Karifean replays Final Fantasy X

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Immediately we see Tidus as he flirts with girls, has everybody cheering for him, has kids looking up to him, gets envied for his cool floating house. People sucking up to him, offering him dinner, being super excited to be his pals or anything, it feels almost ridiculous how much he's living the high life.

Reading this now is quite sad- knowing what the rest of Tidus' life is going to be like very soon. We are watching his last moments of glory and fame. In Spira, he's a nobody, doesn't know trout about anything, gets schooled/scolded/smacked around by people around him. And of course is surrounded by death and destruction. It's quite a reversal that makes his character arc all the more interesting. So these intro scenes in Zanarkand very much make me want to reach in and tell him "Enjoy this moment while you can!!"

It was a short time, and hard to say how necessary/unnecessary it was to the narrative overall, but the introduction to the Al Bhed is nice and it does give us a sense of just how lost Tidus is in Spira when he has no one to rely on and no place to go, so I think it plays a fairly important part in showing the urgency of his fundamental situation. If Tidus had washed up at Besaid right away we wouldn't have really felt a sense of danger for his base survival, I think.

Agreed. X probably has my favorite beginning of any game. You get an immediate sense of how big, how dangerous, and how foreign the world is. Your rescuers are literally speaking a foreign language and start off wanting to kill you. I like that this all happens at night, too. Square really managed to create an amazing atmosphere with this game that was just unspeakably memorable for many players. Many of these early scenes give me goosebumps thinking back to them.

- Was surprised to see pretty much all the NPCs here having lines of dialogue for speaking to them twice. I'm learning new things about this game already.

OT, but is this uncommon in the franchise? I ask because as someone who started with X, I was surprised to discover I, VI and XII all had mostly one-liner NPCs. At first I chalked it up to the games being old, but when I saw even the newer XII had mostly one-line NPCs I was surprised. Definitely took me out of the moment the first few times it happened because it immediately reminded me that I was in a video game... In X, I wasn't even that big into talking to every NPC and uncovering every bit of dialog, but it definitely made a huge difference that just under the surface there were all those lines available if I did. Made the world seem so real and I realize I def took that feeling for granted.