It's wild to me how he left partially because of FFX, which is widely regarded as one of the best, and my personal favourite.

Sakaguchi is a fucking pro

Hadn't run through X since original launch, but was it the first FF with active battles? No more turn based? Or was it 12 that more-or-less abandoned turn based battles? (Never played 11)

FFX is tied as my favorite game of all time. It's the only other game consistently talked about as being the best in the series along with VII. It sucks that the delay caused him to quit. But also, I'm glad it got delayed if it meant that we got the final product that we did.

X actually went back to fully turn-based, getting rid of the ATB. XII still had the ATB, but you could move freely in the environment and all enemies were already there. So no more random battles. XV was the first mainline Final Fantasy with active battles. But games like Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, and Lightning Returns had it earlier.

I had a long conversation the other day about the maps in FFX being a huge turn off for me. I also recognize that effectively nothing actually changed from roaming a world map, and roaming a regional map that you selected from the world, but for some inane reason I couldn't get past it.

I'll actually copy a comment I saw recently by someone else who knows more about Final Fantasy than I do. Apparently it's much older than that. >Though historically the ATB system was invented for FF4 and used by all games until FFX itself before being used again for X-2, though I think most of them had the option of "active or wait" like Chrono Trigger to pick from. I haven't played most of those FFs to say for certain. Not that it makes it better, but it technically was the return to form and earlier games just had less you cared to watch happen.

> I also recognize that effectively nothing actually changed from roaming a world map There isn't much, but there are actually a couple of hidden locations related to important sidequests, like the zodiac weapons.