Final Fantasy X story

The story of Final Fantasy X is told by Tidus, a sports star from the futuristic metropolis called Zanarkand. During a match, Tidus gets swept up to another world and joins Summoner Yuna and her friends on her journey to save the world of Spira from a rampaging monster known as Sin. Making their way toward the mythical Zanarkand while running into the corrupt undercurrent of Spira's society, Tidus holds onto the hope he will one day find his way back home.
==Story==
===Welcome to Spira===
The party sits around a campfire in silence. Beyond the horizon is a ruined city, covered in pyreflies. Tidus begins to tell his story of how he reached this place.
Tidus's story begins in the metropolis of Zanarkand, where he is signing autographs for fans, thinking it is a typical day as the star player for his blitzball team, the Zanarkand Abes. Amid the opening match of the Jecht Memorial Cup (organized to honor Tidus's father, Jecht, who vanished ten years ago), a gigantic wave enters the city destroying everything in its path. The only person undisturbed by this is Auron, a man who has acted as Tidus's mentor since Jecht's disappearance. Tidus meets up with Auron outside the blitzball stadium, but time stops, and a boy in purple robes appears before him and tells him, "It begins. Don't cry."
After the boy vanishes, Tidus continues after Auron, who reveals the force destroying the city is called "Sin" and gives Tidus "a gift from Jecht", a longsword. The two fight their way through the invading monsters, and when they reach Sin, Auron allows both himself and Tidus to be sucked up into its "maw". Tidus loses consciousness—but not before glimpsing a vision of his father.
When Tidus awakes, he finds himself in a temple ruin where he sets up a camp. When a monster attacks him, a group of strangers blows through the door, and the leader helps Tidus with the battle. Tidus tries to thank his helpers, but they speak a language foreign to him. The people capture him and bring him to their ship, where the leader, a girl named Rikku, says they are Al Bhed, people who use the forbidden machina technology.
For Tidus to stay, he must accompany Rikku on an underwater salvage operation of an ancient airship. Afterward, Tidus tells Rikku about his life in Zanarkand. Rikku is reluctant to believe him, asking if he breathed in Sin's toxin, which is known to induce amnesia. After Tidus assures he was telling the truth, Rikku decides to take his word, but not before telling him that Sin destroyed Zanarkand a thousand years ago, and since Zanarkand is a holy place, it would be wise not to tell any Yevonites about his life there. Shortly after, Sin appears and knocks Tidus off the Salvage Ship.
Tidus wakes up on a sunny beach and is glad to see something familiar: a group of islanders playing blitzball. After showing off his skills, the islanders flock around him, and the leader of the group, Wakka, explains Tidus has arrived at Besaid Island. He is unnerved when Tidus mentions his home city is Zanarkand and chalks up Tidus's behavior to his recent encounters with Sin. Wakka explains Sin is a monster that rose a thousand years ago, destroying the machina cities, including Zanarkand, as a result of human crimes and use of machina.
Wakka leads Tidus to Besaid Village hoping to have him join his blitzball team, the Besaid Aurochs. The team has not won a game in 23 years and needs Tidus's help, even more so since Wakka is quitting to become a full-time guardian. Tidus agrees to join and later follows Wakka into Besaid Temple, a branch of the Spiran religion of Yevon. The apprentice summoner who had begun her trial in the temple the day before hasn't returned. Despite the priest's orders, Tidus goes through the temple's Cloister of Trials to rescue her. Encountering her guardians—the Ronso Kimahri, the black mage Lulu, and Wakka (who'd gone in after him)—Tidus makes it in time to see the summoner, Yuna, exit the Chamber of the Fayth.
Outside, Yuna summons her first aeon, Valefor. Aeons are the physical realization of the dreams of the fayth, souls petrified in stone whose statues lie in every temple of Yevon. The fayth communicate with summoners who pray to them within the temples' Chambers of the Fayth and establish a mental link with the summoner. Through this link, the fayth gives their dream a physical form: an aeon, powerful creatures only a summoner can use in battle.
