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Heavy story spoilers ahead

Introduction

“Listen to my story.”

Those are the first voice-acted words spoken in the Final Fantasy franchise. They’re spoken by Tidus as Final Fantasy X begins in medias res. A group of people sit around a campfire looking forlorn and melancholy. There’s no context for who these people are or where they are, or what’s causing them to be so depressed. All we have is this beautiful piano piece playing over the scene as a blonde boy touches a girl’s shoulder and then walks up a hill to look at a ruined city in the distance. He asks us to listen to his story.

Before I dive any further in, I want to mention up front that Final Fantasy X is one of the few Final Fantasy games I had actually played a lot of before starting this blog series. I played the original PS2 release back in 2005 when I was about 14 or 15 years old. I vaguely remembered something, like running into a stone wall of a fight when Kimahri has his solo battle, and some another boss or two being incredible difficulty spikes. I remembered the major plot twists, and getting up to what I thought was the final boss. That said, something I’ve learned over the course of this series is that if you don’t play a game for twenty years, you really don’t remember very much of it when you come back.

Story

Final Fantasy X begins in earnest with Tidus about to head to a Blitzball game, a type of underwater soccer. He’s a star player of the Zanarkand Abes and treated exactly like you’d expect a professional sports celebrity to be treated. He’s cocky, full of himself, loud, kind of obnoxious. Just a downright jock in every sense of the word. But as the Blitzball game gets underway, an unknown monstrosity attacks the city of Zanarkand. Buildings crumble around him and, in the chaos, Auron appears. Auron was a friend of Tidus’s father, Jecht. Jecht disappeared at sea ten years ago and Auron has seemingly been watching out for Tidus ever since. He tosses Tidus a sword and asks if he knows how to use it. Before long, though, both Auron and Tidus are sucked up into the sky by this gigantic gaping maw.

Tidus then awakens in an unknown ruined location where he’s picked up by a ship with some Al Bhed peoples, who speak a language he doesn’t understand. Thankfully, one of the Al Bhed, Rikku, does speak his language and she recruits him to help recover some underwater treasure. Things go slightly awry, as that giant monstrosity appears again. The Al Bhed call it Cin, and the next thing you know, Tidus is once again waking up in the water. This time, however, he washes ashore on the island of Besaid, an idyllic tropical beach that feels almost aggressively peaceful after the destruction of Zanarkand.

In Besaid, he meets Wakka, captain of the local Blitzball team. Tidus can’t help but show off his Blitzball skills, Wakka. He asks who Tidus plays for, and Tidus proudly proclaims that he’s the star player of the Zanarkand Abes. The whole group is in a quiet shock. Wakka says Zanarkand was destroyed 1,000 years ago and its ruins are considered sacred ground. They chalk Tidus failed memory and general cluelessness to the customs of the world to Sin’s toxin messing with his head.

Wakka brings him back to the village where Tidus meets Yuna, who is about to embark on her pilgrimage. Yuna is a summoner, and the role of a summoner is twofold. Their first duty is to go on a pilgrimage across the world, praying at temples along the way until they reach Zanarkand where they obtain the Final Aeon and use it to destroy Sin, bringing about a temporary Calm to the world. But Sin always returns. The cycle continues endlessly until humanity has supposedly atoned for its past sins.

The monster Sin that destroyed Tidus’s Zarnakand in the introductory sequence is this cataclysmic force that appears seemingly at random to destroy towns whenever humanity becomes too technologically advanced. The local religion, Yevon, teaches that Sin appeared because Zanarkand relied too heavily on machina and that Sin is humanity’s punishment for becoming lazy and dependent on technology.

The second duty of a summoner is to perform sendings, guiding the souls of the recently departed to the Farplane, so they can rest peacefully. Otherwise those souls linger, consumed by resentment, eventually becoming the fiends you fight throughout the game. I actually really appreciated this because it’s a great bit of ludo-narrative cohesion. The monsters aren’t just there because it’s a JRPG and JRPGs need monsters. The game gives them an actual place in the world and mythology. These souls are often represented by pyreflies, floating streaks of light drifting through the air, and you see them constantly throughout Spira.

