YMMV / Final Fantasy X

A-G

• Accidental Aesop: No human can ever measure up to their legend. Jecht, legendary blitzball player and guardian who is also an alcoholic that emotionally abused his son. Tidus, star player of the Zanarkand Abes who also has deep-rooted personal issues related to his father and a constant fear of loneliness. Auron, legendary guardian and warrior monk who is now a broken shell of a man fixated on revenge. Yuna, daughter of the High Summoner and future High Summoner herself who is also frequently unsure of herself and her place in the world. All of these people do end up improving by the end of the story but they never quite match up to the reputation that they have in the eyes of others.
• Accidental Innuendo: When the Earth Eater Optional Boss is knocked on its back, whenever it casts Flare on itself (it has Auto-Reflect) it awkwardly looks like Farts on Fire.
• Adorkable: Clasko's clumsiness, sad face and quick friendship with chocobos makes him likeable.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Here.
• Angst? What Angst?: Tidus is surprisingly good-natured and cheery for a teenager who was emotionally abused as a kid, lost his mother (by implied suicide), had his town destroyed by Sin and got transported to another world with no way back. It gets even more surprising near the climax when he learns that he is not real, and states that he is happy to have existed nonetheless. He does show some angst at times, but remains in a good mood. This is, to a degree, some Truth in Television. Children who grow up in bad environments usually react to it in one of two ways: Either they become the same as their parents, or they become the antithesis, not wanting to inflict the same harm. Auron's influence and guardianship could have helped Tidus become the latter. The spoilered twist is also partially a case of Values Dissonance because Tidus's reaction is rooted in the Japanese concept of Mono no Aware, which makes his attitude more understandable to Japanese players.
• Anticlimax Boss: The fight against Seymour Omnis is disproportionately easy compared to what came before. To put it in perspective, you just got done fighting a four-part Sequential Boss where the final part alone had 140,000 HP, almost 300,000 for all its parts total. And the Climax Boss before that was a three-part Sequential Boss with a combined total of 132,000 HP. Seymour Omnis has only one phase with 80,000 HP. For his offense, he'll just spam elemental magic while telegraphing which element he'll use, so the basic "Nul <Element>" spells (that Yuna can cast every turn for a measly 2 MP) will nullify his ability to harm you. Beyond that, the only thing he has to hurt you with is Ultima, and he gives you a full turn's warning to prepare for it. To make him even easier, the area immediately before the battle with him has an armor piece for Yuna which absorbs three elements, and an empty slot for customization to weaken the fourth one, too. The result is that your White Mage is invincible for most of the fight as she protects the rest of the party from the boss's predictable attack pattern. Plus, if you've found the Celestial Weapons, your characters can break the damage cap and a strong enough Overdrive or summon can end the fight on the first round. Or, if you've done enough grinding, you can use a basic attack and kill him in one hit.
• Applicability: Word of God has stated that the game is purely Japanese and that it was intended to criticize the hierarchal structure of Japanese religion. However, because the main villain is named "Sin" and the Church of Yevon has elements reminiscent of the Catholic Church, Western players tend to interpret it as anti-Christian, or at least critical of organized Catholicism. In addition, Buddhism tends to have more positive PR as a peaceful subcultural religion in the West, many degrees removed from the issues the game criticizes organized Buddhism for.
• Awesome Music: Like all Final Fantasy games, the entire soundtrack. "Battle with Seymour", in particular, really gets the blood pumping. Didn't make it into Dissidia for nothing.
• Best Boss Ever
  • The culmination of the pilgrimage has you fighting against Lady Yunalesca, who the party rejects for her "false hope" and belief that the cycle can never end. It is a pivotal scene in the game, the boss undergoes a One-Winged Angel not once but twice, and it's set to the percussive "Challenge". The scene which precedes the fight also has Yuna and Auron delivering two extremely memorable badass speeches about living without false hope and fighting for what they believe is right.
  • Fighting Evrae in the skies above Bevelle. The fight takes place from the deck of the Fahrenheit, so you have the option to move out of range of its Poison Breath, and Cid can help you by firing missiles at it.
  • The climatic showdown against Sin after the pilgrimage ends and The Reveal pivotal scenes happen, being a multi-part fight against all of Sin's colossal body in multiple locations, now with the party trying to defeat him on their own without false hope combined with the extremely epic "Assault" battle theme.
• Base-Breaking Character: Spend five minutes on a Final Fantasy forum and you will quickly discover that Tidus is one of the most polarizing main protagonists in the franchise's history. The commonly cited reasons include: James Arnold Taylor's whiny voice, his daddy issues, his Hot-Blooded characterization which comes across as stupid, and the tackiness of his design in general. However, fans of the character either don't mind the voice/enjoy the contrast between early and late Tidus, find his anger toward Jecht both understandable and relatable, and note that he matures as the story goes on. He got over his hatred of his father in the original game, and honored him in the CD Drama by wearing his bandana. His romance with Yuna is likewise considered either one of the best (with even her English voice actress acknowledging the necessity of the romance plot) or worst in the series. Finally, his Heroic Sacrifice is either a sad moment or a cathartic Take That, Scrappy! for his haters.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The fact that Kimahri attacks Tidus on Besaid never ever comes up again even though the former was fully intending to kill the latter in this battle; an underlevelled player who forgets to use potions can quite easily die to him before the rest of the party interrupts. This really seems to be something that should have been discussed once the two were on speaking terms.
  • The games Relationship Values system can cause this depending on the players choices at points. Sometimes characters ask Tidus his thoughts on an ongoing subject, which tend to have different results that factor into a hidden mechanic. Most of these don't really factor in until the end of the game, and feel out of place or sudden. For example: Lulu can make very flirty comments towards Tidus near the final dungeon, even though Tidus has firmly gotten with Yuna by that point, because the Relationship Values are skewed towards Lulu. It makes anyone besides Yuna being the highest in the total points feel like it comes out of no where.
• Breather Boss: Evrae Altana, which occurs after the aeon-to-aeon fight with Isaaru and right before Seymour Natus, both of which can be very tough bosses if you're under-prepared. By contrast, Evrae Altana is permanently inflicted with the Zombie status, meaning healing items are lethal to it. Toss two Phoenix Downs or two X-potions at it and it goes down without much effort on your part.^note Normally this would be a One-Hit Kill, but it's immune to instant death. Not that it really matters much here. This is actually the more rewarding method of defeating it, as if you try to defeat it the conventional way, you not only have to navigate a side route full of locked gates, but you permanently miss out on a few pieces of nice equipment.
• Broken Base:
  • Along with VI, VII, and IX, it's thought to have one of the better plots in the series, although the game is much more linear than its predecessors and some of the voice acting is questionable (it was the early days for such things). As a result, there's a divide between those who like the plot and who think that the voice acting, as well as other flaws, are easy to ignore and don't detract from the experience and those who like the plot, but feel that the voice acting and the game's other flaws make the game hard to enjoy
  • A lot of fans were salty that the first fully-voiced FF title got a seemingly-inferior English dub. Especially considering that anime was really blowing up in the west and was miles ahead in presentation. Still, for all the flak JAT gets, he's at least playing the character as written. In fact, most of the main cast is well-cast and well-acted. Hedy Burress is the weak link here: she cannot do emotional turbulence and that's a problem in a pair of games that are supposed to be an emotional roller-coaster. It's also kind of weird/funny that they picked someone who can't carry a tune to play a world-famous Songtress in X-2, though they did dub over Hedy in FMVs.
  • The non-European setting and world-building are unique and top-notch, a combination of Okinawan, Caribbean, Indonesian, and other cultural influences. It's fun going to each new city talking to NPCs for the hell of it; it feels like Square Enix made a living world. Unfortunately, it's a very linear world. Even then, many fans don't mind the linearity, believing it's justified in the story context of a solemn pilgrimage and allows the player to get much more immersed in it.^note The game itself throws in a scene near the end which reflects the players' general disappointment with the linearity, while at the same time showing how well the immersion allows the player to feel they're part of the solemn pilgrimage. Tidus notes Yuna would often just stare off into the distance, knowing she'll never see these places again.
  • Is the main character's name pronounced "Tee-dus" or "Tie-dus"? Not even Dissidia or Kingdom Hearts and II (all Square developed properties) can agree. Given the Romaji used for his Japanese name (ティーダ, Tīda), it's probably supposed to be the former, and James Arnold Taylor affirmed this. Doesn't mean people won't still argue over it, or prefer to keep calling him "Tie-dus".
