Final Fantasy X Walkthrough

Welcome to our Final Fantasy X walkthrough! This guide will lead you through the game’s story, while also helping you pick up as much treasure as possible, and strategies on how to defeat the game’s bosses. It will also assume that you are using the Standard Sphere Grid for leveling, as the Expert Grid allows you to greatly change which character learns which abilities as you level.

While this walkthrough will try to be as spoiler free as possible, keep in mind that the game’s locations and bosses will be named. There is plenty of side content in the game, however most of them will only be briefly mentioned in the walkthrough, as there are dedicated guides on how to complete these (such as obtaining Celestial Weapons, the ultimate weapons for each character).

We also have a guide for some general tips and tricks that will help you out as you go through the world of Spira, which you can check out here.

This guide is a work in progress, so if you feel that anything is missing, or that anything might sound confusing, please let us know!

Things to Keep in Mind While You Play

Minimap

Final Fantasy X is a fairly linear game, however there can still be times when you’re not exactly sure where to go. If this happens, refer to the minimap on the top left corner of the screen. It gives a clear layout of the area you’re in, and there will be a red arrow indicating where you should be going, so just make your way towards it if you’re not sure where to go.

Town Shops

Whenever you make it to a new town or rest area, it’s always a good idea to check the shops. You can restock on useful items you might be low on, or you can find new useful weapons and armor for your characters. You can also sell equipment you’re not going to use anymore, which will give you more gil, and free up inventory space.

Random Battles and Running

The game features random battles, meaning that in most areas outside of towns, any step you take has a chance to trigger a random battle. While getting into random battles can get annoying, and it will be tempting to run away from them to save time (Tidus even has the Flee ability to help with this), be careful with how much you run. If you run away from too many battles, bosses can easily catch you off guard, and the fights will become much harder than they would have been if you were leveling. Final Fantasy X doesn’t require much grinding to get through the story, but we recommend fighting most if not all of the random battles to keep your characters leveled properly.

Keeping Your Party Healthy

The last thing you want while going through the story is getting caught off guard by a random battle or boss, and have your party members weak before even starting the fight, so you want to keep an eye on their health at all times. Luckily negative status effects do not carry over, but characters do not heal between battles. Keep an eye on everyone’s HP as you explore and heal as needed, and take advantage of Save Spheres whenever you see them (interacting with one fully heals your party).

Backup Saves

Backup Saves are always a good practice in RPGs. Making a separate save file just before going to a tough boss or point of no return is a good idea, because this will prevent any chance of you ‘soft locking’ yourself in the game (where you are stuck in an area, and have no way to make your characters more prepared from where you saved).

Understanding Abilities

As you learn new abilities through the Sphere Grid, read on the effects that they have, so that you will know how to utilize them in battle. Every ability in the game has some kind of use to make battles easier for you. If an enemy hits hard with physical attacks, you can use Cheer, Power Break, or Dark Attack to reduce the damage. If an enemy has Reflect or Protect on itself, use Dispel to take it off.

Extract Skills

The HD Remaster for Final Fantasy X added the Extract Skills that characters can learn on the Sphere Grid. These abilities only cost 1 MP, and will force the enemy to drop the sphere you want them to instead of what they normally drop (for example, Extract Power will force the enemy to drop Power Spheres instead of what they would normally drop). You can get these much earlier than the Distill items (which do the same thing), so it is recommended that you get these as soon as you can so you will never run out of spheres to level your characters. Extract Ability is especially helpful, as Ability Spheres can be hard to come by early on in the game.