Yuna convinces her party to let Tidus join them as one of her guardians. Wakka is already traveling with her, and you’re introduced to Lulu, the black mage, and Kimahri Ronso, this giant muscular blue lion-man with a broken horn who sort of exists somewhere between a dragoon and a blue mage. The party sets off from Besaid, and thus begins Final Fantasy X.

What immediately sets Final Fantasy X apart from every previous Final Fantasy is that there’s no over world to explore. Instead, you are on a pilgrimage, traveling from one location to another down a series of narrow hallways. Seriously, Final Fantasy X is basically a straight line that you move along as the story progresses. Sure, there are often small diversions or forks in the road. But at the end of those diversions is generally a single treasure chest, then you just need to head back to your main road and keep following the carefully designed path.

On one hand, I genuinely appreciated this change. No longer are you aimlessly hoofing it across barren over world landscapes trying to find the next destination while random encounters chew through your patience. In past games these over worlds gave you a sense of freedom, of having an open world. But you aren’t really free in those games, there’s a specific place you need to be to progress the story. Having the open world gives you the illusion of freedom. And in many of the past games if you accidentally venture in the wrong direction, you’ll encounter enemies 30 levels higher than you are and get instantly KO’ed. I know Final Fantasy XIII was heavily criticized for being a series of hallways, but part of me has to wonder why XIII got all those criticisms and yet X seems to have dodged the hallway simulator moniker. Maybe it’ll make sense when I get to XIII.

Most of the world is rendered fully in 3D unlike the previous games which used 3D character models on pre-rendered backgrounds. Because the locations in Final Fantasy X are mostly narrow hallways with fixed camera angles, the camera can pan and zoom and frame scenes in ways earlier games really couldn’t. In Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX, the camera mostly just slid around on the X and Y axis. Here, the camera moves dynamically through forests, villages, and temples, creating this sense that the world is dense and alive beyond the path you’re walking. I wonder if the reason Final Fantasy X avoided the “hallway” criticism I mentioned, is because hallways evoke the feeling of being overly simplistic. These hallways are acceptable to me because the world feels textured and full in a way the older overworlds often didn’t.

The use of linear pathways does something that I really appreciate. It controls the pacing of the story. You don’t miss important details because you didn’t visit an optional location, you don’t spend days wandering between plot points. The story is delivered smoothly and cohesively.

Using Tidus as the protagonist in this story also works incredibly well because he’s effectively a stranger in a strange land. Since he doesn’t understand Spira, the game has a perfectly natural excuse to dump exposition to him, and by extension, to the player. Tidus doesn’t understand Yevon’s teachings because we don’t understand them either. Meanwhile, for the people of Spira, these rituals are just part of life. They’ve never known anything different.

So as Yuna’s pilgrimage begins, Tidus is this happy-go-lucky idiot. He makes all these promises that he and Yuna will come back to these locations later. He completely misses the awkward and sad looks people give when he says these things. Then, partway through the journey, Tidus learns the truth: summoning the Final Aeon to defeat Sin kills the summoner. Yuna’s pilgrimage is her offering herself as a sacrifice, so the people of Spira can experience a brief period of peace, called the Calm.

Everyone else already knew this. They understood from the very start that this journey ends with Yuna’s death one way or another. Tidus, meanwhile, absolutely refuses to accept it. He vows to think of something, like the irrational child he kind of is. Which to be fair, defeating Sin doesn’t mean Sin is gone forever. Quite the opposite, the Calm generally lasts for about 10 years, then Sin always returns. The teachings of Yevon say that when the people have atoned enough, then the cycle will break. So they just keep throwing Summoners at the problem, hoping that each new Calm will be the eternal one.

Tidus also finds himself directly at the center of this conflict when Auron reveals that Sin is actually Jecht. Auron brought Tidus here at Jecht’s request in the hope that Tidus might finally break this endless cycle. Tidus hates Jecht. Jecht was the Wayne Gretzky of Blitzball players, so even though Tidus is a star athlete in his own right, professionally he’s still living in his fathers shadow. When Jecht was at home, his mother ignored him, fawning over Jecht. When Jecht tried to be a parent, he would berate Tidus, calling him a crybaby and that the only thing he was good at was crying. Anytime Jecht’s name comes up, Tidus is quick to point out his resentment towards Jecht.

