Watching streamer Taline, known by her Twitch username Yunalescka or Yuna, play Final Fantasy for an audience of hundreds of devoted fans, it seems as though she’s been doing it forever. Thanks to a self-described obsession with JRPGs cultivated during her childhood, Yuna is right at home playing Square Enix’s fantasy epic and other similar titles.
However, she says streaming Final Fantasy was a leap of faith that left her second-guessing her career decisions on more than one occasion. Drawing on her experiences streaming for what she called a more “toxic” community, Yuna has learned volumes over the span of her seven-year career about how to handle herself in the world of streaming. Game ZXC spoke with Yuna about how, despite the trials and tribulations she faced, she is happy about where she ended up.
How Yuna’s Early Streaming Career Set Up a Risky Career Choice
Yuna first started streaming around 2015. In a past life, she had been a laser tech at a dermatology clinic, and when she got going on Twitch she was supplementing her streaming income with a second job in online marketing “in case streaming didn’t work out.” She said she wasn’t very familiar with Twitch before starting. “I never watched any streamers, and I never watched YouTubers. I just went in without really knowing about any of that."
Soon after, Yuna became a spotlight streamer for Blizzard Entertainment, playing multiplayer arena game Heroes of the Storm. It was pretty much the only game she played at the time, for upwards of nine to 10 hours a day.
Yuna loved Heroes at the time. “It was fun, the community was great, and it was generally a good time.” But slowly, Blizzard started making changes to the game that started to give her pause. After the developers shut down their support for the game’s official competitive league at the end of 2018, a lot of Heroesstreamers started leaving the scene. Yuna said she saw the level of toxicity and trolling increase among members of the Heroes community.
“It makes me so mad now, because there are so many trolls in that game,” she said. “It’s just like any other online game. League of Legends has trolls, Call of Duty does too, but there's something about Heroes that gives me a negative vibe now, because of some people that I dealt with in the past.”
Yuna recalls having a lot of anxiety related to trolls in the Heroes of the Storm community. There were a couple of experiences in particular that really put a bad taste in her mouth.
“There was this one guy I remember that said women shouldn't be playing video games, and even harsher stuff.”
Around that time, Yuna began wondering if it was time for a change. She had been playing a lot of JRPGs like Final Fantasy in her free time, and decided to switch things up by adding more of that kind of content into her streams. Yet it wasn’t an easy decision because of the risk inherent in changing her content so drastically.
“If you’ve been focusing on one game and you have thousands of followers who want to watch you play that game, you’re going to lose followers and subscribers when you make a switch,” Yuna said. She decided to take a chance anyway, hoping to build a new community that centered around the types of games she loved to play as a child.
Yuna Follows her Passions
Today, Yuna’s content consists mainly of old and new Final Fantasy games. She also plays other types of JRPGs, and is currently working her way through 2021’s Yakuza: Like a Dragon. She also does what she called “throwback streams,” during which she plays retro games on consoles that the grew up with like the Super Nintendo or original PlayStation.
Starting off on her new career direction was “really stressful,” she said. “I lost a lot of subs, and it’s my job on the line.” There were times that she questioned whether she had made the right choice. Yuna even considered going back to Heroes despite her problems with the community.
“There was a point where I didn’t know if I should continue doing this,” Yuna said. “I didn’t know if I wanted to be a streamer anymore, because there was just too much drama and toxicity.” Despite that, her community slowly grew, and now she has an even bigger following than when she was streaming Heroes.
“I’m happy that I switched over and I started playing these games because, without the switch, I wouldn't have met these people and I wouldn't have grown my community.”
Yuna’s experience with Heroes also gave her some perspective on dealing with a toxic community. “I think people just need to relax," she said. "They get too serious about video games.” Yuna understands the desire to be competitive, but rejected the idea that competition should involve putting people down, especially women. “We’re just playing to have fun.”
Since her channel’s grown, Yuna also has more tools at her disposal to keep toxicity off her streams. “Now, I have moderators who remove all the people who come into my streams to say negative things,” she said. The number of trolls she encounters has declined sharply over the last few years, with maybe one appearing every couple of weeks, “but that’s it.”
Beyond her moderators and a supportive fanbase, Yuna also said she’s learned how to personally deal with toxicity. “I’ve also just started to have fun with people trolling me,” she said. “They buzz off when I don’t really react the way they want.” Overall, Yuna said focusing on Final Fantasy puts her in a much better place than she was when she was streaming Heroes of the Storm, and she’s glad she stuck with what seemed like a risky move.
“I'm so much happier where I'm at now. I get to live my passions, play games that I grew up with, and play the new games that are released.”