Later, Yuna wishes to hear more of Tidus's story. Afterward, he overhears Lulu berate Wakka over his interest in Tidus, since she believes Wakka is only protecting him out of memories for his deceased brother, Chappu, whose face resembles Tidus's.
===The pilgrimage begins===
The guardians head out with Yuna on her pilgrimage, a sacred journey across Spira to defeat Sin. Wakka takes Tidus along out of hopes somebody will recognize him at the blitz tournament at Luca. They set out on the S.S. Liki to reach Kilika, and Tidus and Yuna get a chance to talk. Yuna believes Tidus's story, partly because ten years ago a man named Jecht worked as her father's guardian. Yuna is the daughter of High Summoner Braska, the last person to destroy Sin. During the journey, Sin appears, and the party fights it, but fails to stop it from leveling Kilika Port.
In Kilika, Yuna performs the sending, guiding the souls of the dead to the Farplane. Those who die in Spira can leave behind pyreflies, the spiritual energy that comprises everything in Spira. Unless a summoner sends the pyreflies of the dead, they can become fiends, the primary monsters of Spira. The next day, the group enters Kilika Temple to gain the aeon Ifrit. Though Tidus was to stay out of the Cloister of Trials as he is not a guardian, he is tossed in by the guardian of Summoner Dona, who sees Yuna as a rival. Nonetheless, Yuna obtains Ifrit.
The pilgrimage moves to the city of Luca, the second-largest city in Spira, where a blitzball tournament is taking place. Maester Seymour Guado and the elder Grand Maester Yo Mika overlook the competition, which is honoring Mika's 50th year as Grand Maester of Yevon. During the first match, Yuna learns of Auron's presence in Luca. Auron is a legendary guardian to her father, Braska. She has Tidus and Kimahri help her look for him. While Kimahri's rival Ronso, Biran and Yenke, appear to harass him, the Al Bhed Psyches blitzball team kidnaps Yuna to force the Aurochs into surrendering the match. While Wakka handles the game, Tidus joins Lulu and Kimahri to rescue Yuna from the Al Bhed ship, and learns Yuna is half-Al Bhed. Lulu sends a signal to Wakka, who wins the game, ending a 23-year losing streak without Tidus's help.
The next blitzball match is against the Spiran champions, the Luca Goers. After the game, a group of fiends attacks the stadium. Tidus and Wakka fight the beasts with surprise aid from Auron. Seymour's aeon, Anima, dispatches the rest, and Yuna is among the spectators left in awe of the aeon's power. When Tidus and Auron are alone, Auron explains how he, Jecht, and Braska defeated Sin ten years ago and claims that Sin is Jecht. Dumbfounded by this apparent impossibility, Tidus refuses to accept it.
The pilgrimage continues up the Mi'ihen Highroad, now with two new guardians: Auron and Tidus. When the party spends the night at Rin's Travel Agency Yuna explains the goal of the pilgrimage to Tidus: to go to Zanarkand to obtain the Final Aeon, which can destroy Sin. At the highway's north gate, the group is barred entry because of Operation Mi'ihen. Nevertheless, Seymour gets the Crusaders to let Yuna and the party pass.
The Mushroom Rock Road is under occupation by the Crusaders, the military arm of Yevon's clergy. Under the command of Seymour and his fellow maester, Auron's former friend Wen Kinoc, the Crusaders join forces with the Al Bhed to defeat Sin. Operation Mi'ihen involves using Sinspawn as bait to draw Sin to Djose, then attack it with a machina said to be as powerful as the aeons. Wakka, being orthodox to Yevon's teachings and resentful of the Al Bhed, is furious over the plan. Auron stands back, knowing the plan will fail. The operation is a disaster: hundreds of Crusaders die, and Yuna must again perform the sending. Yevon covers its involvement by blaming the defeat on the Crusaders' heresy. Auron explains to Tidus the reason Sin (Jecht) came to the operation was to see his son.
