I ran into the first boss I had trouble with (Seymour Flux). After getting a game over I was dismayed to have to sit through a 3-4 minute unskippable cutscene before I could reattempt the fight, so after the second game over I looked for some strategy hints online so that I wouldn't have to keep doing that...

The strategy relied pretty heavily on Tidus having Hastega, which he was still 13 moves away from on the sphere grid. (I had already been trying to have him cast Haste on everyone during my two failed attempts, but the boss kept Dispelling my buffs faster than I could set them.) I had to wait until the weekend to do that, because I will fall asleep doing something at night after work that's as dull as grinding random encounters for AP.

To make it somewhat less monotonous, I backtracked as far as I could without access to the airship and then busied myself with catching 10 of each area monster for the monster arena in all 3 areas leading up to my current area. (And here I thought I wasn't going to bother with the monster arena stuff!)

Along the way I ended up doing a side quest that unexpectedly turned a heretofore mysterious and useless item into a useful one, allowing me to open two chests I'd spawned earlier but hadn't been able to open - one containing Kimahri's ultimate weapon and one containing Yuna's.

By the time I finished collecting monsters in those areas, Tidus had enough SP to acquire Hastega, and as a bonus I had enough gil to buy new weapons for Kimahri and Lulu, and to put Zombie Ward on every party member's armor. That time around I had no trouble beating the boss on my first try! The story twist that followed was one I actually hadn't seen coming at all, either. Onward I press...

I've made a lot of progress in this game. I had just exited the Via Purifico before calling it quits last night. There was a minor "twist reveal" in the story a couple hours before that which I'd been predicting since pretty early on (that summoners sacrifice themselves to defeat Sin), so it was nice to have that confirmed, and the reveal was nicely played - I even got a little misty eyed and tight in my throat despite knowing ahead of time that it was coming, because it was so well-executed.

I'm finding the weapon customization system kind of annoying. The cost of adding one trait to one weapon or armor feels way too steep considering how many party members there are and how many different weapons they can all obtain. A large majority of available traits require large to huge quantities of rare mats that you can only get by stealing in combat or finding them in limited quantities inside chests, and the thief only just recently joined the party so even having her steal in virtually every encounter hasn't amassed enough to do shit with shit.

Also, teaching your Aeon new moves basically draws on the same resource pool and you have multiple Aeons to worry about too. Altogether it feels like if you're not going to camp out in the field grinding random encounters for hours on end in every area, both of these systems might as well not exist for you.

On the bright side, most of my party members have gotten far enough along their sphere grid paths to be mastering a second or even third set of moves which is exciting. I taught Kimahri all the basic black magic skills and then backed him up a bit and now he's learning all the status effect attacks. Since he also has Piercing on most of his weapons he can be a backup for Auron, Wakka, or Lulu - not a strong as any of them but what a range of skills! Tidus has been learning time magic, and I'm a few moves away from Yuna learning Use and Steal to back up Rikku.