This place is a wreck. A young woman is dancing on the water. It feels like you probably shouldn't interrupt.
As the dance ends, Nida waves you over. He tells you that Cid has decided to provide humanitarian aid to Kilika, in the hopes of improving Garden's relationship with Spira. The relationship's not off to a great start; the locals seem extremely suspicious of the flying school that brought you here.
While you're helping with the rebuilding effort, let's talk about Final Fantasy X.
The first time I saw a trailer for Final Fantasy X, it absolutely blew me away. I'd never seen anything like it.
If you had the same experience, you'll already know how it felt! If not, there's no way I can explain how it felt to see Final Fantasy X's graphics for the first time in 2001. I genuinely thought that this was the pinnacle of videogame graphics. Surely they could never get better than this? The characters all looked exactly like real people!
It's hilarious to look back on it now, three console generations later, in the knowledge that graphics very much did get better than that. But, to my thirteen-year-old eyes, Final Fantasy X was photorealistic.
I couldn't wait to play this game. When it eventually came out in the UK, I bought it as soon as I could and played it for five hours straight. I was absolutely enraptured.
Final Fantasy X is still one of my favourite games in the Final Fantasy series. The characters are strongly drawn, the world is gorgeous, the battle system is enjoyably strategic without being overcomplicated, and the central plot is perhaps my favourite in the series. I also find it very satisfying to train Yuna up to the point where she can lightly bop the enemy with her staff and do 99,999 damage.
Yuna is one of my favourite fictional characters of all time. I'm often drawn to weakness in characters, but I really admire Yuna's strength. She's a little awkward, but she's brave; she's determined; she's prepared to fight against everything she believed in when she finds that it was founded on false principles. She wavers sometimes (which is a good thing; wavering is interesting!), but she's always prepared to grit her teeth and push past her doubt and her fear. And, below all the impossibly heavy responsibilities, she's just a teenager; she wants to have fun, she wants to spend time with her friends, she wants to live.
I feel I should talk about Final Fantasy X-2 here as well! I don't think it's as strong as the original, but I did enjoy it when it first came out. I haven't replayed it in a very long time; I keep trying to, but every time I get overwhelmed by how much missable content there is. Maybe I should just grit my teeth and power through the main plot, rather than obsessing over what I'm missing.
I used to daydream a lot about Final Fantasy X (and, later, X-2) while wandering around my grandmother's garden, so it has some very fond and nostalgic associations for me.
Most of my fanfiction for the Final Fantasy X series was written in my early-to-mid teens and is pretty embarrassing, so I'm going to opt not to share it here. This is a Final Fantasy VIII website, so I want to include all my FFVIII-related projects, even the old and embarrassing ones! But it's not a Final Fantasy X website, so I think I can get away with concealing the terrible fic where I got sucked into the game and had a big crush on Tidus.
I have written a couple of short Final Fantasy X fics as an adult, though, both crossovers with other games in the series! Binding Contract is a FFVIII/FFX fic in which Squall is Yuna's guardian. Across the Distance is a tiny FFVII/FFX piece in which Yuna meets Aerith.