The party enters the Djose Temple to gain the aeon Ixion where they meet fellow summoner Isaaru. There is a rumor that summoners on pilgrimages are disappearing. The party continues to the Moonflow. While crossing the river on a shoopuf, Wakka points to the sunken ruins of a city as an example of what happens to people who use machina. An Al Bhed abducts Yuna into the water, but Tidus and Wakka destroy the machina holding Yuna captive and rescue her. Reaching the other side of the river, they run into Rikku, Yuna's cousin, who was the destroyed machina's pilot. Not wanting to upset Wakka, Tidus and Lulu keep him in the dark about Rikku and Yuna's lineage. Rikku joins the party as Yuna's sixth guardian, with Auron's blessing, who is also aware of her race.
The party moves on to Guadosalam, the city of the Guado, of which Seymour is the leader, as he is half-Guado half-human. He invites the party to his mansion, where he tries to woo Yuna and shows them a sphere recording of what appears to be Tidus's Zanarkand: a glittering metropolis from a thousand years ago. Within the vision is the first summoner to defeat Sin, Lady Yunalesca, and her husband Lord Zaon. Seymour proposes marriage to Yuna, but she avoids answering. Instead, she takes her group to visit the Farplane, the land of the dead that exists inside of Spira, where pyreflies gather to form images of the dead from the visitors' memories.
Rikku believes it to be nothing but an illusion and chooses not to enter. Auron stays behind as well, though he does not give a reason. Inside, Tidus finds Jecht does not appear, meaning he may still be alive as Sin. Tidus accidentally summons the image of his mother, who, as Yuna explains, must have accepted death and entered the Farplane without needing a sending. One of the reasons Tidus resents his father is that his mother had lost the will to live after he went missing.
Seymour's father, Jyscal Guado, leaves the Farplane as an "unsent", a ghost created from a person who dies "an unclean death". Yuna sends Jyscal, and during the ceremony, Auron falls upon his knees, significantly weakened. A sphere recording appears from the unsent, which Yuna snatches up. While Yuna enters the Guado manor intending to discuss Jyscal, Seymour has already left for Macalania, where the group heads next.
Rikku panics when the group reaches the Thunder Plains, and halfway across, they stay at a Rin's Travel Agency to calm her. Rikku has severe astraphobia—fear of thunder—left over from a past mishap when her brother aimed a Thunder spell at an attacking fiend, except it missed and hit her instead. While staying at the agency Yuna privately views the contents of Jyscal's sphere recording. Before the group enters the Macalania Woods, Yuna announces she will accept Seymour's offer of matrimony. Auron guesses Yuna is hoping to negotiate something with Seymour, and that she doesn't want the others involved.
===The true face of Yevon===
While passing through the Macalania Woods, Auron hacks his way through an overgrown sidepath to reveal a spring with pyrefly-infused water used to create spheres. After fighting the Spherimorph, a movie sphere from Jecht is left behind that shows snippets of Braska's pilgrimage. It includes a sentimental message from Jecht to Tidus. Auron explains Jecht had accepted his fate to remain in Spira and assist Braska in defeating Sin, and later tells Tidus that Jecht loved his son but didn't know how to express it. Tidus is unsure how to react, as the main things he remembers of Jecht are the times he used to reproach him.
After leaving the woods, the group is met by Tromell, Seymour's butler, who leads Yuna into the Macalania Temple to prepare for the wedding. The Al Bhed ambush them with Rikku's brother among the group. The Al Bhed try to stop Yuna's pilgrimage by unleashing the powerful Crawler, which Yuna's guardians destroy. Wakka learns Rikku is an Al Bhed and expresses his disgust at the "heathen". Angry that no one is taking his side, Wakka heads to Macalania Temple on foot, while the others ride on machina sleds. (Depending on the affection levels, Tidus will either ride with Rikku, Lulu, Auron, or Kimahri.)
