Final Fantasy X

The Good
Ever since Final Fantasy series reached the "mainstream", its creators have been paying much attention to visuals and cinematic presentation.

Final Fantasy X is no exception: the first thing you notice when you fire it up are graphics and cutscenes. From a technical viewpoint, the game does to Playstation 2 what Final Fantasy VII did to Playstation - pushes the console to its limits. Not only are the character graphics fabulous - the backgrounds match them fully. Part of them are still pre-rendered, but there are also some very impressive real-time 3D visuals.

CG movies are absolutely gorgeous; while many of them are simply technical "eye candy", some are really memorable thanks to their usage of camera work, visuals, and music. Yuna's wedding, for example, is truly a great piece of CG animation. In short, expect the usual Square artistry and cinematic talent: if you play their games just to see beautiful cutscenes, Final Fantasy X would be perfect for you.

Dramatic storytelling has always been an important component in Final Fantasy games, and Final Fantasy X certainly does not disappoint in this aspect. It delivers a personal, romantic tale with a touch of melancholy and sadness that I'm always ready to appreciate.

The story is told entirely from Tidus' perspective, taking the shape of his memories about the past, with his reflexions and thoughts about what has happened to him. Unlike other Final Fantasies, where heroes come from different parts and join together despite having different motives, Final Fantasy X is fully concentrated on Tidus' personal experience. He is the only stranger, the only outsider, the one who has lost his home forever. There are many plot elements here we've seen many times in previous installments of the series: romantic love, family matters, psychological conflicts, and so on. The narrative also tries to deal with deeper issues, such as religion and its influence on people's lives - though, like most games, it hardly convinces in that aspect.

Spira, the world of Final Fantasy X, has an interesting Asian flavor, superficially resembling South China, or Thailand with a bit of India. The melancholic, "sleepy" and exotic atmosphere of the game is complemented by a lovely musical score, with the piano introduction standing out as one of Nobuo Uematsu's most nostalgically characteristic creations.

The new character growth system is pretty interesting - that is, until you realize that it's just a fancy version of abilities that have been present in the series for a long time. Still, from time to time (actually only near the end of the game) Final Fantasy X does manage to convey a bit of that magical RPG-ing feeling that comes when you train a summoned monster to inflict obscene amount of damage by your own choice.

The Bad
For years, Final Fantasy series has been trying to set itself apart from the formulaic, linear structures of its genre brethren. Optional companions, jobs, abilities, hidden areas and monsters - all that distinguished those games from generic Japanese RPGs that told you exactly how they should be played. Alas, Final Fantasy X seems to be the first one in the series that neglects precisely those aspects that made it refreshingly and appealingly different.

Final Fantasy X is too linear. There is no way around it, and it really hurts. It is by far the game's most serious flaw, and it sucks the fun out of it. Lack of a world map and narrow hostile areas means that exploration in the style of earlier Final Fantasies is no longer possible. You follow a pre-determined path for almost the entire game; only before the last dungeon you finally acquire an airship. But you can't physically navigate it; all you can do is select a location from a menu.

Granted, there are still a few optional locations with side quests and optional bosses the series is famous for. But the sensation of exploring the world on your own is sorely missed. Remember how fun it was to drive vehicles and even breed chocobos to uncover more and more of the world map in Final Fantasy VII? Unfortunately, you won't have any of that here. You'll travel from one small town to another in a straight line. Hostile areas connecting those settlements often consist of plain roads without any branches. The only interesting locations are temples where you'll have to solve puzzles to proceed.

Customization is lacking as well. Gone are the rich equipment possibilities of earlier Final Fantasies: all you can do now is have a generic class representative equip one single type of weapon and armor. There is still the relatively free-form character development the series has become known for (i.e. you can eventually have your tank cast black magic or whatever), but this is achieved only through the needlessly complicated ability grid. It feels more artificial - and certainly less expansive - than the convoluted system of Final Fantasy VIII.