I actually really love the father-son relationship here. I grew up with a single mother and never knew my father, and one thing that always frustrated me throughout the 90s and 2000s was how media constantly depicted fatherless sons as being overwhelmed with joy the moment their deadbeat father returned. It’s never something I connected with because I don’t have those feelings. If my father appeared in my life tomorrow, I wouldn’t suddenly want a relationship with him. To me, family is so much more than blood, it’s the relationships between people.

So I appreciate that Tidus is angry. Jecht was a jerk to him as a child and then disappeared. Tidus doesn’t spend the game longing for reconciliation. He has this massive chip on his shoulder because he spent his entire life living in the shadow of his famous father. And then in a twist of cruel irony, throughout Spira, he learns that Jecht traveled alongside Yuna’s father, High Summoner Braska, and because Braska brought the last Calm, he, Jecht, and Auron are viewed as legendary heroes. It’s genuinely compelling watching Tidus try to reconcile these conflicting feelings about a man he hates and hearing from everyone how much of a hero he was.

Graphically, Final Fantasy X looks significantly better than Final Fantasy IX. Almost like there was a generational leap or something. Like the previous games, it uses both low-resolution and high-resolution character models depending on the scene. Most gameplay uses lower-detail models, while emotional cutscenes swap in the more detailed versions. Sometimes it’s kind of jarring. You’ll have Wakka’s high-detail face standing beside some poor NPC who looks like they were carved out of damp cardboard.

The character movement can also be hilariously stiff at times. There are scenes where characters pivot like forklifts before walking off in a different direction. While very often the aesthetic, music, and well realized world can look great, there are absolutely moments where you’re suddenly reminded that Final Fantasy X is over twenty years old.

But then the FMV cutscenes kick in and good lord. These cutscenes are what I remembered the game looking like back in 2005. The flowing water, the hair physics, the lighting, it’s all incredibly good looking. Squaresoft absolutely flexed everything they learned from the previous Final Fantasy games and from their failed movie venture Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. One thing I especially appreciated was how seamlessly the game transitions between in-engine scenes and FMV scenes. Sometimes the transition between FMV and in-engine is clunky, sometimes it’s smooth, but it always looks good.

As the story progresses, the party begins to reject the idea of feeding summoners into this endless cycle of death. They repeatedly clash with Seymour Guado, a high priest of Yevon who believes the only release from suffering, is death itself. Seymour wants to actually become Sin because he genuinely thinks annihilating humanity is its ultimate salvation.

The party, unsurprisingly, rejects his philosophy.

Another aspect to the world is you discover that some people can remain in Spira after death as “unsent,” essentially refusing to pass on. Eventually, near the end of Yuna’s pilgrimage, the party meets Yunalesca, the original summoner who defeated Sin a thousand years ago. They learn the full horrifying truth: not only does summoning the Final Aeon kill the summoner, but the Final Aeon itself must be created from one of the summoner’s guardians. Braska chose Jecht. The Final Aeon destroys Sin… and then becomes the next Sin.

The party refuses to continue the cycle and defeats Yunalesca, effectively destroying humanity’s only known method of combating Sin. I actually chuckled at the scene afterward where the group casually informs Maester Mika that they killed Yunalesca, and the poor man just completely breaks down, refusing to believe that there is any alternative to the current cycle. Instead of listening to the party or trying to help, he just gives up and sends himself to the Farplane, dissolving into pyreflies.

During all this, Tidus also learns the truth about his own existence. A thousand years ago, Zanarkand and Bevelle were at war. Zanarkand’s summoners knew they were doomed against Bevelle’s machina, so the leader of Zanarkand, Yu Yevon used the fayth, people locked in an eternal slumber, with their dreams getting physical manifestations. That’s what Yuna’s aeons are, dreams from the Fayth at each temple. Yu Yevon uses the Fayth to summon Dream Zanarkand, and hides it elsewhere in the world before Yu Yevon created Sin. Tidus is from Dream Zanarkand, and is therefore a dream of the fayth himself. All this means that when Sin and Yu Yevon die, the fayth will stop dreaming, and Tidus will disappear.

