The top 11 video game heroes- Number 3

I continue the countdown with the third best video game hero. Ladies and gentlemen, there are few words that can do this hero justice. When I close my eyes and think "female hero", and notice that this includes ALL media, not just games, this is the character I see. This is someone who embodies perfectly the greatest attributes a hero can ever possess. Her name is Yuna, and she hails from Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2.

I just love Yuna. She has to be the most bad ass female character I have ever had the pleasure of playing as. Now, I know what some of you are thinking. "Clearly, you've never played as Lara Croft/Samus Aran/Chell/insert female character here". Well, I can say in all honesty, I've never played as Chell, but I have played a lot of female characters, and I can say with certainty that Yuna trumps them all. But how about we find out what makes Yuna tic?

When we first meet Yuna (properly) she has just become a summoner. She's sweating profusely, she's ten seconds away from fainting from exhaustion. She must have clearly been through a taxing experience; in fact, she has spent literally an entire day praying to the Fayth, special spirits that grant people the power to summon special beasts named Aeons. 

Yuna had spent a good chunk of her life training for this moment. She is now a summoner, and she is now ready to embark on a special pilgrimage to attain all the aeons and defeat the scourge of Spira, Sin. No, not sin, Sin, a giant monster that has been terrorizing the world of Spira for a thousand years, bringing death wherever it goes.

Yuna and her guardians (and Tidus, the main Point of View character) embark the very next day towards Kilika, the site of the next Aeon that Yuna needs to continue her pilgrimage. En route, they encounter Sin, who attacks Kilika, and, well...

This scene is brilliant for two reasons. Number one, it shows us that Sin isn't some lame duck monster, he's a menace and he needs to be destroyed. Number two, it also shows us that anyone willing to take on this beast must have balls of steel.

Kilika is utterly destroyed. It is here that the player learns of not only what kind of menace Sin really is, but also of the summoner's true function in Spira. Summoners do more than just summon Aeons, they also send the souls of the departed from this world to the next, so they may rest in peace, lest they become restless ghosts that haunt the world. Yuna is shown performing her sacred duty in what I can only call the most amazing scene in not just this game, but also in all of Final Fantasy. It must truly be seen to be believed.

Yuna's entourage then goes to Luca, for a sports tournament UNIMPORTANT MEANDERING.  Yuna also gets herself kidnapped by this group of people called the Al Bhed, who have their own language and use machines, a big no no in Spira (the machine usage, I mean. I also think the language thing is frowned upon, since everyone else speaks whatever language the localizers use.) She gets rescued by Tidus. No, I do not like this part of the game. I love blitzball, but it really wasn't necessary here. After all that jazz, Yuna teaches Tidus to just smile whenever he feels sad, leading to one of the most...unfortunately misinterpreted scenes in the game. I won't show you this one, however, I don't want too many videos on this post.

Let me just make one quick parenthesis here. Yuna smiles when she's sad. This is something that really strikes me, because it is very difficult to have to hide your sadness under a facade of happiness. It isn't healthy and it isn't helping anyone, especially not you. There is a difference between controlling your emotions, and ignoring them by feigning. Putting on a happy smile while you're feeling down is not controlling your emotions. By the time this scene came on, I was already a fan of Yuna, but this is what really made me identify with her, and I am sure far too many people have as well.

Yuna continues her pilgrimage, heading towards Djose Temple. On the way there, she is witness to Operation Mi'ihen, an attempt to destroy Sin by firing hundreds of lasers at it. It fails, miserably. An untold number of people, including several Al Bhed, die. She also meets Seymour Guado, who is, well, a bit of a jerk, but also a Maester of the Yevon faith, which is pretty much the major religion in Spira (and the one in charge of summoners). A Maester is pretty much like a cardinal, with the Grand Maester being the pope of Yevon.

After she gets kidnapped (again), Yuna meets her cousin, Rikku, who is also an Al Bhed. After heading towards Guadosalam, the city of the Guado, who are pretty much the dryads of Spira, Yuna meets again with Seymour Guado, who asks her to marry him. However, Yuna discovers a very disturbing truth regarding Seymour: he killed his own father, a Maester of Yevon. Yuna sees that Seymour is heading down a terrible path, so she agrees to marry him in order to keep him from going further.

