Characters / Final Fantasy X Villains

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Final Fantasy X

Jecht

Jecht

"There's a time when you have to stop crying and move on. You'll be fine. Remember, you're my son."

"I ain't gettin' any younger, so I might as well make myself useful."

Voiced by: Masuo Amada (Japanese), Gregg Berger (English)

Tidus' father, a Blitzball champ and alcoholic who was never satisfied with his son. He went missing while out practicing when Tidus was young and became a sort of martyr in Zanarkand.

His voice can be heard during the final boss melee in X-2: His spirit lives on in the Farplane alongside his comrades, Auron and Braska.

He is the main villain representing Final Fantasy X in Dissidia, though unlike the other "Warriors of Darkness", his motives are still altruistic.

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• Abusive Parents: Tidus does have a good reason to hate him as Jecht was emotionally abusive, despite genuinely loving Tidus. He wanted to make Tidus a star blitzball player like him, but his attempts to do so involved berating his son and acting like he would never amount to anything. Part of Jecht's development in Spira is realizing he messed up, and owns up to his mistakes in the end, realizing his son has every reason to hate him. However, Tidus genuinely loves him too, he just doesn't want to admit it.
• The Ace: He is considered a legend for his blitzball prowess in Zanarkand, and is fondly remembered by his fans even years after his disappearance.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: When he, Braska, and Auron went to the Moonflow, Jecht, being drunk, mistook one of the shoopufs for a fiend and attacked it, forcing Braska to pay off the damages. Jecht was so embarrassed over forcing Braska to do so and afraid that his family would be ashamed of him that he swore never to drink again.
• Alcoholic Parent: To Tidus, until he had a fateful incident with ze shoopuf in which he sliced the poor animal with his sword, after which he swore not to ever drink a single drop of alcohol.
• And I Must Scream: He became the chaotic beast Sin after volunteering to be the Final Aeon but even though he is trapped inside it, he is sometimes able to control the creature. Luckily, Tidus arrived in time as Jecht was losing this ability and he was going to be a new Sin completely.
• Anti-Villain: The only real reason he's technically a bad guy is that he became a Final Aeon in order to destroy Sin, not knowing that Yu Yevon will possess him right afterward, becoming the new Sin. In addition, Jecht was perfectly willing to die at the hands of his son if it meant eliminating Sin for good, although that didn't stop him from having to fight his son under Yu Yevon's influence.
• Apocalyptic Log: His diaries littered throughout the game. At first, they mostly document his buffoonery but become more somber as Jecht comes to grips with the fact that he will never see his family again or mend fences with Tidus.
• Archnemesis Dad: Tidus views him as this for a long time. It turns out that he's not quite that bad, but there's still some resentment, and for good reason.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Both as Sin as well as his Final Aeon form.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: His heavy metal theme is heard twice: when Sin attacks Zanarkand in "the past", and during the fight with Jecht in his Aeon form.
• Badass Boast: He always reminded his son that he was the best and liked to call his signature shot Mark III, even though there was no Mark I nor Mark II.
  Jecht: But don't worry, my boy. No one else can do it. I'm the best!
• Barbarian Longhair: Indicative of his gruff and aggressive demeanor.
• Batman Gambit: He was at least partially in control of Sin when it attacked Tidus's Zanarkand at the very beginning of the game as he was able to consciously pick up Tidus and Auron and transport them to the Spiran mainland so that they could unite with Yuna to ultimately find a way to end the cycle of Sin permanently. It might have even started earlier than that with his decision to become the Fayth for Braska's Final Aeon if he knew that doing so would result in him becoming the next Sin (it's unclear in the game if he was aware of that part beforehand).
• BFS: And it becomes even bigger when Jecht powers up into the Final Aeon.
• Boss Corridor: The Point of No Return one room before Jecht has a long hallway between it and the final Save Sphere and the rest of Sin.
• Broken Ace: He's a genius blitzballer, but also an alcoholic who can't connect with his son and only comes to terms with it after he can't do anything about it.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Braska dug up this lush and made him a guardian, against Auron's protests.
• Calling Your Attacks: The "Sublimely Magnificent Jecht Shot Mark III."
• Captain's Log: Jecht recorded spheres of his journey to show his wife and Tidus, still hopeful he would find a way home someday. When Jecht came to accept he was trapped in Spira, he left behind spheres to help guide Tidus, should the same fate befall him.
• Cassandra Truth: He was promptly locked up for heresy after claiming to be from Zanarkand. By the end of his journey with Braska, both Braska and Auron are completely convinced he was telling the truth about Zanarkand, but do not get the chance to visit it with Jecht. At least, not an alive Auron or a human Jecht.
• Character Development: If you watch the recorded spheres in chronological order (from the time they leave Bevelle to their trip to Besaid) you can see the subtle changes in Jecht's personality. For a start, he stops drinking entirely after the Shoopuf incident but also after he begins to grow and care for the world as well as slowly realizing he won't ever go home again. Jecht noticeably becomes more somber and introspective, culminating in his decision to be Braska's Final Aeon and giving up on his chances to find a way back home.
• Covered with Scars: Since the only armor he wears is a metal armguard on one arm, it's not surprising.
• Corner of Woe: It's no Pose of Supplication (rather, he's lying on his side), but he's otherwise obviously sulking when Auron admonishes him for attacking a shoopuf.
• Death Seeker: Once he realized he was trapped in Spira, he came to terms that his life was essentially over and his dream to make Tidus a star Blitzball player would never come true, hence the header quote said about his decision to become the Final Aeon. After he became Sin, he wanted Tidus to kill him before his consciousness was completely subsumed.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the Manly Man. Jecht was a buff sports superstar, he lived a life full of machismo and fame, and he drank heavily. Because of all of this, Jecht has absolutely no way to resonate or bond with a child who doesn't share in the machismo, and his attempts to make Tidus like him backfire since instead he just becomes a bully towards his son. While he does love Tidus, he has trouble talking to him without coming off as a condescending jerk, which made Tidus both hate and fear him. It takes him journeying through Spira, giving up drinking, and learning he never will be able to return home to fully admit his failures, and even then he cannot do anything to fix it until Tidus is almost an adult. Coincidentally, this was intentional considering Japanese attitudes towards Abusive Parents.
• Despair Event Horizon: Distraught at the knowledge that he would never return home, and feeling guilty over how he treated Tidus, Jecht volunteered to become the Final Aeon; unwittingly, he had just doomed himself to becoming Sin.
• Disappeared Dad: He went lost at sea when Tidus was very young; unbeknownst to anyone, he accidentally crossed over to Spira after passing through the Dream Zanarkand's barrier.
• Dying as Yourself: After he is defeated in his monstrous form as Braska's Final Aeon, he reverts to his human body just long enough to say farewell to Tidus and give the party some advice for the final battle with Yu Yevon.
• Evil Counterpart: To Tidus, if not exactly evil. They're both ace blitzball players from Zanarkand that were transported to Spira and took part in a pilgrimage to help stop Sin. However, while Jecht is a boastful braggart, Tidus is much more level-headed and friendly. Jecht is cocky and arrogant, Tidus has a lot of self doubt thanks to Jecht's treatment of him. Jecht eventually resigned himself to becoming a part of Spira's spiral of death, but Tidus refused to and insisted there was another way.
• Evil Laugh: When Tidus was perfecting the real "Jecht Shot", the memories of Jecht mocking him included a loud ha ha ha ha.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: A sash covering only his right leg, and a metal armguard on his left arm.
• Final Boss: As Braska's Final Aeon, since he's the last storyline boss that you can lose against. The battles against the aeons and Yu Yevon are both Post Final Bosses.
• Final Boss Preview: Jecht calls out to Tidus when the latter is sucked into Spira and Tidus sees a vision of his father in a ruined blitzball stadium over a field of lava. This is in fact where the party finds Jecht's spirit inside Sin, and where the battle with the Final Aeon takes place.
• Flunky Boss: The fight with Jecht as the Final Aeon has two Yu Pagoda statues on either side of him; these statues give him extra boosts, and cast status effects on the party. They can temporarily be disabled but come back stronger.
• Freudian Trio: The Id to Braska's Ego and Auron's Superego.
• Honor Before Reason: Alluded to by Auron. If he ever used the phrase 'it's the right thing to do' to talk you into doing something, it meant he was about to get himself (and his companions) into a lot of trouble.
• Humanoid Abomination: As Braska's Final Aeon, he retains some of his most recognizable features (beard, hair) but becomes enormous and much more muscular with new features like a giant clawed hand and wings/crests on his back.
• Hunk: A rare villainous example.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: He can't control his own actions and thus needs your party to kill him, which also means he's unable to throw the fight with your party. The most control he has as Sin is when hearing the Hymn of the Fayth, but it's only enough to be idle and not attack anything or anyone.
• I Have No Son!: He is very proud of his sporting accomplishments and resents Tidus for his inability to pick up the mantle.
• It Runs in the Family: Neither he nor Tidus is very comfortable with the whole hero gig.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He was very rough with Tidus, believing it would 'toughen him up,' and dreamed of seeing his son become a great blitzball player. Through the spheres, we learn that while Jecht wasn't good at expressing himself, he really had a good heart; as Yuna points out, he was a kind man when she met him. At the end of his life, he fully becomes a good person willing to do whatever it takes to help people.
• Jerkass Realization: Realized over the course of his pilgrimage with Braska that he was a lousy father to Tidus. When Tidus reunites with him and tearfully tells him he hates him, Jecht simply accepts his son's feelings with no protest.
• Kryptonite Factor: Being pacified by the Hymn of the Fayth (perhaps exclusive to Jecht only, not any previous Sins), which the heroes utilize in order to weaken the outer shell.
• Limit Break: Jecht has three when you fight him in the final battle. In his first form, there's only one: Triumphant Grasp, which can dish out serious damage to one fighter. In his second form, he has one Overdrive for Aeons, and a second called the "Ultimate Jecht Shot" for the team themselves if he can get it off; this is one of the most devastating attacks that isn't used by an Optional Boss in the game.
• Manly Man: Jecht is the biggest source of testosterone and manliness in Spira, if not outright the entire franchise. His raspy voice, rugged appearance, and quirky personality give him a very badass image compared to the much more soft-spoken and calm Spirans.
• Memetic Badass: An in-universe example to Dream Zanarkand, it's one of the many reasons why Tidus hates him. The shadow cast by his legend is bigger than the one cast by the man himself, which is already pretty big.
• Music Soothes the Savage Beast: He really liked the Song of the Fayth, and is seen taking five to listen to it even as Sin. It's how the party ultimately manages to defeat him from the outside.
• Parents as People: Won't be winning any Father of the Year trophies, though as he becomes more humanized through the Jecht Spheres, we realize that Jecht was ultimately a father who was looking for the manual on child-raising; while he did love his son, he didn't know how to express it.
• Posthumous Character: Presumed to be for the first several hours of the game as we only see him through flashbacks in the form of recorded spheres, though it turns out he's not actually dead.
• Puzzle Boss: In the fight with Braska's Final Aeon, he has two pillars behind him that will each heal him for 1500 health every turn, for a total of 3000 health if both are active. If you are underleveled, they can easily undo the damage dealt to him. AND their healing ability also increases Jecht's overdrive gauge. Fortunately the two pillars can be attacked, and if they lose all their health, they are knocked out for a few turns, allowing for uninterrupted damage on Jecht. The rub is that all extra damage they take when being knocked out gets permanently added to their total health when they revive. So if they have 5000 health total, and you were to knock one out with an attack that does 5500 damage, when they get back up, they'll have 500 extra health (and if you were to knock them out with 15000 damage, they'd revive with 15000 health). This means that you have to be careful with how much you damage them (and be careful with Aeon overdrives), because if they gain too much health, knocking them out becomes less and less feasible, turning the fight into a long battle of attrition.
• Real Men Hate Affection: He did love Tidus, but had trouble expressing it. In one of the spheres he leaves behind, he tries to leave Tidus a sentimental message, but ultimately gives up:
  Jecht: Remember, you're my son. And...well, uh...never mind. I'm no good at these things.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The brash, outgoing and hot-headed Red to the even-tempered, restrained and cool-headed Auron's Blue.
• Sequential Boss: Jecht as the Final Aeon has two separate health bars and makes up the two critical parts of the Final Boss encounters. After his first health bar is drained, he pulls his BFS out of his chest and uses a different attack pattern.
• So Proud of You: Jecht probably has trouble putting it into the right words, but seeing Tidus in front of him after all these years makes him almost fight back some Manly Tears.
• Tall, Dark, and Handsome: Coming in at 6'3", he's ruggedly this almost too perfectly.
• Took a Level in Badass: Over time, he takes Braska's pilgrimage more seriously and becomes a more focused individual. When his drunkenness causes him to injure a shoopuf, he stops drinking altogether.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Over time, Jecht grew to like Braska and whole-heartedly threw himself into the pilgrimage.
• Tough Love: Jecht later says that he wanted to toughen Tidus up and was looking forward to seeing him become a star blitz player. He never told Tidus this directly, of course.
• Tragic Monster: He remains self-aware, and while he is aware of Sin's horrific actions he is for the most part unable to stop them. However, he does retain enough control to bring Tidus to Spira with Auron's help, in the hope that his son will be able to do what he could not and end Sin's reign of terror.
• Troll: We don't know if he actually called it out in games, but he did call his Jecht Shot "Mark III" to get fans to come out in hopes of seeing the non-existent Mark I & II, which tells you something about him.
• Turns Red: After you deal enough damage to him in his first form, he pulls his iconic BFS right out of his torso and gets a lot stronger.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Auron constantly scolds him, and he loves to push Auron's buttons. That said, they truly bonded during their journey, with Auron becoming a second father to Tidus.
  Jecht: You were always such a stiff, Auron, but that's what I like about you!
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Hell, his only attire for his entire tenure in Spira is board shorts, a metal armguard, and what looks like half a sari wrapped around his waist. That's even on Gagazet.
• You Can't Go Home Again: The moment he realizes this is when he begins to become a Death Seeker.

