✦ Chapter I — Final Fantasy X
Zanarkand Never Existed — and That's Why It Means Everything
I was fourteen when I first heard "To Zanarkand." Not in a concert hall, not through headphones
carefully chosen for audio quality — through a television speaker in a small room,
the volume turned low so I wouldn't wake anyone. And still it hit like something breaking open.
Final Fantasy X is, at its core, a game about grief. About the things we carry from people
we've lost. Tidus is a ghost who doesn't know he's a ghost. Yuna is a girl who has been
taught to smile while walking toward her own death. And somehow, between the Blitzball and
the turn-based battles and the Al Bhed cipher, Nobuo Uematsu and Masashi Hamauzu made you
feel every single word of it without saying anything at all.
I've tried to explain this to people who haven't played it. I've mostly failed.
So I stopped explaining — and started writing it down instead. This is where that begins.
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