Take seriously at your own peril.

Tidus: Hi, I'm the hero. I'm also a nasally-voiced douchebag who NEVER STOPS GODDAMN WHINING, EVER. I'm also a star player in the really boring sport of Blitzball. Clearly nothing can go wrong as I knock a throw a metal ball around a big glass sphere in yet another noninteractive FMV movie

Godzilla Sin shows up and starts wreaking havoc on Tokyo Zanarkand.

Tidus: What a shocking and unexpected turn of events!
Auron: Here have a sword. Let's kill a few guys.

They do just that, eventually Auron gets bored and tosses Tidus into the ocean.

Tidus: You're an asshole, Auron!
Auron: I know.

Tidus ends up on a boat and meets Rikku.

Rikku: Obligatory cute girl who never does anything, nice to meet you! Now we must dive underwater to fight monsters for no real reason.

They do just that. Somehow Tidus ends up a thousand miles away and conveniently meets most of the game's protagonists all at once.

Wakka: Behold my Carribean accent that nobody else in the game has! My weapon is a Blitzball, which is... kind of stupid now that I think about it. I mean, we're really heaving these skull-crushing metal spheres at each other in the name of entertainment? What kind of fucked up dark age do we live in?
Kimahri: I'm just here to appeal to the furry demographic because I never do anything important. I'm also completely worthless because my placement on the sphere grid sucks and my Limit Break is a joke. Which is really too bad, because my weapons and manner of dress are the only ones that don't look completely stupid and impractical.
Lulu: And I'm a generic bucket of angst! Also, my outfit is one of the tackiest pieces of shit ever put into a video game. Seriously, look at this damn thing:


I've seen prom dresses made out of carpeting samples that were more appealing to the eye.


Yuna: Hi, I'm going on a long, perilous journey with this band of losers, want to come with?
Tidus: Wow... your voice acting is terrible, and every time you talk you flail around like you have Parkinson's Disease. But sure, I don't have anything better to do.

They journey to some random village

Yuna: I didn't mention this earlier, but I send the spirits of the dead so they don't become monsters. It's also a convenient excuse to show off more eye candy.
Tidus: Ooo, pretty!

They arrive at the Blitzball tournament.

Seymour: Look at my hair, it's so CRAZY!
Tidus: He has an absurd outfit, looks menacing and is not part of our party, so he is obviously evil!
Seymour: Way to spoil the plot twist, you stupid kid.
Tidus: Hey, don't hate me because this series is more predictable than clockwork.
Seymour: Fine, I'll hate you because you're a sniveling twat and your obnoxious, whiny voice is the audible equivalent of having my testicles filed off with a cheese grater.
Tidus: That works.

A few Blitzball matches occur, which nearly put the player to sleep from watching the clock stop every two seconds as the same three animations loop over and over again constantly. I had no idea that a match timed at ten mintues could drag on for upwards of half an hour until I played this game. Needless to say, once it finally ended I vowed to never, under any circumstances, select the "Play Blitzball" option at the save points. That, and I learned that you need to pay out of your own pockets to renew player contracts, which is pretty stupid since you'll quickly figure out that everyone but Tidus is awful to the point of being completely useless.

Spoony: It's actually pretty much a carbon copy of Captain Tsubasa/Tecmo Cup Soccer for the NES, just with substantially worse mechanics and so much padding in the animations that it makes the experience completely unbearable.

Anyway, after that big borefest finally ends, you finally reunite with Auron.

Auron: (Damn it, he didn't drown.) Oh, hi! Um, Sin is your father.
Tidus: GRR DAD, I HATE HIM... wait, what's that supposed to mean?
Auron: Nothing, forget I said anything.
Tidus: There isn't some incredibly important information you're keeping hidden from us, is there?
Auron: No.
(I wish; Auron doesn't press this point and Tidus doesn't even question this revelation even though it would basically blow the entire plot wide open)

In a desperate attempt to distract us from that plot point, Sin attacks the stadium, raining down more monsters to attack. Fortunately, Seymour saves the day - by dropping a boat anchor into the Stygian pit and pulling up the tormented soul of a chained fish-demon to fucking kill everything with eye lasers!