  • The infamous fake laughter scene, both in English and Japanese. The laughter is meant to sound forced and awkward, so a lot of people think it's okay as-is, with it fitting the context of the scene. But there are just as many people who think it succeeds too well and it's hard to not physically cringe when watching the scene. There aren't many neutral opinions on it.
• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • At the end of the pilgrimage, summoners die when performing the Final Summoning. Aside from being foreshadowed in the text, the general atmosphere of the game and the attitudes of characters when discussing the topic make it pretty clear there's something they're not telling Tidus. Yuna in particular is heavily built as a Messianic Archetype, so the revelation that she intends to sacrifice herself to save the world may not surprise players that much. If players have their highest affection with Rikku and travel with her on the snowmobile in Macalania, she outright spoils the twist to Tidus, then hastily doubles back and claims she meant something else.
  • This happens twice with the reveal that Auron is an Unsent. There's ample and obvious foreshadowing for it prior to each reveal: Rin saying he was wounded so badly he shouldn't have survived, Seymour asking why he is "still here", and Auron's reaction when Yuna performs the Sending for Jyscal. When Tidus learns, he's not surprised at all. The cutscene immediately before the boss battle before Tidus learns this also makes it pretty clear that Yunalesca fatally wounded Auron. If the player has their highest affection with Auron, his words right before the final battle in front of everyone heavily imply that he, like Tidus, will fade away immediately after they defeat Sin. Most of the rest of the party only learns for certain after the final boss, though several of them should've been able to piece it together. Auron had promised Braska he'd take care of Yuna, but Kimahri was the one who brought her to Besaid and served as her first guardian. This is because Yunalesca fatally wounded Auron when he confronted her. He was only able to make it to Bevelle, and not carry out his promise, so he had to pass the request on to Kimahri, who was likely the last person to see him alive.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Beating the insufferable Luca Goers for the blitzball championship, on their own turf. And the Aurochs receiving an utterly massive trophy for your trouble.
    • Given how hair-pullingly frustrating the first game is, firing the Besaid Aurochs for their incompetence can also be pretty satisfying even if you lose. Replacing them with actual skilled blitzers like Brother and then hammering the oppposition that previously made your life miserable is also a lot of fun.
  • Sending Seymour to the Farplane for good for the Smug Snake he turned out to be.
• Character Perception Evolution:
  • At the game's release, Tidus was an unpopular character in the West and frequently derided as a whiner with "daddy issues." More recently, players have seen Tidus as someone who's grappling with the effects of a childhood marked by verbal abuse from his father and negligence from his mother. Back in the 2000s, Tidus' detractors would go so far as to claim that Jecht's treatment of him was okay because he was a "whiny kid", but fewer people today cheer for scenes where an adult repeatedly bullies his seven-year-old child, now that there is a greater understanding of the ramifications of emotional and verbal abuse. Additionally, Tidus' constant questioning of Spira and its customs are more appreciated now as an integral part of the game's theme about questioning authority.
  • Conversely, Jecht's initial reception was as a role model for Rated M for Manly and Tidus' complaints had no grounds because Jecht was a strong, cool guy who made a Heroic Sacrifice for his friend, ignoring that the Jecht Tidus knew had gone through none of the Character Development that turned him into the Jecht who volunteered to be the Final Aeon. These days, people are more likely to pay attention to the parts of the game that criticize Jecht for being selfish and holding a child under 10 to impossible standards. While he's still considered a tragic figure, these days part of his tragedy is that he was indeed a bad father, but he's forced to live with regret because he didn't figure it out until he was permanently separated from his son and unable to make things right.
• Common Knowledge:
  • The infamous laughing scene is frequently taken out of context, leading to the popular misconception that it's a case of bad voice acting and that the Japanese version of the scene was "better". Neither of those things are true (see for yourself). In reality, the awkwardness is intentional. The point of the scene was to show how forcing yourself to laugh or smile makes you look weird, as evidenced by every other character's reaction to Tidus laughing. In-context, Tidus had just learned that his father, Jecht, had become Sin and is responsible for scores of deaths across the globe. Tidus is forcing himself to laugh...because he doesn't have a lot to be happy about. Tidus and Yuna immediately descend into genuine laughter afterwards, further reinforcing that the fakeness was intentional.
  • The nature of Dream Zanarkand has caused many players to refer to anyone from it as simply Dream People who don't really exist. While true to an extent, the game also makes it clear that in truth, the people made from Dream Zanarkand and the Fayth are real, and are not too different from the Aeons Summoners use. This is why Tidus can see his mother in the Farplane despite her death and being from Dream Zanarkand. The confusion largely stems from how the game calls Tidus a dream, making it seem like he never really existed, when in truth he is a dream, but does actually exist.
  • Yojimbo's Zanmato attack is often said to require paying an exorbitant amount of Gil in one turn for him to use it. While money is certainly a factor in getting him to use it, it is not the only factor, and some hidden variables are involved; things like making sure he doesn't die, not dismissing him the turn you summon him, and always paying him enough for him to use Wakizashi also contribute to his likelihood of using Zanmato for even as low as 1,000 Gil on the turn that he uses it. In fact, the variable that increases when you pay him money requires exponentially more Gil for each +1 increment, so throwing him hundreds of millions of Gil is in fact one of the least efficient ways to get him to use Zanmato. In short, Zanmato-based strategies are less about paying him tons of Gil at once and more about a commitment to deploying him and treating him with respect and steady income — basically The Theme Park Version of how mercenaries work.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Most endgame parties will end up having Tidus, Wakka, and/or Rikku, if not just all three. Tidus' Blitz Ace/Slice and Dice and Wakka's Attack Reels are two of the most damaging Overdrives in the game beyond what other characters can acquire, making them your best source of DPS, and Rikku's Mix lets her grant the party powerful buffs and fully heal them, making her the best support character. Tidus, Wakka and Rikku are also the only party members who can fight underwater, so using them for the whole game is a good way to make sure they aren't underpowered when the game suddenly forces you to use them, like against Geosgaeno or Shinryu. Fourth place goes to Yuna, as her aeons are invaluable as meat shields against some of the games most devastating attacks your party otherwise cannot survive (such as Dark Anima’s Oblivion, or the Dark Magus Sister’s Delta Attack). Fifth place goes to Auron, whose Tornado Overdrive is good against groups of enemies and his Celestial Weapon comes with First Strike and Counter-Attack, and since Tidus and Wakka's Celestial Weapons have Evade & Counter, this creates an entire party that will counter enemy hits with an attack of their own.
  • Kimahri will almost always be placed in Rikku's Sphere Grid path when he's finished with his own, since the ability to steal is mighty useful to have even before she joins later.
  • For blitzball, Brother. Though his stat growth slows to a crawl at Level 50 and his stats at Level 99 are mostly mediocre, his Speed starts at 75 and will hit 99, making him significantly faster than most other players the moment you recruit him. Even if his other stats are subpar, Brother can just kite the enemy team and run the ball to the net and take his shot without opposition.
• Creepy Awesome:
  • Anima is a massive, chained monstrosity whose top half is perpetually screaming, with a burly bottom half (used for her Overdrive) which unleashes a hurricane of punches on her targets. She's also one of the go-to aeons for the endgame in re-releases.
  • Jyscal talking about Seymour's plan to kill him, with the fittingly cold, haunting music of Macalania Temple playing in the background.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • FFX is the final game in the franchise to feature Turn-Based Combat, and it's clear that Squaresoft applied all that they had learned. Status Effects matter; Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors matter; Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors matter; there are abilities that affect the Visual Initiative Queue; and because the player can swap any of the seven party members in and out of the active three-person front line at any time, enemies can have complicated and multi-layered defenses which no single player character can pierce through. It's a fun and rewarding system, but the days when the "Fight" command could carry through the final boss are over.
  • The first half of the game isn't too bad, but the game takes a sudden jump up when you hit Macalania Woods in the second half and doesn't let up until you get the airship.
  • Encountering the dark aeons in the International version. Even with all the Infinity Plus One Swords, you need the right armor and a lot of Sphere Level Grinding (or Yojimbo and a hell of a lot of gil) to even stand a chance against the weakest one. As a bonus, that weakest one (Dark Valefor) is blocking the path to Besaid, so if you missed anything valuable there (such as solving the Sphere of Destruction puzzle, getting the Jecht Sphere or Valefor's second Overdrive), well, good luck. And God help you if you missed the Sun Crest in the place where you fight Yunalesca on Zanarkand, as you'll be dealing with Dark Bahamut if you try to return there. And even if you've been knocking down dark aeons left and right, Penance is a completely different fight even with all character stats maxed out. Whittling down all of its 12 million HP (for comparison, the story's Final Boss by this point can be taken out with less than three hits), as well as contending with its regenerating, independently-acting arms to throw every conceivable debuff your way, will take at least half an hour and lots of strategizing to avoid being completely wiped out.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Jecht was a drunken egomaniac who mostly ignored or emotionally abused his son. He got better, true, but many fans like to rate him as the pinnacle of manliness or claim that he was a good role model, or that it was Tidus' fault for not living up to Jecht's expectations.
