Flaws

The Final Fantasy franchise is known for recurring elements, such as chocobos, names of magic spells, and summons. While replaying FFX recently I started to notice other less remembered recurring ideas, which really should stop coming back.

Insane Optimism/Morality

I get that the FF games are of the glass half full viewpoint and are generally about a group of diverse individuals coming to together to change the world for the better. Fine, I can accept that. What I can't accept is when the characters take this to an irrational extreme and are still portrayed as heroes.

A brilliant example is present in FFX where Tidus (the protagonist) frequently declares that Yuna won't have to die to temporarily defeat Sin because he'll 'think of something'. Yep that is the sum of is plan, think of something.
It gets worse when the entire group sees a flashback of Tidus' father Jecht declaring that he also 'think of something' and he then proceeds to FAIL COMPLETELY. This would be a perfect time for Tidus to learn a lesson and stop being so arrogantly idealistic. But instead he continues to announce his intent to 'think of something'.
Further more the party then go and kill the one person who can teach them how to temporarily defeat Sin. Their reasoning is that since it stops Sin for a few years it is not worth the lives of two of their friends, ignoring the fact that Sin can easily kill many more people in that time than two. But don't worry, now that they've taken out the one sure fire defence, Tidus and co will really think hard about how to save the world they've endangered.

Ineffective/Stupid Villians

I suppose it is fitting to have pathetic villains to contrast the morally questionable heroes. Or it would be if it was intentional and the you were trying to make some pretentious subversive point.

Let's look at FFX again. The order of Yevon, like all religious groups in videogames, is corrupt. What I find baffling is that they don't even attempt to hide their corruption, and yet some of the PC's are surprised when it turns out the Yevon isn't all that pure. Yuna even grew up in the city of Bevelle (the capital of Yevon) which happens to be a giant machina city (machina is banned). Did she spend her entire childhood with her eyes closed?
Further more the leaders of Yevon seem to make habit of telling people things that will anger them and then get surprised when they get angered. Most noticeably they outright tell summoners that Sin will ALWAYS come back and there is no chance that this time it won't revive (which is the motivation of a lot of summoners). Despite saying this they still expect the summoners to throw their lives at Sin.

So I'm not just referencing just one game, I'll focus on FF7's Shinra now. Initially a power company, they developed a monopoly and in time became the effective rulers of the world. They then precede to act like villians from Captain Planet by being colossal bastards for no reason while also being completely incompetent.
When they discover the location of the eco-terrorist's hideout they drop a plate on it. The city of Midgar is two layers with the second richer layer being built over the poorer original city. So when I say they drop a plate, I mean they drop a portion of their own city onto another part of it. It'd be like Sydney nuking itself so that the radiation would kill some criminals in Brisbane.
It could be said that as supreme rulers of the world they can do whatever they want such as casual genocide and unnecessary evil laughter. And that would be acceptable reasoning if Shinra's massive military force were any good. But as any astute reader could guess from context Shinra's forces are a joke. Only several hours into the game you storm Shinra's headquarters and beat the crap out of the CEO; this is when you're on the first disc of three and you have only half of your party members. If that's not a sign of incompetent enemies I don't know what is.

I'm running too long as usual so I'm going to leave the exciting conclusion for tomorrow*.

*next week