The end game of X is very long (think the longest in the series) and stuff like character stat maxxing and unlocking ultimate (celestial) weapons is hard without a guide.
Dont feel bad about looking up a guide either, some of the shit you are required to do is super convoluted and/or tedious. Plus you can easily miss one item in an area and semi-permanently lock yourself out of content.
They were definitely trying to be super bosses which the game desperately needed, but a layer or two of additional strategy would have really been nice.
Maybe with shiva you might need to hit her with a fire attack before you could apply debuffs or do damage to her.
Or valefor being immune to non ranged melee attacks as it flies, I dunno just something other than a bigger health bar. Could have been cool.
Penance has a little more to him, having to deal with the 2 arms as they regen to ensure you don’t get wiped so easily, but he was still just immune to everything and had a big bar.
FFX has something like 44 status effects and super bosses were immune to basically all of them, give me some reason to use these abilities like Triple Foul or Doom (think Auron had an overdrive that could apply break debuffs even to super bosses, but I think that was it).
FFX was so annoying about this, was doing the dark aeons recently and all you can do in those fights is buff yourself and attack, felt pointless unlocking debuff skills at the end of some characters pathways only to never use them.
Looking at you Triple Foul.
Nonsense quests that had nothing to do with the characters.
Like Yuna’s and Wakka’s sigil quests made perfect sense to their character, but what does Kimahri, Lulu or Tidus have to do with unlocking their weapons exactly?
Trying not to spoil things for the other dude, but I straight up refuse to do Lulu’s sigil minigame anymore.