Heading towards Macalania Temple, Yuna obtains her next Aeon. However, she finds her entourage attacking Seymour. With Seymour dead, it is up to Yuna to perform the Sending, to send Seymour to rest. However, the Guado steal Seymour's body, preventing Yuna from sending him to the world of the dead. Afterward, the team encounters Sin and get teleported towards a desert (literally) island named Bikanel.

While in Bikanel, Tidus (and the player) learn a horrible truth: Yuna will die, guaranteed, if she finishes her Pilgrimage. Yuna had been kidnapped (AGAIN!) by the Al Bhed, precisely to keep this from happening. The reason why Yuna will die is because the Final Aeon, needed to destroy Sin, will consume Yuna's life force. Furthermore, Sin will just return either way, maybe in a few days, maybe in a few months. Sin can never truly go away until Spira, according to Yevon, redeems itself from its past warmongering ways. Yuna then gets captured (URGH!!!!) by the Guado, who take her to Bevelle, the capital of Yevon, to marry her off to Seymour...who is now a ghost, for all intents and purposes.

So Yuna gets rescued, and confronts the Grand Maester with the revelation that Seymour is literally dead and should be sent. The Grand Maester, however, just shrugs, revealing that he's ALSO a ghost. Basically, Yevon is a church of hypocrisy, because not only do they have dead people in charge (when their Laws specifically state the dead should be Sent) but also, many of their security forces use guns (the same machines that their faith specifically state caused Sin to appear to begin with).

So Yuna decides that, in spite of the hypocrisy of Yevon, the need for the Calm (that sweet period of time where Sin is dead) is more important than anything else, so she continues onward with her pilgrimage. She also falls in love with Tidus, and they have sex underwater. After a long trek, the group finally arrive in Zanarkand, the ruined city where Yuna will obtain the Final Aeon.

In Zanarkand, Yuna learns another horrid truth: Sin is eternal, and the same Final Aeon that will destroy it, will simply serve as Sin's new shell. Having had enough, Yuna decides to simply find a way to destroy Sin permanently.

Yuna and Tidus devise a plan: paralyze Sin, go inside it, and destroy the ghost of Yu Yevon, the main cause of Sin's existence. This plan, however, comes at a steep price: the Fayth will leave Spira forever, taking the Aeons, and Tidus, with them.

Yuna started the game willing to give her life for Spira, but she ended up giving up her love. Yuna's sacrifice allows Spira to live in an Eternal Calm...

Which was threatened by war no less than two years later. Capitalist greed, paranoia, unwillingness to compromise, and a refusal to let go of the old ways, are threatening Spira. The world is divided into three factions: the Youth League, a military group seeking to rid Spira of the old and replacing it with the new; New Yevon, a faction that insists on adapting the Yevon faith into a world without Sin; and the Machine Faction, a salvaging group dedicated to advancing technology to a pre-Sin level. Though the Machine Faction is neutral, New Yevon and the Youth League are at war, with the Youth League as the aggressor. This is the start of Final Fantasy X-2.

Yuna had beem living a quiet life for a little while, and then she decided to explore the world with Rikku instead. When she steals from New Yevon (oh that silly girl) a video recording that showed a giant mechanical...thing...beneath Bevelle, Yuna knew she was onto something.

With the world plunging further into a new war, Yuna discovers the horrible truth: Bevelle had created Vegnagun, the machine in the video, a thousand years ago as a weapon to destroy Sin, but it was considered much too powerful, so it was sealed away. But now, a ghost from the past seeks to use Vegnagun to destroy all of Spira. It is up to Yuna to not only stop the war between the YL and NY, but also to prevent Vegnagun from destroying the world.

Yuna, eventually, after a whole slew of wild meandering (seriously, X-2 was a mess) Yuna eventually stops Vegnagun, bringing Spira to a new age of peace. Also Tidus is brought back to life, so Yuna gets to live happily ever after.

