^ and potentially very easy

And I haven't played the game since it's release... so I can't tell you when it picks up... I remember the blitzball tourny was tedious and it was after that... not sure if it was immediately after or a couple hours or what.

This game made me a so called hardcore gamer!

1st playthrough: roughly 190h
2nd playthrough: approx 100h -> 100% complete = sphere grid for every char, weapons, aeons, monster hunts, secrets, blitzball, chocobo (man i remember, me and my pal played in shifts !!!! that was just .... insane and awesome... good old times)

OT: ehmm, i ... cant remeber, lol

I asked him how long he played.  About 230 hours on his main game, around 100 on his other four.

once u meet yuna, like@darth said. and from their it gets truly great. :)

Once you get a little bit passed your first Chocobo encounter.

The sphere grid starts off interesting, but ultimately ruins the game for me. Your party will be Yuna plus whichever 2 others you feel like putting in because they are all identical. Just spam quick hit, and maybe summon if you get bored. Having only one character with any unique moves was a terrible design decision in my eyes.

Storywise it never really picks up in my eyes. It does eventually drop off, but thats probably 20-25 hours in. Blitzball was easily the best part of the game.

I love this game and I'm not going to bother with some of the criticisms.

I will say that it really picked up for me when Yuna performs the sending at Kilika and you move on to Luca.

I would say it picks up within the next couple of hours. I got into it once the battles began to kick in.

I really enjoyed this game when I played it years ago and I even got attached to a few of the game's characters. It was real good stuff.

So just give it a few more hours. By then you should know if it is good enough for you to stick with it for the long haul.

I'll be honest. FF10 isn't that great. I was disappointed with it. Especially after good old FF9.