FFX is def a game I appreciate the more I play it. I think the two main things that drawn me in were how good Tidus and Yuna's development and relationship were, as well as Spira as a setting thematically. Spira represents a cycle of false hope, trapped in a never ending spiral of despair, loss and grief so seeing the main characters having to overcome and break through is powerful. It also has one of the most emotional conclusions to any game I've experienced.

The gameplay was surprisingly innovative, this is the first time I seen such a leveling system that does not revolve around leveling and weapons not having stats. If you know what you are doing there are so many ways you can play these characters its amazing. I think with a bit of polish it could have been one of the best combat systems. FFX is also a game that encourages all party members involvement so there is a nice cohesion that ties into the idea of connection of the game brilliantly.

The graphic were incredible for its time but yeah it def doesn't hold up as well for me outside of parts of Spira looking really good. The dub is also kinda eh. I didn't enjoy most of the side content and I think some of the main party members and most of the side characters were quite average which were things holds it back for me, but still a really great game and I see the Final Fantasy vision now

For the first time, I kneel for a Final Fantasy game.

FFX hadn't started well, but I didn't give up and continued playing. The protagonist's unique style made me interested. Slowly, as silly as it seemed, the game interested me in one thing or another until suddenly I was already halfway through it, when I looked back I noticed although its worldbuilding was nil, how much it had connected the story between its characters of the plot. What makes this JRPG different is that it's a story that seeks us to understand the characters there and feel each other, their connections. This was one of the only times I played a JRPG caring about the characters instead of the world of the plot.

Its only flaw was that the narrative is not polished enough and its artistic direction is not strong. FFX would be a monster if it weren't these two problems.

I remember always reading how this is one of the best Final Fantasy stories and it’s a must play for fans of the franchise. While I do mostly agree, time has not necessarily been kind to it.

On one hand it has all the classic charm of a FF game, but on the other it’s painfully dated. While I liked the story and its character writing, the stiff ps2 graphics and lackluster voice acting made it difficult for me to truly get invested. This game was obviously the right step forward in the franchise by introducing voice acting and cinematic moments, but I wonder if it would have aged better with classic text boxes. Regardless, without it we wouldn’t have the great voice acting and epic moments in modern FF games like we do today. In a way, it paved a better future for the games moving forward.

Regarding combat, I think this did take a minor step back. One thing I love about older FF games is the classic ATB mechanics. In my opinion it makes the turn based combat more lively and interesting - keeping you on your feet at all times. Here we just have the classic take your time and attack method. Still fun, but I did miss it. If you are a fan of newer JRPGs then I doubt this will be an issue at all.

Overall Final Fantasy X is a great game that I think is still worth playing. You may want to bang your head against the wall figuring out the sphere system and overcoming some of the painful boss fights, but the story still has a ton of heart at its core. Just sit back, listen to Uematsu’s beautiful score, and push through to the end because it is very much worth it.

Like many people, FFX was one of my first JRPGs and it still holds a special place in my heart. Since I didn't grow up on the NES/SNES/PSX era of world maps, it didn't bother me how linear FFX is (at least until the endgame sidequests). Even today, having played a lot more JRPGs, I still appreciate the combat system and the Sphere Grid, and the story in FFX is interesting and still worth thinking about. I've gone back and replayed it several times and I always feel like I'm experiencing something a little different each time. Also, people seem to either love or hate blitzball, but I think it's one of the best minigames in RPG history

“Everyone has lost something precious. Everyone has lost homes, dreams, and friends. We can make new homes for ourselves, and new dreams. But the people and friends we have lost, the dreams that have faded. Never forget them.”

In 2000, with the Playstation 2 already released, Squaresoft released Final Fantasy IX for the Playstation 1. A grand adventure full of obtuse side content and immaculate presentation, FF9 felt like the culmination of generations of experience making these games. A year later, Final Fantasy X arrived for the Playstation 2, beginning a new era for the franchise that took all those lessons learned and used them to pivot the franchise into an exciting new direction. One that clearly owed thematically and structurally to its predecessors, but that wasn’t afraid to excise and build until it felt so much like its own thing that a new Final Fantasy was able to feel truly fresh. And it paid off in spades, because Final Fantasy X is maybe the single truest 3D masterpiece of the franchise.

The key differences with FFX and what came before it lie in the nitty gritty of its gameplay approach. Most notably, the ATB system that had been iterated on so prominently for the last several entries has been entirely replaced by a more traditional turn based system. Characters get EXP for participating in battle, but you can only have three in battle at a time. Every character has a specific use-case, and where the game brings it all together is in its switching system. You can switch an active character with anyone else in your roster on their turn, and the switched character will still get to act. This is brilliant, and battles will often center around figuring out when a certain character needs to use a specific maneuver against an enemy and swapping around to capitalize. Using Tidus to cast Slow on flying enemies that can petrify your party, then swapping over to Wakka who specializes in taking down flying enemies and taking them all out before they can move. It’s a really snappy system and it feels very good to play. After the molasses slowness of FF9’s take on ATB, FFX feels like a colossal readjustment for the better in every conceivable way.

