I’ve loved the Final Fantasy games throughout my life. 6 is great if a little messy story-wise. It’s about the resistance to a totalitarian government. Now we’re at an opera scene! What? They’ve always been a bit scatter shot but I feel like that one even more so.

That brings me up to my one true love, Final Fantasy X. I think I’ve talked about it on this blog before. But if I haven’t the story is thus: Tidus was once the star of the Zanarkand Abes, a blitzball team. What’s Blitzball? Who cares.

This giant creature attacks and he wakes up on the beach of this place called Besaid. From there, he finds out that the creature that attacked him is called Sin. There’s a young woman going to fight it named Yuna and she has a number of guardians that are going to go with her to do it. He joins up with them and they set out.

I know this game is over twenty years old at this point but if you haven’t played it, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But this game is phenomenal in all its parts. The music is Nobuo Uematsu at his best and because it’s on the PS2, he can utilize actual tracks instead of bleeps and bloops. Here’s one of the best pieces, To Zanarkand.

The cast of characters are all interesting. The combat is turn based and just really fun. There’s a great amount of endgame content. The world itself is bright and colorful. Most of it taking place in tropical locales. It all just works together so well. I’ve bought this on every console that it’s appeared on. I play it every year just because.

The only thing… the main fly in the ointment… are the minigames. The fucking minigames to get the ultimate weapons. If you’ve played it you already know. Collecting the butterflies, the chocobo race and finally… dodging lightning bolts.

For the uninitiated, to get a necessary item for Lulu’s ultimate weapon you have to go to this place called the Thunder Plains. There you have to dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row. There is no counter and if you get hit, you have to start again. It takes hours to do this even if you don’t mess up. I’ve never done this and recently just used a mod to get the crest. Cos who has the time.

You should for this wonderful game. Just use a mod though like I did. No shame in it.