Never played VIII, but why do you hate X?? X-2 was huge fan service but I thought X wasn't too bad.
My God, don't even get me started!
Warning: 'Sperg mode activating!I hated almost every single character (with the exception of Wakka and to some extent Auron), but Tidus (who is the main character) was one I absolutely could not stand, and Yuna (the female lead) was almost as bad. Combine this with the horrendous, faux-dramatic dialogue and it only gets worse. Plus the story was mostly hokey as hell: Tidus was a dream all along! Various people are actually dead (not that it really matters)! Tidus' deadbeat dad is now a bad guy (for someone that I never even remotely liked, this was neither interesting nor shocking)! The only interesting bit (that the Summoner has to kill herself) can be averted by killing a funny-shaped cube!
So that's strike on, the characters and storyline.
Then you've got the tiny world size - it never really feels like you're exploring a large area at all. You've got the 'ice place', and the 'village place' and so on... but they're all relatively small areas and never feel like part of a larger whole. It might be artificial, but the world maps of previous games gave a much better sense of scope. In Final Fantasy X, I always felt like I was restricted to a few very linear paths.
So that's strike two, the environments and sense of exploration.
But then comes the worst thing: the game system itself. There is usually very, very little point in using magic, as physical attacks are almost always superior, and don't cost any MP. While the characters start off differentiated and interesting, as they advance through the sphere grid they all start to become more and more the same. And there's no actual even remotely believable, explained, or understandable reason of what these 'spheres' are, or how they work to help you 'level up', or anything. It's a phenomenally artifical system imposed almost entirely for the purpose of being 'different'.
That would be three strikes, but none of this matters because of the game's worst crime:
It's designed in such a way that that more thorough you are, and the better you do, the more boring and tedius the game becomes. The game would be MOST fun for the casual gamer who whips through it and doesn't look any deeper than than the surface of the gameplay. Woe be to the perfectionist/completionist (like me) who dares to try and do more! To do 'everything' in the game, you have to do a phenomenal amount of completely illogical crap, for which there is no rhyme, or reason, or even clue. For example, you want your Celestial Weapons? Well, better go to some place you couldn't go to earlier, but which you can go to now (for no particular reason), and read a plaque that's there (that nobody ever said anything about) and get a magic item from it. Did I mention that you have to win a really annoying and largely luck-based minigame with a ridiculously perfect score to get another item that you didn't know you'd get from it? Oh, and that you need to take another item (whose purpose is not explained) to a specific orb in a forest that is full of other orbs that all look exactly the same, and use it on that one specific orb to activate the weapons? Wait, what's that, you had to read a guide to figure all that shit out? Why, me too! I guess Tidus and his party must be insane or psychic, because there's abolutely no remotely logical reason why they would ever pull this shit in the game!
And yet another travesty in game-making: one of the 'challenges' to get one of the Celestial weapons is to succeed at the lighting-dodging minigame. The game works as follows: you stand in a certain place. There will be a flash of light (these happen intermittently), so you quickly need to press a button to dodge the lightning that follows. To get the ultimate weapon, you need to do this successfully 200 times IN A ROW. Make a mistake? Too bad, start again. Gone to save the game after doing 100? Haha, you'll need to start again. The whole thing, if you don't make a mistake, takes about half an hour of solid staring at the screen waiting for these stupid flashes. But you'll never make it in one go anyway, so good luck with that.
And should you want to take out all the Dark Summons, then you'd better level all your characters up to max stats (and I mean max stats) first, by endlessly farming the incredibly, incredibly long battles at the monster arena. You have no idea how long that takes.
Sound like fun? You're right, it's not. The more you try to get done in the game, the more it makes itself repetitive, illogical, and downright painful to play. It effectively punishes you for seeking out everything there is to see in it.
Yet since I shelled out money for it, I would certainly hope to see everything there is to it in my playthrough.
And that, my friends, is why I despise Final Fantasy X.