Spoony: Jesus, guys. Could you possibly be any less subtle about foreshadowing Seymour's dark intentions? Between this, the giant blue hair-horns and the huge forehead veins, You might as well just change his name to "Evil Mcbadguy."

After a particularly dreadful laughing scene (seriously, Tidus' laugh sounds like someone strangling Donald Duck), the party roams the countryside for months killing monsters, solving the Trials of Yevon Boring Busywork and collecting Aeons. You also frequently run into this boring narrator guy who tells you about what's going on in the world, because printing a line of text and playing a voice clip is so much easier than actually letting you interact with something. Of course, that might require the game to be something more than a strictly linear, no-surprises journey from one overused plot point to the next, and apparently Square wanted to avoid that at all cost.

Rikku: Well, we meet again.
Tidus: You know the drill, Obligatory Cute Girl. Back of the line and stay there.
Rikku: But... I can steal things!
Tidus: So can everybody else, thanks to the sphere grid system. What, you think people get UNIQUE abilities in this series anymore?
Rikku: Well, there's Limit Breaks.
Tidus: I... guess. They're nerfed so badly that they're barely worth using anymore. Blue Magic and Item Mixing are only usable once every twenty battles when they were freebies in earlier games? What the fuck, Square.
Rikku: *Sigh* I give up.

Yuna: I forgot to mention this earlier, but I'm half Al-Bhed. Not that it really affects anything.
Tidus: Anything else you want to tell us?
Yuna: ...No.
Tidus: Are you sure?
Yuna: I just said no.
Tidus: Fine, fine. You're the most boring protagonist this series has probably ever had anyway.
Yuna: Look who's talking, crybaby. "My Daddy didn't give me enough cuddles, waaaahhh!"
Tidus: Hey, it's called "character development."
Yuna: Bullshit. You don't change at all throughout the whole game, and even when you come close it's a moot point anyway since you vanish forever five minutes later.
Tidus: At least I didn't take off most of my clothes just to star in an even more craptastic sequel.
Yuna: ...You win this round.

And now we reunite with Seymour for... no apparent reason!

Seymour: Hi Yuna, will you marry me?
Yuna: I barely know you and your hands are really gross, but I accept anyway.

The dumbass just happens to leave around a videotape revealing that he's an evil bastard and wants everyone dead for no real reason at all.

Tidus: Holy shit! This is... something I predicted less than two hours into the game!
Spoony: I think this "big reveal" would have been a lot more effective if Yuna and Seymour had some kind of history together at the beginning of the game rather than dropping this proposal on us literally seconds before we find conclusive proof of his evil nature. It also would have been a perfect opportunity for Yuna to have an interesting character arc as she set her feelings for him aside and resolved to stop his mad plans. But hey, why would I know better than professional writers?

They save Yuna and kill Seymour, getting declared heretics by the Church. Then they reinforce another Square cliche by falling down a pit into the next dungeon. Come on guys, you already used that at the BEGINNING! Get creative! Use your brains a little!

Seymour: Surprise, I'm back less than an hour after you killed me!
Tidus: What is this Mickey Mouse bullshit? Dead people supposed to turn into monsters! We kind of spent the first few hours of the game establishing that plot point.
Seymour: Oh yeah, we can just ignore that rule whenever it's convenient to the plot because the writers of this game are total hacks.
Tidus: What?
Seymour: You'll find out later. Toodles!

Despite the fact that the church has pretty much everyone on the planet after blood for the murder of one of their high priests, they decide to complete the pilgrimage anyway.

Yuna: I didn't mention this earlier but this pilgrimage to destroy Sin for a while kills me in the process.
Tidus: Of course, shit like this never flies in JRPGs, so we're going to find a sloppy, last-minute way to weasel out of it and still beat the bad guy. ...Boy, it's never a good sign when you can predict the ending of the story and you're not even halfway through it yet.
Yuna: Sorry.
Tidus: Whatever, this plot's a fucking mess and it's only going to get worse. Let's just get it over with.

And then THIS lovely scene plays!

