10 Final Fantasy X Secrets Players Still Miss to this Day

Final Fantasy X is a game loaded with secrets. Not only is so much of the story built on the secrets everyone keeps from each other, it's also loaded with optional content that's all-too easy to miss.

Unfortunately, this game can be pretty unforgivable with its missing content, and can disappear for good if you don't pick it up on your first time around. It can also decide to punish you by pushing a superboss in front of you if you decide to backtrack to grab an item or complete a quest.

For that reason, the most die-hard of fans remain glued to guides or wiki's to triple check they're not missing out on any limited items or unique events.

So, without further ado, here are 10 secrets that most players still miss in Final Fantasy X even after all these years.

10 Jecht Shot

An Easy-to-Fail Mini-Game that You'll Wish You Reloaded a Save to Get

Getting the Jecht Shot can help trivialize the Blitzball tournament, and the seemingly unwinnable match against the Luca Goers.

After sailing out from Kilika, you'll experience a cutscene that features a flashback of Jecht mocking Tidus that he'll never be able to learn his iconic move. Here, you'll immediately be plunged into a quick-time event mini-game, requiring you to hit the right directions on your controller as they flash on your screen. Doing so correctly will reward you with the infamous Jecht Shot skill, which will be an immense help for the upcoming Blitzball matches.

When you finally start the match, you'll have to play out two rounds. The common sense strategy here is to try and stall the first half out by passing the ball between your defenders and midfielders to get them experience points for the next round.

In the second half, with your now stronger players, you can pass the ball to Tidus and cast your overpowered Jecht Shot ability, all but ensuring a single goal. Then, as Wakka subs in, you can simply pass the ball to one of your defenders and swim behind your goal. This will cause the game's AI to break, and they'll start swimming in circles. Simply wait out the time, and bam; you're officially the best Blitzball team in the league.

Winning here doesn't change much. You'll be awarded a mere Strength Sphere and see a more triumphant cutscene. Ultimately, the real prize is keeping the Jecht Shot for future matches without needing to grind all those levels with Tidus later. Which, if you're intending to get Wakka's Ultimate Weapon and Overdrive's, you'll be immensely thankful for the Jecht Shot earlier on.

9 Creating the Best Armor with Wantz

I Wantz that Armor

This is an optional endgame tip, but if you're planning on grinding out the Monster Arena and the Dark Aeon fights, you'll be thanking yourself for taking the time here.

Wantz is the brother of O'aka, who you'll meet while climbing Mt. Gagazet. Here, he'll inform you that your trusty traveling merchant has been imprisoned, but he's come to pick up his trade. The secret people will miss is that he eventually moves back to Macalania Woods, and will sell armor with four empty slots. While this may seem useless, this is a mere canvas waiting for you to make your masterpiece.

With this armor, you can equip four very broken abilities that will keep you alive and outspeed the majority of your opponents.

The most flexible build I recommend will have you equip Auto-Haste, Auto-Protect, and Auto-Phoenix. The fourth slot can be a bit more flexible. Most would recommend Ribbon, as that'll save you from those pesky Malboro ambush encounters that almost always instantly wipe the party (unless you have Auron's Ultimate Weapon and provoke it). However, it is fairly expensive to get and can be a major time sink in a late game that's already fairly grindy. Therefore, Auto-Potion is also a great alternative. Simply sell all your other potions and replace them with 99x X-Potions and your team has a loop ready to go.

Someone dies? They'll instantly be revived with Haste and Protect already applied. Survive a major attack? You instantly heal back to full with an X-Potion, all without wasting a turn to do so. This will effectively flip the game to easy mode, but it's near mandatory for some of the toughest side content available in the game.

8 Getting Valefor's Second Overdrive Early

Always Pet the Dog

Before leaving Besaid, if you head back to the village, you'll be able to score a second overdrive for Valefor.

Speak to the item shop girl, and she'll tell you that her dog dug something up. If you head to the tent with the dog inside, it'll give you something "mangled and slobbery", which ends up being the overdrive Energy Blast. It's a far stronger version of Valefor's already existing overdrive, Energy Ray, except there's more turn delay after using it.

Weirdly, this is the only second overdrive you can get for your Aeon's in the entire game. Is this most likely a cut feature left in because Valefor needed something to make it remotely interesting? Probably.

If you try to come back here later with the airship, you're going to have to fight your way through Dark Valefor, which is likely to one-shot your party if you haven't invested in completing a fair chunk of the Sphere Grid.

7 You Can Backtrack All the Way to Besaid Before Lake Macalania

Your Last Chance for a Bit to Pick Up Anything You Might have Forgotten

Extending the above, if you're a completionist looking to avoid the Dark Aeon fights for as long as possible, you may want to consider turning 180 degrees and running backwards before entering Lake Macalania.

After defeating the Spherimorph in the woods and unlocking the first Jecht Sphere, you'll be able to walk all the way back from the Macalania Woods, through the Thunder Plains, Guadosalam, Mushroom Road, all the way back to Luca. Here, you'll be able to take the ferry back to Besaid, where you can tie up any unfinished business before hitting the point of no return.

So, if you missed Besaid's Destruction Sphere on the first go, and Valefore's Overdrive, now is the time to do it. While backtracking, you'll also want to find Jecht Sphere's spread throughout the world. By doing this, you'll be able to acquire nine out of the ten spheres available, unlocking three out of the four overdrive's Auron can learn in the game.

While it can be a pretty unintuitive trip, it's neat that the game lets you do this before punishing you with Dark Aeon fights later in the game.