Seymour Guado

Maester Seymour Guado

"Death is a sweet slumber. All the pain of life is gently swept away...Ah, yes. Don't you see...if all life were to end in Spira, all suffering would end. Don't you see? Do you not agree?"

Voiced by: Jun'ichi Suwabe (Japanese), Alex Fernandez (English)

The son of the late Maester Jyscal, who represented the Guado in Yevon's hierarchy. He briefly joins the guardians in a boss battle at Mushroom Rock. Like Yuna, he is a summoner who wields a staff; however, he doesn't use Aeons in this battle, and he has knowledge of black magic along with white.

Seymour is briefly shown again in a recording in X-2, which took place in his manor shortly before the guardians arrived. Humorously, his house has been commandeered by the LeBlanc Syndicate. He can also be fought and recruited in the Creature Creator, making him the fifth returning playable character from X. Seymour is a versatile Red Mage who absorbs all elemental attacks besides Holy. As he can spam magic for free (via Spellspring), it's no use trying to deplete his mana pool.

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• Abusive Parents: So his Mom dragged him to Zanarkand at a young age in order for him to kill her for a political ploy that would have ended in Seymour's death if he had carried it through to the end after his mother could no longer directly influence him. His Dad was totally on board with this. It explains a LOT of his nihilistic attitude.
• All for Nothing:
  • It turns out that his plan to become Sin was doomed from the start, as becoming the Final Aeon requires a strong emotional bond with a summoner, and Seymour was far too narcissistic and nihilistic to have that kind of bond with anyone. Even when Yuna genuinely did intend to marry him, she was doing so out of a sense of duty rather than because she actually loved him.
  • His mother's plan to become a Final Aeon and have Seymour destroy Sin in order to become a hero of Spira was similarly doomed, as said plan would have gotten Seymour killed and resulted in her becoming the next Sin.
• And Now You Must Marry Me: He had an odd obsession with marrying Yuna, even though it later becomes clear that it has no relevance to his plan to become Sin. It's more than likely that he simply wanted to recreate the relationship of Yunalesca and Zaon in the hopes that by becoming the Final Aeon, his bond with Yuna would give him the power to wrestle control of Sin.
• Anime Hair: Seriously, look at that picture and wonder how that is physically possible.
• The Assimilator: Absorbs the pyreflies of Kinoc and his own men to assume his Natus form. Later he absorbs the pyreflies of almost the entire Ronso tribe to become Seymour Flux.
• Assimilation Backfire: What he hoped to pull on Sin after being absorbed by it, hoping to learn to control Sin from within. Unfortunately for him the heroes get to him before he has the chance.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Despite hanging around for only one battle, Seymour does have an Overdrive, Requiem. While it certainly does some impressive damage, and you only ever get to use it once in the game, it takes so long to charge his Overdrive gauge up, due to him having the default Stoic mode for the gauge; you can easily kill the boss well before the gauge is full.
• Back from the Dead: Yuna gets wise to his treachery and confronts him at Macalania Temple, causing Seymour to retaliate and get killed by her guardians—though the party is chased away before Yuna is able to send him.
• Barrier Change Boss: His fourth and final form; in this case, the party can actually manipulate what element he can change into by attacking the Mortiphasms (those glyphs stationed behind him).
• Berserk Button: Seymour will have a conniption if you sic Anima on him. His mother is Anima's fayth.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Shares this role with Yu Yevon, since he is a much more personal foe to Yuna and her Guardians.
• Big Bad Wannabe: His plans never come to fruition and despite his screen time, Sin remains the most pressing antagonistic force which Seymour can't hope to compete with in scope.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Downplayed: his sliminess and insanity are only thinly veiled, and it's largely his position as a maester and his saving people during the attack at Luca that cause the general public to think well of him.
• Boss Corridor: All four Seymour boss fights have some sort of hallway/walkway/stairs prior to them.
• Climax Boss: Seymour Natus is fought shortly after he and the other Maesters reveal their corruption, and after he kills Jyscal, at which point Yuna becomes an outcast; this fight can be difficult due to him possessing some strong spells.
• Dark Is Evil: His Aeon is the Dark Aeon, Anima, but once you get her on your side, it's the opposite.
• Dark Messiah: He could be the poster boy for this trope. He believes that all life is suffering, and thus it is his duty to save Spira by destroying it.
• Derailing Love Interests: He seeks Yuna's hand in marriage to bring Spira together, but in reality, he plans on becoming the next Sin in order to kill as many people as possible to bring them "peace".
• Determinator: Pretty much lampshaded by Tidus himself. Seymour is insanely determined and persistent in becoming Sin to kill everyone. Death doesn't stop him. Several times over.
• Devil in Plain Sight: His devil-like appearance and low, fiendish way of plotting makes it quite clear that he's a bad guy. It takes some convincing for the party to actually go after him, though.
• Engineered Heroics: The Fiend invasion of Luca was a way for the public to see him as a hero.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Invoked during the Fiend invasion of Luca, having his men release Fiends into the stadium, then summoning Anima to decimate them all. All to show his power and to appear to the populace as their savior.
  • The true Establishing Character Moment for him? After Wakka says that Seymour's condoning the use of machina is not something a Maester would say, Seymour responds "then pretend I didn't say it."
• Et Tu, Brute?: In the final fight against him, if you acquired it beforehand, you can summon Anima. Since Anima originally was Seymour's aeon, not to mention Anima's Fayth is in fact his mother, Seymour will remark, "You would oppose me as well? So be it!" Also counts as Video Game Cruelty Potential, given the true nature of Anima.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • To Yuna. Both were born to one human parent and one parent of another race. Both their mothers died when they were young. Both had fathers who made difficult choices that involved staying out of their children's lives for the sake of peace and their children's well-being. The key difference is in their upbringing: Yuna was loved throughout her life despite being half Al Bhed, and always had friends and people who cared about her; Seymour, in contrast, was hated for being half-Guado, was outcast, and grew up lonely and isolated. Hence their different philosophies about the meaning of life — Yuna came to believe that life was worth living even despite the pain, while Seymour came to believe that life was about pain and suffering.
  • To Tidus. Both were reluctantly abandoned by their fathers and left in the care of their mothers and mentors who were friends of their fathers. Both were groomed to enter their fathers' professions. And both fell in love with Yuna. But, similar to the above, Tidus remained a fundamentally kind and optimistic person despite his pain while Seymour let his pain consume him.
• Eviler than Thou: Kinoc closes ranks with Seymour at your trial, even after Seymour's patricide is entered into evidence. However, Kinoc later hints that he no longer trusts Seymour to do what's right for Yevon. Seymour kills him off-screen.
• Evil Is Hammy: Once he is an undead and revealed to be a Omnicidal Maniac, he chews up Mt. Gagazet and Bevelle and raises his voice, Evil Laugh included, but still leaves some of his softspoken tongue.
  Seymour: The only means of destroying Sin are forever gone! Now nothing can stop us!
• Evil Virtues: Diligence: His mother was human, which resulted in them both being exiled from Guadosalam. Some years later, Seymour returned as a summoner, curried favor with the Yevonites, and clawed his way back to his rightful place as Guadosalam's leader.
• Fantastic Racism: This was the reason why he ended up exiled from the Guados as a child (by his own father, no less), as the Guados were appalled by his Human/Guado hybrid status.
• Faux Affably Evil: Although it's played mostly for Squick. Seymour is the sort of faux-complimentary creep you could see being a stalker in real life.
• Flunky Boss: The first time Seymour is fought, he has two Guado Guardians at his side that need to be killed. Then Yuna must summon an Aeon to take down Anima, and then the party can finally attack him full-force. The other fights have some sort of "Morti-" creature attached to him that can temporarily be killed, which will prompt the creature to absorb health from Seymour.
• Foil: To Yuna. See Evil Counterpart above.
• Forceful Kiss: With Yuna, considered by many to be Squick seeing as he's dead. Yuna's wiping her mouth off after the fact further proves this point.
• Four Is Death: Only after his fourth defeat will you be finally rid of him.
• Freudian Excuse:
  • Seymour was incredibly attached to his mother, the one and only person who cared for him regardless of his birth. When she sacrificed herself to become a Fayth so he could defeat Sin and become a hero, Seymour didn't take it well.
  • He also was hated and rejected during all his childhood by the Guados because he was half human. His father was forced to banish him because of that, and its something Seymour even years later hates him for. His mother was the only person who showed him love and, as mentioned above, but because she sacrificed her life to become his aeon when he was a child, he essentially viewed the world as pointless. Sure, the guy is a dick now, but you can easily see how he acquired his nihilistic view of the world.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Despite this, anyone who learns that he killed his father over this react with horror and disgust, even the rest of the church.
• Glass Cannon: During your first fight against him, Seymour's health is very low, making him susceptible to die in one hit from an Overdrive. However, after Anima is defeated, he will cast two grade 2 spells per turn that deal massive damages and can very easily kill unprotected characters. Thus, it is highly advised to dispose of him immediately, as unsuspecting players are in for a nasty surprise.
• Graceful Loser: Surprisingly enough, he takes relatively well his last defeat and Sending.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Though Seymour was pretty messed up already from the Fantastic Racism he'd endured and his mother's death, he spent the remainder of his childhood in isolation at Baaj Temple, which only caused him to slip further into nihilism and insanity.
• Guest-Star Party Member: For one fight. He even levels up despite having no position on the sphere grid.
• Half-Human Hybrid: His Guado father, Meister Jyscal; and his unnamed human mother.
• Hypocrite: Is constantly talking about the "sweet slumber of death", yet he refuses to move on to the Farplane.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: And Now You Must Marry Me as well.
• I'll Pretend I Didn't Hear That: Inverted. See Establishing Character Moment above.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: By Kimahri, but because he's an Unsent, he's barely even annoyed.
• Improbable Hair Style: More like impossible. Those hair antlers are many a cosplayer's defeat.
• Interim Villain: Once his true colors have surfaced, Sin takes a backseat and Seymour takes over as primary villain, leading the Yevonites on a Stern Chase towards Yuna and her Guardians. Once Seymour is defeated for the third time, Sin becomes the focus again, although that doesn't mean Seymour is done with them.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Even Tidus had to admit a lot of what Seymour said during Operation Mi'ihen made sense. Namely, Seymour says that, if the Al Bhed can stop Sin, it shouldn't matter if they're using forbidden machina. On top of that, Seymour also condones their bravery. Granted, he knows the plan isn't going to work, but all the same...
  • Even Seymour's Omnicidal Maniac status has justification; for a thousand years, Summoners and their Guardians have been repeating the same cycle - march to their deaths, push Sin back for a few years, only for Sin to return and keep destroying everything. He just figures that since Sin is just going to wipe every living thing out anyway, he might as well speed it along and give the world a Mercy Kill.
• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Saying this guy is a dick is an understatement. As much as he puts on a front of being polite and being a Good Shepherd, he's anything but.
• Joker Immunity: Justified, as Yuna was prevented from sending him after the party initially defeated him in battle, and doesn't get a chance to until their final confrontation inside Sin.
• Joker Jury: When put on trial for assaulting him, Yuna protests that Seymour (who is attendant in the galley) is an unsent, but his fellow Yevonites laugh this off; after all, Lord Mika is also an unsent.
• Kinslaying Is a Special Kind of Evil: After the party learns what he has done to his father they fight him to protect Yuna from him, and when the evidence is brought up in Yuna's trial, the Ronso Maester reacts with shock and disgust. Even Kinoc gets in on this by pointing out he can't trust a man who'd kill his own father.
• Klingon Promotion: Seymour is promoted to Maester by Lord Mika in his very first appearance. It later turns out that he murdered Jyscal in order to inherit his title and wealth.
• Knight Templar: His master plan to save the people of Spira is to kill everyone so that they can be "free".
• Leitmotif: A sinister one present in fully six tracks in the game soundtrack, tying in with Musical Spoiler because these tracks play well before the game outs him as evil...plotwise, at least. If Square Enix didn't want us to think the man was evil, they shouldn't have played Arpeggios Of Malice in E(vil) Major every time he showed up.
• Limit Break: Actually has one called Requiem in the second stage of the Sinspawn Gui fight. Later has an Overdrive-like attack called Total Annihilation on Mt. Gagazet, which is an accurate description for what it will do to the party.
• Little "No": His reaction upon being defeated for the final time.
• Love Makes You Evil: His synopsis in the Ultimania reveals that his feelings for Yuna were genuine, and that part of his motivation to save Spira through death was his twisted way of earning her affection.
• Magic Staff: His weapon when he's in your party in the Mushroom Rocks battle. He'll typically be dealing more damage than Auron! When you fight him later, it's curiously absent, though after his death he doesn't need any staff for sure because of his new powers.
• Manipulative Bastard: He thought he could manipulate Yuna into having a happy marriage and become a Final Aeon to save Spira. He might have succeeded if his father Jyscal's ghost didn't warn her about his real intentions. Although he clearly thinks that just having Evil Plans makes him a magnificent one.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning:
  • Possibly doubling up as a Thanatos Gambit. Upon the first fight, Seymour is killed by the party in self-defense. He seemed to have planned this, or at least he didn't care if he died. Because the Guados forbade Yuna to send his spirit to the Farplane, he ends up returning much stronger and decides to fully enact his plans to fuse with Sin and kill everyone in order to "end all suffering in Spira".
  • Later, after being defeated for the final time, he swears to Yuna that even if they do succeed in destroying Sin once and for all, Spira's pain and sorrow will continue, with or without him.
• Navel-Deep Neckline: A male example, with his robe having a neckline that goes all the way down to his navel.
• Obviously Evil: Seymour's theme sounds rather ominous, he styles his hair into horns, has Tainted Veins, and he seems to have his mouth set in a perpetual subtle smirk. And that's all before he summons Anima, where a chain descends into a portal to the underworld and pulls up a grotesque demon. When Seymour is revealed to be evil many hours later into the game, it's less a reveal and more "no kidding, really?"
• Omnicidal Maniac: As he seeks the destruction of Spira by becoming Sin, though he doesn't wait to be Sin to cause death to kill anyone who gets in its path.
  Yuna: (after listening to his rejoicing over murdering several Ronso) I don't understand you!
• One-Winged Angel: As an undead, he gained new powers by absorbing dead people's pyreflies. Gets three of these throughout the four times you fight him.
• Patricide: He killed his father in order to take his place as the Guado Maester.
• Pet the Dog: Probably the closest thing to a good-will, selfless act that Seymour ever committed was giving Baralai a place to stay after the latter and his party were ambushed by a Shuyin-possessed Nooj.
• Plot-Irrelevant Villain: Zigzagged.
  • Ultimately, his schemes make no major impact on the heroes' pilgrimage and by his last appearance, is treated even by them as a mere nuisance. Furthermore, it is Mika and Yunalesca that reveal the dark secrets of Yevon to the party.
  • However, had his goals not involved dragging Yuna and her guardians so close to him, it's very arguable they would never be in a position to learn about Yevon's corruption from Mika in the first place, and thus could possibly be more accepting of Yunalesca's own Awful Truth, likely making it harder for Auron to convince them to reject Yunalesca and the Final Aeon. While Seymour's relevance drops after Bevelle, and is practically non-existent after Gagazet, Seymour's mad schemes do ultimately lead to the foundations of Yevon cracking and eventually for it and the cycle to end.
  • Not to mention, he is responsible for the slaughter of the Ronso that cause the once-revered Guado to be hated, even before the endgame. Also, it's pretty clear that Seymour's relevance is largely tied to being the unluckiest product and victim of the world he was born into, which is also why his twisted logic is basically the most logical conclusion of the Spiran mindset in the most horrific way.
• Recurring Boss: Seymour is fought four times in the game: once as a summoner, and three times in various boss forms.
• Self-Made Orphan:
  • He killed his own father, as revenge for exiling him as a child, as well as doing so to secure his position as leader of the Guado.
  • He was also indirectly involved in the death of his mother, though we find out via flashback that he didn't want her to do this for him.
• Sequential Boss: The first fight only; first his two Guado Guardian friends with him helping them, then Anima, and then finally Seymour himself.
• Smug Snake: He's manipulative and scheming, but his plans usually end up blowing up in his face, mostly due to his arrogance causing him to constantly underestimate the heroes.
• Softspoken Sadist: At the beginning, he seems like a Reasonable Authority Figure, although perhaps a bit of a jerk due to his high position as a Maester. It's not until The Reveal and his death when he hams up everything. Played fully straight in Japanese, where he remains as serene-sounding the entire time, all the way to the end.
• Soul Eater: When Kinoc insists on killing Yuna if she emerges from the Vio Purifico, Seymour responds by killing him and absorbing the pyreflies that emerge from his corpse to become a fiend; an act he repeats with the Ronso after they try and block his path to Zanarkand.
• Species Surname: Guado, like the rest of his kind.
• Straw Nihilist: The definitive example among Final Fantasy antagonists. Whereas being inherently evil and wanting to destroy the world just because it's there or as part of a breakdown is a common motivation for them (Exdeath, Kefka, Kuja, etc.), Seymour is the only one who monologues about how life is meaningless and how the world can only be saved by being destroyed. (At least until Dissidia has Kefka follow in his footsteps.)
• The Starscream: For the Church of Yevon. He ends up killing or exiling every other Maester so it's just him at the top except Lord Mika, who isn't about to get in Seymour's way.
• A Taste of Power: In the only battle you get to use him. Also mentioned by his mother's fayth in-game as part of his motivation to become the new Sin.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • He quite literally massacres monsters in the Blitzball stadium by summoning Anima. Turns out that's nothing on what he plans to do to the world. It's also stated that he was the one who released the monsters he massacred in the first place.
  • He can also do this to you when you run into him on Mt. Gagazet. Late in this fight, a countdown begins. If you can't kill Seymour before the countdown finishes, he uses an attack called Total Annihilation, which will do just that to the team. You will be lucky to survive.
• The Undead: Seymour dies after his first battle but comes back stronger than before with horrifying new powers.
• Undeath Always Ends: He finally gives up inside Sin, when Yuna properly sends him.
• Villainous Crush: On Yuna. He pretends to marry her in a similar manner to that of Zaon and Yunalesca, which this is a part of his plan as he wants become Yuna's Final Aeon so that he can then turn into Sin.
• Villainous Legacy: His actions leave an impact two years later in X-2. Due to their support of Seymour's atrocities, the Guado have been ostracized from most of Spira and forced out of their own home, with some of the remaining Ronso plotting vengeance against them.
• Villain Has a Point:
  • Invoked by Tidus while narrating the story. He reflects that while he never carried anything but dislike for Seymour, a lot of what he said during Operation Mi'ihen made sense. Even if Seymour lied and was manipulating people, giving the people of Spira the chance to defeat Sin even through forbidden means, should be something worth trying.
  • Even Seymour's Omnicidal Maniac status has some justification. For a thousand years, Summoners and their Guardians have been repeating the same cycle - march to their deaths, push Sin back for a few years, only for Sin to return and keep destroying everything. He just figures that since Sin is just going to wipe every living thing out anyway, he might as well speed it along and give the world a Mercy Kill. It isn't until the heroes find a way to defeat Sin for real that they prove him wrong, but even they were hesitant about what they could do.
• Villain Decay: After defeating him for the second time, he drops out of significance in the plot and eventually becomes a complete joke. Not even the main characters take him seriously anymore, with Tidus' reaction to their final confrontation being one of simple annoyance ("Don't you know when to give up!?"). The player has to wait for his third form to fall before deeming him insignificant, however.
• Villain with Good Publicity: A Justified Trope. Despite doing many terrible things, as one of the most important people in a society heavily revolving around a religious institution, Seymour is well loved by the people.
• Walking Shirtless Scene: Thanks to his otherwise unflattering robe.
• We Can Rule Together: He constantly tries to talk Yuna into helping Mercy Kill the people of Spira by turning him into her Final Aeon, though he drops this once Yunalesca is dead. At Mt. Gagazet, he also tries to tempt Tidus by arguing that his plan will free Jecht from Sin.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: In the Metaphorically True way. He legitimately believes that the only way to free people from the cycle of suffering is via killing them, and seeks to take control of Sin to do so. Given that The Government in Spira is dedicated to ensuring said cycle continues forever, his plan is simply the ultimate conclusion of Yevon's philosophy. In fact, when he says "But even when I'm gone, Spira's suffering will prevail," he seems to say it with some sadness. The only reason he turns out to be wrong is because Yuna and her friends defy Yevon totally and Screw Destiny.
• Whole Costume Reference: It's hard to notice this in the game itself, but look at the picture of him above. Now look up a good picture of Anima. It's subtle, but the resemblance can't be accidental.
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?: He gloats over his killing of the entire Ronso clan to provoke Kimahri. The clan is still in shambles in X-2; Seymour's enmity lives on.
  Seymour: Yours was truly a gallant race. They threw themselves at me, to bar my path. One...after another...
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: What turned him into a Well-Intentioned Extremist. The loss of his mother and his exile due to being a Human/Guado hybrid turned him into a tormented person filled with anger, sadistic ambition, and hate.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: After his first defeat, ie. death, Seymour transforms into more powerful forms when he absorbs pyreflies. His first transformation, Seymour Natus, came from absorbing the pyreflies of his Guado henchmen, a Warrior Monk, and Kinoc, while the second, Seymour Flux, was most likely the result of Seymour massacring most of the Ronso tribe.