Rikku: Oh yeah, all those Al Bhed machine bosses you've been fighting? We've secretly been trying to kidnap Yuna and other Summoners to prevent unnecessary death.
Tidus: ...So to prevent unnecessary death, you kidnap summoners by murdering their guardians with giant tanks and submarines so you can save them from meeting their fate at the end of the Pilgrimage. Never mind that in stopping Sin - even temporarily - they prevent attacks that result in HUNDREDS or even THOUSANDS of lives being lost. Am I getting this right?
Rikku: Yep!
Tidus: Spoony: Okay, seriously, I can't take this. People defend THIS game as one of the genre's prime examples of cinematic storytelling and great writing? Are you fucking serious? I've seen GI Joe/Halo crossover fan fiction written by eleven year olds that didn't have leaps of logic this fucking retarded. There weren't nearly as many annoying characters or glaring plot holes, either.

Scene missing

Seymour: BLAAARRGH, I am back to annoy you with another tedious battle! Oh, and I killed the Ronso race.
Tidus: Who cares, not one of them has done a single thing of note the entire game. Hell, even Kimahri's had maybe five lines of dialog.
Seymour: Nevermind then. Back to my original plan, I need Yuna to become a new Sin and destroy all life on Spira!
Tidus: That's why you've been stalking us across half the damn planet? You do realize you just wiped out an entire civilization in the five minutes it took us to pass through their territory, right?
Seymour: What are you saying?
Tidus: I'm saying that if you can wipe out a whole civilization in the time it takes me to speak this sentence, why the hell do you need Yuna?
Seymour: ...Uh... shut up!
Tidus: Hey, don't hate me just because I rendered your entire contribution to the plot pointless.
Seymour: I don't. I explained this to you earlier.
Tidus: Oh yeah.

They fight again anyway. As a beginner's trap, the game throws in the option to trash-talk Seymour, which just results in wasted turns for an extremely minimal stat boost. He also instantly kills any summoned monsters, but it doesn't make much of a difference since summons are useless as dirt in this game anyway. Once he's finally defeated, Yuna neglects to send him AGAIN because she is an IDIOT.

Tidus: Great, now we have to put up with him again later.
Seymour: After I finish unleashing genocide on the Al Bhed! Thanks for just standing there and watching while I remanifest and leave, you dumb broad! Nya ha ha!

Yuna gets captured by the church or something, I don't remember exactly. At any rate, it's little more than an excuse to show a few more cinemas, draw the game out with a few more boss fights (effectively revealing that the Church is a bunch of hypocrites because they use fucking forbidden machina to fight you), and establish this plot point:

Churchguys: Surprise, we're all unsent ghosts too. Also, as you've probably figured out, this entire religion is a sham. We're all too busy feeling sorry for ourselves after our repeated failed attempts to permanently stop Sin, so we just set up the whole pilgrimage thing as a way to give people false hope whilst we secretly pull strings behind the scenes to keep ourselves in power.
Tidus: So the whole planet is suffering just because you three guys are cowards, notwithstanding the point that people just seem to be able to get back up and walk around again after being killed as many times as they fucking want?
Churchguys: Pretty much.
Tidus: Do I even need to point out how IDIOTIC it is that you're helping Seymour - a goddamned lunatic guilty of double genocide - become a new Sin so he can MURDER EVERYBODY? It's kind of hard to hold rule over a bunch of dead people turned into mindless monsters, you fucking chuckleheads.
Churchguys: Um... sweet baby Jesus, you're right. Boy, are our faces red. Ha, ha, ha!
Spoony: And here I was thinking that Star Ocean 3 had the worst plot twist of all time. At least that one made some modicum of sense; here, the game plays so fast and loose with its own rules that this twist raises far more questions than it creates! Why the fuck do Seymour and these guys keep all of their memories and physical form in death when everyone else just becomes a monster? This is NEVER explained!

As the story really has nowhere else to go at this point, the group decides to just finish the Pilgrimage and maybe get a shot at stopping Sin. Personally, I'd probably have them round up the survivors of the Al Bhed and Ronso camps and declare war on the Church of Yevon, with the ultimate goal of forcibly extracting some method to permanently destroy Sin; that might actually make for some interesting storytelling. But again, I'm not a professional writer, so what do I know... right?

Spoony: Oh, and why do they not carry any of those spheres that can record stuff? It might really help to have some EVIDENCE of the church's evildoings, you fucking clods!