6 Collecting all the Al Bhed Primers

Textbook Collectors Items

The Al Bhed primers are a unique mini-game to Final Fantasy X where, throughout your journey, you'll be able to pick up these small tomes that'll reveal the Al Bhed's language to you.

There are over 26 primers across the world of Spira, with some tucked away in some obscure areas.

Of course, this is Final Fantasy X we're talking about, so you better believe that if you miss some, you won't be able to go back to them later.

Which is the case for Al Bhed primers 19-23. That's right, you can miss a total of four Al Bhed primers for good, and frustratingly, they show up towards the final stretch of the game. Make sure you priotize these so you don't miss out permanently.

5 The Dark Aeons

The Stuff of Nightmares

Alright, I've spoken enough about them at this point; let's dive into the Dark Aeons.

After defeating Seymour at the Macalania Temple, priests of Yevon will pop up in select locations, and will ambush you by summoning Dark Aeons. These are some of the toughest fights in the game, and without the right gear and finishing a majority of the Sphere Grid, you're likely to get taken out before you can summon Yojimbo.

There are some neat strategies you can use to help make the fights far easier. For example, you can switch to Yuna so she can summon an Aeon to tank a hit for the party. If you're also grinding for the best gear in the game, you'll be able to farm Dark Matter from Dark Yojimbo in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth by repeating encounters.

One that's very helpful is, with some clutch movement, you can isolate the Dark Magus Sisters, so you only need to fight one at a time, instead of all three together.

Once you beat all the Dark Aeon's in the game, you'll be rewarded with the superboss Penance, who to this date is one of the hardest superbosses in the entire Final Fantasy franchise. This beefy boy can take players up to over an hour to beat, so between you and me, I won't judge you for using Zanmato to get it over and done with.

4 How to Get Easy Sphere Levels Late Game

Grind be Gone!

Final Fantasy X is one of the grindiest games in the series. This is because this entry veered away from your usual level 99 cap, and instead implemented a Sphere Grid, which every character can spec into. While you can beat the game without filling the Sphere Grid for everyone, if you're looking to beat the toughest superbosses in the game (without spamming Zenmato), this is almost mandatory.

Thankfully, the community found a pretty easy solution to help players grind sphere levels easily without wasting days of their life.

For this, you'll need to unlock the Don Tonberry boss in the Monster Arena by capturing one of each fiend in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth. After this, you'll want to equip your party with weapons that have the 'Overdrive > Ap' ability.

Before the fight, you'll want to set the character who's killed the most monsters in the game (Either your Auron, Wakka or Tidus) Overdrive mode to Stoic, and the other two companions to Comrade mode. The Don Tonberry will inflict major damage (often one-shotting) anyone who hits it. Stoic turns the damage taken into AP, with Comrade sharing it among the other party members.

Once the Don Tonberry gets close enough to the party, you can easily cast Flee and inherit all the AP points from the battle. These can net you anywhere between 25-40 sphere levels per attempt, so you'll be gliding through the sphere grid in no time. Once you run out of spheres, just use any of the Extract abilities on Kottos in the Monster Arena to get 40 spheres per attempt to top yourself up.

3 Airship Codes

Hope You Brought a Guide

Nothing dates Final Fantasy X more than its hidden airship codes. You see, Final Fantasy X was developed during a time when printed guidebooks were all the rage (due to the lack of information freely available on the internet), so developers would hide these hidden codes in the game to encourage players to buy them and find the hidden easter eggs throughout.

While you can manually search for all but three of these on the Airship's map, there are three codes, GODHAND, VICTORIOUS, and MURASAME that you'll have to type in. If you have great memory, you can piece together the words hidden in Al Bhed ciphers across Spira, but it is a fair bit unintuitive to connect the dots that they're related.

Unfortunately for early 2000s gamers as well, you'll need the GODHAND code to unlock Rikku's Ultimate Weapon of the same name, which is a must for going up against some of the toughest superbosses in the game.

2 Seymour's Overdrive

Points for Style!

During the Sinspawn Gui boss fight during Operation Mi'Hen, Seymour will briefly join your party to fend off the poison-spewing creature. Thanks to Seymour's access to higher level spells, you should be able to make quick work of the boss.

However, if you decide to delay the battle, you can fill Seymour's Overdrive to full, unleashing his powerful Requiem attack to well and truly take out the Sinspawn for good.

It's one of those moments where, in the moment, you probably don't consider if this guest party member would even have an Overdrive, only to discover that the devs actually thought it out.

What's also interesting is that this is the only time Seymour will ever cast this move, meaning a majority of players never see this move. Which I have to admit, is a little disappointing as the animation for it is stellar.

1 The Sun Crest in Yunalesca's Boss Room

Hope You have a Zanmato Ready

I don't think there's a worse feeling in gaming than returning to Yunalesca's boss room (a source of trauma for us already) only to get jump scared by Dark Bahamut, one of the toughest boss fights in the game.

Usually, this would be something you could avoid until you were finally ready to take on such a great feat. However, hidden in this room is one key item in obtaining Tidus' Ultimate Weapon. So, in a cruel twist, in order to get the means to defeat Dark Bahamut, you must first get through him.

Thankfully, there is a way to obtain the Sun Crest before Dark Bahamut spawns. Right after defeating Yunalesca, make sure you return to her boss chambers and head down the stairs far in the back of the room. This should spawn the Sun Crest, letting you grab it, Superboss free.

However, if you return here after obtaining the Airship, you will get ambushed. It's honestly completely understandable after the Yunalesca fight for someone to forget entirely by accident, but you'll absolutely be kicking yourself if you forget to grab this item before leaving Zanarkand.