The Ephemeral Calm: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, and the Importance of Post-crisis Aftercare

By the end of Final Fantasy X, Summoner Yuna and her guardians have vanquished the natural disaster incarnate known as Sin, and while she reflects on the losses and sacrifices made, the bittersweet ending has a hopeful tone that things will eventually get better. Two years later, the world seems to be at peace, if not a little carefree, as teams of sphere hunters roam the newly fried planet of Spira looking for clues about the past. But despite the light tone of the game, there is a sinister undertone of unrest around the world, as a direct response to a world still coping with the effects of Sin. In this chapter, I look at the world of Final Fantasy X-2 as an ecological study about a world post natural disaster (Sin), specifically how the world reacts in their peaceful “post-apocalyptic world” after a millennium of the natural disaster cycle caused by human greed and desire for power. In Final Fantasy X-2, we see a glimpse of a world whose ecosystem ecology is in a form or recovery, but there has also been mass community and population ecological damage in its wake, including the collapse of the power that denied the public the truth about Sin (creating a power vacuum and ideological war between the Youth League and New Yevon), the out casting of an entire race of people who committed mass genocide against two other races to follow a tyrant who wanted to control Sin (Seymour and the Guado), and the reclaiming of sacred land for monetary gain (Zanarkand as a tourist trap). In the end, the world of Final Fantasy X-2 can be seen as a cautionary tale of only ending the crisis on the planet, and not thinking beyond the end of the world’s new ecological normal.