  • Jecht's wife tends to be treated as this by those who outright hate Jecht, depicting her as the long-suffering wife who tried her best to be a good mother. The game suggests anything but: Tidus recalled her being totally obsessed with Jecht, to the detriment of her family (to the point where Jecht of all people told her to spend more time with the kid). Great pick of parents. Let's face it, Tidus turned out extremely well, considering.
  • Yunalesca gets a bit of it as well, considering she's the one perpetuating the sacrificial summoner system. Certain fans are quick to excuse her actions by pointing out that she likely doesn't want to destroy what remains of her father. Which may have been excusable at first, but still refusing to let go of Yu Yevon after a thousand years and perpetuating a cycle of mass murder puts her well over the "Moral Event Horizon." (See below.)
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Anima. She's first introduced as an antagonist because she's Seymour's exclusive aeon, but her Fayth's tragic backstory — and the fact that she's just as powerful when you get your hands on her — made Anima a favorite of the aeons.
  • Among the entire franchise, this game's version of the Shiva summon is one of the most popular of her incarnations, likely helped by the Badass Finger Snap she does in her Diamond Dust animation, and the sassy Hair Flip as part of her victory pose.
• Event-Obscuring Camera: the very last room of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon is fairly simple: There are icicles exploding up from the floor, and you have to dodge them, whilst simultaneously there are round crystals coalescing out of thin air — and dissolving back into it — that you have to collect. Get 9 of them and you go to the Final Boss. The reason it's a Luck-Based Mission is that the camera is constantly panning, making it hard to see everything in the room, and also meaning that trying to maneuver around the camera can result in running into icicles which sprouted behind the fourth wall.
• Evil Is Cool: The aeons themselves are already very cool, but this game introduces the dark aeons - evil counterparts to them with different coloring and monstrous stats. The scenes and battles with them tend to have deliciously nightmarish moments and epic music.
• Fanon: Some fans claim that Rikku says the Al Bhed perform their own version of the Sending by dancing. No such dialogue exists in the game, and there are no supplementary materials to back this up.
• Fashion-Victim Villain: Seymour. This guy's got a really weird fashion sense, even for Spira: an outrageous hairdo, guyliner, and jumbo-sized kimono.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Final Fantasy XIII and its two direct sequels would later be criticized for, among other things, a very linear world as well as lore and backstory that can seem impenetrable at times. Those things got part of their start here, though their execution was vastly different and not as pronounced here, and between that and a turn-based battle system which sticks close to the classic games, X is much less divisive among the fandom. Exploration actually was largely an illusion even in the franchise's earliest games, as even if the prior games gave players two or three different directions to go, most of those directions were blocked off or didn't provide them with much to do until more of the game is unlocked. You still had to find the path to a degree, but the game always locked you on the same course. The general feeling regarding X specifically is that gave an in-story justification for the more linear nature of the main story, and had its side-quests more evenly spread throughout the journey, alongside towns with shops to visit and NPCs to interact with, whereas XIII simply lacks any side content for much of the game and has its shops relegated to just its save points. Regarding the complexity of the lore, while also possessing a complex lore and backstory, X avoids XIII's pitfall of info dumping it into Datalogs for the player to read outside the game, instead integrating its lore and backstory through several in-game cutscenes. YouTube analyst Design Doc does a compare-and-contrast here.
  • Tidus' role as a Supporting Protagonist led to a more polarizing example in the case of Vaan from Final Fantasy XII: The story actually focused on Ashe, Basch and Balthier, with Vaan acting mainly as The Watson and Plucky Comic Relief. This is also true (though to a lesser extent) of Lightning from XIII and Serah from XIII-2. (For that matter, Final Fantasy VI is guilty of not being able to decide whether Terra, Locke or Celes is the focal character.) Yuna is the apex the entire party revolves around, but Tidus still has links to the plot in the form of Sin and everything it represents for him as well as the positive impact he has on Spira and Yuna specifically. Vaan on the other hand had less direct involvement by comparison, mostly just being there because he is a civilian of the conquered nation you are trying to liberate.
• Game-Breaker: See the full list here.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • In Japan, Jecht is just another Tragic Villain, but he has a pretty sizable fan base in the West. It's mainly because of his oozing testosterone. Might also help that he's got a good English performance.
  • In the West, Wakka is a well-liked character. In Japan? He was ranked number 2 on an official character poll in 2022! Might have to do with Wakka's Fountain of Memes status in Japan.
• Genius Bonus:
  • All of the Yevonite symbols seen throughout the game are not just random decoration, but are actual words that can be translated.
  • Each of the Magus Sisters has a special attack which is named after a military maneuver. Cindy's Camisade is a sneak raid performed while the enemy is asleep. Sandy's Razzia comes from Arabic, which also means raid. Mindy's Passado is a fencing move: A forward lunge with a rapier or epee.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • The chocobo racing minigame has birds who exist for no other reason than to eat away at your score as they attack in a rabid, Hitchcockian frenzy.
  • Sand Worms are not particularly dangerous, but they have an obnoxious 45,000 HP, more than most bosses you will encounter later, and are capable of ejecting a party member by swallowing them whole, making the fight even longer. They are vulnerable to Percent Damage Attacks, but you won't have Demi at this point unless you've been grinding a lot, so your only options are tossing a few Shadow Gems (depletes 50% of all enemies' current HP) at them to make things go faster. They're not a particularly common item, but they can stolen from worms. Or just poison them. They have an Underground Monkey variant, the Land Worm, which has 80,000 HP; but it's only found past the Point of No Return, at which point you've probably been preparing for the Final Bosses and can make quick work of them, or went on sidequests and have weapons and Overdrives that will kill them in a single turn.
  • Inverted with some of the fiends you need to capture for the Monster Arena, a few of whom appear so infrequently and under such specific conditions that finding ten of them can easily take hours. Examples include the tonberry variants in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth and Omega Ruins, and the notorious simurgh in Djose.
• Goddamned Boss: With enough Level Grinding and upgraded Celestial Weapons, the Monster Arena creations (aside from most of the original ones, who are on a whole other difficulty level) can actually be a cakewalk. The same cannot be said for the Species Creation Jumbo Flan. Immune to physical attacks? You can just use magic, except it has Auto-Reflect, meaning you have either to cast Ultima (pierces Reflect) or set up Reflect on your own party to bounce magic at it (magic can only be reflected once). Alternatively, you can use special attacks such as Overdrives or Anima's Pain, but this still needs high stats to do decent damage. And even if you can hit the damage cap of 99,999 with each hit, it will still take 14 turns for Jumbo Flan to finally fall. You'll need high Magic Defense if you want to survive Jumbo Flan's own devastating magic. It makes you feel like farming for Magic Spheres (Jumbo Flan's drop) is more cumbersome than farming for Fortune and Luck Spheres (against Originals the Earth Eater and Greater Sphere, respectively).
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • There is a glitch in the blitzball enemy AI. The opposing team has no programming for what to do if you swim into your own goal while carrying the ball, and will swim uselessly around in circles until time runs out. You can easily exploit this against the Luca Goers in the finals in order to grind in the first half so you can beat them in the second after leveling up.
  • There is a chance that Geosgaeno, upon its final defeat, will drop a weapon with the No Encounters ability, which is normally available only for armor.
  • The PS4 version had a faulty random number generator, meaning some stuff that is normally left up to random chance...isn't. Some people were actually annoyed when Sony fixed the bug, due to its usefulness: Players using the nonrandom results will always be able to open all twelve chests in the Omega Ruins (normally a 1/240 chance of success, with the result determined the moment players first enter the Ruins). The prize for doing so is 99 Warp Spheres, allowing characters to teleport to anywhere on the Sphere Grid they want, as much as they want. As such, it can be advantageous to delete the 1.01 patch which fixes the error before entering the Ruins, take the chests and then reinstall the update, heh heh.

H-S

• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Dissidia Final Fantasy's re-enacts the conflict between Tidus and his dad, but in a situation where they're actually given time to talk through their issues. The result is that Jecht departs the world on amicable terms with his son, even sharing a few last friendly jabs at each other. In that context, it makes more sense that Tidus would greet him in the afterlife with a high-five.
• Ho Yay:
  • You haven't seen a Rule 34 thread on 4chan until you've seen someone request Tidus and Jecht.
