Yeah i'd go ahead and drop FFX, it's really mediocre by FF(good) standards.
-It's very linear; The game is basically just a straight line until you get the airship which is like 80% through the game
-The voice acting is terrible. It's not that the actors themselves are bad, but the combination of bad voice direction (they were told to match the JP lip syncing) and mismatched voice / character pairs just make FFX's overall voice acting beyond salvaging. And no, i'm not going to predictably harp on the laughing scene... because the entire game is like that from a VA stand point. Just awkward (and occasionally funny).
-For a game thats been praised for having a highly customizable, the character progression is arguably just as linear as the game itself;
Tidus is the melee guy and gets melee skills and some decent support spells, Yuna's the mage summoner and gets magic skills, etc. there isn't that much variety... until you're 80% in and you can jump around other sphere grids, but again by that point you're 80% in.
-Blitzball is garbage. To this day I remember the crushing disappointment I felt when I entered my first blitzball match.
-The story is pretty dull. It gets somewhat interesting towards the end but... (are you going to really make me say it...?)
BONUS: FFX-2 completely invalidates the only good thing about FFX's ending. C-o-m-p-l-e-t-e-l-y.
I have no idea why FFX is praised, when its just so... mediocre. FFIX was the pinnacle of the series. I guess i'm bitter because at one point I really liked FFX. Ugh.
For a series where half the games score 10/10 in my book, Final Fantasy X has the best gameplay
by far. Tactically the Final Fantasy series is frankly a wash, only FF4 forces some amount of tactics but that's mostly due to its crushing difficulty. FFX on the other hand has a significantly diverse cast of characters, the ability to switch out during fights, and the most creative boss battles I've seen in any video game. More tactical JRPGs like Grandia just aren't as fast and fun as the FF series. The only games that even come close to rivaling FFX for what it does are Persona 3 and 4, but they suffer from an endless guessing game of which monsters is weak to which spell, while FFX trains the player using visual archetypes. Also it is the only RPG in existence without useful/useless spells, which is a fucking feat.
All Final Fantasy games are linear, FFX just doesn't have a really distracting world map (these things always bugged me, where they are super barren and you are the size of each city).
As a story I wouldn't jump out and say it is the best Final Fantasy, but its direction and
use of music is unparalleled which really sell a plot that takes place in already fascinating world. There are some awesome twists and gut wrenching dramatic moments. If your only complaint is voice acting in
2001 video game, you really just need to relax and let yourself get immersed. I did and I even named Tidus Meg Ryan in my first playthrough. I'd make a few obvious design and voice acting changes if I could, but it's an absolute masterpiece.
X-2 is mediocre though, but we'd get much worse from SquareEnix in time...
Now my backlog is X-Com and Persona 3. Been working on Persona 3 all year, start X-Com a week ago but got distracted by The Walking Dead.
EDIT: What am I saying, I still haven't beaten Super Mario 3D Land, Shantae; Risky's Revenge, or Kid Icarus. Those are 3DS games though, so I mostly play them while out of the house. Also I just bought Spec-Ops; The Line while on sale, so I guess that needs to be taken care of in time.