This is the most confusing part of the plot, and I’ll be honest in saying that I looked it up after the fact. But I do want to mention here that Final Fantasy X has the most approachable story of the series by far. There’s no alien cells being injected into people, no memory loss mixed with time travel, nothing that convoluted. The world has all kinds of texture and depth, the religion feels real and well thought out, but the overall story, Yuna’s pilgimage, is really straightforward. This is one of the first times I’ve been able to follow the entirety of the story without much confusion or needing to look up alternative resources to figure out exactly what’s going on.

The party eventually teams up with Cid and his airship, tears a hole into Sin. They journey inside Sin’s body Pinocchio-style to confront Jecht and Yu Yevon himself. Tidus’s reunion with Jecht is exactly the kind of messy emotional confrontation I wanted from the game. Tidus says he hates him. Jecht basically responds with “Yeah, I know.” There’s no magical reconciliation. No perfect healing. Just two deeply flawed people understanding each other a little too late.

And then Tidus says, “This is the only time I’m glad that you’re my dad,” right before they have to kill him. Perfect.

After defeating Jecht, the party confronts Yu Yevon in a final battle that’s kind of fascinating mechanically. Every time you hit him, he heals for 9,999 damage, so unless you’re breaking the damage cap, the fight becomes this long grind. At the same time, all your party members have Auto-Life, so no matter what Yu Yevon does, you just keep getting back up. I suppose there’s something thematically fitting about that. The battle feels less like overcoming a challenge and more like stubbornly outlasting the embodiment of an endless cycle. Apparently Yu Yevon will use Grativja and hit the whole party and itself at the same time, constantly knocking it’s health down, but I managed to overcome it by breaking it’s magic, and then casting reflect on it so it’s healing just reflected to my party instead.

Anyway, once Yu Yevon is defeated and Sin explodes into a mountain of pyreflies, Tidus begins to fade away. There’s this genuinely emotional farewell where Yuna runs to hug him and falls straight through his disappearing body. He stands behind her, wraps her arms around her for a tender moment, then leaps off the ship with a hasty ‘goodbye’.

Because the church of Yevon sits at the center of the story, the gradual dismantling of that institution gives Final Fantasy X an incredible sense of scale. Whether it’s the party being branded heretics or watching Wakka, who starts the game as a blind follower of Yevon, to the point of racism and bigotry, slowly confront and unpack the hypocrisy around him, it feels huge. When the game reaches its climax and you finally tear down the foundations of this entire religion, it genuinely feels like you’re killing God. Final Fantasy has always loved the “fight God at the end” thing, but I think Final Fantasy X executes that idea better than any game in the series so far by having the entire conflict and story and culture of the world being centered around the church of Yevon.

The Level System

For this playthrough, I played the original US PS2 release, meaning I didn’t get access to the Expert Sphere Grid, but I’ll touch on that in second. The Sphere Grid itself is this massive interconnected web of nodes where every character starts in a different location. Instead of traditional leveling, gaining experience and passively improving their stats with each level up, characters gain Sphere Levels which let them move within the grid following the lines and activating nodes to increase stats or learn abilities.

I actually really enjoyed this system. It feels highly customizable even if, in practice, the customization is a little illusory because most characters are clearly funneled along intended paths. Tidus moves toward agility and time magic like Haste and Slow. Lulu focuses on elemental black magic. Auron becomes a physical powerhouse. But because everyone exists on the same grid, you can absolutely do ridiculous things if you want. You can focus your time and efforts to turn everyone into black mages if that’s your dream.

Often characters will come across a branching path on the sphere grid. Perhaps it’s a dead end, but has access to a couple extra nodes for a stat boost, or a path will be blocked off by a lock. Often removing these locks are what give characters the ability to trespass on other characters routes, letting you double up on skills amongst your party members. That being said, most of the time I just followed characters along their intended routes. The one exception was Kimahri, who I pushed toward Lulu’s section of the board to turn him into a backup black mage so I could exploit elemental weaknesses more aggressively.