  • Some fans also like taking Auron's "Come or don't come. It's your decision," out of context.
  • Auron's devotion to Braska and Jecht has some of these undertones. Especially combined with the fact that Auron ran away from an Arranged Marriage.
• Incest Yay: Yuna and her cousin, Rikku, have a sizeable shipping fandom judging from the amount of fan art dedicated to pairing them together. Which is encouraged by the fact that Rikku is extremely close to Yuna, and appears to shrug off the attention of most men e.g. Gippal.
• Iron Woobie: The Al Bhed are this as an entire race. They've been cast out by Yevon, are solely blamed for the Machina war that supposedly summoned Sin, are generally disliked by worshippers of Yevon, being seen as evil kidnappers and murderers, as well as one of the major reasons Sin still returns due to their continued use of Machina, and have had their home blown to bits, forcing them to rebuild. Twice. And despite all of this, they don't seem to have anything against Yevon itself, or their worshippers, just the sacrificial aspects of the pilgrimage, and genuinely are willing to work with them if it means defeating Sin. While they are shown to be kidnapping summoners early on and throughout the plot, it's really because they don't want them to die summoning the Final Aeon, and many of them spend their lives protecting them from the Guado when they attack Home.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Jecht. He was a cocky, macho prick who barely lifted a finger to raise Tidus, and never referred to him as anything but "runt". But after going through a long journey to save Spira, and sacrificing himself to become the Final Aeon, he spends years as Sin, forced to continue the destruction he had worked to stop until his son arrives to put him out his misery. Before that, his spheres reveal that being stuck on Spira gave him a long time to self-reflect. By the end, he had lost all hope of returning home, and decided to sacrifice his life for the Final Aeon so his death would at least be "useful" for something. Also, he more or less concedes that he was a poor father.
  • Seymour, for those who sympathize with his Freudian Excuse. After all, being rejected during all your childhood simply because you were half-human, and then watching your mother (the only one who showed that she loved you) basically kill herself to give you power when you're still a child isn't good for your psyche.
  • Wakka spends much of the game ranting about the Al Bhed, accusing them of crimes against Yevon and preventing humanity from "atoning" for the heresy that produced Sin. He later finds out that the Grand Maester of Yevon is an Unsent, and Wakka has to participate in the slaying of both Maester Seymour and Lady Yunalesca (Yuna's namesake and the co-founder of his religion). Which naturally gets Wakka branded as a traitor to Yevon. He ends up sympathizing with the Al Bhed after they fall victim to an unjust massacre by the Guado. Then he has to ride in a "forbidden Machina"...then learns that Yuna is half Al Bhed...then learns that the great Sir Jecht is Sin and that he was responsible for killing his little brother Chappu.
    Wakka: I, uh...I think I'll just pretend I didn't hear nothing. I'm getting a little confused, ya? Why...Why'd all this have to happen?
  • Lulu is pretty hot-headed and rude to almost everyone besides Yuna when the game starts. But then you discover that the Chappu everyone keeps talking about was her fiancé, and that he volunteered to fight with the Crusaders, which resulted in his untimely death. Additionally, she's been a guardian twice. Although the second simply gave up his pilgrimage, the first died under Lulu's care. Doing the math puts Lulu as a teenager when this happened.
• Love to Hate:
  • Seymour's so obnoxious, but that makes him oh-so-fun to kick around.
  • A more minor example is Biran and Yenke, the two Ronso who bullied Kimahri while he was growing up, and then continued that same behavior throughout the game. Their cartoonishly idiotic voices (especially when they say their “Hornless! Hornless!” catchphrase) combined with their petty behaviors in general make them come across as oddly lovable buffoon bullies, similar to the likes of Bulk and Skull or Biff Tannen. And then it ends up being quite cathartic to finally defeat them in their two-on-one battle against Kimahri, prompting them both to pull a Heel–Face Turn and finally respect him. Though sadly, they die shortly after that.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Lulu. Early on in the game, she's invaluable due to her spells providing her a damage output unrivaled by most of the party (especially against enemies with a weakness to certain elements). However, as the game goes on, Lulu simply isn’t able to keep up with the rest of the cast due to her low Speed and the recovery on spells, meaning her damage output falls off considerably. It doesn’t help that her Overdrive is a pain to use (requiring one to rotate their joystick rapidly to increase the number of hits) and doesn’t scale well into the later portions of the game. It also doesn't help that the process of obtaining her Infinity +1 Sword is a pain in the ass.
  • Kimahri. His Ronso Rages (read: Blue Magic; copying certain enemy skills) are few, you won't get to use them much since they're Overdrives, and the ones that could hypothetically be useful are outdone by the skills and Overdrives of other characters (for example, Mighty Guard is entirely outclassed by Rikku's Mighty G line of Mixes that offer far more stat buffs). Otherwise, he's meant to be a Jack of All Stats who can slip into the Sphere Grids of other characters, but moving him around so much like that would be very resource intensive, and even when he's focused into just one character's skills he'll inevitably be inferior to them since it takes time to get him into their section of the Grid that they're using to advance through it. His main utility will end up being a shallow clone of Auron or Rikku, since they join the party later in the game and Kimahri is your default third physical fighter before Auron joins; once the party is filled out, Kimahri will probably get set aside unless needed for specific circumstances. Worse still, the process of obtaining his Infinity +1 Sword is just as difficult as obtaining Lulu's.
  • The Magus Sisters qualify as both variants of this trope due to their unpredictability. They have a lot of haters due to the fact that you can't actually control them. You can only suggest what they'll do, but Cindy is especially prone to taking a break and missing a turn if she's tired. The Sisters' saving grace is their ability to break the damage limit: See Mindy's Passado attack, which isn't an Overdrive, and she uses it quite often.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • The legendary guardian Auron is a man intending to save Spira from Sin and Yevon after failing to save Braska and Jecht. Actually an Unsent, Auron went to the Dream Zanarkand to watch and train Tidus until the day Jecht would return as Sin, where Auron would take Tidus to the real world amidst the destruction as planned. Forcing himself and Tidus into becoming Yuna's guardians, Auron subtly manipulates and deceives the group into defying Yevon and Yunalesca by exposing to them the corruption of Yevon and hiding vital info about the aftermath of defeating Sin, while being a ruthless protector to Yuna and the Pilgrimage. When his machination works and he manages to get Yuna and Tidus to defy Yunalesca, he helps pave the way to end the Cycle of Sin for good, helping eliminate Yunalesca and Yevon's influence, before guarding them one last time against Jecht and Yu Yevon, happily passing on with his oath finally fulfilled.
  • Yunalesca is the first summoner who defeated Sin and the overseer of the sacrificial Final Summoning. Defeating Sin to restore her father's honor by sacrificing herself and turning her husband Zeon into the Final Aeon, Yunalesca now resides in Zanarkand as an Unsent in-charge of carrying out, explaining, and enacting the ritualistic Final Summoning to whomever proves their worth regardless of race and character. Highly protective of the ritual, Yunalesca would strike down anyone who defied it, such as Auron, and later attempted to do the same to the party when they reject it, considering her act to be "mercy" since they know the horrible truth of Sin and the Final Summoning. Having bid her time and set her own courses, Yunalesca laments her defeat, believing Spira is doomed without the Final Aeon.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Jecht, especially in the West. One of the few explicitly-manly characters in the Final Fantasy series, along with his baritone.
  • With Auron, it's not memetic. He really is just that badass.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Tidus' forced laugh. It later became an Ascended Meme in World of Final Fantasy. See this scene.
  • To a lesser extent, "Stay away from the summoner!"
  • "People die, and Yuna dances".
  • "To Zanarkand" being used as a song to convey sadness (often used with the image of the victim in black and white).
  • Wakka singing about Tidus' love parts. (a.k.a. oto wakka) ^ExplanationIn 2022, Wakka became a Fountain of Memes in Japan thanks to an otoMAD video showing Wakka singing about how good Tidus' "love" is over the soundtrack "Connect" by ClariS.
  • "I'm annoying, huh?!" ^ExplanationThe alarm chatter heard every 3 seconds in Home translates to "Everyone underground!" in Al Bhed, but is frequently Mondegreen'd into this.
• Mis-blamed:
  • An odd inverse Type 2 in regards to the voice acting. There's a lack of Executive Meddling when it would have been beneficial. Many of the flaws stem from the actors running on their own ideas and concerns: JAT came up with the idea of starting Tidus off with his whiny tone and gradually deepening his voice; John Dimaggio invented Wakka's weird accent, which no one else uses (apart from his brother Chappu in X-2); and Hedy Buress was hopelessly trying to match up her lines with Yuna's lip flaps (resulting in Yuna's Hong Kong Dub). But it's the job of the voice director to worry about things like this, or at least to try and keep the actors' ideas consistent with each other.
