Paralells Between Shadow Hearts and Final Fantasy X/X-2

In playing the Shadow Hearts series and Final Fantasy X and X-2 I've noticed a number of parallels.

Warning; Spoilers for SH and FFX/X-2 From Here On In

Shadow Hearts focuses on Yuri and Alice.  It begins when Yuri saves Alice from Albert, and continues with their journey together.  Yuri is tormented by the fusion monsters inside him, and Alice bargains with them to rescue his soul.  In the bad ending, which is canonical, Alice dies and Yuri lives because of this deal.  In this canonical ending, Yuri doesn't know that Alice is going to die until it happens.

Final Fantasy X focuses on Yuna and Tidus' journey.  Yuna is attempting to attain the final summon, which will kill her.  Everyone but Tidus is aware of this.  Once he does find out, he vows to find a way to prevent it, which he does, sacrificing himself.  Final Fantasy X does not have any alternative endings.

The parallels here are obvious.  Both Yuna and Yuri would have died without Tidus' and Alice's interventions.

Shadow Hearts II and Final Fantasy X-2 focus on Yuri and Yuna coming to terms with the death of Tidus and Alice.  Shadow Hearts II focuses more on Karin and her feelings for Yuri, so his feelings are purposefully obscured, for the purposes of fucking with us.  However, what we do see of Yuri involves him not getting over her death.  Of course, she's been dead for less than six months, if I recall correctly.  Furthermore, Alice's ghost lives deep inside his mind, like his father did in the first game.  That makes sense - that's where her grave appeared once she'd made the original pact.  This is most likely not helping him to recover, at all.

Yuri himself has been cursed, yet again.  This time, his soul is going to dissolve, leaving him an empty shell with no memories. That on top of everything else gives him a reason to cling to Alice's memory even more.

In the good ending of Shadow Hearts II, Yuri evades the mistletoe curse by dying.  His soul goes back in time, to the start of the first game, with the implication that the good ending becomes canonical the second time around.  This is confirmed in the third game, when Roger Bacon claims he's never performed the Emigre ritual before.  If that's the case, then this Roger Bacon cannot have lived through the events of Shadow Hearts II, indicating that, in this timeline, they never happened.

Anyway; Yuri's journey in Shadow Hearts II can be described as him striving to keep Alice.  In the first game, he told us he'd rather die than live without his soul.  This game is him coming to terms with the fact that that is his choice; he can lose Alice and his soul, or he can die.

Final Fantasy X-2 has a number of endings.  The two best endings involve Yuna reuniting with Tidus.  The mechanism for this is not her dying, but rather his being brought back to life.

Yuna's journey is entirely focused on searching for Tidus.  In the other endings she longs for him still, despite building a new life without him.  In one notable ending, she can choose not to revive him, despite attaining the ability to.

Looking for parallels, we can see that in both sequels, the pairs are reunited.  In Shadow Hearts, it's by Yuri dying.  In Final Fantasy it's through Tidus being brought back to life.

It is worth noting that both games included mechanisms by which Tidus and Alice could be revived.  The entire Shadow Hearts series is built around the Emigre maniscript, a document which explicitly explains how to revive the dead.  We later see it work successfully, in Shadow Hearts 3. 

Tidus was a creation of the fayth the entire time; he was never real in the way that the rest of his world was.  However, the entire mechanism for his imagining was destroyed during Final Fantasy X, which is why he disappeared in the first place.

In short, you could find a lot more justification for Alice being revived than for Tidus.  So why did Yuri die while Tidus lived?

 I feel that the reason for this difference, and the contrast, is because Shadow Hearts  is darker and edgier, and more realistic.  Although it has fantastical elements, it is more firmly rooted in reality.  The first world war is a major plot point, and real world people and locations are used.  In that world, Alice couldn't come back to life.  Her death was real, it meant something.  She couldn't be revived for the same reason Aeris couldn't be revived; because her death was real to the players, and it hurts too much when fictitious deaths that feel real are revoked.  It highlights how it can't happen in real life.

In Yuna's world, Tidus could be revived.  X-2 was happier and lighter than the first game, while, in contrast, Shadow Hearts II was often darker than the original - see Yuri brutally beating the politician who'd caused the deaths of both his parents for example.  I feel that X-2 departed further from reality to the point where we could accept Tidus' revival.  It felt like it made more sense within the plot and the tone of the story.

Kids with Swords

I played my first RPG, Final Fantasy VIII, when I was around twelve or thirteen. Now I'm twenty-two.

The heroes of Final Fantasy VIII were all seventeen or eighteen, and it's been very odd growing past that age. At first, the characters seemed impossibly mature to me - now they seem very young and out of their depth. I wonder how the older characters will look, in later games, as I grow past them? I've past Cloud's age (21) now. I'm the same age as Aeris (22)(I insist on calling her Aeris. Bite me, it's my blog and my playthrough). I've passed Alice Elliot (21). Soon I'll catch up to Yuri Hyuga (24).

I played Final Fantasy X and X-2 between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. That is, I started off at Rikku's age (15) and grew up through to Yuna's (19) in X-2.

