

More importantly, you can swap out any of your characters mid-battle since the guardians always travel together, there's no need for characters to split up or spend the game cooling their heels in an airship. The turn order is displayed in a corner, giving players as much time as they want to ponder their next action. X departs from Active Time Battles in favor of a new Combatant Cooldown System called Conditional Turn Based (CTB) it is the last Turn-Based Combat system in the franchise. X is very much a " class"-based game ( White Mage, Samurai, Thief, etc.) until the end, when they break out and invade each others' Grids, which is more reminiscent of Pokémon "TMs" than shared abilities. Along the way, they activate nodes that award new skills or stat increases. Instead of featuring levelsand experience points, characters instead navigate a skill tree (Sphere Grid) by consuming Ability Points won in battle. Each of them was announced as a different experience IX would return to the roots of the franchise, XI would be a new Online experience, and X would be the next evolution in the franchise.īeing the first entry for a new and significantly more powerful system, X split from previous games in almost every way. X was announced at the Square Millennium Event alongside Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy XI. Finding himself smitten with a young summoner named Yuna and hoping to find a way back home, Tidus agrees to join her diverse cast of guardians and accompany her on her pilgrimage across Spira a journey which ends in the holy ruins of Zanarkand. Only one method exists to defend against it: A ritual which allows a " summoner" to temporarily destroy Sin and grant the world a period of respite from its wrath (the "Calm") before its inevitable return. Tidus soon learns of Sin, an invincible aquatic Goliath which attacked Zanarkand and now terrorizes Spira, bringing destruction without reason and keeping them locked in the dark ages in a spiral of death. According to the locals, his home still exists in Spira, but as ruins: it was destroyed one thousand years previously. In the ensuing chaos, Tidus is sucked into a portal and reawakens in the pre-industrial world of Spira. No sooner has the game begun than a giant sphere of watery doom engulfs the city and reduces it to neon kindling.

The plot opens in the Mega City of Zanarkand, where a cheerful sports star named Tidus is preparing for a game of blitzball, a sci-fi combination of rugby and water polo.

Its music was composed by Masashi Hamauzu, Nobuo Uematsu, and Junya Nakano, with arrangements from Shiro Hamaguchi and Hirosato Noda.

It is the first entry with fully 3D environments and the first fully-voiced entry, which garnered then-obscure voice actor James Arnold Taylor some attention. The tenth main game in the head-bangingly popular Final Fantasy series, released in 2001.įinal Fantasy X was the series' first foray into the sixth console generation- PlayStation 2, to be exact.
