babyflutterb:

gizensha:

prokopetz:

There are a lot of games that stick you with a male viewpoint character as the nominal protagonist even though the story is really about a woman, but Final Fantasy X stands out to me as the only one where the fandom has just collectively decided to address that by talking about the game as though the woman in question is the player character. If you were to casually follow contemporary discussion of the game, you’d never in a million years guess that Yuna isn’t the player character – we’re all just “we recognise that the game thinks Tidus is the protagonist, but given that he’s a stupid-ass protagonist, we’ve elected to ignore him”.

See, I’m not sure Yuna would work as the player character. She’s absolutely the protagonist of the game, sure, everything important that happens is done by her, even if she wouldn’t have done some of it if she wasn’t friends with a ghost and an imaginary boy, but…

…That world? Kind of needs a reason for it to be explained to the player, which is easiest to do by making the player character a fairly minor character Not From Around These Parts, but instead a more traditional fictional universe. Which happened to be the imaginary boy who’s utterly irrelevent aside from him coming from the dream to the real world helping trigger Yuna’s realization about how to end the cycle of someone sacrificing themselves every ten years to… Buy another ten years of peace… and stop Sin once and for all.

It’s world is a step beyond your vague steam punk medieval fantasy of FFIX, or even your full on steam punk of FFVI, dystopean corporate magi-tech future of FFVII, and …whatever… of FFVIII, is what I’m saying. But yeah, under no circumstances does imaginary boy qualify as a protagonist, he’s just the player character so that the game can explain the world to the audience.

Honestly? I love Tidus as our eyes into Spira, because he’s reacting as we would’ve reacted to the strange new world. Don’t get me wrong, I adore Yuna and her story, but seeing it through the eyes of Tidus brings it to a whole new level of drama. Imagine playing as Yuna and already knowing where you’re going, what you’re doing, and what needs to be done. However with Tidus he’s completely oblivious: promising to see the pyreflies at the moonflow after they beat Sin, talking about how he wants to show her the Zanarkand where he grew up. When Rikku finally tells him what will happen when Yuna summons the Final Aeon, you can pinpoint the exact moment where his heart stops. I dont know about any of you, but I sure as hell didn’t see that coming the first time I played FFX

TL:DR; while I would adore Yuna being the main protagonist, Tidus is the kind of perspective we need to be immersed into this game.