The other significant changes are with the leveling system and the gear system. I won’t go as in-depth with these mechanics, just know that it’s all in the service of allowing the player to truly customize their experience. Traditional level ups have been replaced with an insane gigantic skill tree, with each level giving a character a single move along the tree. This allows you to pick and choose how you want to progress your characters - make your white mage the strongest physical attacker on the team, turn your nimble protagonist into a Vivi-tier black mage, do whatever the hell you want. Coupled with the new gear system, which completely removes stats from equipment and focuses entirely on passive buffs, mastery and excessive play can allow you to essentially turn your entire party into invincible demigods that turn every fight into a joke. But it’s a long journey there.

Narratively, Final Fantasy X centers around a pilgrimage. A few great characters, traveling together on a journey to a specific destination, making a few necessary stops along the way. FFX’s most obvious difference in world design from the games that came before is its linearity, but because of this narrative structure it feels kind of hard to fault it. Of course you’re going down straight linear paths - you are doing a tried and true journey and following in the footsteps of your forebears. It’s definitely an early mark against the game regardless, but I think this narrative conceit is the reason people are less harsh on FFX for this as opposed to, say, FFXIII. The game also does a great job pacing itself, every long linear path is usually punctuated with some sort of switch-up, whether that be a series of intense boss fights, a dungeon, a puzzle sequence, or some awful underwater soccer. There’s enough variety to keep things fresh despite the repetition of its general level progression, which is a huge boon that helps wipe away some of the disappointment from the lack of freedom.

Towards the very end of the game, it opens up substantially. Once you can go wherever you want whenever you want, suddenly there are a million things to do. Many of them are annoying, many of them are obtuse, and many of them are difficult. I didn’t do all of them, but I did go through the hassle of acquiring everybody’s Celestial Weapon and all of the Aeons. And while dodging 200 lightning bolts and playing like six hours of Blitzball did suck, that’s kind of… the fun? It’s an impossible feeling to describe, but there’s something about overcoming an obtuse and ridiculous challenge and getting rewarded by becoming so strong you can sleep through endgame superbosses that makes you feel incredibly accomplished. It’s sort of like the game’s own narrative structure - journey through something painful to experience a relaxing calm.

What a wonderful journey it is, too. Final Fantasy X tells possibly the single greatest story in the franchise, with a unique and well thought out world populated with interesting characters. Not all of them get tons of development, but they don’t have to. They all serve a role in both battle and the group dynamic, and they’re great to have around. When they do have a role in the narrative - and they all do - it’s always done with tenderness and weight. And I think that’s the best way to describe the game’s story and script: tender and heavy. So many great individual lines, individual moments, individual scenes. The early PS2-era animation and voice acting cruft largely wears off early on, so by the time you’re getting to the seriously impactful scenes you are all in, and the actors are doing great work. Tidus especially is given a lot of work to do, and actor James Arnold Taylor is able to pull it all off. From confident braggadocio to covert sadness to out and out despair, he’s able to make it all work. Even the infamous laugh scene works well in context and is called back to many hours later in a way that felt genuinely moving. I have no complaints about the narrative, which trucks along at a pretty good pace and ends perfectly. No notes.

So what we have here is a Final Fantasy for fans and first timers, one that reinvents so many aspects of the series while maintaining the core of its soul. Through its excellent storytelling, phenomenal soundtrack, and deep gameplay it marks itself as possibly the single greatest rpg of its era and easily one of the top Final Fantasy games.

I never want to play Blitzball again.

If square was making hit after hit on the PS1, then this was the final culmination and I think the fact it’s more linear than those titles (something that initially made me dislike it as someone who grew up with FF4 on the ds), removed ATB for tactical turn based combat, and doubled down on cinematics says a lot about how they knew what people came to Final Fantasy for and what moves they needed to make to get to the good stuff instantly.

I need to replay it since it’s been 5 years since I finished it but this is very easily one of my top 5 FFs

Man, you guys really don't rip this game enough. Final Fantasy X is without question one of the goofiest experiences I've ever sat through in my life. Yes, everyone clowns on the iconic fake laugh scene (and rightfully so, because that shit's ridiculous and even funnier in context), but, like, what about everything else? It's just such a bizarre adventure. An amazing one from a gameplay standpoint, don't get me wrong, but an absolutely batshit one in terms of story. The voice acting is HORRENDOUS, the plot is wild and there are so many scenes where you're watching baffled that someone actually thought this up. But with every mention of Blitzball, Sin, magical dreams and the convoluted nature of who's secretly an evil ghost, I genuinely just wound up loving Final Fantasy X for all the wrong reasons.

