Summary

  • Most consider Final Fantasy 10 to be one of the three best Final Fantasy games due largely to its narrative, leveling system, and soundtrack.
  • Fans have created unique challenge runs for Final Fantasy 10, like Ragnar Alvarr's Special Abilities Only run and RPG Challenge Runs' ChatGPT run.
  • Other notable Final Fantasy 10 challenge runs include ChrisTenarium's No Sphere Grid run, Primalliquid's No Healing run, and Staposian's No Damage run.

The best Final Fantasy game tends to vary from person to person, although most tend to be in agreement that Final Fantasy 10 sits somewhere in the top three. The 2001 title features an incredible narrative, an innovative leveling system, and what is arguably the best Final Fantasy soundtrack of all time.

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It's the kind of game that makes you want to complete it over and over again, although this can become a little tedious after the third or fourth playthrough. To get around this, fans have come up with a wide variety of Final Fantasy 10 challenge runs to help keep things interesting, the best and most impressive of which can be found down below.

5 Ragnar Alvarr's Special Abilities Only Run

A few people have tried to complete Final Fantasy 10 using nothing but Special Abilities over the years, but the first person to pull it off was an Austrian YouTuber and Twitch streamer named Ragnar Alvarr. As with a lot of the other great FFX challenge runs, his attempt required an awful lot of grinding, particularly during the early stages of the game. The rules he chose to follow certainly didn't help in this regard.

With the exception of Tidus (who was allowed to acquire Kimahri's Lancet ability), party members were only able to learn their own Special Abilities, meaning that Alvarr couldn't just send everybody over to Rikku's Sphere Grid to learn Steal and Use. Unsurprisingly, Rikku ended up being the run's MVP due to these stipulations, although Alvarr still found ways to utilize all of the other party members.

4 RPG Challenge Runs' ChatGPT Run

It's amazing how far AI technology has advanced over the past few years, with services like ChatGPT now able to help users with a wide variety of tasks. This even includes completing Final Fantasy 10, as demonstrated by the RPG Challenge Runs YouTube channel. The rules of this FFX challenge run were fairly simple: ChatGPT must offer clear instructions rather than vague recommendations and all of the instructions that it gives must be followed to a tee.

The run was a little messy in places, particularly during the underwater ruins section near the beginning of the game. However, as the chatbot's understanding of Final Fantasy 10's core mechanics improved, the run began to go a lot smoother. It even came up with an innovative strategy for the final boss, allowing Yu Yevon to continue using Graviga until his HP was low enough for Tidus to one-shot him with a regular attack.

3 ChrisTenarium's No Sphere Grid Run

As anybody who's ever played Final Fantasy 10 will already know, the Sphere grid is incredibly important, with players using it to both increase their stats and learn new skills. Despite it being the only way for Tidus and the rest of the party to grow stronger, though, it took less than three months for players to successfully complete the game without ever touching the Sphere Grid, thanks in large to the huge damage potential of Yuna's Aeons and the OP nature of Rikku's Mix Overdrive.

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The NSG challenge run became so popular that it's now a recognized category over at SpeedRun.com. The current record holder is ChrisTenarium, whose sub-four-hour Cutscene Remover time is ridiculously impressive considering the fastest Any% run of the game is only around one hour faster. Some players have taken the NSG concept even further, imposing additional restrictions like no Summons and no Trio or Quartet of 9999.

2 Primalliquid's No Healing Run

Primalliquid began creating YouTube videos back in 2017, but it wasn't until he started completing challenge runs that he really made a name for himself. Perhaps his most ambitious Final Fantasy 10 challenge run came in mid-2024 when he attempted to complete the entire main story without ever healing or absorbing damage. Story heals were allowed due to them being unavoidable, but any other form of healing was strictly forbidden.

These rules created a rather big problem, as interacting with Final Fantasy 10's save spheres fully restores the party's health and MP. This meant that Primalliquid was forced to rely on autosaves for most of the run and could only play Final Fantasy 10's Blitzball mini-game immediately after a story heal. Sadly, due to the Gravity-based attacks of the Sinspawn Ammes and Geosgaeno mini-bosses, he was forced to use a solitary Hi-Potion during the Klikk fight in the underground ruins. However, after finishing the tutorial section, Primalliquid was able to complete the rest of the run without manually healing once.

1 Staposian's No Damage Run

On the same day that Primalliquid made the final cut of his no healing run available to his YouTube Members, another YouTuber named Staposian released an incredibly impressive no damage run of Final Fantasy 10. This is exactly what it sounds like, with Staposian attempting to complete the entirety of the game without losing any health. The run began after he first gained access to the Sphere Grid and ended with the death of Yu Yevon.

In addition to a ridiculous amount of skill, this run required patience, as taking even a single hitpoint of damage would result in Staposian having to reload his last save. There was one allowance made, as it's impossible to avoid Yunalesca's Hellbiter attack at the beginning of her second phase, but Staposian cleverly got around this by going into the fight with armor that increased the character's health by 20% and then removing it after taking damage, resulting in everybody finishing the fight at max HP.

Honorable Mention - Alymere's Water Flan One-Shot

Although not technically a Final Fantasy 10 challenge run, it would be wrong not to mention Alymere's Water Flan kill. Like many others over the years, Alymere wondered whether it was possible to have Tidus one-shot the Water Flan in Besaid in order to skip the magic tutorial with Lulu and Wakka. In the end, he was able to do exactly that, although it took more than 100 hours of grinding to finally get the job done. It was well worth the effort, though, if only to see Wakka make a fool of himself after the Water Flan goes down.

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Final Fantasy 10
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Released
December 17, 2001
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WHERE TO PLAY

DIGITAL
PHYSICAL
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Developer(s)
Square Enix
Publisher(s)
Square Enix
Platform(s)
PS2
Genre(s)
JRPG
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