Yunalesca: Yuna, you must sacrifice yourself and one of your friends to stop Sin for a few weeks.
Auron: I nominate Tidusi!
Lulu, Wakka, Rikku, Kimahri: Second.
Yuna: I came all this way hell-bent on offing myself, but now I'm changing my mind at the last second!
Yunalesca: Even though you've absolutely no way to stop Sin and nobody will listen to you anyway since you've all been declared heretics, I'm going to kill you to keep you quiet. DIE!

Yunalesca turns into Medusa and one of the most obnoxious, frustrating battles in any game ever occurs. After much grinding, cursing, and a whole ton of Game Overs which you're sure won't pay off anyway because the plot's an irredeemable mess at this point, the bitch finally fucking dies.

Auron: This might be a bad time to mention this, but your father is Sin because Yuna's dad turned Jecht into an Aeon, which Yevon just turns into a new Sin after a few months so he can resume his rampage. Oh yeah, that's also why Sin is pretty much immortal.
Tidus: ...What? Are you for real? Do you know how much time and how many lives we could have spared if you'd just revealed that straight away?
Auron: A lot?
Tidus: YES! For fuck's sake, the rules of death apparently don't apply (except to US, of course), the entire planet is kept submissive by lies, we're being used as the church's scapegoats, two entire races of people were pushed to the brink of extinction because we turned Seymour into an invincible superghost, and we were about to ADD to the Sin problem before Yuna got cold feet at the last second. Is there any other vitally important information that you'd like to share, or are you just going to hold out until a million MORE unnecessary deaths occur because of our actions?
Auron: The part about "us" being the only ones able to die isn't true, but only for me; I'm a ghost too.
Fayth: You're not real, Tidus. Neither is your dad, but he's apparently still able to become Sin and terrorize the whole of reality.
Tidus: ...You're both assholes. I'm out of here.

Spoony: I may have been able to buy that the VILLAINS of this story had some means of cheating death that they deliberately kept hidden from the rest of the world, but now AURON does too? Why can HE cheat death too? Furthermore, why even make Auron a ghost? This plot element is completely pointless. You could have just as easily had him barely escape with his life and then relay his story to Yuna, except - oops - he didn't think to do that until it was too goddamn late! Why the fuck DIDN'T HE TELL HER THIS?! It would have been one thing if she didn't believe his words, and then came to realize that what he said was true after it was too late to do anything about it, but THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN! Kee-rist. If all I can think of as I'm sitting here watching your story unfold is how you could make it far better with only a few slight rewrites, you have failed as a storyteller.

Fayth: Wait, there's more!
Tidus: *Sigh*... fine, out with it.
Fayth: Zanarkand as you know it isn't real either, it's a fabrication created by Yevon and his only real reason for existing as Sin is to protect it from anything he perceives as a threat. Which includes pretty much everybody and everything.
Tidus: So why in fucking HELL did he ATTACK it at the beginning of the goddamn game?!
Fayth: ...I don't know.
Tidus: Great. Not only is this plot point stolen straight from the Matrix, it's diluted with a whole ton of backwards-ass idiocy that causes it to make even LESS sense.
Fayth: Yep. The whole plot is derivative, self contradictory and little more than a thinly-veiled whinefest about the evils of organized religion, which was already a trite and played-out concept when Xenogears and Breath of Fire II did it several years earlier. What a way to bring this series into the sixth generation, eh?
Tidus: Yeah. Not to mention that Grandia II came out a year before Final Fantasy X, had the same general premise, a comparable setting and even a disquietingly similar cast of characters, but was much, much better written.

The story has officially hit a dead end since there's now no way to even TEMPORARILY stop Sin, which had the potential to set up a lot of nihilistic angst, invoke a genuine sense of dread in the story, and maybe even make you think that the Church of Yevon's plan of turning everyone into mindless, unfeeling monsters wasn't so wrong after all (which would be a perfect opportunity to break away from the series' norm of boring, one-dimensional villains with no redeeming qualities whatsoever - we are only ten games in, after all). Hell, it was even a good chance at introducing a moral dillemma by having the means to stop Sin come at some dire price like - and I'm just throwing this out here - destroying the Farplane and the Fayth, ensuring that Sin could never remanifest, but also that there would no longer be an afterlife for any Spirans ever again. I'm sure that would piss more than a few people off. But hey, why enhance your story with things like "depth" and "thought provoking material" when you can just repackage the same braindead story elements and black-and-white scenarios over and over again? Pander to that lowest common denominator like there's no tomorrow!