The series' trademark active-time combat has been replaced by a vanilla turn-based system. Apparently it was done to make battles more tactical; in reality, they only became more predictable and devoid of challenge. The possibility to replace a character at any time during the battle simply means that you have an overpowered party with a fully healed "bench" preventing you from ever coming close to danger.

The Bottom Line
Some people play Final Fantasy games for their melodramatic stories and artistically appealing cinematic direction. I certainly do not oppose those; but to me, Final Fantasy is also (and primarily) about traveling, finding little secrets, and having different ways to build up your characters - that is, all things pertaining to gameplay. And that is, sadly, precisely where Final Fantasy X falls behind its more entertaining, longer-lasting predecessors.

The Good
Well, it's Final Fantasy X. After having some very great experience with other Final Fantasy titles, I wanted to play this too. I buy my PS2 only for this game (I have a couple of other games now, but this is the main one). And yes, it was worth is.

Final Fantasy X is very innovative. Battle are no longer ATB, but CTB - That mean turn per turn system. Each attack consumes time, depend of the attack itself and of the speed of the characters. So a quick character's turn will come more often, like in ATB, but you have all your time to set your commands, like in the original turn per turn system. This new system add a lot of strategy, and make the game more enjoyable. It works very great. Also, the level up system is kinda particular. It take places on a sphere gird, and your character can move from sphere to sphere and activate them to rise their stats and learn new attacks. Each characters have its default sphere range, but can also overpass it with key spheres and overflow in the whole sphere gird. This system, while not the best system ever seen in the series, is great, and make levelup very addictive.

The overkill system was a particularly great innovation. When you kill a monster with a brutal hit (I don't know the exact requirements, but you have to use a weapon or spell that is it's weakness or do a critical hit), the icon "overkill" will appear, and you'll got more EXP and items after the battle. So you see the extra challenge that is to overkill bosses, that often leave rare items. One flaw is that you'll get more EXP from weaker monster that are easier to overkill, but often easier monsters doesn't give enough AP even when overkilled to compete again stronger monsters, so that doesn't ruin the game by allowing the player to rise its levels with weaker monsters.

Overall, the game is a lot about game play. It's not one of those RPGs with great story, great graphics and boring battles. It is FAR of it.

By the way, the story. It is definitely a bit below the average Final Fantasy plot, it is a bit too linear. But it is still interesting. Sin, an enormous monster, is attacking the town where Tidus lives. Then, he'll wake up at a totally different place. After a while, you'll be rescued by people that make you figure that you town was destroyed 1000 years ago, and that looks to have much more experiences with that Sin. They're all about praying a god called Yevon in the hope to banish Sin forever, but it doesn't really work. You have to travel to figure the truth out. Also, this is strongly related to aeons, the summons of FFX. I'll let you discover more in the game.

One thing that take a great place in FF10 is the graphics. Square did everything to use the PS2 are wisely as they could. While fighting, each character is so much detailed, they all have their own style, and so you'll never be bored to fight monsters again and again. The magical effects are also soo well done.

There isn't any longer difference between cutscenes and gameplay. Yes, there is a few pre-rendered cutscenes, but most cutscenes aren't prerendered, because they didn't need to, the graphics are detailed enough. Now there isn't only pre-rendered background like in FF7-9, but a mix between real 3D environments (large maps) and pre-rendered background (small maps). This works pretty well, and thank to the 2D plan on the upper right corner, you won't get lost.

The characters are all dressed up very strangely. But when you grow used to it, you'll eventually love them. They even talk while fighting ! This leads me to another stuff, the acting. It is welcome, while battling to have voice of the characters. Yuna and most NPC have horrible acting. Tidus and Rikku, while okay, could be a lot better. Auron, Wakka, Kimari and Lulu got perfect acting. I think the acting of characters is better in Japanese, so I don't really care to evaluate the game, that is from Japan.

Another thing I liked is seeing the spirit of the monster leaving its body when defeated through some light spheres. You'll see those "spirit light spheres" (not sure it's their official name) very often through the game. Overall, adding the fact that the save points are called "save spheres", and among the sphere gird, the game seems all about spheres (there is also spheres involved in puzzles you have to complete through the game). This is kind of strange.