If Tidus rides with Rikku, he'll learn that Rikku and Yuna are cousins. Rikku explains the Al Bhed want to protect the pilgrimaging summoners because they disagree with the summoners sacrificing themselves to bring happiness to Spira. If he rides with Lulu, Tidus comes to understand Wakka's hatred towards the Al Bhed, which stems from the way Wakka's brother Chappu died: while wielding a forbidden machina weapon of Al Bhed origin. He asks Lulu if a human can become Sin, and she finally believes Tidus comes from another world.
At the temple, the party comes upon the sphere Yuna had retrieved from the unsent Jyscal. It shows Seymour murdered his father to succeed him as maester and the leader of the Guado. The party confronts Seymour outside the Chamber of the Fayth and, with the new aeon Shiva, is forced to kill him when he turns on them. An angered Tromell takes away Seymour's body before Yuna can send him, and breaks the sphere that proves Seymour's crimes. Now dubbed traitors, the party flees the temple with Guado soldiers in pursuit. They escape when a yeti-like fiend sends them plummeting through the ice of the frozen Lake Macalania.
They land atop an underground mass near the bottom of the temple. Yuna reveals that in exchange for marriage, she was hoping to have Seymour turn himself in for his crimes. Auron reminds her the pilgrimage is more critical, saying that the fayth are the ones that give power to the summoners, not the temples or the teachings. The ground begins to shake, and the party realizes they had landed atop a docile Sin that had been listening to the "Hymn of the Fayth" emanating from the temple, a song Jecht used to be fond of. Sin knocks the party unconscious as it begins to stir, Tidus accepting that Sin is his father.
Awaking on Bikanel Island, Tidus finds himself alone by an oasis. He rounds up his fellow guardians, but cannot find Yuna. Rikku leads the group to the secret Al Bhed city of Home, which is under siege by Guado forces. Fighting through the invasion, the party finds the summoners Dona and Isaaru taken by the Al Bhed to the Summoners' Sanctum. Tidus suffers an emotional breakdown after he discovers the truth behind the pilgrimage: summoning the Final Aeon will kill the summoner, and Yuna will meet the same fate if she completes her journey.
The group boards the Al Bhed airship, the Fahrenheit (the airship Tidus and Rikku salvaged upon their first meeting), captained by Rikku's father and Yuna's uncle, Cid. The ship takes off with Tidus's group and most of the Al Bhed on board. Cid blows up Home with the airship's missile system to take out the invading forces. The party learns Yuna has been taken by the Guado to the now-unsent Seymour to be married.
thumb|Yuna and Seymour's wedding.
The party finds Yuna at the capital city of Bevelle amid a wedding ceremony with Seymour. Tidus and his group crash the wedding and force their way through, and Yuna tries to send Seymour. Grand Maester Mika stops her by having Tidus and company held at gunpoint by warrior monks and Wen Kinoc. After the ceremony, Yuna threatens to dive off the tower if Seymour won't release her guardians. She lets herself fall off the tower, but summons Valefor in midair and heads to the Cloister of Trials.
Rikku throws a flash bomb to distract Seymour and the guards, allowing Yuna's guardians to escape. Along the way to Bevelle's Chamber of the Fayth, they discover several machina inside the temple; Auron confirms that this is the "true face of Yevon: they betray their own teachings." Yuna gains the aeon Bahamut, but the group is arrested. The maesters of Yevon put Yuna and her guardians on trial, where they press their case, claiming Seymour should be sent to the Farplane. Grand Maester Mika reveals he is also an unsent, and it seems they are without allies except for the Ronso maester, Kelk Ronso, who leaves Yevon, troubled by Jyscal's murder.
While imprisoned, Auron tells Tidus about the "spiral of death" that traps Spira: the summoners sacrifice themselves to defeat Sin, but Sin will always return. Yuna and her guardians are deemed traitors and sentenced to the Via Purifico, a dungeon said to be inescapable. After reuniting with her guardians and making her way to the exit, Yuna is confronted by Isaaru, who places his loyalty to Yevon above his friendship to Yuna. They duel with their aeons and Isaaru is soundly beaten. Making their way to Bevelle's exit, the party finds Seymour with Kinoc's corpse. Seymour reveals his plan is to "save" Spira from its cycle of death by becoming Sin and destroying all life. This is why he wanted to marry Yuna: he knows the truth behind the Final Summoning. Seymour absorbs the pyreflies from Maester Kinoc's body, which he can do now that he is an unsent, and transforms into Seymour Natus, but is defeated.
