Not a lot of people put X in high regard because the main character, Tidus, is super whiny throughout the game. I blame the voice acting personally. I did enjoy the ability level up system and how involved it was. I'll always hold VI as my all time favorite personally.

I don't really find him whiny, but that's probably my blatant bias. It was the first Final Fantasy game that I bought and played through (albeit not to the end at the time).

Also, the game benefits greatly of having two protagonists. And Yuna is my favorite character in the ENTIRE franchise. I was a Rikku-boi as a wee lad, but Yuna is still greatness incarnate.

I can understand that. My bias is towards 4 and 1 because those were what I grew up with. It was 6 that I first fully played through on the snes. Yuna is pretty interesting, but I always found her more as a tag-along character to lead Tidus to his next shenanigan.

That's what I thought back when I first saw the game, and when I started playing it myself. But last year, when I got it for the Vita, I saw and understood why I liked Yuna so much: because it's HER story.

Tidus is a partial narrator, and he's the player's avatar, but no matter how much Auron tries to spin it, this isn't about him. In fact, he doesn't even exist, emphasizing how he's just a character in Yuna's story, and not the other way around. Yuna drives the plot, Yuna is the one that has a major character arc.

Granted, they are both the protagonists, but the narrative revolves around Yuna's Pilgrimage.

What's true. Even when the story tries to separate Yuna from Tidus so that she can continue her pilgramage where he can't follow he does so anyway so that they he can continue to be part of her experience. Or in other words.... Tidus enters a society that he knows nothing about and instead of trying to fit in says "Screw all of your rules. Ima do what I want!!!"

Well, I hope you enjoy VIII when you play it. Right now it might be one of the least well regarded Final Fantasies, but I still love it for some reason.

From what I've gathered, FFVIII suffers for two reasons: realistic characters on PSOne-era polygons are like pulling teeth, and the pre-rendered backgrounds don't help; and it was coming after FFVII (which was massively popular and garnered many new players), except FFVIII's combat system was far too complex and never properly explained, leaving most people who played it as kids flabbergasted on how to actually play the game on their own.

That is odd, I must have been a very weird kid then.