  • The laughter scene is a Type 3. It's typically cited as an example of bad voice acting, but it's invariably taken out of context: Tidus and Yuna are intentionally trying to sound as fake as possible. Not only do the characters sound just as broad and over the top in the Japanese version, within less than a minute of that laughing scene, the other party members gawk at them and Wakka says, "We were just worried you guys might have gone crazy."
  • The "I'm gonna be a blitzball when I grow up!" line from one of the children on Kilika Island is generally assumed to be a translation error. However, the original line in the Japanese version and the updated line in the Japanese HD version ("I'm gonna be a blitzball player when I grow up!") indicates that this was actually a mistake on the writers' part rather than the localization team.
    • Hilariously, one modder used a texture swap to allow the kid to live out his dream.
• Misaimed Fandom: Jecht. What was intended of him for the story and what the audience saw him as are two different things. In the story, Jecht is a boorish, overgrown kid who can do only one thing well: He can hit a ball. The point of his journey was to strip Jecht of his creature comforts and throw him into a world where he has to rely on his wits to survive — not to mention getting thrown in jail for heresy, forcing him to join a ragtag duo on their trip to Zanarkand. Initially tagging along only to get home, Jecht forms a camraderie with these men and undergoes a change in personality, e.g. kicking the bottle after his vices prove to be a liability to the group, and coming to regret how he treated Tidus. The Jecht fandom focus mainly on his manlier aspects, and even glorify his abrasive personality pre-Spira; players who dislike Tidus may take delight in Jecht brow-beating him in flashbacks.
• Misattributed Song: There was an old rumor that the song "Otherworld" from the game's soundtrack was written and performed by Rammstein. In truth, it was composed by Nobuo Uematsu and performed by Bill Muir. Rammstein never covered the song either.
• Moe: Yuna, Rikku and Shelinda are all very cute.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Seymour crosses it with the revelation that he murdered his own father to become a Maester and take command of the Guado race.
  • Mika and Kinoc cross it with The Reveal that Yevon is corrupt from top to bottom, and is governed by Unsents.
  • Yunalesca crosses it with her calm admission that Sin can never be truly destroyed, and she has perpetuated a thousand-year cycle of pain and suffering.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Successfully casting Death.
  • Wakka's T.K.O. doing its thing: "thwock! *shatter*"
  • Just about any Pre-Mortem One-Liner your party delivers right before dealing the final blow of a fight.
  • Final Fantasy's victory fanfare never sounded as good as upon completion of the game's ulcer-inducing sidequests.
  • The hum of pyreflies departing whenever you kill a Fiend.
  • Rikku saying, "Let's see what this does" when using Mix.
• Narm:
  • The game treats Summon Magic differently, having the aeon come in as a controllable character who replaces your party. This can lead to amusing interactions with the animation system: if one of your characters is dead, then, when you summon your aeon, the character will get up (as though a Phoenix Down was used on them) and run offscreen. Then, when the aeon is dismissed or dies, the dead character runs back on screen and falls down again.
  • When Tidus finds out that Yuna will die fighting Sin, his scream makes it sound like he stubbed his toe. The rest of the group walk past him in slow-motion as if he's not there.
  • It's difficult to make out what the Al Bhed chatter in Home is saying. It sounds like the intercom is yelling, "I'm annoying, huh?" on a loop, which continues even during the big dramatic reveal where Tidus finds out about the consequences of a Pilgrimage.
  • Much of the voice acting. While groundbreaking when the game came out due to being the first fully-voiced Final Fantasy game, the acting was harshly (perhaps too harshly) criticized from the outset, and is unfavorably compared with the later titles. It's obvious the translators and voice actors are trying to match their dialogue to the Mouth Flaps to avoid Lip Lock, resulting in lines that sound stilted or hurried. And the result still doesn't match the lip movements very well, so one wonders why they even bothered.
    • As for the voices themselves, most are fine, but Seymour's English voice is very foppish and silky for a character who is supposed to be a major antagonist.
  • The NPC who discovers Jyscal's sphere speaks rather matter-of-factly for someone who has just collapsed into a heap of disbelief...
  • The dream sequence Tidus has after meeting Yuna involves him being stuck in an Imaginary Love Triangle between Yuna and Rikku, only for Jecht to show up and start mocking him about trying to pick up girls. Then Tidus is suddenly a child yelling at him about how much he hates him while Rikku and Yuna cheer him on. It's so jarring and out of no where that it's incredibly funny, especially for what seemed to be the games attempt to convey Tidus' views on his dad by giving Jecht an Establishing Character Moment.
• Narm Charm:
  • Hedy Burress' attempt to lip-sync with the animation is frequently brought up when discussing the quality of the voice acting. On the other hand, it fits pretty well on the ferry to Kilika, since she's trying to chat up Tidus with lines like "Weather is nice" and "God wanted us to meet", so it makes sense for it to be awkward.
  • For some, Seymour's English voice is a fine match for the character. It may not befit the type of Evil Overlord fans are used to from Final Fantasy, but it is very fitting for a preening, disingenuous, creepy stalker, which is what Seymour is.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Any discussion of the game will inevitably lead to someone invoking the infamous Tidus-Yuna awkward laughing scene.
  • Even if he gets better, Wakka is remembered for his prejudice attitude against the Al Bhed.
  • This game's Final Boss is notorious for the fact that it is absolutely incapable of killing you (the only way to lose is on purpose) and that there are many ways to easily kill it, including Revive Kills Zombie and of course a single attack of 99,999 HP (and if you do a little sidequesting, this becomes easy).
• Once Original, Now Common: While the gameplay, storyline, and music still hold up extremely well (and it's considered to have one of the best turn-based battle systems, soundtrack, and even story in the series), it's hard to appreciate nowadays how much of a risk voice acting was back around the turn of the millennium. These days, it suffers a lot from Lip Lock (especially with Yuna) or Hong Kong Dub. The presentation itself also fell victim to this. In 2001, the game's opening was mind blowing, having fully motion captured character animations and subtle facial expressions. The "this is my story" scene was practically a tech demo of showing how far Squaresoft had come without having to totally rely on pre-rendered cinematics to have big emotional highlights with character models like prior games. But Technology Marches On, and within only three years after this game's release, other series rapidly caught up to and showed up Final Fantasy X in presentation, and by today's standards it becomes incredibly obvious where Square had to cut corners to get higher quality scenes elsewhere.
• One-Scene Wonder: The nameless Guado who summons Dark Shiva if you revisit Macalania Temple after completing Zanarkand. He only has three lines and won't appear in the game again, but his memorably chilling voice ensures he sticks in memory.
• One True Threesome: Tidus and Rikku are a popular ship due to their similar personalities, but Yuna is likable enough she avoids Die for Our Ship hatred, and also has quite a bit of Les Yay with Rikku. So a number of fans have compromised by settling on Yuna/Tidus/Rikku.
• Player Punch: Every playthrough, one of the supporting characters Gatta or Luzzu will die during Operation Mi'hen, and the actions of the player determine which one. There is no avoiding it.
• Porting Disaster: The PC Remaster version of the game comes with a few bugs, the most annoying one being the green screen you get instead of the full motion videos. This very well-known bug has never been fixed ever since the game's release. There are also cases of the game not proceeding as it should, such as when Tidus is fighting one-on-one in the lost ruins where you can get stuck in a never ending fight, unable to enter inputs, when Rikku is supposed to appear and help you. Finally, the game can crash, though it seems to be rare. Such issues are absent from the console versions.
• The Producer Thinks of Everything: While the ending of X-2 is sometimes considered a Writer Cop Out, talking with the Fayth in their temples before the final fight results in the foreshadowing of the sequel's ending, as does the ending of the first game. In fact, the ending to the second game picks up right where the first game ended, with Tidus rising out of the sea.
  Shiva: Let us summon a sea in a new dream world. A new sea for you to swim.
• Retroactive Recognition: In the Japanese version, Wakka is voiced by Kazuya Nakai, who is best known as Roronoa Zoro in One Piece.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Here.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • As usual, there are varying levels of this, including: no summoning, no Overdrives, no Sphere Grid, and use only starting equipment.
