So my experience with the Final Fantasy franchise has been littered with half-finished attempts at beating some of the games. Let's see, I quit playing Final Fantasy I cause it was stupid with a broken battle system. I quit playing IV cause getting money was way too tedious but to be fair I played the PS port. I quit playing VI for some reason that I don't know. I quit playing VII because I got a bit too scared. I quit playing the VIII demo cause it was too hard....and history has shown that it wasn't worth my time anyways. And while I don't want to say I quit playing XII...I probably have because it got way too overwhelming for me. Now for some reason, I got it in my head that X was going to be the Final Fantasy game that I was going to beat going as far as vowing to do so in the public, twittering my progress on my twitter account....which you should be following and even buying Final Fantasy X-2 to ensure that I did beat X. So what are my thoughts on this? Let's find out as we dig into Final Fantasy X.
So you start off as Tidus, the best blitzballer that's currently alive since the best blitzballer ever, Tidus's father Jecht, has been missing for 10 years. So as Tidus's starts proving his awesomeness in a game, some evil being called Sin comes by and destroys the city but lucky for Tidus, his guardian Auron comes by and helps him kick some ass before they get swallowed up by Sin into the land of Spira. But before long Tidus has to have his butt saved by the savage Al Bhed led by the non-savage and really sexy Rikku who can speak English. But before long Sin attacks and you're thrown to some other place where you meet the lovable moron Wakka and through some hijinks, I don't think that they're wacky hijinks, you meet the really sexy Yuna, the really sexy Lulu and the beast man Kihmari. With everyone together, you journey on to find a way to kill the hell out of Sin so he can stop his reign of terror.
The story of X is a bit flawed but it has its moments. The first strike is that 80% of the game is told pretty much through flashback. That means everything is a fore-gone conclusion, there isn't any tension on who's going to live or die and you don't get much chance to explore the world as you run around in a very linear manner. It isn't until very late in the game that you can get an airship and explore the world but even then it's just a list of places you can go instead of flying the thing. Then it takes about 10 hours before the story stops sucking with lack of transitions, various ass-pulls and some spinning wheels but once it gets going then it gets really good with decent entertainment and emotional moments.
The thing that the Square team really trumpeted was that it was introducing voice-acting to the world of Final Fantasy. It's somewhat used like how King's Quest V used the new toy of voice acting which was all the time with mostly competent acting but with a couple exceptions. So our exceptions in X is our two main characters, Tidus and Yuna....which is kinda bad since they're important because they have the most emotional content in their stories. Tidus is voiced by the guy who does Ratchet from the Ratchet and Clank series...after the first game but that doesn't count. Unfortunately, there is no difference between Tidus and Ratchet making it very weird to hear, I kept expecting Clank to show up and school Tidus with his robot intelligence. It's just not a good voice for me to hear coming out of a human's mouth. Then there's Yuna, while I may be too harsh on Tidus, I can never ever be harsh enough on Yuna. She sounds like a malfunctioning robot with weird inflection and Shatner-esque pauses that don't work at all. Almost every emotional power that could happen doesn't since Yuna's voice just is unable to convey emotion, it's sad. Everyone else is at least competent and some are even good.
Also, this game does away with all those fancy experience points like the rest of the Final Fantasy games. It has sphere points which are kind of like experience points but they're spheres. And when you gain a level, you don't have all your stats increased like the rest of the FF games. You get a sphere grid where you can choose what stat you want to increase and what abilities you want to learn...even though progression is mostly linear. The fatal flaw is that you gain levels way too fast and it is quite easy for you to be over-leveled and overpowered. That's not a bad thing but it makes the game a bit too easy most of the time. To be fair it is a great idea and FFXII will tweak the idea into something usable, balanced and awesome with the licensing system.
This game is flawed but there are enough moments for me to not make this a waste of time. The voice acting is good, but not great other than Tidus and Yuna. The story takes a while for it get good but when it does it gets really good. The battle system is a great throwback to the old-school Final Fantasy games where you didn't have this ATB crap to worry about as you choose your strategy wisely. The sphere grid was a nice idea but a bit poorly executed. Then there's blitzball....which is a horrible game with poor controls and it sucks and you suck for liking it! Thankfully I just played it twice before I realized how useless it was. But it will always be the first Final Fantasy game I ever beaten and that does make me a bit proud.
7/10
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