===Revelations===
Leaving Bevelle for the Macalania Woods, Yuna, her faith in Yevon shaken, goes off into the woods to be alone. Tidus follows and finds Yuna in the spring. He reveals he knows the truth behind the Final Summoning and apologizes for talking about life "after" defeating Sin, believing he had only depressed Yuna. Yuna says his words had made her happy. Tidus tries to persuade Yuna to quit the pilgrimage and stay with him, and though tempted, Yuna cannot allow Sin to run rampant across Spira. She breaks down in tears, and Tidus comforts her, and they embrace and share a kiss under the full moon. They return to the party to continue their journey into the Calm Lands and onward to Mt. Gagazet.
Before crossing Gagazet, Kelk and his tribe of Ronso give Yuna their blessing after witnessing her resolve and courage, and Kimahri proves his worth to his rivals. Tidus and Rikku are intent on finding a way to save her. A pursuing Seymour attacks the Ronso, and many are slaughtered, including Kelk, Biran, and Yenke. The party struggles through the frigid mountain before they run into Seymour, who transforms into Seymour Flux. Despite Seymour's growing powers, the party defeats him again. After the battle, Yuna and the guardians learn of Sin's identity as Jecht.
Near the mountain peak, the group comes across a fountain of fayth lost in dreams. Tidus suffers a vision of his home in Zanarkand, and while there, meets the boy in purple robes he saw at the beginning of his journey. The boy is the fayth of Bahamut, a soul in stasis whose petrified physical body is in Bevelle's Chamber of the Fayth, but whose spirit is free to wander. The fayth reveals Sin was created to leave Spira forever backward so Tidus's Zanarkand could exist eternally without being detected, and that the Zanarkand Tidus hails from is only a dream created by the fayth. Tidus, Jecht, and everybody else from the city are nothing but "dreams of the fayth" who will cease to exist once Sin is genuinely defeated.
As Jecht and Tidus have both been "touched by Sin" they have been made real and have a chance of destroying it. The fayth asks Tidus to defeat Sin and free the fayth of their burden of sustaining "Dream Zanarkand". Tidus accepts, even while knowing doing so will mean he will disappear. After he returns to consciousness, Tidus keeps what he learned to himself.
After passing through Mt. Gagazet, the party comes to the ruins of the original Zanarkand where the pilgrimage is to terminate, and Tidus's retelling of the events ends. The ruins' pyreflies are so numerous they display visions of past summoners who came through to defeat Sin. The party even witnesses an apparition of a young Seymour, whose mother had given up her life to become the fayth of Anima.
They meet Lady Yunalesca in the Zanarkand Dome, now an unsent after her battle with Sin 1,000 years ago. They learn that they must sacrifice a guardian to create the fayth for the Final Aeon. They glimpse into the past into Braska's pilgrimage, where Jecht became the fayth for Braska's Final Aeon. The Final Aeon can only defeat Sin for a short time, for after a summoner vanquishes the old Sin, the Final Aeon is transformed into a new Sin, and thus whoever becomes the Final Aeon will later become Sin, continuing the spiral of death.
Yuna refuses to partake in what she calls a "false tradition" as she does not wish to sacrifice any of her guardians. Yunalesca believes that without faith in the Final Summoning, and the hope it's meant to bring, Yuna will succumb to despair, and decides to kill her and free her from such a fate. The party sees a vision of young Auron; distraught about Braska's death and Jecht's transformation, Auron confronted Yunalesca but was killed, making him presently an unsent.
In the present time, Auron rallies his team to attack Yunalesca. Though Yunalesca is strong, the party prevails and destroys her, forever ending the practice of Final Summoning as Yunalesca is the only one who can make the fayth for the Final Aeon. Before she fades, Yunalesca mentions that "Even if there was another way... even if you did destroy Sin... Yu Yevon the immortal will only create Sin anew."
