FINAL FANTASY X

It was a game I took a long time to get around to playing, but thought that I would really love. It has a good reputation amongst enthusiasts and so much about it looked like a lot of fun. I do not, however, think that I had unreasonable expectations: just high hopes. Either way, I found myself disappointed – with the story, the gameplay, the graphics, the characters…even the music, because despite the very pleasant opening theme, that prayer theme is a motif I never, never want to hear again if I can help it.

I play most Final Fantasy titles to the ground. I put well over a hundred hours into FFVII when I was in my middle teens, finding every last hidden scene, materia and hidden boss. I put enough into FFXII to beat Yiazmat and Omega mk XIII. I found Ozma in Final Fantasy IX surprisingly easy and still want to revisit the game to try to make more sense out of that ending. But FFX ranks alongside Final Fantasy VIII as one I just didn’t care about and wanted to be over and done with as soon as possible. Granted, I didn’t dislike FFX as much as FFVIII, in which I didn’t even bother to get all the summons because I was so sick of Squall and his grumpy face, but the sidequests in FFX are so downright dull, overlong and pointless that I really cannot be bothered. Blitzball is terrible – I played it through several tournaments, and it never got fun…I recruited one guy with a level 3 sleep tackle, he always got the ball, passed it to one of my strikers, and they always scored. Even when it was balanced, it’s a game of chance and numbers…played…excruciatingly…slowly. And after the hours I played it…my reward was some overdrive moves for Wakka I never used. Great. The chocobo racing was horribly clunky and frustrating, with those bloody seagulls. The monster arena concept was endlessly dull, and even the one zone I did involved fighting 30 annoying enemies to get the last one I needed to come out. And as for dodging lightning 200 times…you must be joking.

The Dark Aeons and Penance I had no inclination to fight. It annoys me that the hidden parts of the game are so ridiculously far ahead of everything else in terms of required level that it’s absurd…and makes a mockery of the regular game, as the tools to help you at that stage are so overpowered that they plough through everything in the final dungeons with absurd simplicity. I can understand Anima taking out all the regular enemies in one hit, but then you get the Magus Sisters who not only could do it three times over, but meant that I have no idea how the final boss fights, because I summoned them and they took out his first form in one hit and his second in an overdrive.

Perhaps it’s because I had recently finished FFXII, but I think this pales in comparison. The fixed camera and weird weightless running animations look poor after XII, and the voice acting is just horrible beside the surprisingly accomplished work there – so bad that when I play X-2, even though I’ve legitimately bought it, I’ll play the ‘undub’. I hate the sphere grid, especially since I ended up taking a couple of my characters down the wrong path with no guidance and they ended up very poor until right at the end. It’s annoying to have to go to its screen after almost every battle as well. I hated the vague shadow of the job system that meant you had to match a certain character to a certain style of enemy, which seemed to me awkward and slow. I hated that weapons only make a difference when attributes are configured. And I really hated how several bosses did not rely on the strength of your characters or intuitive strategies but on your psychic ability to know what statuses they might inflict on you, or what they do when they die. Seriously, there should be no boss that can just inflict a status on you and kill you in one turn, and that I once got a game over screen because I didn’t know that if you struggle inside an underwater boss when its HP is low and kill it, that means instant death for your entire party. Seriously. That’s just extremely poor design.

The graphics didn’t sit well with me, either. I should say that the most positive aspect of this game for me is the character design, especially of Lulu and Auron, who are two of the most visually striking and awesome characters in any game. Summons like Yojimbo and Anima look great, too, and I must say that I find the Magus Sisters to be brilliant despite being quite comedic. Indeed, if you could take Wakka, Tidus and Rikku out of the party and have the Magus Sisters instead, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Despite the nice characters, though, the backgrounds are mostly horribly, horribly repetitive and boring, especially since you don’t get an airship til near the end and even then it mostly makes you trek through areas to get anywhere you want to go anyway. And I haven’t heard anyone else have this problem, but for me the transition between in-game graphics to FMV really jar because to me, Tidus and Yuna especially look like completely different people after the transition…with totally different racial characteristics.

So it doesn’t look nice, sound nice or play well. But with a great story I could forgive that. Well, this ain’t great. Set in a world where the dead don’t go away until they’re ‘sent’, you get one boss who you have to kill about seven million times, yet he keeps coming back. It’s horribly irritating and he isn’t even interesting to begin with. This also leads to several plot twists much less clever than they seem to think they are. A dichotomy between the technologically advanced world of the prologue and the fantasy setting would have been interesting, but it never comes, replaced by some cheap debates underpinning racial prejudice, done very clumsily. And as with XII, the end came too quickly, just as if felt like the story might actually be starting to get good. It never did, leaving FFX best summarised as a trek between a bunch of temples and a big scrap with the big bad guy you know you’ll have to fight from the start.

And that’s not even mentioning how certainty about an afterlife ought to really affect the way death is viewed…

I don’t think I’ll play X-2 that soon. I think I’ll relax with Okami first, then play through Persona 3. Undubbed.