  • It's actually feasible to win nearly every boss battle in a NSNSB (No Summons, No Sphere Grid) run, apart from the last four arena encounters, so long as your party setup is solid and you've got 30-60 minutes to kill! (NSG Dark Anima just takes more time than anyone ever wants to spend, though.) Rikku is a staple of these battles due to her Mix ability. One mis-click will end it all, though. If you're curious, you need aeons and/or magic to beat Neslug (it regenerates HP), Ultima Buster (too many attacks per turn), and Nemesis (too luck-reliant). Shinryu is a no-go because it's fought underwater, and its Eraser has a Petrify probability of 255%, which means it ignores protection and therefore ALWAYS kills you since you sink to the bottom and shatter instantly. You need maxed-out stats and Quick Hits to kill it right away.
  • This GameFAQs guide takes the trope to its logical conclusion, explaining how to complete the game without the Sphere Grid, summoning, equipment customization, Overdrives, Fleeing from battle, equipping the "No Encounters" auto-ability, or using any of the rare items you get from playing blitzball.
  • Winning the first (and only plot-mandatory) blitzball game. The other team are insufferable jerks who repeatedly rub in your face that your team is the worst in the league, making you hunger to humiliate them. Unfortunately, they're basically correct — it's meant to be a Hopeless Boss Fight, but can be won if you're prepared to reload a lot.
  • Defeating Evrae Altana the "hard" way, that is, without resorting to Revive Kills Zombie. It relies on using a series of locked gates to give yourself a tactical advantage over it, and you end up missing out on some good gear as a result, so the only reason you would ever try to defeat it by any means besides "heal it to death" is this trope.
• Sequelitis: While there's Will, there's also a lesser-known (and Japan-only) novel released alongside the Updated Re-release called FFX-2.5 ~Eien no Daishō~ (The Price of Eternity in English) which leads up to it, and is responsible for most of what people took issue with Will. Some highlights: Tidus kicks a bomb because he thinks it looks like a blitzball, which ends up killing him in a gory manner (complete with his severed head landing on Yuna). She revives him, which incidentally brings everything back from the Farplane, but he's made of pyreflies and will vanish if he realizes this. There's also a lot of sex for some reason, even after Tidus dies and is subsequently revived. It's near-universally hated in Japan.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: While considered to have various Difficulty Spikes as mentioned earlier, certain encounters can be easier compared to other games, many random encounters can be cleared in a single round if you use a party that is appropriately leveled and tailored to the enemies' weaknesses (for example, Auron for armored fiends, Lulu for flans and Rikku for machina), and when they get their ultimate weapons, they've become near-unstoppable. The fact that the party members could use Yuna's summons as tanks to absorb enemy damage definitely helps, as they’re also powerful in their own right.
• Shocking Moments:
  • In the final phase of its final airship fight, Sin can unleash an attack that destroys the entire airship you're on for a Non-Standard Game Over. Players summoning an aeon expecting it to tank the hit get sorely proven wrong.
  • Yojimbo's Zanmato instant kill attack, much to the shock and horror of players, doesn't merely turn the targets into dissolving masses of pyreflies; it slices them in half!
• Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer: Blitzball has enough content in its mechanics to be its own separate game. Managing your team, recruiting free agents or even rival players whose contracts have expired, learning techs to improve your players' performance in a match, etc. The amount of time a player could spend on blitzball alone compared to the rest of the game can add up really fast.
• Signature Scene:
  • The laughing scene at Luca, albeit for the wrong reasons.
  • In a more twisted way, the doomed Operation Mi'ihen.
  • The heroes crashing Yuna and Seymour's wedding in Bevelle.
  • The Macalania Lake kiss.
• Squick: The Seymour/Yuna relationship is full of subtext about stalking, obsession, molestation, and child husbandry. The attraction is entirely one-sided on Seymour's part, he's much older than Yuna (he's 28; Yuna is 17), and as a Maester of Yevon he holds power and influence over her (which is the only reason Yuna even considered marrying him). During their marriage at Bevelle, Seymour forcibly kisses Yuna while forcing the party (including Tidus) to watch; considering a famous interpretation of Tidus and Yuna's kiss at Lake Macalania (which is right after Bevelle) is that it's G-Rated Sex, the implications of Seymour's kiss are deeply uncomfortable, especially with the look of smug satisfaction he gives Tidus afterward.
• Stoic Woobie: Auron. At first, he comes off as an aloof, sarcastic coach. Then we discover his backstory: He started out as an ostracized monk and decided to go on the pilgrimage with Braska and Jecht, basically because he had no other purpose in his life. When the three were told by Yunalesca that the Final Aeon requires the sacrifice of both the summoner and one of their guardians, Auron relented, but failed to convince Braska and Jecht to "turn back". Even that turned out to be a lie, as the Final Aeon who kills Sin is possessed by Yu Yevon and reconfigured into a new Sin. In revenge, Auron tried to kill Yunalesca, but she flattened him with no effort. After dying from his wounds, Auron reformed as an Unsent and, in an amazing display of resolve, kick-started a majority of the game's plot by crossing over to Dream Zanarkand and watching over Tidus, hoping to guide the next generation to finally end the spiral of destruction. During their journey, Kinoc, one of his best friends when he was a monk, is introduced as a corrupt Yevonite, and Auron (who's already a very jaded man) seems to still be very disappointed to see that his old friend has become so rotten. Yet, when Kinoc is killed, Auron is still visibly enraged by this. Auron's other unexpected Not So Stoic moment is when he lashes out in an emotional frenzy at Zanarkand's projection of a younger him, trying to get Braska and Jecht not to go through with the Final Summoning.

T-U

• That One Achievement:
  • The HD Remaster decided to turn two infamous sidequests into trophies: Lulu's sigil sidequest in which you have to dodge 200 lightning bolts, and killing Penance, a sidequest that will take most of your game time.
  • The HD Remaster also includes one particular trophy which invariably doubles the play time of any given game file: complete the entire Sphere Grid with all seven playable characters! This includes unlocking all of the locked nodes and filling in every single empty node with a stat-boosting sphere AND activating it. Even with the proper AP-boosting equipment, it is a very long, incredibly-tedious grind.
• That One Attack:
  • Any attack which "ejects" a party member for the remainder of the battle, since that party member cannot be replaced and/or revived, leaving you with only two active fighters at a time, or if you're really unlucky, only one. Or, when fighting underwater, attacks with Stonetouch, since the same thing happens. (The character shatters into bits instantly.) Geosgaeno and Shinryu both have such an attack. The Stone Status in main battles are no slouch either, as any type of attack to the afflicted character will also shatter them.
  • Cactuars' 10,000 Needles attack. It deals a Fixed Damage Attack of 10,000 points to a single target, exactly one point higher than the normal HP cap. It can't be protected against like "Death"-type moves can, either. Yeowch.
  • Malboros' Bad Breath. Its status effects include Poison, Darkness, and either Berserk or Confusion; an easy ticket to an unavoidable Game Over. Even worse with Greater Malboro, as it will always ambush the party in some areas, and always open with this attack. To add insult to injury, neither one will ever use Bad Breath on aeons (who are all immune to most status effects), resorting to powerful melee attacks instead.
  • Seymour Flux's aptly-named Total Annihilation. Inflicts multiple high-damage hits that guarantee swift Total Party Kill to the unprepared. Cross Cleave is also not far behind since it's almost guaranteed to kill any of less physically-inclined party members (while doing major hurt to the more inclined ones).
  • Yunalesca's Hellbiter and Mega-Death Combination Attack. The former turns all party members into Zombies, which causes heals to damage them but makes them immune to Death. The natural course of action would be to cure the zombies, but if no one's Zombified, she'll use Mega-Death as soon as her third form emerges. Your only chance to survive is to still have a zombie.
  • Sin's Giga-Graviton. It's an instant Non-Standard Game Over, even if you try to tank it with an aeon. Not an exaggeration, as the cutscene of the airship blowing up indicates.
  • The demonolith's Breath is the enemy version of Kimahri's Stone Breath, and just as deadly. If you don't have an active aeon or your characters aren't wearing Stoneproof armor, Breath will petrify the entire party, ending the game.
• That One Boss:^note Bosses faced after Yunalesca only really apply if you take them on at the first opportunity, as the sidequests offer many ways to power up your characters and make the post-Yunalesca bosses pushovers.
  • For many first-time players, facing off Seymour for the first time may be a wake-up call. A pair of henchmen who focus on healing the main boss, a freaking high-health aeon in the middle phase, and multi-ra spells in the third round.
