Final Fantasy X's Final Boss: More To It Than You May Think (SPOILERS)

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This was a response that I wrote out to RisingStorm in the FFX/X-2 HD review. I figured it was detailed enough that it would be worth sharing on the forums.

RisingStorm:

"The Yu Yevon fight-- is it a challenge this time around? The original game had Auto-Life cast on your party, making it impossible to lose under normal circumstances."

It’s actually done that way on purpose.
Perhaps this explanation will help you appreciate that puny insect a little bit:

It is a classic trope made popular by the Wizard of Oz called The Man Behind the Curtain. In it we are building up this impossibly bad-ass mother fucker in our minds, because (in the case of FFX) how could someone capable of creating the ultimate killing machine Sin and then building up a religion around himself while simultaneously castrating the non-magical people by banning 99 percent of high technology with said self-constructed religion not be the ultimate bad-ass, right? I mean, you saw how fucking tough Jecht was right? Yu Yeveon infused that power into him to make jecht that powerful so Yu Yeveon just HAS to be the most powerful thing in the world.

That’s in our mind, but the reality of the situation is that Yu Yeveon is waaaaayyy past his prime and basically just has this complex machination of self-regulating magic, social manipulation, and forced ignorance built up around him which makes it damn near impossible for anyone to get to him.

It is very much like the titular wizard of Oz in the Wizard of Oz story. All that shit is built up to him but he ends up being nothing but a man behind a curtain, not a great fire-enshrined wizard in an emerald city.

As homage to the Wizard of Oz, they made Yu Yeveon look like a shitty little nothing of a bug. In the Wizard of Oz, after the dog pulls back the curtain and The Wizard is shown to be a sham, the Scarecrow calls the man behind the curtain a humbug, hence Yu Yeveon looking like a bug.

Wizard of Oz-- Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

Now don’t think Ebeneezer Scrooge who thoroughly ruined the popular understanding of the word humbug by making most people think it means someone "miserly". Instead think of the dictionary definition which is "something intended to deceive". By thinking of it in this way, Yu Yevon’s puny, bug-like appearance can be more greatly appreciated.

200px-yu_yevon_medium

While you went through this journey with Tidus, Yuna, Kimari and all the rest you don’t really feel it. Imagine how much of a punch to the gut it was to Wakka to see the hypocrisy of the Bevelle Temple with fucking automated stairwells and robot butlers. By using the the man behind the curtain trope however they can deliver that gut punch in a way that connects via the gameplay. By the time you reach the final boss, you are so invested in the mythology of Spira that it is almost impossible to not have the wind knocked out of you by how silly and insignificantly easy it is

By designing the final boss in this way we are being told that this is our world and we will make of it what we will. It actually leads very nicely into why FFX-2 takes such an interesting turn in how the world changes. There is no over arching menace and there really never was, well there was Sin, but any summoner could have defeated it so long as they had tenacity and were willing to work outside of the blinders that the Yevon religion put in place.

Hopefully that can help you appreciate the final boss a little more : )