FF10 have a wide choose of great music, especially the battle theme. I think it is one of the best battle theme over the whole FF series, it won't get on your nerves are battle themes did in older FFs. However, for the first time in the FF series, there is also a wide choose of horrible music. Not only Nobuo Uematsu (the traditional FF composer) did the music, but Junya Nakano and Masashi Hamauzu too (these already worked on Front Mission - Gun Hazard). The last two did a couple of great songs and a lot of horrible song each, while the first tend to keep his good old traditional style (well, he did some bad stuff too). The "Song of Prayer" (aka Hum of the Fayth) is quite amusing, it was a great idea to input a such song in a game, and let it take a place in the gameplay. (in the case of you doesn't know, this is a song related to aeons).

The game is pretty challenging. It isn't too hard, while it can get hot on some bosses. At the beginning, it will see really really easy (that is until you reach Mi'hen highroad). After that it will be hard, but not ridiculously. Any beginner in RPGs could beat the game without suffer its lack of overall experience. However, there is a lot of side-quests. I've heard half of the game is about side-quest, if you do them all. I completed the game with practically no side-quests myself, so don't be afraid, the game isn't that hard. But if you want challenge, you cannot miss this title. It has some optional bosses that looks really impossible to beat, killing your party in one single attack. You'll need a FAQ if you want to complete some of the side quests.

The Bad
While FFX has so called great graphics, I still have something to complain about. When fighting huge enemies in dark places, the camera will zoom in order to see the whole enemy, and you characters becomes so small, and adding to the fact that the screen is dark, you won't recognize them, and you'll mess up in your commands. That flaw is annoying.

The pseudo hardrock "Otherworld" steamed theme you'll hear at the beginning and during the final battle incredibly suck. The "Big Boss theme" is also a bunch of pseudo hardrock, but with no melody, only distortion guitar and bass chords, it also suck. And the normal boss theme isn't really bad, but too "dramatic". While the music is great, the theme isn't really appropriated to a boss theme. Overall, there is some unforgivable things about the soundtrack, considering its from Square.

And yeah, the characters have "real time facial sentiment" when talking. It sure is enjoyable a lot to see the character look close to real when talking, but a simple small mistake and they look totally ridiculous, and this happen several times through the game, especially to Tidus. Look at the beginning when he first got his sword, or latter he's fed by Rikku. Doesn't he looks absolutely ridiculous ? (those are just example I had in mind). Also, they will sometime move in a way that looks great, and then after repeating that exact movement 3 or 4 times, they'll appear ridiculous. Such things doesn't happen in battles, but on the field. I'll never repeat this enough, in battle, the characters looks perfect in all their movements, and also on most cutscenes on-field, that it is a shame that a little number of them are somewhat wrong.

Oh, yeah. It will sometimes happen to you to die after one hour of more of leveling up, and that is quite frustrating. Unlike in the Dragon Warrior games, you cannot keep your experience and items with half of money, and unlike Final Fantasy 4-9, save points are quite rare (because, if they weren't rare, it would allow you to always restore your health and mana, and then the game will become too much easy). If you played the 3 first FF on the NES, you'll be used to that, because it pretty much the same story. Fortunately, there is a save point right before almost every bosses, so you won't have to level up AND fight boss while not saving, as in the first 3 Final Fantasy games.

Finally, there is a last flaw. You'll way to often get weapons (or armors) after battle, and you'll have easily 30 weapons per characters, additionally you often got poor ones (or strong, but not interesting enough). The game allow you to modify your weapons to get your own effects, that is great, but each random encounter will frequently give you useless new weapons. They better give more rare items allowing to improve items (that would become less rare).

Those small flaws apart, there isn't really anything bad about FFX. And I could write much much more into "the good", but that wouldn't be very useful, since other people already did it.

