on the Siddham Script used in Shingon Buddhism, one of the biggest mainstream schools of Japanese Buddhism as well as one of the oldest. Here, the letter A represents Yevon, and Z represents Sin. The sound of that ‘A’ is the meditative core for Shingon Buddhists. In the game, that sound also doubles as the glyph for Yevon as a whole. A-to-Z and back again, this is your story. This is everyone’s story, always.

A representation of the Buddhist concept of nothingness.

Yevon’s leader, Grand Maester Mika, refuses to accept this immutable cycle of living and dying. He is already dead but not properly ‘sent,’ the Sending being a coolly complex dance summoners perform to ensure the dead don’t linger and become vengeful fiends, the game’s enemies. His condition is hugely ironic. For all its antitheism, FFX believes in the human soul. This belief revolves around pyreflies, which are presented as a natural phenomenon that seems to infuse all living things. They themselves are an allusion to the hitodama, Japanese folklore-talk for what the souls of the recently deceased might look like (little flaming ball things).

In FFX, there is no heaven or hell. There is life on Spira, and when there is death, the dead go to the Farplane, a kind of negative space.

In FFX, there is no heaven or hell. There is life on Spira, and when there is death, the dead go to the Farplane, a kind of negative space. The living can even physically visit the shades of their dead in the Guado city of Guadosalam. It’s interesting to note both the Guado’s faith in their own living ‘prophet,’ Maester Seymour (unerring even by Yevonite standards and ultimately their undoing), and that As-Salām is the fifth name of Allah in the Qur’an, 59:23. It translates to ‘The Peace, The Source of Peace and Safety.’ In Islamic tradition, no Muslim can be given any of the 99 names of God, because no human is God’s equivalent. Yet in Guadosalam, everyone can freely enter what might just pass for God’s kingdom.

Maester Seymour - a powerful mage and summoner.

There is zero mystery as to where you go when you die in FFX. Good or bad, the Farplane has no entry requirements. This is a thorn in divinity’s side, because that fear of an uncertain afterlife – some might say, the ultimate human fear – is what frequently forms the backbone of religious direction. Striking this from Yevon’s available tools is one of FFX’s boldest moves, and asks an important question: What is religion if it can’t tend to your existential terror with faith?

Mika and his Yevonites are subsequently revealed as simple politicians, with Mika himself eventually trying to rationalise away his unnatural life by insisting his leadership “is invaluable to Spira.” It’s so invaluable it now only serves to sustain itself and not Spira. No matter how many summoners Yevon sacrifice in needlessly ritualistic pilgrimages, Sin is still there, some 1,000 years later. If it wasn’t, they would become irrelevant.

Blitzball - deeper than you might think.

More immediate than Sin and Yevon or any of that, FFX’s two most prominent and recurring motifs are the sphere, and water (the great game of Blitzball even puts them together as one). In other, less symbolic words, the cyclical nature of planetary life, and change – both of which are mutually exclusive and as true as each other. If it walks like a Yin and talks like a Yang, hey. After lambasting the human perils of most major religions, FFX’s greatest subversion seems to be that the answer, if there is one, is distinctly Buddhist. Just don’t call reality’s philosophy a religion.

After all, the very last thing you do in Final Fantasy X is kill God – and that God looks like a cockroach.

Toby is an Australian freelance writer who just sank 100+ hours into Final Fantasy X HD Remaster. Turns out it's every bit as good now as it was in 2001. You can follow him on Twitter @jane_tobes