  • Evrae, fought outside Bevelle, is particularly obnoxious. If you have been relying on Yuna's aeons or Lulu's arsenal of Attack Its Weak Point elemental spells up until this point, as opposed to properly training the rest of your team (something that many first-time players are prone to do), you're going to run into a lot of trouble. And it's not just the lack of aeons that are the problem: Yuna is your team healer as well, and despite Rikku now having Al Bhed Potions (which heal the entire party for a thousand hit points and cure a gamut of status ailments) that allow her to act as a substitute White Mage, it is really hard for her to keep up with Evrae's damage output. (You can also move Rikku into Yuna's section of the Sphere Grid, but actually doing so will leave you so over-levelled that the fight won't be terribly difficult anyway.) Oh, and right afterwards, you're thrust into a raid on Bevelle with no chance to save. While the enemies are relative pushovers, if they manage to score a game over on you, you have to start all over from Evrae again.
  • Seymour's second and third forms are both turning points for the game in the sense that you can't just brute force through those and require some complex strategizing around. Seymour Natus can utilize Doublecast, destroy buffs and petrify targets, the latter being really crippling if you let him shatter whoever gets petrified (since it completely removes not only the character from battle, but their spot as well). And Seymour Flux is among the hardest fights in the main game, introducing the concept of zombification and Revive Kills Zombie, reflections of self-cast spells (meaning you cannot reflect them back) and using Total Annihilation to finish off the whole party, as even Shell/Mighty Guard are not guaranteed to fully protect the player.
  • Yunalesca, the boss of Zanarkand. Her first two forms aren't that bad; she'll use an attack called Hellbiter in her second form which does a bit of damage and inflicts Zombie status on the whole party, and most of the damage after that is caused by using healing spells on them, which the boss will keep spamming even if you remove the Zombie status. The hard part comes in the third phase, when Mega Death comes into play. It's an instant death spell on the whole party, and can only be blocked by armor with Death Ward or Deathproof^note While it's possible to get Deathproof at this time, it requires dipping into sidequests like the Monster Arena or the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth, and it takes time to farm enough Farplane Winds to customize Deathproof, or if the party are under Zombie. This makes the battle a balancing act of healing Zombie status to avoid characters being KO'd by healing spells, and allowing characters to be inflicted with Zombie so they can survive Mega Death.
• That One Level:
  • The assault on Bevelle right after defeating Evrae can be a very anxious period for the player depending on how much supplies and MP they have left, as they have just defeated Evrae, who is widely considered a very difficult fight and there are no save points during this entire sequence. If you lose here, you will have to fight Evrae all over again!
  • The Bevelle Cloister of Trials is quite the headache, since it's made up of several escalators and treadmills that can make the whole thing far more confusing than any of the other ones, and can be especially difficult to get past without a guide.
• That One Sidequest: This game has several examples.
  • The game's only mandatory blitzball match will indisputably be the hardest one you'll ever play. The Luca Goers are superior to the Besaid Aurochs in every way save for Tidus and Wakka, and you only get one of them at a time. You have no time to practice beforehand, just a tutorial for the controls, so first-time players will barely understand how to play anyway. Winning pretty much requires playing keep-away in the first half of the match, and then using Tidus to score a goal quickly in the second half before the clock runs out. If players get the Jecht Shot beforehand, they'll have a much easier time, thankfully, but the difficulty of the match is enough to where some people thought it was supposed to be unwinnable.
  • You need to play blitzball to get the rest of Wakka's Overdrives and one of his sigils. That means winning a tournament, then a league, then a tournament, and finally a league for the Mercury sigil. Also, since league prizes get set at the end of the last league game, you'll have to play 20 or more games to clear out the deadwood, and each game takes about 15-20 minutes, making it a slog even if you know what you're doing. This is by far the most time-consuming element of the game, and unless you are playing on PC with the Untitled Project mod, there is no way to actually speed up the games. That's roughly 50 games of blitzball (if the RNG gives you the rewards you want), for a total of 16 hours or more. While Lulu's sidequest is also reviled, it doesn't hold a candle to Wakka's insane time investment.
  • Charging up the Celestial Weapons, the most difficult tasks of which are listed below:
  1. That butterfly minigame in Macalania Woods. To get the sigil for Kimahri's ultimate weapon, you need to catch every blue butterfly in 30 seconds, in two different areas. Touching a red butterfly will cost you 2 seconds and force you into a tedious battle from which you cannot Flee and in which the enemies have higher stats. The time limit is extremely tight and the red butterflies very difficult to evade, meaning that if you make an error, you may as well give up and try again.
  2. Getting the sigil for Tidus' ultimate weapon requires you to get a time of less than zero seconds on the chocobo race, which requires hitting more than a dozen balloons for a time bonus while evading all the birds, who give a time penalty. You also need to be careful to avoid running into the invisible walls of the course, because your chocobo will veer away from them at a sharp angle and almost certainly ruin your route. Also, while the bird strikes are scripted, the balloons spawn at random, so you have a Luck-Based Mission on top of hoping the balloons are positioned in a way that hitting enough is even possible. To add insult to injury, if you manage to get zero seconds on your first try, you have to race again, because the trainer won't keep track of your score until after the first completion.
  3. Getting the sigil for Lulu's ultimate weapon forces players to dodge two hundred lightning bolts in the Thunder Plains, in one sitting. This requires very careful timing by the lightning flashes and a single error means all your hard work is for nothing. It's also possible to get into battles during this, which will screw up your timing. Finally, you have to keep track yourself - the chest with the sigil spawns at the Travel Agency, so you have to leave the area to check it, and this resets your score (the remasters thankfully make dodging 200 bolts an achievement, so you have that indicator of when you're done). There are exploits to make this more manageable (pausing to take a break, a crater near one of the towers that one can walk around to force a lightning strike), but it still takes a long time, is very tedious, and has zero margin for error. This is widely considered to be one of the worst, if not arguably THE worst, sidequest in the history of the entire franchise.
  • Unlocking the final Superboss Nemesis requires you to capture 10 of every monster in the game by defeating them with a weapon which has the otherwise-useless Capture skill, no matter how rare they are. This can easily take tens of hours. Not to mention that facing said monster generally requires extensive grinding to remodel the sphere grid, unless you use Game Breakers.
  • Nemesis is topped by Penance in both the difficulty of making such a behemoth show up, and the very fight itself. To even get Penance to appear, you have to defeat all the Dark Aeons, each one individually just as difficult (or more) than Nemesis itself.
  • In the European/HD release, collecting all the Jecht Spheres can be difficult because one is in Besaid Village. Unless you have the hindsight to backtrack all the way to Besaid once the sidequest begins, the player has to defeat Dark Valefor in order to regain access.
  • The only Al Bhed Primers that are Permanently Missable Content are in Home and Bevelle, the two most chaotic locations in the game, whose areas can't be revisited. So unless you already know where they are (which is frankly impossible without a guide), the only way you'll find them is if you're actively combing over every inch of the map going through these areas.
• Theiss Titillation Theory: Why Lulu's dress just doesn't fall off.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Quite a few people were quite vocal about the changed faces in the HD Remaster, citing that they make them look weird, particularly Tidus and Yuna.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Yunalesca's backstory is incredibly interesting - she was the first High Summoner, willingly sacrificing her own husband to create a Final Aeon that would defeat Sin (who by the way was created by her father) and is eternally bound to Zanarkand to continue the Final Summoning and give Spira false hope - but it isn't explored in that much detail. In fact, her being Yu Yevon's daughter is barely explored, and no attempt is made to get to know her motivations in becoming an Anti-Villain. She could arguably have made for a strong Big Bad in her own right, especially since Yu Yevon himself gets no characterization etiher.
• Too Cool to Live:
  • Auron. Technically, more of a "too cool to be alive when the game starts in the first place." He was more expressive when he was alive, meaning he become cool after dying.
  • Jecht, technically speaking, since you know he's Sin in the same regard.
  • Inversion with Yuna. She's meant to die at the end of her quest, and yet she ends up breaking the spiral of death for good. She was Too Cool To Die.
• Tough Act to Follow: Final Fantasy X was met with extreme critical acclaim and financial success after it released in 2001, and after dabbling in an MMORPG as the next game, expectations were high for XII when it was getting ready to come out. However, like VIII before it, XII didn't quite live up to the lofty expectations set by its predecessor, with criticism toward the game's tinkering with the turn-based combat system, Vaan and Penelo's seeming irrelevance toward the greater story, and a plot that was heavy on politics while also very referential of Star Wars coming right off the heels of the divisive Prequel Trilogy. It wasn't considered a bad game by any stretch (it also received commercial and critical acclaim), but it was considered a letdown for the longest time, but like VIII, it would start to gain a significant following as time went on.
