Favorite Character

^ Agreed. The fact that Auron wasn't constantly spouting off at the mouth or whining incessantly gives him a huge advantage over the majority of the cast. Loved him.

 

^ She had more depth, especially in X, than I sometimes gave her credit for. At the least, she's an excellent party member, with lots of useful skills.

 

^ Nostalgia is making me feel fonder towards Tidus than I typically have while playing the game. I agree with you, though, that the "perfect" ending (which I assume is the canon one) of X-2 did a huge disservice to the character and was really irritating.

FFX had some awful voice acting, but the characters are actually mostly pretty intriguing and likable. I kind of want to change my vote for Yuna to Kimahri, because in 8 years, he's yet to get one vote, which is sad, and I did like his personality and loyalty to Yuna. I just wish he would have been a bit more useful in battle. His sphere grid set up just made me not want to bother screwing with him, and I only occasionally found his blue magic helpful.

 

I thought the perfect ending felt really cheap. I hate when stories pull that- kill someone off/have a downer ending, and then magically make it all better in the sequel. Tidus didn't really grow or change a whole lot during X, in my opinion, but his mature handling of his destiny and the sacrifice he made was one of the few times I really liked him. X made me cry real tears over its freaking ending, and X-2 just ruined so much about it. I agree with you about Yuna being especially disserviced. I think it's a better story arc for her to make peace and move on with her life. But like you said, at least X-2 gave us multiple endings, so we could choose the one we like best and pretend like it's the only ending.

There's nothing that Kimahri is good at. I usually took him down Rikku's path, because there's some item you can steal from the two Ronso he solo fights later on in the game that I usually need, but until then and after that, there are always people better than him at accuracy, speed, strength, etc. I guess I just didn't know how to properly use him, but there wasn't a lot of point wasting the energy when other characters were easier to level up. Plus, I could never completely unlock his celestial weapon, so he was even more disadvantaged. But I still did like him from a story standpoint- he seemed like a good surrogate-dad figure to Yuna, and I'm a fan of the strong, silent type. I always thought he would have made an awesome Final Aeon.

 

^ I've always got to try for the 100% completion. But Kimahri's bullshit butterflies, screw it. After suffering through dodging 200 lightning bolts, and making a negative time in that chocobo race with an animal that is stupid af because it purposely runs both into oncoming birds and off course, even after you supposedly train it, I was done.

For sure. Thinking on it some more, I did like some of Tidus' backstory, such as his relationship with his parents, and I think his presence changed some of the other characters for the better. I blame a lot of my dislike of the character on the voice acting, or rather, the director who told the voice actor to play the character that way, because James Arnold Taylor is pretty prolific as a voice actor, so he can't be that terrible. I think it was a mistake to have such a whiny, shrill voice, because I think the voice exaggerates some of Tidus' behaviors in scenes where he's already being an idiot and makes him seem a lot worse. Yeah, I know the character is sort of a wuss, he's still a teenager, and not every male character needs to sound like a badass like Auron, but still, the performance could have been less cringeworthy, in my opinion.