Sure enough, Square goes down the familiar route yet again as Cid arrives minutes later to bail our heroes out with a literal deus ex machina.

Cid: Hey look, I now conveniently have an Airship powerful enough to contend with Sin!
Spoony: ...So the last forty hours of the game were nothing but pointless bickering. Fan-fucking-tastic, Square. What's next, all we have to do to defeat Sin is show him the power of our love and he'll lose his supernatural immortality?
(Don't laugh, by the way - that's almost exactly what fucking happens. Nevermind that this "love is the ultimate trump card" bullshit is such a trite and cliched plot device that it was laughed off the Disney channel years ago - the fanboys will eat up ANYTHING we serve!)
Cid: ...Shut up and get onboard!

Since the game's having so much fun pissing on every plot point it spent the first half of itself setting up, we throw one more on the grill by having Sin be defeated by Blitzballs, Magic and thrown items, even though earlier on some dudes were hitting the monster with high-tech magic cannons and didn't even manage to make a scratch.

Spoony: Who'd have thought it, THOUSANDS OF YEARS of terror and oppression at the hands of this unstoppable monster, and all we have to do to defeat Sin is fly an airship next to it and throw Blitzballs! This is straight out of Battlefield Fucking Earth, you clods. Christ, if you're going to rip off story elements from something, at least rip off ones that actually make sense. Not stealing ideas from one of the worst films AND books of all time wouldn't be a bad idea either.

After an extremely padded-out battle, eventually they manage to blast its mouth open and enter its innards.

Tidus: What the shit? Why does this look like the last area of Quest 64?
Yuna: That sure doesn't bode well for the game's image, does it?

Lots of fights with Behemoths ensue. Seriously, you've never seen this many Behemoths before. Hell, you've never seen this many fights with this many enemies with this much HP in a row outside of a Nippon Ichi title; the only difference is that Final Fantasy X's damage cap* ensures that you'll be hacking away at the same enemy for upwards of twenty minutes while in Disgaea you could take them out in three or four hits. This dungeon is one of the most mind-bendingly tedious things I've ever endured, yet for some reason I kept playing.

* You could do the quests to boost your characters' damage caps from 9999 to 99,999, but that involves dodging lightning 200 consecutive times, getting an absurdly low time in a race on a chocobo that doesn't respond to the goddamn controller, playing around 100 hours of Blitzball and all sorts of other tasks that are exercises in complete and utter frustration and/or mind-numbing tedium. I've played a lot of video games and seen a lot of crappy side-missions in my time, and I can honestly say that these are the absolute worst I've ever encountered. But if you really, REALLY want to torture yourself for a couple hundred hours for such a minimal payoff, then be my guest. As for me, I'd rather do something far less painful. Like pull out all of my toenails.

Countless days of needlessly long and obnoxiously frequent battles later...

Seymour: ROOROGHGLFBLAAAGH
Spoony: So if you can get INSIDE Sin AND you're far more powerful than Yu Yevon himself, why do you need Yuna exa- you know what, fuck it. I don't even care anymore. I've seen kids act out more coherent plots with Power Rangers action figures after downing a six-pack of Josta. You've stolen twenty dollars from me and left me with nothing but a miserable goddamn excuse of a video game and mental scarring that will never heal, now you're going the fuck down.

Yuna FINALLY sends this fucking lameass villain out of the story once and for all

Tidus: Farewell, sweet prince. You were more annoying than Seifer and twice as ugly.

Now we move on to Sin's core, where we meet the game's only likable character! Hey, anyone who can make Tidus' life miserable is okay by me.

Spoony: Seriously though, Jecht is the only character I felt any degree of sympathy for. He was trying to save the world and now he's an active force in helping to bring it to its ultimate destruction. It weighed pretty damn heavily on him, and it shows in this scene. But even during this emotional moment he still manages to mock and belittle Tidus for being a whiny little bitch. Now that's just awesome.

After a climactic battle with abismally bad metal music, we get this rather strange scene.

Auron: Yuna, summon your Aeons! Quickly!
Yuna: Okay!

