Final Fantasy X crashes/freezes right before going inside of Sin

Question

Crashes every single time. This is with the US PS2 version (not international or PAL). I win the battle where Sin slowly opens his mouth. After this I am supposed to go within Sin. But the screen fades to black and stays that way. No post-battle screen displaying AP and Gil. Nothing else happens. Left it like this for 20 minutes and still nothing.

I don't think it's a scratched disc or damaged ps2 because I just had somebody check my ps2 and had the disc resurfaced. Freezes don't happen anywhere else in the game. I suspected it was related to a bad clock battery so I just set the date/time to a much later date then tried again. Didn't work. Neither did trying a different memory card.

Is there some obscure glitch few people know about? I am at a loss to figure this out. I would like to advance to the next stage but can't because of this.

Answer 1

I haven't found anything relating to the original PS2 game, but a lot of people have been reporting a similar glitch were the game effectively soft locks during the Sin fight in the HD remastered version.

The reports of this happening are during the use of certain Overdrive moves or Summons, where the game simply stops responding. It doesn't freeze, the game continues, then nothing further happens.

As far as I'm aware, while this glitch is incredibly game-breaking, I haven't found any evidence of a fix for this, or any advice on how to manage it.

Using Overdirve on Sin causes Softlock

Battle freezes during Sin fight

As you can see, these were posted several years apart, so the issue has never been resolved, and some users have posted about the issue occurring regardless of platform (PC, PS4, Switch, etc).