• Ugly Cute: When spotted head-on, Sin's face has a pug-like (if pugs were covered in eyes) Playful Cat Smile which is slightly adorable.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Series-wide. The CTB system makes for some of the best Turn-Based Combat in the series. It not only displays the turn order, but also warns you if using a particular skill will delay that user's next turn. This lends a small degree of strategy. Should you use a melee attack, use an item (which consumes less time), or push the character's next turn further back to pull off a special ability? Sadly, subsequent Final Fantasy games, including X-2, scrapped this in favor of going back to real-time battle systems. Surprisingly, the battle system came back, mostly-intact, in Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia. But don't expect to see CTB in future titles now that the series has since shifted to more action-oriented gameplay.
  • You get to see Seymour's Overdrive, Requiem, in all of one battle in the entire game. And since he comes with the default Stoic Overdrive charge mode (which you can't untoggle), you have to pointlessly draw out the battle so that he soaks up enough damage to use it. He doesn't even use it later when he's fought four times.

V-Z

• Values Dissonance:
  • Cultural differences are a major factor in why Western and Japanese audiences have very different views on Tidus and Jecht. In the East, hating your father is a big deal, because of the value placed on the Confucian ideals of filial piety: loyalty to one's family and particularly to one's parents is valued above all else, even if they are bad parents. For the same reason, parental abuse is not discussed as openly, since it's not the place of outsiders to get involved in someone else's family affairs. Tidus openly speaking ill of Jecht and how he was mistreated is a scathing indictment of how poisonous these values can be, and how damaging it can be to a family to let these problems go unaddressed. In America, it's completely different. A phase when teenagers resent or "hate" their parents is so common it's practically considered a normal part of child development, and therefore Tidus talking about how he "hates his Dad" is not taken as seriously, and is often dismissed as whining from an angsty kid with "daddy issues". Meanwhile, Jecht is viewed as a Memetic Badass (especially by male fans) who rightly calls Tidus out for being a scrawny, wimpy crybaby.
  • For the same reason, Tidus' influence on Yuna carries a different weight between East and West. Yuna has dedicated herself to becoming a summoner in order to defeat Sin, just as her father had done. This is also a part of filial piety; it is generally expected that children will follow the same career paths as their parents in order to honor them. Tidus not only being skeptical of Yuna's choices, but openly questioning them as an outsider, is therefore a big deal, and the other party members vocally disapprove. In the West without these values, the impact of Tidus speaking up is greatly lessened, and it comes off more that he's the Only Sane Man who is willing to vocalize disagreement with Yuna's choices when no one else will.
  • This goes as far as the Church of Yevon and The Reveal that they're continuing the cycle willingly out of fatalistic defeatism, and in order to keep power for themselves. Both Japanese and western audiances can agree this is a bad thing, but the difference is that many in the West likely see Yevon as an analog of Christianity. Therefore the revelation that they are a Corrupt Church can come off as a Captain Obvious reveal because organized religion as a whole, and Christianity in particular, is almost always portrayed as cruel, deceptive, and hypocritical in mainstream Western media. But the truth is that Yevon has far more Shintoist and Buddhist philosophy going on, and serves as a Deconstruction of the idea of Eternal Recurrence and infinitely persisting cycles of destruction and decay, which are central to a lot of eastern religions. To Japan, the idea of refusing to accept the inevitable and breaking the cycle is truly revolutionary, and in defiance of a lot of commonly-held ideas there, making the point where Tidus and the group betray the Church to end the cycle all the more poignant to Japanese players.
• Values Resonance: On a flip of the above, though he is still a Base-Breaking Character, increasing discussion and criticism of toxic masculinity in the years following the game's release have made Tidus more relatable to Western players, as well for subverting the stereotype of men not being allowed to show emotion other than anger. Meanwhile, with emotional and mental health awareness on the rise, it's being recognized that even if he didn't physically hurt Tidus (as far as is known), Jecht's manner of parenting was still emotionally abusive, which is just as harmful and something a child would struggle with well into adulthood. The game is, in The New '10s and beyond, seen as having been a bit ahead of its time in being willing to discuss the concept so frankly.
• Viewer Name Confusion: Due to the lack of voice acting and avoiding saying their given name, the main protagonists of Final Fantasy IX and this game, Zidane and Tidus respectively, are often pronounced incorrectly.
• Vindicated by History: At the time of its release, X was well-received by fans but became the source of a lot of ridicule (in the west, in its country of origin Japan all of its elements received universal praise and was always considered one of the best games in the series —if not the best—, and even one of the best games of all time) due to its voice acting, story, and characters, as well as the lack of freedom (especially in the later half). For many years, it was subject to a hardline Broken Base that either adored it or despised it, with the game's flaws bringing plenty of mockery from its detractors. Years later, many detractors reevaluated their assessment of the game and found the more nuanced story and characters, as well as the gameplay innovations, as refreshingly unique (and, in many ways, ahead of their time instead of flawed).^note For example, the lack of a pilotable airship was criticized for the removal of immersion, as well as adding more linearity to a game that already had plenty. However, since then, Fast Travel has easily become a must-have feature to avoid tiresome backtracking, making the destination menu in FFX seem less out of place and even innovative for its time, also actually allowing the game's story to feel more immersive. The fact that X was, in many ways, the last "traditional" Final Fantasy compared to the games after helped to win over both former detractors and curious new fans that started with the HD version. Over time, perception shifted whereas praise replaced mockery as the default reaction to the game and its elements, earning it a spot as one of the most well-received entries in the series, with a poll in 2020 flat out having it voted the best game in the series.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The art direction still holds up, long after PS2 graphics have become outdated.
• The Woobie:
  • Tidus. He grew up with a neglectful father, a mother who was driven to suicide following the disappearance of her husband, saw his hometown destroyed and then got sucked into a world where his family's past and achievements are long forgotten. Even worse, he finds out that the plan to save the world means sacrificing his girlfriend, and that he and everybody else he knew from Zanarkand are just part of a dream world. Even if Tidus figures out how to save Spira without Yuna dying, he still has to die.
  • It's hard not to also feel this way about Yuna. She grew up as a celebrity orphan, idolizing her late father and training to eventually follow in his footsteps, knowing that she would meet the same fate if she did. Everywhere she goes, people flock to her and cheer, but only because they know she has promised to die for them. She's constantly being asked to send the souls of the dead and comfort people in their grief. She begins to fall for Tidus and allows herself to fantasize about a future with him, only to break down crying when she realizes she can't abandon the people who invested all their prayers in her. She's then told that to defeat Sin, not only will she have to die, but one of her loved ones must die as well, and that her hopes of defeating Sin for good are futile. Finally, when she does find a way to vanquish Sin permanently, it costs her the love of her life. There's also a heavy implication that, before Kimahri took her to Besaid, she had been shunned by people in Bevelle because she's half Al Bhed, just as Braska was kicked out of Yevon for marrying one.
  • The rest of the party also has some Woobie in them: Lulu and Wakka are still both reeling about the loss of Chappu, with the former heartbroken over the death of him, and the latter nursing a hatred towards the Al Bhed for what he perceives as their role in his passing. Kimahri is a Black Sheep of his clan, being born smaller than most other Ronso and having his horn (a symbol of pride) broken by two of his dickhead clansmen. Auron had to watch his two closest friends die for no reason thanks to Yevon's machinations, and died trying to avenge them, only to come back an Unsent and be revered as a hero who can't even speak the truth about Yevon to most people. Rikku, the most upbeat of the group, still has to contend with the Fantastic Racism that most of Spira hold toward her people, and constantly frets over Yuna's impending suicide.
• Woolseyism:
  • Perhaps the most notable example occurs in the final scene between Yuna and Tidus. In the Japanese script, the final thing she says to him as he begins to fade away is "Thank you." In the International version, this was changed to an Anguished Declaration of Love. This was viewed by many as an appropriate deviation for a couple of reasons. For one, in Japanese, love is rarely expressed directly in words but rather communicated by actions and subtext (although like everything else, it depends on the person, regardless of country or culture). The actions Yuna had taken earlier, such as making a Video Will in which she discussed how painful love is in reference to Tidus, as well as her behavior in this scene, would have already made it abundantly clear to players how she felt, with her expressing her gratitude being a culturally appropriate way to handle such a painful moment. In western cultures, a "thank you", no matter how heartfelt, just doesn't carry the same emotional weight as it does in Japanese.
  • Other examples include renaming shibito (which literally means "corpse") as Unsent and shokanju (literally "summoned beasts"^note Which is what they're called in most other Final Fantasy games, and in other productions.) as aeons, and rechristening the protagonist Tidus instead of Tidaa, his original Japanese name, since that doesn't sound like a masculine name to western ears. The choice of aeon also gives Final Aeon, which was simply "Ultimate Summoned Beast" in Japanese, a poetic double meaning synonymous with "end of an era."

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