Mika

Grand Maester Yo Mika

Voiced by: Hiroshi Iwasaki (Japanese), Dwight Schultz (English)

The spiritual leader of Spira and the Grand Maester of Yevon for the last 50 years.

In X-2, he is encountered as a boss in the Bonus Dungeon Vio Infinito. He becomes the Concherer, a vile-looking fiend.

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• Anti-Villain: Mika does many vile things during the game, but he genuinely thinks that it's all necessary for Spira's survival. He knows about Yu Yevon's creating Sin and respawning after every Calm, but he has a Freak Out when he learns that the heroes destroyed Yunalesca. If Maechen's speculations about Yunalesca's plans on Mt. Gagazet are true, Yunalesca may have duped Mika-and by extension all of Yevon-into thinking that Sin is impossible to destroy and that only the Final Aeon can keep it at bay.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: A coward to the end, Mika panics once he learns that no more Final Aeons can be created, and seemingly sends himself to the Farplane. Apparently not, though: He's still hanging around Bevelle as a fiend.
• Big "WHAT?!": When the party reveals to him that Yunalesca is no more, he blurts out a panicked "What?!".
• Dark Messiah: According to Kelk and Kinoc, the Spirans are too weak and foolish to be left to their own devices, so Mika remained in the world as an unsent to enforce the edicts of Yevon.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Concherer has massive defenses and is always under Auto-Protect, so whittling down his already-high HP is a big chore.
• Dead All Along: When Yuna publicly reveals that Seymour is an unsent, Mika taunts her by showing off his own undead nature; the Yevonites consider him too valuable to give up even in death.
• Despair Event Horizon: Yunalesca's death causes him to cross it. He loses all hope that Spira can survive and willingly departs for the Farplane.
• Dirty Coward: After Tidus and crew crash the faux wedding of Yuna and Seymour, Yuna attempts to send her "husband" to the Farplane. Mika then orders her to stop or he'll have the surrounding guards shoot her allies dead where they stand. Then he vanishes when he thinks Spira is doomed.
  Wakka: Disappearing on us!? Rotten son of a shoopuf!
• Evil All Along: He is not only actually dead, but also thoroughly corrupt.
• Evil Old Folks: Wakka is aghast when Tidus remarks, "Shouldn't he be retired now?"
• Fantastic Racism: He says a bigoted remark about Ronsos after Maester Kelk deserts Yevon due to a troubled conscience.
  Mika: Ever the Ronso. Hard-headed, hardly useful.
• Ground Pound: The giant mutant snail, Concherer. He a belly flop called Megaton Press which has a damage multiplier of 254, i.e. the maximum. This will deal 99,999 damage to you no matter what. Oversouling him highly-recommended; it removes Megaton Press in favor of an acid tongue attack.
• His Name Is...: Much later in the game, the guardians pump him for information regarding Yu Yevon. He turns into pyreflies and flees before revealing too much.
• Immortal Ruler: He has been the leader of the Church of Yevon and the de facto ruler of Spira for a very long time. It is revealed that he is in fact an unsent, a deceased ghost who remains tied to the mortal world.
• Knight Templar: He is convinced that the people of Spira can't be trusted to govern themselves, and that they need a firm hand to keep them moral. He also uses lies and manipulation to keep the truth about Sin concealed to keep everyone from suffering a Despair Event Horizon.
• Manipulative Bastard: As Grand Maester of Yevon, his duty is to tell all the people of Spira that Sin will be truly defeated if they redeem from their sins and that summoners will bring peace summoning the Final Aeon, when Sin cannot be destroyed with neither those methods. He also announces that Yuna is a traitor to all Spira (some believe it, some not) and when things start to tremble inside Yevon, he then says that Yuna being a traitor was an Al Bhed lie because he sees the summoner as his only hope.
• Mr. Exposition: As a high priest of Yevon, he is well aware of many of the story's secrets, including the very truth behind Sin's constant revival, which he reveals to the party: Yu Yevon, and his exact nature.
• Optional Boss: He returns as the third guardian of Via Infinito, Concherer.
• Pragmatic Villainy: When the heroes return to Bevelle after the events in Zanarkand, Mika lifts them out of the blacklist, allowing them back into Bevelle, and have an audience with him. This is only because Mika believes Yuna has already obtained the Final Aeon, not knowing that they have instead defeated Yunalesca.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: He's set up as this at the start, and it's possible to think he is one all the way until Bevelle, as the other Maesters are seen taking underhanded or villainous actions, but he is not. The events at Bevelle, however, prove him to have been The Chessmaster behind Seymour and Kinoc. Auron remarks that "Mika and Seymour are not of one mind." At day's end, Mika honestly thinks there's no possible way to defeat Sin and that lies and manipulation are necessary to keep the people from succumbing to despair and to ensure they remain moral. While he may have some knowledge of Seymour killing Jyscal, it'd be fair for Mika to underestimate the sheer bat-shit insanity of Seymour.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Thinking that Spira is doomed after the defeat of Lady Yunalesca, he vanishes because he doesn't want to see his world destroyed. He returns in X-2 as a fiend.
  Auron: The Grand Maester, running away?
• Sinister Minister: He is corrupt to the core, much like his religion: he venerates Yu Yevon, officiates the Shotgun Wedding of Maester Seymour and Yuna, and expresses no alarm when he learns that the groom murdered his father.
• Unwitting Pawn: It's implied by Auron that Mika may not be in complete confidentiality regarding Seymour's true goals, and that Mika would even actually object to it.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He keeps the Yevon faith as a millenarian tradition and does everything for the greater good of his people, because he thinks there are no other ways to defeat Sin. As he puts it himself, he has no desire to see Spira die, and he doesn't take it well when they tell him that the only known way to calm Sin is no more.
• You Fool!: He calls out Yuna and her group on killing Yunalesca, calling them fools and asking them if they realize what they have done.

Maester Wen Kinoc

Maester Wen Kinoc

Voiced by: Hidenari Ugaki (Japanese), Roger L. Jackson (English)

The human representative of Yevon and leader of their Warrior Monks.

His restless spirit is found wandering the Vio Infinito, transforming into the Giant Enemy Crab Aranea.

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• Adipose Rex: At least compared to his younger self (who we briefly see in Auron's sphere as a fit warrior monk) he is now an obese leader.
• Always Second Best: It's implied that Kinoc may have felt this way about himself in relation to Auron: a flashback via sphere shows that Kinoc only got his promotion after Auron turned it down first, and he knows it. In fact, it's possible that it was this insecurity that led him to become The Paranoiac when he becomes a maester.
• Armchair Military: In charge of both the Warrior Monks (part of the Yevon order) and the Crusaders (heretics who use machina to fight Sin). He has a past as a warrior monk, but now he just hides in his tent without ever entering the field of battle. Seymour eulogizes him as a schemer, not a doer.
• Bald of Evil: His younger self had a full head of hair and sported a beard, but now that Kinoc has turned bad he's bald and clean shaven.
• Bandit Mook: Oversouled Aranea can rob the player of 10,000 gil, a symbol of Kinoc's insatiable greed.
• Big Bad Friend: He was a good friend of Auron in the old days. Now a Maester, he passes a death sentence on Auron for the attempted murder of Seymour Guado.
  Kinoc: Your sentence has been decided.
  Auron: Sentence? Don't you mean execution?
  Kinoc: Who would execute an old friend?
  Auron: You would.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: It is implied that one of his own Monks is under Seymour's employ, that same monk carrying Kinoc's body while accompanying Seymour as he confronts Yuna's party at Bevelle's Highbridge.
• The Chessmaster: Once a warrior monk in Bevelle and Auron's friend, he became known for playing dirty politics and engineered the suicide mission which was Operation Mi'ihen. He was thoroughly corrupt, and from what we see of the Crimson Squad exercises, it's not surprising to find his fingerprints on it.
• Even Evil Can Be Loved: He used to be friends with Auron in the past, but by the time you meet him in the game he has become a corrupt and cynical leader who let the Crusaders be slaughtered by Sin in order to rally people behind the church and the Warrior Monks. But that doesn't prevent Auron from being very upset when Seymour kills him, and it's actually one of the few times Auron loses his composure.
  Auron: "Although he was not the man I once knew, Kinoc was still my friend, Seymour! YOU WILL PAY FOR HIS DEATH!"
• Even Evil Has Standards: Kinoc seems to earnestly believe that his deeds benefit Spira. This puts in him conflict with Seymour, who kills him and his security detail in Bevelle.
  Seymour: (when Kinoc offers to go with him to guard Via Purifico's exit) You don't trust me?
  Kinoc: What man would trust anyone who killed his own father?
• Eviler than Thou: According to Ultimania, Kinoc felt threatened by Seymour's popularity and sought to oust him. Kinoc was intrigued by stories of Vegnagun and thought it might be useful against Seymour. He also intimated that Seymour was not be trusted, citing the murder of Jyscal and Seymour stealing his title. Seymour had enough of Kinoc's politicking and killed him to make a point.
• False Flag Operation: The Crusaders foolishly trusted him, but he let them be slaughtered by Sin in order to crush any opposition to Yevon.
• Fat Bastard: He's put on a lot of weight since his days as a Warrior Monk. Now he sends younger, fitter men to their deaths.
• Flaunting Your Fleets: Kinoc provides security for Seymour's sham marriage in Bevelle.
• Killed Offscreen: Seymour kills him offscreen and has his body brought to the Highbridge when the party tries to flee across it.
• Leave No Witnesses: As revealed in X-2, Kinoc assembled a task force called the Crimson Squad in order to research Shuyin, but they were slaughtered during basic training. That didn't work out so well, so he tried to cover up his blunder by having four survivors shot, but they got away. Kinoc also wheedled his way into a joint operation with the Crusaders.
• Mirror Character: He is an old friend of Auron's from the days when they were both Warrior Monks: Auron got shafted by Yevon's leadership, whereas Kinoc got a promotion which was rightfully the former's. If Auron hadn't been blacklisted, he never would have deviated from Yevon and might've become a Maester.
• Optional Boss: Aranea, the first Threshold Guardian of the Via Infinito, is Kinoc's Fiend form, a Palette Swap of the Warmup Boss Boris fron the Gagazet Ruins.
• The Paranoiac: Seymour describes him as such, at least.
  Seymour: He was a man who craved power, and great power he had. But he feared losing it. Trembling at unseen enemies, he spent his days scheming petty schemes. Chased by his fears, never knowing rest...
• Photo Op with the Dog: Kinoc and Seymour both arrive at Mushroom Rock and pretend to endorse the Crusaders' activities; in reality they want to see the Crusaders destroyed, as it will be a powerful recruiting tool for Yevon.
• Properly Paranoid: He's suspicious of all of Seymour's actions. He's right to be so, but he underestimates how far Seymour is willing to go, and was presumably caught by surprise when Seymour suddenly murdered him.
• Retired Badass: Implied. You wouldn't guess it by seeing him now, but he used to be a Warrior Monk and Auron's friend back when he was young.
• Springtime for Hitler: Along with Seymour, he backs Operation Mi'hen despite knowing full well that it's doomed to failure, partly because it'll get a bunch of non-believers killed, and partly to demonstrate that the ritual of the Pilgrimage and Final Summoning is the only way to defeat Sin. While his goal succeeds in the short-term, it ends up backfiring in the longer run, as it demonstrates first-hand to Tidus, Yuna and the party how corrupt and hypocritical the Yevon religion really is.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Created the Crimson Squad and sends them to the Den of Woe under the guise of an initiation exercise, when in truth he wanted to find out anything about the illusions of a giant machina, Vegnagun. Not only was the whole operation a dud (with most of the Crimson Squad slaughtering each other) one of the four remaining survivors was possessed by the evil spirit inhabiting the cave, leading to more problems for Spira, even in its Eternal Calm.
• We Used to Be Friends: He used to be Auron's friend when the latter was still a Warrior Monk in Bevelle. They're not on very good terms anymore, mostly because Auron doesn't recognize his friend anymore. He's become callous and greedy after rising in the Yevon hierarchy.