By the end of the game, each character was around the end of their sphere grid, or was just starting to overlap with others. Wakka got Auron’s Break skills, Auron was moving into Tidus’s path to get more speed, that kind of thing. I’ve read that some people put the time in to earn ludicrous amounts of sphere levels to then max out each character on the sphere grid, but that’s an insane task that’s wholly unnecessary to beat the game. I’ve also read that doing that largely robs each character of what makes them unique.

The Battle System

The Sphere Grid gives you stats and abilities, so it ties directly into the battle system, and I think Final Fantasy X has one of the better combat systems in the series so far. Gone is the ATB system that’s been present since Final Fantasy IV Now, battles are fully turn-based with visible turn order. Big attacks will cost more ‘time’, while quick attacks or using items might let you do 2 actions before the next enemy gets to make their move. Adding to this, you can (and are encouraged to) swap party members in and out mid-battle without forfeiting that characters turn. I can’t stress how much I like this flexibility. Now I’m no longer trying to think if I should have my black mage in the party, or leave them behind for a summoner like I was in Final Fantasy IX or VI. Everyone is available at all times, but only 3 characters are in a battle at any one moment. Sometimes it was a juggle trying to get the right 2 characters out at the same time so one could buff the other, but it was a tactical consideration I really enjoyed.

An important aspect of this battle system is that any character who participates in the battle gets the full SP rewards. The SP earned from a fight is not divided between all characters, everyone gets the full amount from the fight. What this means in practice is that you really want every character to take at least one action in every fight. Once you get into the rhythm of it, it becomes second nature. Using your first two turns to kill all but one monster, then swap in every other party member to do a non-damage skill before finishing off the last one. I’m also pretty sure this mechanic is why teenage me struggled so much with the game back in 2005. Especially because some story sections lock your party composition, and if you’ve neglected certain characters, suddenly you’re in trouble. I neglected Kimahri hard, so when he had a solo battle he had to tackle, it was essentially a brick wall for me. Thankfully older me is more wise and now that I understood the system from the beginning, I was much more prepared to deal with that twist.

A lot of the regular mobs have have specific weaknesses that you’ll want to exploit. Tidus hits fast enemies, Wakka takes down the flyers, Auron with piercing is best for enemies with high defence, and so on. It made most of the random encounters pretty trivial, as you generally just needed to use the right tool for each job, but the flexibility of swapping in chracters mid-battle created some very satisfying tactical considerations, especially in some of the bigger boss moments.

One thing I especially appreciated was how quickly the game gives you most of the party. Compared to Final Fantasy IX, where you don’t even get the final character until absurdly late, Final Fantasy X gets your core cast assembled relatively early. Sure, Rikku doesn’t join until about 10 hours in, but the other 6 characters are in your party nearly from the get-go.

The Equipment/Aeon Customization system

The equipment system, however, is a bit weird. Weapons and armor don’t really have traditional stats. Instead, they have slots containing abilities. One sword might give Auron +5% Strength while another gives elemental damage or counterattacks. Later, Rikku unlocks the ability to customize equipment by consuming massive piles of items to fill empty slots with abilities.

I barely touched this system.

The customization costs felt absurdly high for relatively minor benefits, and there’s NO way to undo modifications. I couldn’t justify spending 20 mega-Phoenix to embue one piece of amour with Auto-Phoenix on an armour I might need to replace eventually. I mostly just made do with whatever gear I found naturally. The same applies to Yuna’s Aeons, which are this games Summons. They can also be customized using enormous quantities of items. Sometimes it was tempting to give one of them a new spell, but raising one aeon’s single stat by a single point would cost ~30 spheres. It was something I was never willing to commit to doing.

Also, I didn’t engage with this system because the main story really didn’t need it. Sure, there were difficult bosses. Seymour on Mt. Gagazet took me several attempts. The optional Baaj Temple boss underwater where you can only use Tidus, Wakka, and Rikku while dealing with petrification and party members being swallowed for a turn was rough. But overall, I didn’t find the main game especially punishing. I’ve read that in the HD Remake, the Dark Aeons are brutally difficult, but that’s not a feature in my game so I can’t really comment on it.

