Last night, Japanese singer Koda Kumi gave us all a live performance of Real Emotion from Final Fantasy 10-2, and immediately transported me back to 2003.

Final Fantasy 10-2 was the first mainline game in the series to receive a sequel, and its opening song – performed by protagonist Yuna along with returning character Rikku and new face Paine – has proven popular ever since.

I have always found great enjoyment in the Final Fantasy series, with 8, 9 and 10 especially playing a key part into my early video game education (I wanted a dog called Angelo for quite a long time when I was little. I also dyed my hair dark with a blonde steak a la Rinoa once).

But one Final Fantasy game that will always remember playing is 10-2, which opens with Yuna transforming from the relatively reserved summoner we first met in 2001 into a fully fledged pop star. The song she sings at the start of 10-2 quickly became my backing track for the year, and I can still recite the lyrics (in English, at least) at the drop of a hat over two decades later.

So, when I saw a post yesterday saying that Koda Kumi would be performing Real Emotion from Final Fantasy 10-2 on Japanese TV that night, I was flooded with a sense of nostalgia and the desire to have a little bop in my kitchen. For those unaware, Koda Kumi performed the Japanese version and did the motion capture for the Real Emotion full motion video shown at the start of Final Fantasy 10-2.

I hunted the performance down on YouTube this morning, and even 20 plus years later, Koda Kumi has still got it. Watching it made me feel like I was a pre-teen once again (which is no small feat given that these days I regularly crick my back just by getting out of bed).

You can check out Koda Kumi’s live performance of Real Emotion in the video below.

More recently in Final Fantasy news, Final Fantasy 7 Remake director Naoki Hamaguchi revealed that the team once considered downsizing Cloud’s iconic Buster Sword.

“How Cloud swings it around with one hand that sort of felt like it would weaken the sense of realism, you know,” the developer explained. “So at the time, when we were making Remake, there was some discussion about whether we should give Cloud a more realistic version of the Buster Sword.”

Personally, I am glad they decided against this idea.