Sin

Sin

The primary antagonist of FFX, Sin is a Space Whale that has been terrorizing Spira for a thousand years. All of Spiran society revolves around people's fear of this seemingly invincible beast, with Yevon teaching that it was created as punishment for their ancestors' sins and it will only disappear when all of Spiran society atones for them. In the meantime, Spira staves it off every so often by sending summoners on pilgrimages to create an Aeon powerful enough to temporarily destroy Sin, but it always eventually comes back.

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• Animalistic Abomination: Looks a lot like a giant whale.
• The Assimilator: It cannot be "killed" because the Final Aeon who slays it will be absorbed by Yu Yevon and transformed into a copy of Sin.
• Background Boss: Sin, or rather one of its fins, is fought by the party on the way to Kilika. In reality, it stays out of the fight and its only action is to send Sinscales at the party. The fin is still the main target, however.
• Back from the Dead: Sin's modus operandi and why the periods between its defeats are called The Calm. Not even its final defeat in the game stops it since Sin returns at the end of the Final Fantasy X -Will- audio drama.
• Beam-O-War: Against the Al Bhed lightning cannon in Operation Mi'ihen. It won.
• Blob Monster: According to the Ultimanias released over the years, its body is composed of innumerable pyreflies highly condensed by powerful Gravity magic into a solid form. Its body, however, remains supple enough that it can absorb other objects into its form, leading to strange phenomena, like it inadvertently sucking people up and depositing them hundreds of miles away, or the ability to enter its otherworldly body where parts of the ruins of Zanarkand can be found absorbed.
• Colossus Climb: Its Sequential Boss battle consists of four parts: dismantling both fins, then jumping onto its back to destroy its core, before finally fighting it head-on.
• Dragon-in-Chief: The most powerful antagonistic force, Sin is actually a creation of Yu Yevon but its greater power and plot importance make Sin the de facto villain of the game. By contrast, Yu Yevon is practically defenseless without it and is easily killed by the party.
• The Dreaded: All life in Spira revolves around the unending terror of a millennium of Sin's random assaults, punctuated only by brief periods of peace when it's temporarily defeated and for a short time, people can sleep without fear. Every single character's life has been touched negatively by Sin. Every single one.
• Eldritch Abomination: It's really hard to make out what it is, but Sin is very, very loosely based on a whale — with limbs, multiple rows of eyes, and some kind of tower or city on its back. Its interior is an Amazing Technicolor Battlefield too.
• Eldritch Location: Its innards are this rather than a Womb Level, featuring inexplicable foggy oceans and a city populated only by powerful Fiends, proving that Sin is indeed not just a creature but rather a supernatural being.
• Extra Eyes: Sin has thirty eyes extending all over its upper face. Its eyes are also starry and purple.
• Flunky Boss: The run-in with Sin between Besaid and Kilika brings out some Sinscales in addition to the boss. Plus, the third stage of the endgame Sin fight has the team dealing with one more Sinspawn, Genais, before they get to the main core.
• Four Is Death: The fight with Sin at the end of the game has four phases to it.
• Fusion Dance: It is the result of Yu Yevon merging with the Final Aeon used to defeat the previous Sin.
• Gravity Master: Sin is capable of manipulating gravity. It uses this ability to fly, hold its pyrefly-based body together, and fire off gravity-based attacks like Gravija. Its power is so immense that just moving near something can rip buildings from its foundations and warp their shape.
• The Heavy: Sin's very existence causes the plot of the game and the nature of the setting of Spira, and it is the most pressing and recurrent antagonist force, far eclipsing Seymour or the other maesters of Yevon.
• I Want Them Alive!: It won't lay a tentacle on Tidus, mainly because Jecht's consciousness still has enough control to stop it from doing so.
• The Juggernaut: A giant beast that shrugs off everything thrown at it. This is why the pilgrimage is necessary; the Final Aeon is the only known weapon that can stop it and even that is temporary. In order to actually kill Sin, the heroes have to basically destroy parts of it's outer layer, until enough of a hole is left that it can be entered into.
• Kraken and Leviathan: A gargantuan cetacean-like beast whose preferred habitat is the sea or any large body of water though it's able to fly too.
• Limit Break: The Overdrive gauge in the last stage of the Sin battle counts as a time limit. Sin's Overdrive in this form, Giga Graviton, WILL end the game immediately if the player fails to defeat it before it can use it.
• Living Bodysuit: For Yu Yevon. It's the result of a person transformed into a Final Aeon by the summoner. But it also served as a bodysuit for the Final Aeons for some time as Jecht was able to control it so Tidus could be sent to Spira from Zanarkand.
• Lost in Translation: The Japanese name for the character is written "Shin" in katakana, which is the closest Japanese syllabary can come to the English word "sin" (and see directly below for more about that); but also, due to the Japanese language being abundant in homonyms, "Shin" in Japanese can also mean "deity"/"god", "truth", or most notably, "death". There was just literally no way to localize this, however, so the English version leans more heavily on the "sin" angle.
• Ludd Was Right: It has one purpose: to bring destruction to technology, or at least any sign of progress in the world.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Its name is derived from the concept of willingly breaking taboos from one's religion, and the creature is named as such because the people believed it originated from the fact that they sinned or their forefathers sinned during the war.
  • It also shares its name with the Babylonian god of the moon, which might seem random until you consider its spherical appearance during the intro, its association with water and the tides, and its gravity-based attacks.
  • Also, in the original Japanese, the homonyms detailed above are not a coincidence; in particular, the "deity" meaning is descriptive, as a malevolent deity that goes around punishing people for their transgressions (and killing them - "shin" again) is what the creature is meant to come across as. This unfortunately created a bit of a localization nightmare, though, since the triple-or-so meaning is meant to be fairly clear in Japanese but is utterly impossible to convey succinctly in English.
• Medieval Stasis: The whole point of its existence. Sin seeks out and destroys all advanced technology, and spreads a religion that bans the use of technology so that no civilization will create a ship powerful enough to venture out into the ocean and discover Dream Zanarkand.
• Mook Maker: For story purposes, it is also capable of launching "Sinspawn" from its body, which includes the goombas fought in the prologue and some later bosses.
• Music Soothes the Savage Beast: As Sin is Jecht, the Hymn of the Fayth has a soothing effect on it, keeping it calm. As a result of this, the party never even realized they were standing right on top of Sin in Macalania Lake until the singing stopped. This is then weaponized and used in the final battle against it to even the odds.
• Non-Standard Game Over: In the final phase of its Sequential Boss fight, if it's allowed to use Giga-Graviton, it will blast away the entire airship. Forget about summoning an Aeon as defense, as you'll still get the Game Over screen anyway.
• Notzilla: It attacks from the sea, goes straight for cities or its offspring, and it's the weapon of mass destruction of an ancient war gone horribly wrong. Note that "Gojira" is a portmanteau of "gorilla" and "kujira (whale)", the latter being the animal Sin is loosely based on it.
• Papa Wolf: "Sin always returns for its spawn."
• Poisonous Person: Discussed Trope. According to Wakka, Sin secretes a powerful toxin that badly disorients people exposed to it and takes a long time to wear off. This becomes Tidus' go-to lie whenever he reveals how ignorant of Spira and Yevon he is.
• Population Control: Sin automatically seeks out populated towns and smashes them to bits. This is Yu Yevon's way of ensuring that technology won't advance.
• The Remnant: The name originates from the fact that people think that it was born from the sins of their forefathers during the Machina War. It's essentially a giant Aeon that was created by Yu Yevon to defend him during his perpetual summoning of Dream Zanarkand.
• Sequential Boss: Sin is fought four times in a row, although there is a short break before the last one in the sequence. Appropriate, seeing as the fourth battle is That One Boss.
• Sphere of Destruction: With the powers of gravity, Sin would make spherical shields either to protect itself (Mushroom Rock) or to attack (Dream Zanarkand, its Villainous Breakdown while listening to Spira's Hymn of the Fayth). Its Overdrive, Giga-Graviton fires a ball of gravity from its mouth towards its target, obliterating anything in the sphere's path. Sin's strongest move, the cutscene-only Tera-Graviton fires eight spheres that can tear through Spira's surface and skies.
• That's No Moon: After one Guado Fiend pulls a Taking You with Me on the heroes, they find themselves in Macalania Lake. When the Hymn of the Fayth being played on the temple above stops, however, the ground starts to move, revealing that they were nowhere near the lake bottom, but rather on top of Sin this whole time.
• Time-Limit Boss: The last battle with him. If you don't defeat him before his Overdrive bar fills up, you're doomed.
• Vicious Cycle: Sin is Yu Yevon's Spiral of Death. Appearing a short while after its previous defeat to ensure chaos and destruction until a Final Aeon battles it, then it loops again. Then Yuna and her guardians found its weak spot: killing Yu Yevon.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Its Giga-Graviton attack, otherwise known as Game Over.

Sinspawn

The various Fiends that Sin creates. Usually large and powerful creatures in their own right, there is also the smaller, easy-to-kill variant, Sinscales.

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• Cartoon Creature: Each Sinspawn is loosely based on an actual animal: Ammes (anemones), Echuilles (jellyfish), Gui (scorpion). Only Geneaux and Genais don't fit the mold, as both are Planimals instead.
• Cognizant Limbs:
  • Geneaux (but not Genais or Catastrophe) plants its arms on the ground to surround its attackers in a triangle. These arms will redirect and absorb any magical attacks that target Geneaux. They must be destroyed in order to attack the main body with magic.
  • Fighting Gui requires the player to target four of its parts: its two heads, and its two arms. The arms need to be destroyed in order to hit the real target, the bottom head, and the upper head must be disabled to cancel its Venom attack. All three parts can regenerate, however.
• Flunky Boss: The first two Sinspawn encountered in the game employ Sinscales.
• Mook Maker: Some Sinspawn spawn enemies themselves, such as the ones that assault Zanarkand in the beginning.
• Mythology Gag: Geneaux's strategy of planting its arms on the ground to surround its opponents is highly reminiscent of another Final Fantasy Kaiju, Ruby WEAPON.
• Sequential Boss
  • Sinspawn Echuilles is fought after Sin assaults the ferry from Besaid to Kilika. Since this takes place underwater, only Tidus and Wakka participate.
  • Sinspawn Gui is fought in two consecutive battles: the first is a standard boss battle, while the second serves to demonstrate Seymour's power.
• Underground Monkey: There are more powerful versions of Geneaux and Gui in the Monster Arena: Catastrophe and Ultima Buster, respectively. Geneaux also has another variant, Genais, that is fought in the four-part boss battle against Sin itself.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: Ammes poses no actual threat, and Echuilles and Geneaux can easily be dealt with (especially when utilizing the latter's weakness to fire). Gui, on the other hand, with its regenerating Cognizant Limbs, can take a while to actually defeat, especially if the player hasn't been taking Level Grinding seriously and/or relying too much on Aeons.
• Zerg Rush: Multiple Ammes burst out of Sin when it shows up in Dream Zanarkand, and even more Sinscales burst out of them. Tidus and Auron find themselves surrounded by dozens of Sinscales, but they only have to fight those who are blocking their way "forward" (or rather, where Auron wants to take Tidus).

