Blitzball was the only reason I even replayed Final Fantasy X. But aside from that, I thought the first playthrough was fun until I was let down by Sin. He was way too easy. The music was good. As lackluster as the story was, the voice acting was good. The Sphere Grid was a cool concept. Fighting the Aeons was easy for me because I only used them in really tough fights. I did not like the fact that there was no ATB in FFX.
I liked the CC battle system(a lot, actually, reminded me of a simplified Xenogears combo system), but I didn’t like the story that much. That aside, there was enough characters and easter eggs to play through it to find all of them. I hope XIII has a decent story to go along with the proposed battle system.
The “underwater breathing” and “ holding breath (underwater) for a long time” abilities fit nicely into my somewhat wacky hypothesis of mutation/genetic engineering. The latter brings to mind the “aquatic ape theory”. The mainstream scientific community treated this “theory” as a mumbojumbo pseudo-science, but accumulating evidence of recent years seems to be tipping the mainstream towards assimilating some of the AA proposals.
I would use this “mumbo jumbo” to fill a few holes of the blitzball mystery.
But then, as one of Yevon acolytes would say: “who are we to question the wisdom of Yevon … aka Kazushige Nojima?”
I started up a new game of FFX a couple of weeks ago. Due to limited playing time, I’m only now in Home when it’s assaulted. I think I’m enjoying it more second time through than I did first time through.