I love how ffx presents you with scenarios that are both genuinely tragic and really fucking hilarious. The aforementioned made up boyfriend thing is so silly but it doesn't feel that way when tidus tells yuna he has to go and he's about to jump off the airship and she runs after him and literally passes right through him and falls to the ground. And everything about tidus and jecht... having to defeat the "sin" that threatens to destroy the world, but also the current incarnation of that entity is your father, who wasn't nice to begin with and then he started drinking... and then he left and your mom got so depressed she died. But he also loved you and just didn't know how to show it, and as tidus comes to realize this he has to reconcile his hatred of his father with the empathy he feels for him upon seeing what he's become. So they're transposing that kind of fraught parent/child dynamic onto a conflict for the fate of the world, and you as the player have all of this information and at the same time tidus is running around yelling in his johnny test voice about how much he hates his dad. And it's funny, even some of the party members joke about it, but then as you defeat sin and he dies as plain old shitty dad jecht, tidus runs over and hugs him and cries as he tells jecht he hates him one last time. Like I cried too it was a lot. There are other elements of the game that contribute to how tonally bizarre I find it to be (not a bad thing!), whether it's the growing pains of the early ps2 graphics or the voice acting (truly not hating it is very fun), but the emotional whiplash looms large in my mind. Did you know people in this world can just choose not to die. You can get killed and say. Actually no thank you!

I wrote this as a tumblr post but figured it would serve as a decent backloggd review too lol. What I will add here is that even though I despise the sphere grid and fucked it up so badly I bricked myself out of the final dungeon, this game hit all the right emotional marks for me at the most opportune moments in my life. I played most of the game up to that final dungeon last summer on vacation. I remember the nights I spent sleeping on my friends' couch playing this on the tv after everyone else was in bed. The famous lake scene was a highlight. Coming back to the ending now after spending the last few months working through complicated feelings re: my own family did actually make me cry a little. This is all so incredibly vague and meaningless to anyone other than myself but I think about these things and I want to remember them