I am going to spoil Final Fantasy 10. In talking about one of the primary antagonists, I will reveal the plot of both the beginning and end of the game. You have been warned.

 

Memories are fickle beasts. They lunge from the past and prey on the present. They stretch between what was and what might be. Can anything born of memories, fueled by nostalgia and driven by instinct be evil? Can it be good?

 

Welcome to Sympathy for the Devil, a series where I take you behind the series, deep into a game’s mythology and hopefully show you that your villains are not evil, just misunderstood. This time: Sin.

 

 

Zanarkand and Bevelle, masters of magic and machines respectively, are at war and it is going bad for Zanarkand. Yu Yevon, the leader of his people and a high summoner, devises a plan. He will transform his people into fayth, beings of spiritual energy, and make their city eternal by using their combined power of will and dreams to create a permanent version of the city. However, because the physical city can still be found and destroyed despite the spectral one remaining, he additional uses the power of his transformed people to create a guardian. 

 

He gives this guardian two tasks: protect Zanarkand and destroy any city that becomes dependent on technology as Bevelle had. Yu Yevon then, upon the use of this massive power, loses his humanity and becomes a fayth himself. 

 

This beast, set free from the leash that held it, immediate attacks Zanarkand which prompts Yunalesca, Yu Yevon’s daughter, to combine her love for and life of her husband, a fayth, to create an additional beast to fight off the guardian. She wins, but the new beast morphs over time from the influence of Yu Yevon into the same guardian. 

 

One thousand years later, Sin, the name given to the protector of Zanarkand, still roams the world of Spira. In order to renew the magic every few decades, a high summoner must travel to the ruined city of Zanarkand, learn from Yunalesca, now trapped there and give up their life as well as transform someone they know into the next incarnation of a beast to temporarily defeat Sin. Just as the deaths of the people of Zanarkand created Sin, more deaths are needed to fuel both the city and the beast.

 

 

Sin is not evil. Nor is it good. It just is. Coalesced from the will of Yu Yevon, it was created to protect and defeat large cities. No one ‘programmed’ it with a greater intelligence. It is only when Jecht becomes Sin that any sentient actions happen and then only because of the connection to the dream Zanarkand via Yu Yevon himself. Sin is a beast of memories, a bundle of thoughts and struggles to just be, let alone take on a malicious intent.