It seems appropriate that this was posted because this is pretty much what I've been thinking about with Final Fantasy X. I played through Final Fantasy IX for the first time this summer(I always was late to parties) and fricken loved it(with a few small nitpicks, mostly related to Freya getting screwed over on her character arc). After a brief sabbatical, jumped into FFX, because for a while I'd heard it was one of the best FF games.
I'm still not really seeing it. Part of it might be the fact Tidus mostly annoys the shit out of me(his voice acting is one of the big problems, but dressing and acting like a clown isn't helping his case) and part of it is that for the first 7 or so hours there's a rather decent subplot based around Blitzball. Except that you hardly get to see blitzball at all, get no chance to practice it until you're thrown into the big tourney after you get to the stadium. I've heard a lot of people say it's a super fun mini-game, but it's not doing it for me. Maybe I need to play a couple more games or maybe it's because I've never really liked sports games, but right now it's pretty much the card game in FFIX for me, as in something I'm forced to play because but I get no enjoyment out of.
The idea of the game still appeals to me, I actually like the combat and the sphere grid is interesting. The problem is, I keep thinking "Why am I not interested? Why is it that every time I start getting engaged in the story and the characters and the world, the game itself finds a way to break my interest?". I'm about 10 hours in right now and just watched the scene where the party members talk to the people who've passed on, and apparently the thunder plains are coming up soon, but I keep thinking "When is this gonna grab me? When is this gonna get good?". I haven't loaded the game in a couple weeks now and I'm really debating on giving it one last chance or dropping it entirely.
Because 10 hours in without feeling like I want to continue seems like a bad sign. I'm really, really tempted to just give up and say that FFIX was the last Final Fantasy game. Starting with X, the series became something else that still uses the name but the series I knew and enjoyed is gone(and the finale at the end of IX was the true end of Final Fantasy). I'm torn about whether I should give it one last try before I write it off entirely.
Sorry if this turned into a mini-rant, but I feel it kind of fits the topic.