Yunalesca

Yunalesca

"It is better to die in hope than to live in despair. Let me be your liberator!"

Voiced by: Yoko Koyanagi (Japanese), Julia Fletcher (English)

Yu Yevon's daughter and the first summoner to "defeat" Sin. Yuna was named after her. She has been dwelling in Zanarkand as an Unsent for a thousand years, acting as the guide to the summoners who complete their pilgrimage.

In X-2, Yunalesca can be found shambling along the halls of the Vio Infinito alongside other unsent, including Maester Jyscal, Kinoc, and Mika.

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• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield: Her lair is in the bowels of an abandoned temple/blitzball stadium in the ruins of Zanarkand, yet for some reason when you confront her the party is apparently transported to a stone platform floating in space.
• Anti-Villain: The party infers that she genuinely believed there was no definitive method to vanquish Sin. In this perspective, providing Spira with momentary flickers of hope could appear to be the sole path to attain peace. However, her actions (unknown to anyone who operates outside of Bevelle's governance), such as pushing the Yu Yevon agenda, and establishing the Summoner-Final Aeon framework, undoubtedly made her responsible for an extensive cycle of death.
• Attractive Zombie: She is an unsent, which is a type of undead technically closest to zombie. She is also Ms. Fanservice.
• Avenging the Villain: Lord Zaon, who was last seen among the mirages in Zanarkand, was the husband and guardian to Lady Yunalesca, the first High Summoner. Zaon became the first "Final Aeon" to be sacrificed to Sin. Keep in mind that his Chamber was inert, as the Fayth was lost. It's unclear how both he and Yunalesca wound up beneath Bevelle as unsent. (Yunalesca was killed by Yuna, but her husband was consumed by Yu Yevon. Perhaps his soul was freed when Yu Yevon fled into another body, but that's conjecture.) He and Yunalesca share an embrace before she fights you in the Via Infinito. When she is beaten and dispersed, Zaon walks away, destroyed. He resurfaces in the next boss chamber as a gold-plated Weapon (Paragon), evoking his gold armor.
• Battle Couple: Her backstory is a mystery, but the original Final Aeon was created from her husband and guardian, Lord Zaon.
  • Final Fantasy X-2.5 ~Eien no Daishō~ added some insight into her character backstory, which remains consistent with this trope. Though, it's evident in the book that she had always been a villain, much like her father.
• Big Good: Subverted. Her function is to reveal the Awful Truth to ascendant summoners and help them fulfill the final steps of their journey; and as far as Mika is concerned — himself the Big Good to the average Spiran — killing her is as good as throwing the world away. For all that, her Final Summoning ritual is a deeply flawed concept and has perpetuated a cycle of death for a millennium. From a narrative structure though, she's The Heavy, being the one responsible for much of the problems, but not being directly involved as the Big Bad, or the Greater-Scope Villain.
• Broken Pedestal: Considered a legend for being the first summoner of the Final Aeon. Then it turns out that she is the one who has kept a tradition that spans 1,000 years and caused countless people to sacrifice their lives for nothing going.
• The Chessmaster: The Ultimania and Maechen both speculate that Yunalesca, and possibly even Yu Yevon himself, used the myths around Sin to create what became the Yevonite religion and ensure that Yu Yevon could continue to summon Dream Zanarkand.
• Climax Boss: An even bigger one than Seymour Natus was back in Bevelle, in both senses of the trope; not only are the stakes raised immensely upon confronting her, but Yunalesca is widely considered to be one of the hardest bosses in the game.
• Combat Tentacles: Her physical attacks consist of using her gorgon form's skull hair. She zombifies with them too.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Infamously, Chac's Stone Glare ignores Stoneproof and Ribbon. The party wouldn't be able to have such a "Proof"-bypassing ability, nor does any other enemy for that matter.
• Cozy Voice for Catastrophes: Tells you some of the most horrifying things regarding Sin and Yevon, in a very calm and comforting voice.
• Daddy's Little Villain: Sin began destroying indiscriminately, so Yu Yevon's daughter Yunalesca formed a plan to temporarily subdue it. She used a close bond, that of her her husband Lord Zaon, to turn him into a fayth and summoned the Final Aeon. But Yu Yevon possessed the Final Aeon, made it Sin's new core, and began to rebuild it. Yunalesca knows this, and is perpetuating the "spiral of death".
• Dark Action Girl: She is a challenging foe, not afraid to get down and dirty.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: Invoked, where the grand Yevon tradition of summoner pilgrimages must come to an end with meeting her at the ruins of Zanarkand. Yuna and her Guardians follow through with the tradition until they find out the truth from Yunalesca herself, and, after defeating her, they resolve to find another way to defeat Sin.
• Despair Event Horizon: She crosses it before she dies, as is shown in how she believes that there is no hope for Spira without the Final Aeon.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: While most of her outfit matches from left to right, the only unbalanced part of her outfit is her legband on her left leg.
• Good Powers, Bad People: Her hardest-hitting attacks are all healing spells, which work quite well considering her habit of zombifying the party.
• Gorgeous Gorgon: Her third stage shows her real powerful form which is a giant gorgon head with hair that resembles human skulls.
• Hair Antennae: Though nowhere near as extreme as Seymour's.
• Hero Killer: She didn't kill Auron directly. Enraged after the Senseless Sacrifice of Braska and Jecht, he charged at her in a blind fury, an attack she easily rebuffed causing him serious injuries to which he would eventually succumb after making his way to Bevelle from Zanarkand.
• Holy Is Not Safe: She's a revered figure in the Yevonite religion, she rules over an abandoned city held sacred by most Spirans, and she uses mostly white magic - but she is pitiless toward those who do not accept her "gift" and will still kill you dead.
• Humanoid Abomination: As she will reveal once she decides to destroy the party. Despite looking human at first, she's the oldest known Unsent, and can transform into two additional forms that give her increased powers.
• Keeper of Forbidden Knowledge: She's the one who bestows knowledge of the true nature of Sin and the sacrifice needed to defeat it on summoners who prove themselves worthy by making it to her lair in the Zanarkand ruins.
• Knight Templar: As with all major Yevonite figures. Her dialogue reveals that she's deeply cynical about humanity's ability to aspire to anything better, and that her lies and manipulation are necessary to keep the people of Spira in line. Worse, she honestly thinks her actions are in the right, making her willing to kill anyone who tries to stop her.
• Leitmotif: She has her own version of the Hymn of the Fayth that has a reverb to it as well as sounding much more sinister in general.
• Life Drain: One of her more damaging attacks in her initial phase.
• Mercy Kill: When Yuna refuses to obey her command to choose a sacrifice for the Final Summoning, she determines to give the party one.
  Yunalesca: Poor creature. You would throw away hope? Well...I will free you before you can drown in your own sorrow. It is better to die in hope than to live in despair. Let me be your liberator.
• Ms. Fanservice: Despite being a 1,000-year-old Humanoid Abomination she first appears to the party as a beautiful woman who is practically naked. Once you start fighting her, though.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The scan feature refers to her as "Reaper of Souls".
• One-Hit Kill:
  • Mega-Death is an instant Total Party Kill unless the party has Deathproof armor, or are under Zombie status.
  • Since Stone Glare is unblockable, Chac can instantly cause the afflicted character to suffer Literally Shattered Lives with any of its attacks. And Stone Glare is usually followed up by the Herd-Hitting Attack Heaven's Cataract.
• One-Winged Angel: Her powers can make her sprout a gorgon head with skull hair and uses form this to battle.
• Optional Boss: In X-2 she "returns" as one of the Threshold Guardians of the Via Infinito Bonus Dungeon, the basilisk-like Chac.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: After her defeat of Sin, she remained in the Zanarkand ruins as an Unsent to pass on knowledge of the Final Summoning to later summoners.
• Power Makes Your Hair Grow: In a horrifying way as she's a One-Winged Angel Sequential Boss that begins to show her true powers as soon as her previous forms are defeated. Her ultimate one is a gorgon-like head with hair that resembles human skulls.
• Prehensile Hair: You know her one One-Winged Angel form? Yeah, that's really her hair. Meaning she's freaking riding her hair and kicking back while kicking your ass in her final form.
• Puzzle Boss: Beating her requires thinking carefully about the mechanics of how her attacks work and taking advantage of them.
• Revive Kills Zombie: She'll exploit this against the party by casting Curaga on anyone who is under the zombie status.
• Scaled Up: Her third form resembles a giant Medusa head.
• Sequential Boss: Yunalesca is fought through three stages of the same boss fight.
• Shout-Out:
  • Her One-Winged Angel seems remarkably similar to the goddess statue boss of Final Fantasy VI.
  • In addition, her overall design was reused from the Amano artwork of the Cloud of Darkness from Final Fantasy III. And her One-Winged Angel, aside from resembling the Goddess, also resembles how the Cloud of Darkness looked as the Final Boss of Final Fantasy III.
• Slouch of Villainy: There's no throne, but rather, she spends the entirety of her third phase lying down seemingly leisurely on her back.
• Status Effects: Her attacks inflict a boatload of them, and understanding how they interact with one another is the key to defeating her.
• Straw Nihilist: Genuinely believes that life is hopeless and Sin can never be permanently overcome.
  Yunalesca: Sorrow cannot be abolished. It is meaningless to try.
• Stripperiffic: She's completely naked and barefoot except for some tiny thongs and a scanty bikini top.
• Super-Empowering: Her role in a summoner's pilgrimage is to grant the guardian of a summoner the power to become a Fayth that is powerful enough to destroy Sin.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: The Ultimania guide for Final Fantasy X reveals that the Church of Yevon was founded shortly after she defeated Sin for the first time and she didn't know anything about it until summoners and their guardians encountered her Unsent in Zanarkand and told her about it and its teachings. She played along since the Church's rules and philosophies aligned with her own personal ideals, but never truly believed in it, so despite being okay with it, she has no issues dispelling the myth if it suits her purposes.
• Total Party Kill: If you don't have at least one character who is either zombified or wearing armor with the "Deathproof" attribute in your party when she enters her third phase, she will promptly inflict one on you with the Mega Death spell.
• The Undead: She has remained as an Unsent in the ruins of Zanarkand for 1,000 years.
• Undead Barefooter: One of the reasons why she doesn't wear shoes may be that being undead, she doesn't care about discomfort and injuries.
• Villains Never Lie: An odd example; while she is the main person perpetuating the Yevon religion and the Summoner's Pilgrimage, which are entirely based on lies, once the party finally meets her she freely admits the entire truth of the plot to them even though being honest to the heroes directly causes them to rebel and fight her. As she never believed in the Church of Yevon, lying doesn't seem like something she feels is necessary.
• Villain with Good Publicity: She was enshrined as a saint by the founders of Yevon out of fear.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: It is suggested she genuinely believes that the never-ending cycle of sacrificing summoners and guardians is Necessarily Evil so the people of Spira will have some (false) motivation to keep living. The issue is that she's so obsessed with said cycle, that she refuses to let anyone go if they will not perform the Final Summoning, and has done nothing to discourage the Summoner Pilgrimage.

Yu Yevon

Yu Yevon

The namesake of Yevon and father of Yunalesca. He was a zealous religious leader in Zanarkand. Yu Yevon gave Sin a simple task: to eliminate all machina and large settlements, wherever they may be. Yu Yevon probably planned to have a degree of control over Sin, but most lore seems to point out that once he summoned it, he completely lost his marbles and attacked Zanarkand, as per his mission.