Auron slaughters them all with a few waves of his sword.

Yuna: ...What was the point of that?
Auron: I got bored watching Nancy here weep and trade blows with his dad.
Tidus: Oh fuck you, Auron.
Auron: Also, we're murdering them so Jecht can't use them to become another Sin.
Tidus: Which we could have avoided entirely if you'd just told us what was going on in the first place.
Auron: Oh shut up about that already, the game is almost over.
Tidus: Fine, fine. (Asshole)

Jecht melts into a pile of goo, revealing the ONE TRUE VILLAIN.

Yevon: I AM THE BIG BAD GUY ...wait a minute. Why am I a pill bug, why don't I have any speaking lines, and why am I so pathetically weak? I don't even have a chance in hell of winning because you all suddenly have permanent Reraise status; where did that shit come from?

Yuna finishes the job by slowly bonking Yevon to death with her wand, ending thousands of years of terror in the most retarded way imaginable. If you thought the final showdown with Sephiroth was an anticlimax, you ain't seen shit until you've seen an invincible Yuna wand-bonk Yevon's 9999 HP away 100 points at a time.

Tidus: Well, that was incredibly anticlimactic. How hard do you have to try to make a final boss lamer than fucking Ultimecia?
Yuna: No shit. As lame and uninspired a character as Ultimecia was, at least she had a speaking part and actually had a fighting chance at beating you. I mean, it was around 0.1% if you had any kind of proficiency with the Junction system, but better that than NO CHANCE AT ALL.
Tidus: Oh yeah, I'm apparently not real. Bye!

Tidus ceases to exist while the rest of the cast goes on to star in a sequel that's not only even worse, but is so brazenly offensive to the series and its fans as a whole that it ruins the franchise's credibility forever. Way to go above and beyond, guys.

---

Spoony: I thought 8 was doomed to be the series' black sheep, but then this came along and somehow managed to be worse in almost every way. The plot is absurd, the writing is cliched, sloppy and filled with amateurish mistakes, the character and set designs are overblown and tacky, the characters themselves are beyond obnoxious (particularly Tidus, who is one of the absolute worst video game characters of all time), the gameplay is railroaded to the point that it may as well just be a non-interactive movie with occasional battle sequences*, the voice acting is terrible, the pacing sucks, and the sidequests are a fucking disgrace. I mean, Triple Triad and "Hot or Cold" both sucked, but at least those were over and done with in a few minutes; here, you'll be plugging away at a single minigame for hours upon hours trying to get a single character's ultimate weapon, then you get to do it again! And again! And again! Blow me; if you're going to require that much of a time investment to fully complete your game, at least make it fucking fun.

* Final Fantasy XIII took the next logical step and actually became exactly this. Way to somehow lower the bar even further, Square.

But the worst thing of all is the "message" it carries, which is so overwrought and heavy-handed that it almost comes off as a parody. But of course, the fanboys fail to see it for the farce that it is and worship it as if it were the greatest piece of knowledge ever put into the electronic medium. Hey fanboys: video games are works of fiction, usually produced by overpaid marketing execs to cash in on whatever is currently popular with a given age demographic (aka your angsty Facebook crusades against "the religious hate machine"). They're written solely because they make money, not because the authors have some deep, thought-provoking message to convey. If you want some intelligent discussion on the rise of religion and the impact of faith, then put this pandering garbage down and read a fucking book.

In fairness, the game is at least appealing on a technical level, bearing some downright incredible visuals and excellent music for the time of its release. It was also nice to see voice acting for the first time in a Final Fantasy game, even in spite of some horrendous casting choices (giving Tidus and Yuna the most annoying and unemotive actors respectively was the worst possible move they could have made). However, like Final Fantasy VIII before it, it also stands as proof that presentation alone does not compensate for a weak script, boring characters and countless gameplay flaws. As I've stated many times before and since: Good visuals and music can help a good game, but they can't save a bad one.

But this isn't the WORST Final Fantasy game, now is it? Oh, no, it's not. But we'll be getting to that one in due course. For now, we're going to go after another of my most despised RPG teams, Tri-Ace. Because lord knows with the "we don't give a shit and it shows" quality of THEIR games, they certainly have it coming.