End-game grind

One of the things I appreciated most about Final Fantasy X. was the fact that I could just play it. In most of the games I’ve played in this series so far, I’ve had a guide handy at almost all times. But Final Fantasy X was different. Perhaps it’s a by-product of the linear nature of the game, but I didn’t look at a guide until I was nearly finished and I wanted to dabble in getting some of the celestial weapons. And I was so happy that I was able to beat the final boss without grinding at all through the entire game.

Unfortunately, getting those celestial weapons was locked behind some tedious grinding that I just wasn’t willing to engage with. I only managed to get Tidus’s celestial weapon, and I think that’s enough, because having a whole party kitted out with the best gear in the game would make the final battles utterly trivial. And those celestial weapons are wildly over-powered. From breaking the damage cap, to tippling the Overdrive meter, to reducing the spell cost down to 1MP for Lulu and Yuna, these weapons are wild, but they’re really tedious to earn.

Near the end of the game you unlock a monster arena, where the proprietor asks you to go out and capture 10 of every enemy. Doing so gives you gobs of items and unlocks some tougher battles for better prizes, but the idea of just running back across the whole world capturing enemies is a lot more tedium than I’m willing to embark on. I’m already most of the way through a Living Dex in Pokemon, I don’t feel like doing it here too. Yuna and Auron’s weapons are gated behind this monster arena, while Lulu, Kimahri, and Tidus’s weapons are hidden behind some mini-games.

I’ve read horror stories about Tidus’s weapon, needing to win a Chocobo race with randomly placed balloons and birds. Some people report spending hours trying to win and failing. I somehow managed to win it on my 4th try. Lulu’s weapon requires you to dodge a randomly occurring lightning strike 200 times in a row. Kimahri has you hunting butterflies while dodging random encounters.

I haven’t even talked about Blitzball yet. It’s a sport that you can play, and there’s one mandatory match in the whole game. It’s kind of a shame the way they framed that one match, as you and your players are hopelessly out-matched. Your first game of Blitzball is a frustrating experience which made me never want to touch it again. By working your way through the tournaments you unlock overdrives and the celestial weapon for Wakka, but I found Blitzball to be a frustrating mess of a game. Each character has half a dozen stats and when you try to do an action based on those stats, it’s not deterministic. There’s a random variable element that means sometimes you’ll just be unlucky in your shot. I get that’s a better way to emulate sport, but I wasn’t willing to pour several hours into a mini-game that I didn’t enjoy.

All of this doesn’t really matter to me though. It’s unnecessary to get those celestial weapons, as cool as it is to be overpowered. They exist for the players who want to bring the battle system to it’s logical conclusion. For me, I’m happy enough just finishing the main story.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I had a fantastic time with Final Fantasy X. Sure, there are scenes where the age of the game shows itself. There are awkward animations and weird PS2-era stiffness. But the story is genuinely excellent, the characters are memorable, the combat remains satisfying moment to moment, and Spira feels like a real world with history, culture, religion, and consequences.

At this point, I would comfortably place Final Fantasy X among the best Final Fantasy games I’ve played so far. Certainly head and shoulders above the PS1 trilogy of games, but I’m not quite so sure if it supplants IV, V, and VI in my heart yet. It might, but I’m not ready to commit to a firm ranking yet.

But I will say that I do not want to be done with Spira yet. So I’m going to play Final Fantasy X-2 next, which I hadn’t originally planned on doing. I have vague memories of trying it about fifteen years ago and bouncing off almost immediately. I remember the opening J-pop concert scene, and the game play being focused around costume changes and then turning the game off after maybe half an hour. But now that I’m so much more familiar with the characters and the lore, I hope I’ll find a lot more joy this time around.

Final Fantasy X represents a pretty major shift for the franchise. Core series staples like the ATB that have been a staple were tossed out, voice acting was introduced, and the FMV cut scenes are just getting better and better. It’s another generational leap forward, and even 25 years later, the story still holds up to this day. I know some people hold Final Fantasy X as “the last good Final Fantasy”, which I doubt is fair. Nevertheless, I will continue to move forward in this series. Hope to see you again, soon.