No, I don't like Final Fantasy X, or X-2 very much. To me, they are very flawed games that heralded the end of Final Fantasy's Golden Age. However, I love Yuna.

Yuna is a woman who places others ahead of herself. She is always willing to sacrifice for others. This is best evidenced by her willingness to become a Summoner, a job that guarantees death unless you quit. There is not one piece of evidence that suggests that being a Summoner is anything other than entirely voluntary, meaning that everything Yuna did, she chose to do. Yuna chose to go on a Pilgrimage that was guaranteed to kill her, and all for what?

For peace. Yuna hated seeing her people live in fear, constantly keeping an eye out for Sin. Yuna loved her people, and the people loved her in return. When Yuna left her home town, many people, children and elderly alike, cried. I suspect that they cried because that, as far as they knew, that this would be the last time they would see her alive. The price for the Calm was a high one, and Yuna was willing to pay that price.

But that didn't mean that Yuna was not scared. And you know what? This is understandable. Fear is a very human emotion, and in Yuna's case, it is natural. Yuna knows she's going to die, and she's scared. However, this makes her actions in the game, her decisions, that much more heroic. Courage is the act of doing what needs to be done, in spite of the fear you feel doing so. Yuna is courageous, and courage is the mark of a hero.

Yuna is someone who knows that the needs of the many surpass the privilege of the few. When she learned that Yevon was corrupt, Yuna could have quit her pilgrimage then and there. Why give her life for these people? But she continued. She knew what needed to be done. If Spira was to know peace, Sin needed to go. She didn't have to be the summoner to perform the Final Summoning, but she still went. And you know what? That was HER CHOICE.

Yuna's best quality, however, is her bravery. When Yuna learned that the Final Aeon wouldn't work, and that everything she believed in was a lie, instead of abandoning her quest, or giving in and perpetuate a vicious cycle of unending destruction, Yuna decided to cut the proverbial knot and bring an end to Sin once and for all. To do this, Yuna needed to disregard everything she knew, everything she had been raised to believe in, and seek out to do something no one had ever even dreamed of doing. And guess what? She did just that! She looked a millennial system in the eye, one that didn't work, and said "Screw You, you suck, I'm gonna do something that's going to get results!" The sheer BALLS it takes to do something like this is something that many, many of us just utterly lack! I've seen thousands of young adults, myself included, dream about doing something similar, only to balk out when the time came. Yuna has done what every hipster, every Liberal Arts major, every teenager has dreamed of doing: she stuck it to The Man.

Yuna is also humble. She never brags, she never gloats, she never basks in any glory. She gets things done, and what does she ask for? She asks for peace. In X-2, instead of basking in the adoration of millions of Spira, she decides to ride an airship and feel the wind in her face. Instead of becoming the ruler of all Spira, a position she has rightly earned as the world's greatest hero, she has chosen instead to live in a little island with the love of her life. Her choice is to live the adventure of every day life. And you know what? She's earned it in spades.

Yuna is the sum of what Feminism wants from characters. She is a fully rounded, three dimensional character with strengths, weakness, autonomy, and agency. When people complain that there aren't enough strong female characters in video games, they are not calling for more Lara Crofts or Samus Arans, they are calling for more Yunas! Take every heroic trait you can imagine, assign them to one character, and then make that character female. Who do you get? Yuna. She is the hero girls deserve to play as. She is the hero who has earned the admiration of every man, woman and child. She has certainly earned THIS man's adoration, that's for certain. She's the third best hero in video games, and the SOLE reason she is not number one is not due to anything she lacks, but because heroes 2 and 1 are so awesome, they deserve those spots more.

Yuna...you're missing half your skirt.

The summary:

Name: Yuna
Motivation: Love for the people of Spira
Main Enemy: Yu Yevon, Sin
Finest Achievement: Destroying Sin once and for all, bringing Spira into a new age of peace
Reward: A happy home life with Tidus and her friends in a peaceful world they helped create