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• Alliterative Name: Yu Yevon.
• Almighty Idiot: At the end of X you defeat Braska's Final Aeon Jecht, forcing Yu Yevon out of it. With no new Final Aeon to possess, he takes over the Aeons Yuna formed pacts with. One by one the party kills them all until he is left with nothing else to possess, leaving behind only the parasite creature you face as the final boss. That is all that is left of Yu Yevon, who "now exists only to summon." Nothing remains of the old Yu Yevon; it has no personality, thoughts or feelings, it's just a husk that lives only to destroy. It is "neither good or evil."
• Anti-Villain: He honestly doesn't know what he's doing anymore. Whether or not he's self-aware or even sentient isn't clear.
• Ax-Crazy: Whatever intentions he had creating Sin, in the present era he is nothing more than a mindless force of destruction.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: He wanted to destroy all machines for two purposes: to end all conflict and to keep Dream Zanarkand safe. The dream has machines that provide convenience and entertainment in it, but nothing that can be used for war. By the time the party confronts him, he's little better than a roomba or computer virus. He destroys anything he comes across, takes over a new Aeon, and then repeats the cycle forever. Sure the people of Dream Zanarkand are happy, but they can't reproduce and their world is fake, basically living in a virtual world like a video game.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: When it became clear he would lose the war, Yu Yevon convinced the survivors to become Fayth for a mass summoning which would preserve their city for eternity.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Shares this role with Seymour, as the mastermind behind the creation of Sin; however, he is still the bigger threat. He stopped the Zanarkand-Bevelle War using Sin and consequently created a religion named after him that preaches false hope for the Spirans that ruled the world for the next 1000 years. Also possesses a summoner's Final Aeon to become a new Sin, caused numerous indirect casualties for nothing, and trapped millions of Zanarkand souls to become Fayth.
• The Chessmaster: The Ultimania speculates that he may have conspired with Yunalesca to use the creation of Sin and the Final Summoning to establish what became the pilgrimage and the Yevonite faith. This way, he keeps summoning Dream Zanarkand while maintaining Spira's Medieval Stasis.
• Death of Personality: Yu Yevon created Sin and directed it using his own disembodied spirit to protect Dream Zanarkand. However, after centuries of repeating the same mission and absorbing new Aeons, Yevon's mind slowly decayed until all he could think of was his mission. By the time the party confronts him, Yu Yevon the man had effectively ceased to exist long ago. All that was left was a mindless machine programmed to follow its former self's last wishes, but so simplistic and uncreative that it could only follow for most rudimentary versions of it.
• Demiurge Archetype: He was once a human summoner who ruled the city-state of Zanarkand and destroyed himself in a war with Bevelle. Becoming a strange bug-like creature, he creates a false world, Dream Zanarkland, trapping the survivors inside, and becomes the god of the Church of Yevon, a religion which he uses to keep the rest of Spira in a Medieval Stasis, keeping his followers in line by regularly attacking them with his literal Dragon, Sin, and demanding pilgrimages that are essentially Human Sacrifices. Like the Demiurge, Yevon rules over a false world and will do everything in his power to keep his subjects trapped within.
• Demonic Possession: He possesses the Final Aeon that defeats Sin and turns it into a new monster. In the final battle, he settles on possessing Yuna's "lesser" Aeons until he has nowhere left to hide. This ability is also why the Final Summoning is known to be fatal for the summoner. It's believed by the people of Spira that the Final Summoning is what kills the summoner, a lie perpetuated by his daughter Yunalesca never mentioning him. The reality is that his possession of the Final Aeon severs its connection to its Summoner, killing them in the process.
• Despair Event Horizon: He convinced all of his people to turn into Fayth and began summoning Sin because the war with Bevelle seemed hopeless.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Actually, he did not ban the machinery used for Blitzball - he may be intent on keeping Spira in a Medieval Stasis, but he's not evil enough to ban machinery used solely for entertainment and sports. (And for attentive viewers, this will be the first major hint that the Yevonite "ban" on technology seems comparatively arbitrary.)
• Evil Luddite: The purpose of Sin is to keep Spira frozen in a pre-industrial dark age.
• Final Boss: Technically, though it's impossible to lose without hitting yourself with Stone status.
• Flat Character: Justified. He has an extensive background and possessed an identity at one point, but because of his actions prior to the game, he has become a blank slate. Just what he was like is never revealed, which has resulted in a couple of different character interpretations.
• Flunky Boss: The two Yu Pagodas from the Final Aeon fight carry over to the Yu Yevon possessing Aeons fight and then Yu Yevon itself.
• The Fundamentalist: From what little we know about him, he was a pretty zealous leader, considering that he condemned all of Zanarkand's citizens to become Fayths and ground technological progress to a halt for over a thousand years.
• Giant Eye of Doom: Yevon's symbol is watching you. Always. The eye is, for all intents and purposes, the final boss of the game.
• God Is Evil: He's a summoner, but is revered as a god by the people of Spira, and has the power to back it up. At the time of the game, he is not aware of his actions and is said to be "neither good nor evil," but nevertheless acts as a destructive force.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The process of summoning the Dream Zanarkand and Sin worked as intended but completely overwrote Yu Yevon's mind.
• Gravity Master: When Yu Yevon is finally seen after all the Aeons have been destroyed, his only attack is the Gravija spell Sin's external cores used earlier.
• He Who Must Not Be Seen: Although we do see him for the final battle, it is only in his parasitic form.
• Hidden Elf Village: His entire purpose now that his mind has collapsed is to create Sin to enforce this on Dream Zanarkand.
• Hidden Villain: His name is not dropped until the third act of the game, and he does not even make an appearance until the final battle. Even worse, his human form is never seen. Despite this, his influence can be felt throughout the entire game through the Yevon religion.
• It's All About Me: He essentially damned the world for over a millennium to keep some semblance of his beloved city. Not only did he create Sin to "protect" Dream Zanarkand by keeping Spira in the dark ages, the dream is maintained by his enslaved citizens. Bahamut implies that this leaves the people in an And I Must Scream situation, constantly dreaming and unable to wake up.
• Knight Templar: If the speculation that he conspired with Yunalesca to create what would become the pilgrimage and the Yevonite faith is true, then Yu Yevon was likely very cynical that the people of Spira could govern themselves or aspire to anything better. In his view, the lies and manipulation would be necessary to keep Spira going.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Sin dissipates into pyreflies after Yu Yevon is defeated. Since Sin itself serves as the final dungeon, the heroes would have fallen from a thousand feet in the air if it weren't for the Fahrenheit. Afterwards, the Fayth are allowed to stop "dreaming" and journey to the afterlife, and the Dream Zanarkand fades away along with Tidus.
• Obliviously Evil: Because his sense of self has been destroyed, he has absolutely no idea of all the death and destruction he's causing during the game. However, he may have been evil prior to his mind wipe.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Yu Yevon gave his summon very vague orders, but it's unknown if his intention was to destroy his city. However, he conveniently created Sin as an "armor" for himself. He kept a few survivors of the war alive, because without them, Sin would just be a normal Aeon. Those followers were turned into Fayth from which he could draw power to maintain "Zanarkand" as he destroyed other cities.
• The Paragon Always Rebels: Said to have been a "peerless" summoner.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Created Sin, which has caused mass death, destruction, and terror to Spira for 1000 years. He continues to revive Sin whenever it is killed with the Final Aeon. The sheer magnitude of his summoning abilities means that he is likely the most powerful person to have ever inhabited Spira.
• Post-Final Boss: The fight against him is literally set up in such a way that you cannot lose to him without intentionally trying to.
• Prefers the Illusion: Faced with the destruction of his beloved Zanarkand, Yu Yevon chose not to build something new, but remake the city in a shared dream so he and all his people could spend centuries in denial.
• Puppeteer Parasite: At this point, he's just a fiend who jumps from one Aeon to another to keep Sin alive.
• The Remnant: He and his daughter are the last 'living' survivors of the real Zanarkand, if you can call them that.
• Rule of Symbolism: His current form is quite appropriately, a giant parasite.
• Sequential Boss: Technically, only the first encounter with Yu Yevon while possessing Jecht is a do-or-die boss fight (it alone has two stages), but then the game forces the team to kill each and every Aeon before they can kill Yu Yevon itself.
• Silent Antagonist: He has not a single line of dialogue in the entire game.
• Squashed Flat: When Yu Yevon is defeated, his Yu Pagoda stones turn and combine with him in the middle, squashing him before they disintegrate.
• Undeath Always Ends: Once Jecht is defeated, Yu Yevon attempts to take control of Yuna's other Aeons, then dies once he runs out of vessels to inhabit.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Dream Zanarkand is just that: an ideal city born from the Fayth's dreams. It's a strange representation of reality. In the Dream, things don't necessarily work the same way as they did in the real Zanarkand. Yu Yevon's end goal was to create an eternal city without conflict; Zanarkand would have lost the war to Bevelle had he not done so. Dream Zanarkand is a mirror of the city during the height of its power. It has all elements of conflict and war removed from it, basically a utopia. Hence why summoners are not a thing there, because they would have been without purpose. (Aeons are essentially tools of War.) The fayth only appear to have summoned the good bits of the city from their memory; the fun and the nightlife, not the politics.
• Vicious Cycle: He's the reason killing Sin is one. First, a Summoner kills Sin with their Final Aeon, then Yu Yevon possesses the Final Aeon which kills the Summoner in the process and retreats to regrow the shell of Sin, repeat for eternity.
• Walking Spoiler: This creature's existence is a spoiler for FFX.
• Was Once a Man: But is now a floating tick...thingy, and the "brain" of Sin. His original human form is never depicted in-game.
• Written by the Winners: He became the leader of Zanarkand and led them in the Machina War against Bevelle a thousand years ago; ironic in light of later events.
• Zero-Effort Boss: Just as Maester Mika implied, he's helpless without his armor or any Aeons to flee inside of. The only way to lose is to petrify your own characters, but you'd have to do that on purpose.

Final Fantasy X-2

Shuyin

Shuyin

"Share my despair!"

Voiced by: Masakazu Morita (Japanese), James Arnold Taylor (English)

A Walking Spoiler who looks and sounds exactly like Tidus from X. But, as Lulu remarks when seeing his image, "...something seems a little off."

