#9
Change YoY: = My Rating: 9.6 / 10
Final Fantasy X was the game I originally bought a PS2 for back in 2002. It was also the first time I had ever bought a console with my own money, and gotten one specifically to play a single game. If it hadn't lived up to my expectations I might have been just a tiny bit annoyed, but fortunately it turned out to be one of the best games I'd ever played. I've never been too bothered by graphical quality, but this game absolutely blew me away at the time. It was so far beyond anything I had played up to that point that I still remember that feeling to this day. The music was then the second element that struck me, the To Zanarkand theme that plays in the intro instantly burying itself into my mind forever as those first few piano chords rang out.
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I've since replayed the game several times, and I find myself enjoying more and more every single time. While the visual aren't as mindblowing as they once were, every other aspect of the game seems to grow on me over time. The battle system remains one of the best in the whole series, allowing for an impressive level of tactical depth as each character with you can be an active participant at all times, the music is among the best video scores ever, and the story and characters resonate with me even more strongly than they did back when I first played through the game. There's this constant sense of underlying melancholy that permeates the game's world and story, a place constantly teetering on the edge of destruction, where even the brief periods of relative peace only ever come through great loss and suffering.
To this day, Final Fantasy X remains my second favourite PS2 game ever, as well as my second favourite Final Fantasy game in general. Though some of its elements were constrained by technological limitations and Squaresoft's inexperience with things like voice acting, it remains one of the most emotionally powerful entries in the whole series, the ending being commonly cited as particularly heartbreaking by many fans of the franchise. Over 20 years after its original release, Final Fantasy X is still just as great as it was back then, and it probably won't be too long until I once again go back to replay it.
