Never played FF6 but have played FF7 through to FFX, I seem to remember lots of religious references in Final Fantasy 7 though. I thought people would be more offended by Final Fantasy X because there’s a fictional organized religion which is a bit like the Catholic Church and it’s corrupt using faith to support an evil cause.
Anyway, here’s a great link which will be useful in discussing religion in the Final Fantasy games.
finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Religious_Allusions_in_Final_Fantasy
The Temple of Yevon…Yes, that is a fascinating one, and clearly modeled on the hierarchy of the Catholic church.
The Yevonite clergy is corrupt in that it does not share the truth (one that is known only to it’s leaders) but I don’t belive that was the main message, after all the Yevonites were lying but for what they belived to be a good cause.
I think the game was heavily based around an opinion shared by Voltaire, and the enlightenment.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him.
Yevon was some sort of ruler of a large cultured city called Zanarkand (A high tech version of Classical culture), which was destroyed by an even larger empire ruled by Bevelle (which would later become the holy city of the Yevonite faith, clear contrast to Rome here). In a fit of rage Yevon created a vile curse, using his own subjects as sacrifices (Fayth) to create a terrible monster (Sin) that wiped out much of that great empire and brought about a dark age (the fall of Rome). Whenever sin was “killed”, always at great expense of life it always came back a few years later to kill more innocents.
The religion of Yevon was created in response to this, and the vengeful Yevon was portrayed as a benevolent and kind God. It promised hope and salvation (more references to Catholicism) in return for obedience to a certain lifestyle that Yu Yevon was said to approve of (No machines, no science especially). If humanity obeyed Yu-Yevons “commandments” and achieved “purity”, Sin would one day vanish for good.
Sin was never going to (so it was believed) and it would keep killing again, and again, and again. By creating the idea of a messiah, the Yevonite clergy created a false hope amongst the masses that they would one day be saved and freed from their suffering. In this world there was no god (the player character would learn there was an afterlife but no such thing as a deity) and it was nothing more than a construct to keep society upright and prevent anarchy and despair from taking over.
Part of the journey for the leading lady of the story (Yuna, a type of priestess) is losing her faith in Yevon, accepting the material reality in front of her and learning to carry on regardless of it, doing good for goods sake rather than because a temple or god told her to. She learns to take destiny into her own hands rather than being guided by any outside force, and ends up changing the world for the better (partially by killing Sin, but also destroying the Yevonite temples control over society)
The fact that the Yevonite equivalent of a Papacy is headed by an conspiracy created by a cabal of undead is hardly flattering to organized religion, but that wasn’t the main question proposed by the story. That of course was “If God didn’t exist, could we live on without him”?
Considering Yuna succeeded in her mission, and in the next game she lived happily ever after with her lover, I would believe the player is assumed to take that as a “yes”.
). The average Japanese probably has much the same views as we would of Shinto or Buddhism, an exotic “foreign-flavor” faith. The Japanese also don’t have as much of a concept of blasphemy as we do, and you can see Shinto and Buddhist deities used as protagonists or antagonists in video games as well. To the designer, Mary was probably just another “kami” to be used in the toolbox, without much further thought to possible offense.