There are a lot of things I dislike about FFX, but in the grand scheme of things I still think it's a good game. One of the weaker in the series? Absolutely. A game that I enjoyed playing? Certainly. A bad game? Definitely not.

I think for a start we need to establish what we're going to judge the game against. I'm going to assume, for the sake of the argument, that part of the reason people dislike the game is because they judge it against the likes of VI, VII, IX. Also I'm going to assume that as we're on a Final Fantasy message board that people generally like those games and hold them in high regard. Is FFX a bad game in its own right? No, it is not. Is it less good than many other entries in the series? Yes, in my opinion it is. There are many, many terrible games I can point you to but I can assure you that FFX is not one of them. To indulge in a bit of motoring hyperbole, judging a BMW 6 series against an Aston Martin, a Ferrari and a Bugatti Veyron, there's an obvious weak link there in a very skewed sample. If you add a Fiat Panda, a Reliant Robin and a Ford Ka into the mix, the BMW doesn't look too bad. I think that's one reason why the game is judged harshly. And I say this as somebody who would much rather play VI, VII and IX. We're comparing FFX against some very good games.

FFX does an awful lot of things well - to an extent I would say it's does them better than many other games in the series. For my money, the battle system is surpassed only by FFXII. The music is excellent, graphically it's very pretty and the environments themselves are pretty impressive. I'd probably go so far as to say that Spira is probably one of the better and certainly more memorable worlds, if only for how vivid it is.

As I've alluded to, FFX is not one of my favourite entries in the series and I tend to rank it pretty lowly. I'm not a big fan of the voice acting, but I think that's partly because I've seen it done much better since, not least by FFXII. The sphere grid I can see people's objections to it - certainly if you didn't get the PAL version (as I did).

One of my major criticisms, and something that has come out in this thread, is Tidus. In spite of some hilarious send-ups, he isn't that bad. I agree, his voice acting is annoying, his character is pretty tedious at times, and he is whiny. I did and do find him annoying. But let's face it, he's not exactly alone in the category of annoying protagonists, is he (cf. Squall Leonhart)? And actually, I think Jiro did a pretty good of showing that he isn't as one dimensional and terrible as people make out.