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• And I Must Scream: Shuyin's soul was trapped as an Unsent in the Den of Woe, and he was forced to relive the image of his lover's death every day for one thousand years.
• Ax-Crazy: Especially when YRP run into him in the Den of Woe; this guy has lost all reasoning and has become quite maniacal.
• Big Bad: Of X-2.
• Body Surf: Two years before the game starts, he possessed Nooj, which caused him to fire on his friends (hence their breakup). Shuyin then lays dormant for a few years, until Nooj, Baralai, and Gippal meet up again, their bad blood with each other reawakening him and forcing him to jump to Baralai.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: His torture? He was subjected to watching his one true love be callously killed, in a loop, for one thousand years. This pushed him even further over the edge than he already was from living through it the first time.
• Cloning Gambit: There are two versions of Shuyin present in the game: the one who is inhabiting Nooj, and the one who is haunting the Den of Woe. The question of which Shuyin is the 'real' one is academic, since both are trying to kill you.
• Enemy Without: The real Shuyin died in the depths of Bevelle. A raw deal, sure, but his hate and resentment have taken on their own shape.
• Evil Laugh: In the Den of Woe.
• Evil Twin: He is Tidus in every aspect; attack animations, critical HP animation, and his special attack is Tidus' Blitz Ace Overdrive, albeit renamed to Terror of Zanarkand. Same dedication, same motivation, but where Tidus was willing to die to protect Yuna, Shuyin got both Lenne and himself killed.
• False Camera Effects: In the Den of Woe sequence, the camera sometimes switches to Shuyin's perspective, and those shots have a static filter over them like a movie sphere. It's meant to reinforce that the Shuyin we're dealing with is a 'recording', not the real person.
• Fighting a Shadow: Contrary to expectation, "Shuyin" is a ghost materialized by the original's hate. In the Den of Woe, it's implied that the Shuyin that the heroes are fighting is not even the same one fought aboard Vegnagun, but rather another copy created by the pyrefly-filled cave.
• Final Boss: He is your last opponent in X-2.
• Final Solution: Vegnagun can blow up the entire world. Since it regards everything as an enemy, it will do exactly that. So not only would it destroy Sin, it would kill everybody, hence why it was mothballed and locked underneath Bevelle. Shuyin believes this the only way to bring peace to Spira.
• Glamour: As Shuyin is embracing Yuna, a warning from an unexpected source shakes her out of trance. "Open your eyes!", yells Nooj. Yuna recoils from Shuyin, who turns out to be Baralai on disguise. Shuyin/Baralai mentions "The end is not far now", before generating a portal for himself and vanishing.
• Grand Theft Prototype: In the present day, Shuyin is able to possess the bodies of the living and use them to commit evil deeds: specifically, he takes over Nooj then Baralai in an effort to carjack Vegnagun again.
• Knight of Cerebus: The moment he shows up is when the story starts to turn away from perky J-Pop concerts and really begins in earnest.
• Kubrick Stare: Shuyin before being shot.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Shuyin seems to have this divide-and-conquer strategy down to an art.
• Living Bodysuit: His ability.
• Love Makes You Evil: A thousand years ago, his girlfriend Lenne was a summoner fighting in the war between Bevelle and Zanarkand. Hoping to end the war before she died in battle, Shuyin snuck into Bevelle to use their machina superweapon Vegnagun against them. He was caught and summarily executed alongside Lenne, who had followed him there.
• Made of Phlebotinum: The game doesn't even offer a token explanation as to why the pyreflies have suddenly turned hostile and are keeping a shadow of this guy alive. He's only running around killing people because his trauma from the war is being preserved. At most you get a couple lines in Shinra's glossary about how more research is needed on the pyrefly phenomenon. Spira still has no clue about how/why they exist or what they do.
• Meet the New Boss:
  • To Yu Yevon. He is not an unsent and cannot be dispatched unless he leaves his puppet body and takes physical form, which he finally does once he runs out of options.
  • Shuyin and Seymour have a lot in common, both being undead nihilists. The difference is that Seymour was corrupted over time; Shuyin was preserved at the height of his rage. However, they're both still vulnerable to emotional appeals. (From Anima and Lenne, respectively.)
• Motive Decay: A tragically justified example. Before he became a ghost, he was just a desperate Well-Intentioned Extremist, but a thousand years of being in the Den of Woe have reduced him into a screaming psychopath that only barely resembles the misguided but noble man he used to be.
• Motive Rant: Whoever this imposter in the meadow is, he's monologuing. Looks like we've found our villain.
• Moveset Clone: he uses renamed versions of Tidus's Overdrives in the last fight of X-2.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: Dying won't stop him from hijacking Vegnagun again, or punishing those he sees as the warmongers of Spira.
• Never Be Hurt Again: After a thousand years of psychological torture, all Shuyin can think of doing anymore is obliterating the people that put him through it.
• Omnicidal Maniac: In another throwback to the 2D Final Fantasy games, Shuyin doesn't spare himself the same fate as his victims. He wants to "fade" away with Lenne after the destruction.
• Orcus on His Throne: Wasn't it nice of Shuyin to delay activating Vegnagun until the Gullwings got there?
• Perspective Flip: The villain of the previous game was Sin, a giant, immortal sea-beast which turned out to be a parody of an Aeon with Sir Jecht at its heart. The final boss of the sequel is an anti-Sin weapon which is stolen by Shuyin. Shuyin strongly resembles Jecht's son Tidus, both in appearance and in his life choices, such as falling in love with a summoner. In a weird reversal, it is the ghost of Jecht, not Tidus, who cheers Yuna on.
• The Power of Hate:
  • His hatred and anger at the circumstances of his and Lenne's deaths were enough to keep him around as a ghost, a rarity in Spira. (It's not stated whether the real Shuyin was sent or not.) Not only that,but it gave him lots of powers that normal Unsent don't have. Seymour was a tough customer but even he couldn't possess the living, only the dead.
  • When Baralai threatens to shoot his meat-suit (Nooj), pyreflies emerge from Nooj and enter Baralai—and Baralai seems to have gotten the worse end of the deal. Shuyin quickly takes control and gloats that "the mind which hates" is "easier to break." It's hinted that Baralai left himself open for possession when he pulled a gun on Nooj.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: His spirit was sealed in the Den of Woe. Even then, it still drove anyone who entered insane.
• Sequential Boss: He's controlling Vegnagun throughout the final battle, but isn't fought directly until Vegnagun (itself in multiple phases) is disabled.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: While his voice and appearance connect him to Tidus immediately, his abilities and personality are actually more closely related to Yu Yevon, the first game's end boss. A native of (real) Zanarkand, whose personality has been tortured away until he is more emotion and instinct than person. And he's capable of possessing Aeons, just like Yevon. If he didn't have access to a giant machina with a Wave-Motion Gun, he probably would have still been able to create a new Sin.
• Voice of the Legion: Upon revealing himself, he speaks with both his own voice and that of the person he's possessing, first Nooj and then Baralai.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Before he became an unsent, he just wanted to use Vegnagun to stop the war between his country and Bevelle before it killed his lover. After spending over a thousand years subject to Mind Rape from the Den of Woe, it's twisted into a belief that the only way to end war is to kill everyone.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: The first time he tried to activate Vegnagun, it was to stop the war between Zanarkand and Bevelle because his lover, Lenne, was fighting on the front lines. That failed, but he remained an Unsent and was sealed in a cave off of Mushroom Rock Road. Said cave, by the way, was filled with pyreflies that recreated the pain and despair of his and Lenne’s deaths and forced him to relive it for a thousand years.

Vegnagun

Vegnagun

"What in Spira is that machina?!"

—Brother

A giant superweapon built during the Machina War and hidden underneath Bevelle ever since. It was never considered as a counter-measure against Sin for fear that it wouldn't be able to tell friend from foe once set loose in the world.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Why it was never used against Zanarkand or Sin; unlike other machina, it has a sentient mind of its own, but a childlike, impulsive one that never could tell between friend or foe; it would detect and attack any emotion that might put it in danger, and it would not protest any attempt to use its planet-killing potential against friendly forces.
• Anti-Villain: Vegnagun itself has no malicious thoughts - Baralai even compares it to a frightened child. It's only when someone who has the will to inflict mass damage gains control over it that it becomes dangerous.
• Church Militant: Vegnagun was built by Bevelle, and many of its attacks have Latin names that refer to death or judgment.
  • The tail, for example, uses a swipe called Noli Me Tangere, or "Touch Me Not," said to be what Jesus told Mary Magdalene when she recognized him after his resurrection.
  • The Leg has an attack named Vita Brevis, meaning "life is short," which is taken from a quote by Hippocrates (of Hippocratic Oath fame). It also fires magic bullets, the most impressive of which is an eight-shot volley called Dies Irae, or "day of wrath," named after a hymn describing the day of judgment.
  • The core will bring its legs back to life if necessary, but otherwise charges up for Memento Mori, or "Remember you will die." The tusks will attack in unison with Pallida Mors, or "pale Death," which is how the Romans described their mythological personification of death.
  • The tusks will fire a laser named Lacrimosa, whose name is taken from the ending of the hymn "Dies Irae" ("Day of Wrath"). The head, meanwhile, will restore the tusks to life with Acta Est Fabula ("The play is over," supposedly the last words of Roman emperor Caesar Augustus) belch fire and statuses at you with Mors Cetra ("death is certain," typically followed by hora incetra, "the hour is uncertain"), suck everyone into a null dimension with Nemo Ante Morten Beatus ("no man can be called happy before his death") and shoots laser bullets at you with Odi Et Amo ("I hate and I love"), from a poem which equates love with the torment of crucifixion.
• Colossus Climb: The first stop is the Tail, which isn't too threatening. All of its attacks ignore Defense, so it's better to bring in characters that are balanced toward offense, so they can outpace the Tail's damage. Once you win, the Tail collapses, opening the way forward. However, it seems like the Leblanc Syndicate is struggling to take out one of Vegnagun's main legs. The Leg itself can't do much against you; since you destroyed the Tail, Vegnagun is having trouble keeping its balance. But it will cast spells at you and occasionally take a swipe at the whole party. As before, winning moves the foot out of the way so you can continue. At the top, Vegnagun's head is taking a beating from Nooj and company... but giving as good as it gets. After you help them win the fight, Vegnagun collapses, and the Gullwings run up one of the legs to the cockpit.
• Contagious A.I.: As Vegnagun absorbs more and more energy from the Farplane, the mossy terrain appears to be turning to metal.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Sin was a magical monster built to be a suit of armor that became the center of all life in Spira. Vegnagun was a giant mechanical weapon that was hidden from the general population. Both have similar body shapes and are fought as a Sequential Boss, with the final element including a Non-Standard Game Over where they fire a Limit Break of Wave-Motion Gun proportions. In essence, the two are mirror opposites of each other, representing the duality of magic vs. machine.
• Cognizant Limbs: It's necessary to destroy its tail and one of its legs before moving on to its chest.
• Dreadful Dragonfly: Resembles a giant mechanical dragonfly.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit: It's dark inside Vegnagun's protective shell, which is trying to emulate the Cradle in Bevelle.
• The Heavy: Taken to the extreme with Shuyin. Vegnagun is a world-ending threat while Shuyin is just a pissed off spirit, yet Vegnagun is only an immediate threat because Shuyin is trying to use it.
• Humongous Mecha: It’s the second largest creature over the X games, second to only Sin.
• Instrumental Weapon: It is controlled by an organ on its head.
• Killing Intent: Vegnagun can sense hostility and flees at the first sign of it.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: Bevelle installing a pipe organ, of all things, as the cockpit for their WMD.
• Knight of Cerebus: Just like Shuyin, the game loses a lot of its humor in almost every scene centered around it.
• Lost Superweapon: It is the most powerful weapon left over from The Machina War, sealed underneath Bevelle.
• Mechanical Abomination: Kind of obvious. It's an ancient monstrosity with a destructive ability that's only rivaled by Sin itself.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: It is destroyed after the third battle with it. But then Shuyin just activates the giant cannon that is hidden in its body and is still very much operational.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Taking too long against the battle on its head gives time for Shuyin to fire off its giant cannon, wiping out the Calm Lands.
• "Psycho" Strings: Plays during the initial battles with its three components.
• Sequential Boss: It takes three battles to destroy it, and then a final battle to stop Shuyin from firing its main cannon.
• Spider-Sense: In Chapters 3 and 5, the Gullwings find Nooj standing in Vegnagun's resting place. The finale a tense stand-off: Nooj knows he can't even think too hard about destroying Vegnagun without spooking it. Last time he tried, it blasted a hole in the Cradle and fled underground. Meanwhile, Vegnagun is picking up on Nooj's anxiety; it stirs but does not react.
• Spikes of Villainy: The shell covering Vegnagun's resting place is lined with spikes. It unfolds once it starts charging up the cannon. Vegnagun's metal hide and the cannon are also covered in spiked appendages.
• Time-Limit Boss: Just like with Sin, taking too long in the last battle ends with an automatic game over when Shuyin fires its cannon.
• Wham Shot: How it is first revealed. We watch a cutscene where Shuyin walks through a shadowy room. The alarm goes on and we go from a close-up to a wide shot, giving us our first clear look at the gigantic machina.