Besides which, every time you came into contact with a fiend foe, your character would pause for half a second to draw their sword, rather than drawing it on the fly. I kid you not when I say that that pause nearly ruined the game for me, so irritating did I find it. Seriously that annoyed me so much.

Anyway, depressing isn't the word for FFX. "Bittersweet" is more like it (and FFX-II, if we're allowed to speak its name, helped clear up some of the sadness). Too, the lightning bolt thing was wholly unnecessary for your average playthrough. You only had to do that to get part of an ultimate weapon, and really, if you could get those weapons, you were already vastly overpowered. Those things were for powergamers / completionists.