I defended Yuna strenuously when her new look was criticised. I suspect that all teenager girls go through a stage like that, when their clothes become sexier and more revealing, as they realise that they're becoming women and not girls. It's not a bad thing. It can be dangerous, if they are encouraged in the wrong ways or by the wrong people in their budding sexuality, but it doesn't mean that Yuna has essentially changed as a person - no more than any teenager does during those years.

If it helps, though, think about how the monsters' hit points are represented, numerically. The characters don't see that - that's there for the player, to make things easier. Is it not possible that the revealing outfits are there purely for the player, that the in-game characters don't see them that way? After all, while people comment on her new outfit, they don't mention that it's overly revealing.

Random Repetition

What I really hate - and I suspect most people do - is the random repetitive element of certain tasks in RPGs.

Like fighting hundreds of a creature for a rare drop. Or, getting into hundreds of battles to find a rare creature. Or, opening a shop hundreds of times, waiting for someone to offer you the best weapons in the game. Or dodging hundreds of lightening bolts.

Speaking of which, I feel that Final Fantasy X is one of the worst for that. At many points, the game felt more like work than fun. Final Fantasy X-2 came as a welcome relief, after that.

Final Fantasy X-2 - On Yuna

Final Fantasy X-2, and the character of Yuna especially, caught a lot of flack. And I suspect that at least part of this is due to the close-mindedness of some of the fans.

In Final Fantasy X, Yuna was a shy white-mage/summoner. In X-2 Yuna's a gunner who happens to sing. It's generally the singing that gets criticised the most, and I'm not entirely sure why.

Firstly, singing and song-writing has been a well-respected profession for thousands of years. Bards were the keepers of oral history, and songs were used to incite strong emotions during battles, or to mourn the dead. Hymns are used in religious worship. The "popstars" we have today, who sing tinny canned repetitive music do not make up the majority of musical history. They are the tip of the iceberg.

Secondly, it was never really Yuna's idea to sing. In the first instance, LeBlanc stole her appearance, and in the second instance, it's highly likely that she was being strongly influenced by Lenne. At the very least, Lenne designed the style and the lyrics of the song.

Another thing which I think influences the dislike of Yuna in X-2 is the fact that...well. To explain this, I'm going to have to talk about high school cliches. The jocks, the cheerleaders, the nerds, whatever. Now, it's the nerds (or whatever term you prefer) who play RPGs, but, in X-2, Yuna is more cheerful, more active, and more popular than nerds are generally perceived to be. She's a cheerleader. And I think that at least some of the bad feeling towards her comes from the nerds feeling abandoned, or feeling that Yuna has "sold out" or "lost intelligence" by dressing and acting the way that she does - in a way that makes her happy.

Firstly, these stereotypes do not exist outside of TV-Land. Nobody's that flat and 2D, not even characters in videogames (barring some of those background characters, who repeat the same line ad infinitum). And no one says that someone has to stay one way, or else they're being disloyal to themselves. Yuna went from seventeen to nineteen, and that's a period where girls change a lot - even without losing the burden of their upcoming suicide.

And that's another thing. Yuna in X faced the fact of imminent death and sacrifice for the sake of the world. Yuna X-2 has lost her, for want of a better word, lover, but she has also lost the burden that she faced before. Yuna is easily lead, and, wanting to be happy and having lost her goal, she now follows Rikku. Perhaps she also feels that she owes it to Tidus to live her life to the fullest, and just have some fun.

I'd also like to reference the Avril Lavigne song Complicated here. That song always offended me. Listening to the lyrics, it would seem that a friend of hers wants to change, for whatever reason. She views this as them being untrue to themselves, or faking. Now, it's true that you should be true to yourself - but it's equally true that your teenage years are a time for changing and experimentation. Sometimes, being true to yourself does mean changing your actions - especially when the circumstances have changed as drastically as Yuna's have.

Finally, the other criticism I've heard levelled at Yuna is that her actions are "not becoming of a High Summoner". Firstly, it's debatable whether Yuna is a High Summoner. Yes, she's a Summoner who helped defeat Sin - but there's a key word in that sentence and it's not the word 'defeat'. She helped. She, alongside her guardians, defeated Sin, and one of their members died doing it. It's arguable whether this is the same as using the Final Summon, which would have destroyed both Guardian and Summoner. However, it's simpler to let the world of Spira believe in the story they've always understood, rather than break apart the entire religious structure of the world, so she keeps that label.

If we do consider her to be a High Summoner, then we must also acknowledge that she is the first one to get up and walk away. The only precedent for a High Summoner's actions is lying around, being stiff, and sometimes being made in a statue. Yes, it is true that Yuna's actions are not typical of a High Summoner - but, since she didn't kill herself immediately after defeating Sin, there is no way she could act like a typical High Summoner. There's also no way that Spira can have any expectations of her actions. She is the first of her kind, and she gets to make the rules. When people claim that Spira should expect religious figures to act a certain way, they're basing this on precedent from our world, and there's no reason why that should affect Spira's mindset. That precedent does not exist there.

Leave BritneyYunie alone!