===Defeating Sin===
With Yunalesca gone, the party needs to find a new way to defeat Sin. Cid arrives in the Fahrenheit to pick them up, and they brainstorm a strategy. Yevon is in disarray with the deaths of so many maesters, and Tidus and his party land in Bevelle during the crisis to confront Yo Mika. When Mika learns they have not gained the Final Aeon and have instead eliminated it for all eternity, he believes Spira is doomed by Yu Yevon's spiral of destruction and the despair it engenders. Mika willingly departs for the Farplane, and his body dissolves into pyreflies.
The party comes up with a plan to beat Sin: they will subdue Sin by having all of Spira sing Jecht's favorite song, the "Hymn of the Fayth", and then attack onboard the Fahrenheit. The attack begins as planned, and eventually the monster opens up its mouth to suck in the Fahrenheit. Inside Sin they find Seymour whose pyreflies Sin had absorbed from the atmosphere. Despite yet another powerful form, Seymour Omnis, the party defeats him once again. With nowhere for him to run, Yuna sends the rogue maester. Before disappearing, Seymour is glad it was Yuna who would send him, but believes that even if they defeated Sin, Spira's sorrow would continue.
At Sin's Core, in a place similar to the blitzball stadium from Dream Zanarkand, Tidus is reunited with his father, who only has a short time left before his mind becomes Sin's entirely. Jecht turns into Braska's Final Aeon, Sin's true form, but the party kills Jecht and saves him from the nightmare of being Sin. Jecht says goodbye to Tidus and scolds him for crying, but the battle is not over yet.
Yu Yevon is an ancient summoner hailing from the original Zanarkand of 1,000 years ago, and Yunalesca's father. When he saw Zanarkand doomed to be destroyed in the Machina War, he performed a summoning so immense that he lost his humanity: he transformed Zanarkand's survivors into fayth and used their collective dream to summon Dream Zanarkand to preserve the city's memory forever. To ensure the continuation of the summoning, he clad himself in living armor made out of pyreflies it would collect from the atmosphere, which became known as the monster Sin. Its purpose is to stop Spira's technological advancement in machina use and to ensure Dream Zanarkand—which was summoned far out to sea—would never be discovered by mortals. Whenever a Final Aeon pierces Yu Yevon's armor, he will possess the Final Aeon and mold it into a new Sin. The time Yu Yevon spends remaking Sin after the old one's demise is known to the Spirans as the Calm. The Yevon Temple arose to deify the phenomenon, all the while knowing the Final Summoning will never defeat Sin permanently.
Yu Yevon is but a husk of his former self, and what remains of him requires an aeon to inhabit. After Braska's Final Aeon dies, Yu Yevon takes over Yuna's aeons one by one. The party destroys each aeon as Yu Yevon possesses them, and with nowhere left to hide, Yu Yevon himself appears, revealed to be little more than a floating bug-like creature. The party destroys Yu Yevon, and thus, Sin.
Auron, his mission complete, requests that Yuna send him. With the fayth retiring from their 1,000-year dream, Tidus bids farewell as he fades from existence. Though Yuna tries to stop him from leaving, she falls right through him. Yuna proclaims her love for him (in the original Japanese version, she thanks him instead) and Tidus embraces her. He jumps off the edge of the Fahrenheit, falling through the clouds, where he sees Braska, Auron, and Jecht waiting for him in the Farplane and high-fives Jecht, symbolizing that he has reconciled with his father.
===Epilogue===
Now a high summoner, Yuna gives a speech at the Luca blitzball stadium about Spira's future: Sin is finally dead, and Spira is theirs again after 1,000 years of terror. The Eternal Calm has begun, and Yuna resolves to aid in the world's reconstruction, and concludes with, "The people and friends that we have lost, and the dreams that have faded... never forget them."
In the ocean depths, Tidus wakes up and swims toward the surface with a smile on his face.
Category:Final Fantasy X