30 best Final Fantasy games

Best Final Fantasy Games #5 – Final Fantasy X

"Listen to my story. This may be our last chance."

Dozens of hours of voice acting in an RPG was not a common thing before Final Fantasy X. The jump from text boxes to a world filled with various sounds and voices represented the biggest challenge Square Enix faced, especially after a company-ruining movie that saw their first voice-acted venture plummet.

What I found most compelling about Final Fantasy X was its evolution in gameplay. It took the RPG combat system and made it a lot more tactical, with a conditional turn-based system that laid out the enemy and party battle order ahead of time to let the player better orchestrate their decisions. The sphere grid is one of my favorite character progression systems in the franchise, with the ability to take on the character progression of another character once you’re done your intended path being godly for party manipulation.

If anything, this game marked the first real effective love story in the franchise worth a damn. Tidus may not be a perfect protagonist, but he represents a god-honest fish out of water, taking the player on a journey you can tell he, himself, is adventuring on. Very rarely do the stories in these games throw me for a loop, but the revelations made as we approached the end of the journey sunk me to the core.

Awkwardly laugh all you want, but Final Fantasy X, with its innovative systems, marvelous soundtrack and a great group of characters, is a charming game through and through.