Final Fantasy X is by far the worst Final Fantasy game I have ever played and easily a benchmark for “bad” in the genre. Everything about it is categorically awful; the gameplay, the story, the characters, the graphics...none of it is done right. I feel bad for playing it. I feel bad for buying it thinking "IX was good, and I liked some of the earlier games, so this can't be that bad".
The story...well, what little story there is is incredibly insulting. It draws on countless old cliches, the corrupt church, absurd technophobia, one powerful, world-defining evil, a crusade of a small group of people to save the world, the love story...nothing it does is new or clever. This would be fine if it did well in doing these things. But it doesn't. The revelation of the true nature of the church is ridiculously forced as a plot device and comes off barely believable. Nobody seems to care. And when the truth is discovered, the church is hilariously inept at covering it up. This is not characteristic of the implementation of this particular cliché – in fact, it emphasises how awful the implementation actually is. We're basically meant to believe a bunch of retards have been ruling the world for a couple hundred years. The technophobia...well, the less said the better; it was only ever touched on when doing so was convenient (or to emphasise how much of a filthy racist Wakka is). Machines are a-okay in Spira as long as they don't matter to the plot or bad characterisation!
Okay, you're thinking, but surely all FF gams have had the great evil and the crusade against it as focal points for the story – surely they're done well! Well, no, they're not. Sin is almost as ineffectual as the church when it comes to doing what it's supposed to do. It's pretty much dropped as a plot point for a considerable section of the game where the focus shifts to “OMG ISN'T SEYMOUR EVIL” instead of “This horrible monster is destroying the world we need to do something about it”. Sin really doesn't do an awful lot after the early game. There isn't a need for it to, what is in effect a giant fish can't drive the plot as well as a badly written religious man.
I want to stop for a moment and have you all appreciate that last sentence: at no point during the game is Sin ever shown as being capable of moving onto the land to wreck :skull::skull::skull::skull:. It is depicted in almost all cases as a big and really angry fish. The place it's fought in the final battle with other summoners is a stretch of land right next to the sea. Apparently the people of Spira are retarded (like their church) and so don't just move inland to avoid this threat. Nevermind! It doesn't matter! Just a piddly little detail that we can overlook when necessary - what matters is our contrived and scarcely believable love story!
And Jesus Christ is it a badly written love story. For some reason, we are expected to believe some of the worst written characters ever conceived in a Final Fantasy are emotionally mature enough to fall in love – when most of the time you get the impression they're barely able to survive walking around outside. Tidus is a spoiled, narcissistic child of a celebrity – he is the Paris Hilton of the dream world he lived in before arriving in Spira. He even looks like Paris. Yuna is the Paris Hilton of Spira, but so sheltered that that is not an apt comparison; Yuna is a creepy, homeschooled version of Paris Hilton. The kind of person Paris would be were her parents crazy fundamentalists. Neither of them seem to appreciate the scope of their quest (Tidus in particular, but that's because he's an ignorant smurf about pretty much everything) and spend most of their time pissing around trying to whistle and laughing like a pair of spastics because that's what you do when the fate of the world is resting on your shoulders. Just what they see in each other we are never really told – Tidus, we can assume, is just really shallow and knows Rikku is underage; Yuna, well, I suppose you could argue that she was attracted to Tidus' energy. Like a moth drawn to the flame, only the moth is a coddled, needy child and the flame is a retard with ADD.
The rest of the cast, all things considered, are not any better. The most tolerable of them are Rikku and Auron; the former being the generic cheerful schoolgirl and Auron being the stereotypical middle-aged badass. Neither of them have many redeeming qualities, and I say this despite having an incredible weakness for bubbly characters like Rikku. They're just genre stereotypes. Which I guess is why they look best, because the others aren't; they're monstrous creations all Square's own.
Wakka is, as aforementioned, a filthy racist. And everyone in the party – including the girl he'd be discriminating against were he actually able to identify the kind of person he discriminates against – are perfectly okay with it. It's who Wakka is, and really, what he is is Spira's Redneck trash. There's no need to admonish him for it! He even has the obsession with a game that he's bad at to fit with that. I wonder if he started beating Lulu after they got married?
Speaking of Lulu, there is practically nothing to really say about her. She's there for fanservice. She has no discernable personality – what you learn about her in Besaid is all you will ever learn about her and all you ever need to know about her. SHE HAS BOOBS. That's what matters! We do learn in X-2 that she also has horrible taste in men, because she does marry that redneck Wakka.
Kimahri, I hope, is a hero for all you FF nerds out there. He is basically what you are – meek, passive-aggressive, and totally worthless to society. When ordered by Auron to take care of the child Yuna, he goes ahead and watches her for years and years as though he's afraid some dying man is going to beat the :skull::skull::skull::skull: out of him if he doesn't. It dawned on me that maybe, maybe he's doing it because of how utterly pathetic he is; he has nothing else to do. Nothing else he can do. Everyone else in his tribe had the sense to disown him when they had the chance. All that'd be left for him without Yuna is to become a circus animal or turn tricks on a street corner in Luca.
I want to close by talking about the gameplay. Well, more specifically, the lack of it. There is no challenge or intelligent thought involved in playing the game. If you play through every storyline battle and a decent amount of your random encounters, it is impossible to die. This is because you can't be bad at mashing X. The fact there were still random encounters in the game is also a testament to how horrible it is – any developer worth their salt would recognise it's an archaic system from a time when memory constraints stopped you from placing enemies on the overworld map. Apparently no one told Square, and we got a relic of a gameplay system to go with a poorly devised battle system. And Jesus, Blitzball. I almost forgot Blitzball. It's not possible to lose at Blitzball, either. Not unless you failed to get the Jecht Shot, which you can spam to win every game. There is no challenge to the game and there is no enjoyment to it – it's like a football game only it's crawling with pointless numbers.
So. Guys. Tell me how this isn't the worst game in the series. Seriously. I can't see anything resembling a defense of this mess. Even VIII beats this :skull::skull::skull::skull: and VIII was a joke.