I will always be a glutton for anything low-key cringey, unintentionally goofy or self-serious in spite of having a bananas-ass plot. And man, Final Fantasy X delivers on all three fronts. A lot of it is funny, sure, but I think my main takeaway from FFX is that Tidus is one of the best characters of the 21st century. I love Tidus. Not because he's a good character. No, Tidus is an AWFUL character. He goes from being the Ronaldo of underwater football to a stranded time-traveller after being teleported 1000 years into the future by a giant whale god and, instead of internalising and comprehending what an insane event that is, says shit like "LET'S BLITZ" and immediately gets his graft on with a magical summoner from a mystical island he washes up on.

Tidus is the kind of guy who randomly shouts "ALL RIGHT!" and "OKAY THEN!" during very serious dialogue exchanges he's not partaking in. Tidus is the kind of guy to have a completely nonsensical internal monologue running through the entire game in which he adds diddle squat to the plot and muses on the most random shit. Tidus is the kind of guy who makes this game by being such a reliable, continuous source of ridiculous nonsense that even the most uninteresting parts of the plot wind up being memorable. He's like a dumber Troy Bolton who can breathe underwater, has no respect for the beliefs of others and is destined to destroy god, and if that ain't the most Final-Fantasy-ass thing you've ever heard of, I don't know what is.

And so Tidus kind of sums up why I liked Final Fantasy X. On a gameplay front, this is a truly fantastic game. Final Fantasy has always been at its best when it forces you to smartly strategise and plan to take down troublesome bosses, exploiting weaknesses, micromanaging resources and playing with a strict game plan. X really is the ultimate refinement of that idea. It lets you utilise all party members during battles and customize them freely with the excellent sphere grid, smartly highlighting both mechanics with some really creative bosses. But in a 50-hour game, a good gameplay loop needs to be supported by something, and this super stupid, so-bad-its-good story lends X that much-needed dash of personality.

And that personality gets you through some real rough patches. The entire final act of the game trades in the aforementioned fun bosses for behemoths with random, late-fight attacks that can one-shot you out of the blue, erasing 30 minutes of progress. Getting the secret (and very necessary) final few aeons means trekking down ridiculously obtuse side mission chains that give no indication of how you're supposed to complete them. And there's the technical frustrations: Not being able to skip 10-minute-long cutscenes before tough bosses that you're definitely going to have to retry, the turn chart never working as it's supposed to, the game just cutting to a green screen frequently during CG cutscenes (I played the remastered version on PC, so could've just been a bug on there).

But somehow, the dumb, idiotic charm of Tidus running around talking about how much he LOVES blitzball won me over. Is it a masterpiece? In my personal opinion, definitely not. But I will give it to Square; I had a ball playing this. Whether that was intentional or whether the silliness just somehow wins out is another question, but I invested 50 hours and I'm kind of glad I did. Plus, in fairness, the ending is actually quite emotional and, my word, it's a really, really, REALLY stunning game for the time. I don't remember much about its release (I was like 4 when it came out and my brain was a pile of mush), but I do recall it being heralded as this Avatar-esque shift in gaming visuals. Even in 2022, that part holds up. Square was on a different sauce in 2001, and FFX feels pretty timeless because of it.

Oh boy, what an adventure! The OST, the epic world, the art direction, the tropical-steampunk aesthetic and the CGI scenes. PURE state of art, impeccable and extraordinary! The turn-based combat is strategic, dynamic and smart, but the grind is mandatory and tedious at certain points in the game. The random encounters are way too frequent. Even though you can flee, it's still annoying because it makes exploring the world frustrating even with Fast Travel. The boss battles are hit or miss; they're either really good or terrible. I fought Yunalesca for approximately 40 minutes—that’s toooo looooong. Speaking of the devil, Seymour is one of the worst villains/antagonists I've ever seen in an epic fantasy. If he were cut from the game, it would instantly improve.

Of course, the plot is the highlight of FFX. While most party members aren't very deep, there are 2 or 3 well-developed characters you'll surely sympathize with. Except for Tidus, the protagonist, who is the stereotype of a teenager. Enduring him for about 40 hours straight was mentally tough. The final act is good, but nothing special, the journey itself was more interesting to me. There are many cringe and bizarre cutscenes, but it's the first entry in the series with voice acting, so I could overlook it.

The year 2001 was incredible, with the release of GTA 3, MGS2, Halo and Silent Hill 2. Because of that, I don't think I can say that FFX is GOTY level, but it's definitely not far behind. It's a really good game. An epic journey of love to save the world from the leviathan!

ps: not my first JRPG, but this is my first Final Fantasy game.