Final Fantasy X Explained

The main character Tidus is not a real human. Rather, he and the other residents of his city are descendants of humans created 1,000 years ago through summoning. Since that time, the Summoner, who is named Yu Yevon, has been continuously casting the summoning spell, and if he stops then all of the residents will disappear. However, the residents are unaware of the situation and have never even heard of Yu Yevon, or of the giant creature he created called Sin.

The city which Titus lives in, which is located in the middle of the ocean far away from the continent called Spira, is known by its residents as Zanarkand, but it is more accurately called Dream Zanarkand. The original Zanarkand was a powerful city-state located in Spira which fought against the other powerful city-state known as Bevelle. The army of Zanarkand used magic while the army of Bevelle used technology, but Bevelle gained the upper hand and Zanarkand was heavily damaged. The survivors, led by their leader Yu Yevon, fled into the mountains, and in a misguided attempt to keep their culture alive, they transformed themselves into crystals called Fayths which are a necessary tool for spells involving summoning.

With the power of the Fayths, Yu Yevon summoned the city of Dream Zanarkand and its residents, and resolved to continuously cast this spell until the end of time. To protect the city, and to prevent attacks on himself, he created an immensely lethal creature called Sin, and proceeded to entomb himself inside. Sin was given orders to destroy any civilization which reached a certain level of technological advancement, and otherwise to randomly murder and harass Spira’s inhabitants, locking them into a state of perpetual dread.

The daughter of Yu Yevon, named Yunalesca, disagreed with this move, and ran to Bevelle with her husband to explain the situation to their upper class. She proceeded to sacrifice her husband’s life, transforming him into a Fayth, in order to summon a giant monster, called an Aeon, to attack Sin. However, after it killed Sin, Yu Yevon seized control of the Aeon, in the process overloading Yunalesca’s brain and killing her. The Aeon became the new Sin, but needed a resting period of several years, during which time the inhabitants of Spira had peace.

Upon the return of Sin, the upper class of Bevelle became terrified and decided to create a church called Yevon to keep the populace under control, so that their society wouldn’t disintegrate into chaos. The church taught that Sin was sent to punish people for their sins, but that if people were to closely follow the church’s teachings, then Sin would eventually go away. Since Sin focused on attacking settlements with technology, the church banned technology saying that it was evil.

In the absence of technology, many people in Bevelle turned to magic and tried to emulate the actions of Yunalesca. However, the process of training to be a Summoner was arduous and involved travelling to several temples containing Fayths to absorb their knowledge. The countryside or rugged terrain along the way was infested with a large number of monsters, and not to mention, human bandits, so melee warriors called Guardians went along as the Summoner’s body-guards. Numerous such teams attempted this journey, which came to be known as the Pilgrimage, and nearly all of them died along the way.

Whenever a team would reach the end of the journey, they would meet Yunalesca, who has become an Unsent, that is, a ghost. Yunalesca would require that a close friend or family member of the Summoner be sacrificed to produce a Fayth, and often one of the Guardians would volunteer, having become grown close with the Summoner as the journey progressed. As a result, the Summoner would be able to produce an Aeon, which would fight against Sin and destroy it. However, as with Yunalesca’s original battle, Yu Yevon would seize control of the Aeon, killing the Summoner in the process, and several years later the Aeon would emerge as the new Sin.

Over 1,000 years, the Pilgrimage only succeeds 8 times because of its difficulty. The church secretly knows that Sin cannot be defeated, but encourages people to attempt the Pilgrimage, since it distracts people and gives them a sense of hope.

In the present day, Sin, for unknown reasons, attacks Dream Zanarkand, the city it was created to protect, and it grabs Tidus, taking him to the continent. Tidus wakes up and is confused when the villagers tell him that Zanarkand was destroyed 1,000 years ago. However, Tidus easily makes friends and gains people’s respect because he is a champion at the sport called Blitzball, which is apparently popular everywhere in the world. As Tidus attempts to find answers, he meets a Summoner called Yuna about to start on her Pilgrimage, and after a short time, decides, along with several others, to become Yuna’s Guardians.

During the journey, they realize the truth about confrontation with Sin, and after several detours, decide to banish the ghost of Yunalesca, and to find a way to get inside Sin and murder Yu Yevon, thus ending the root of all of their problems.

At this point, the fate of Tidus’s father Jecht is revealed, as he had gone missing 10 years earlier. As it happens, Jecht was swimming in the ocean near Dream Zanarkand when he was approached by Sin and seized, and dropped onto the continent. As he began to understand the truth, he and a warrior named Auron became Guardians to a Summoner named Braska. When they reached the final confrontation, Jecht sacrificed himself to become the Fayth, and Braska defeated Sin, thereby bestowing the world with a few years of peace with Braska’s life as the payment.

Amazingly, though, Jecht was able to retain some of his consciousness, and steered the next Sin toward Dream Zanarkand to extract his son, Tidus, so that the latter could assist in future attempts to annihilate Sin for good. This explains why Dream Zanarkand was attacked by Sin earlier.

Yuna, Tidus, and the others finally succeed in murdering Yu Yevon, but this causes the entirety of Dream Zanarkand, including Tidus, to vanish into thin air, to the dismay of Yuna. However, in a final cut-scene, Tidus appears in the middle of the ocean, having somehow discovered a means of survival.