The Bottom Line
YES, it's great ! You won't found anything bad except the few lines above, and you'll found much more fun that what I can say in some lines in "the good". It was one more great RPG experience to play this to me, and the game has all it has to be interesting : Originality, innovation, traditional stuff from older FFs, side-quests, challenge, great graphics, great music, nice storyline... What do you want better, after all ? Thank you, Square !!

The Good
As the 7th from the series (only those series that have numbers, though) changed the world of Final Fantasy into fully 3D land, the 10th one changed not one big thing but many smaller ones bringing variety of teh same to the fans and an enjoyable experience to the newcomers. This game is without a doubt one of really-expected up to date of its release, so it was only logical to expect a lot from such a game. But guess Square didn't learn on mistakes made by some other company (Westwood with their Tiberian Sun, which ended up with game being loved almost only by the loyal fans of the series, yeah, like me, but in this case, I am no fan of neither Square nor Final Fantasy in general, but can't say I don't enjoy in moments of time).

The thing which I probably like the most in this game is the fact that you don't need senseless straying from the storyline to upgrade your characters, playing along the story is more than enough to upgrade your characters to needed strength for every incoming battle, and that includes raising your bahamut's strength to 99999 points of damage (yes, you heard it right, without training aside the main plot). Some battles are tricky but neat. It is all made to enjoy, so even newcomers to the series shouldn't have too much of the problem even with the toughest bosses (I suck at FF battles and I passed them all, so go figure the easyness :)

The upgrading scheme is completely new and consists of several types of spheres which upgrade your agility, strength, magic, and other stuff accordingly as you use them. This way there is no character level mentioned, but you will alone know how much did you upgrade someone by activating certain sphere slots.

The entire game shines gameplay-wise!

From the nice character movements, to the wonderful pre-rendered cinemtics that many of you probably loved (shame on me they didn't affect me as some of other games did, including Final Fantasy 8). For the first time, Square introduced voice-acting in the FF series which resulted in such a nice assemble with the characters, accents and tones marked them unique undoubtedly. On the contrary to all those dark-moody characters from previous FF series (I guess 9th one has exception, too), main character in this game, Tidus, is lively and funny as could possibly be, making the entire atmosphere rise in laugh whenever you may consider it boring ot too dramatic. He alone will never allow you to get bored, I assure you.

It is an overall nice addition that PAL version of Final Fantasy X comes as a Special Edition and includes an extra "Behind the Final Fantasy" DVD. There you can find comments by many Square's developers, and actors for the two main characters in the game. Plus some more nice additions, like music video of "Suteki da ne".

The Bad
Here comes something I never expected I will be writing for this game. In fact, I never expected to write anything against this game in general, and no matter I like its gameplay and wouldn't want Square to change it back to difficulty hard as the previous ones had, some things are still in the lack zone.

Ingame graphics are nice, but not something you would expect to see from SquareSoft, quality-wise. Having in thought this game came out almost simultaneously as Metal Gear Solid 2, and the fact that much more people are familiar with the Square than Konami title, it would be nice that Square prevailed with their game over MGS2 with the quality level, and not with their name. Well, that's their drawbacks, and although many players probably didn't play MGS2, the graphic of MGS2 beats the heck out of FFX's any effects used in the game. And for those who think that MGS2 has pre-rendered vides, you're wrong. That game doesn't have a single pre-rendered cinematic at all, everything is real-time and using ingame engine. However, it matches even the quality of Square's pre-rendered CG in FFX. But we just have to keep in mind that Final Fantasy does have the wider area of players hence must be playable even by little children, so the contents and graphic must use colorful scheme and not so realistic things, but hey, it has the fantasy word in its title, doesn't it?

The biggest disappointment, however, and don't hang me for this when I say it, is the story. Can't believe that I say it, but really, even story of obnoxious (by me, that is) FF7 is much better and more promising. But story as a story might pass for a short fairytale, but it has simply too many gaps and holes that are left unexplained and empty that it simply starts bothering. Maybe that's why Square's making FFX-2, maybe they got some objections so they're trying to fulfill the story, heh. Anyway, Final Fantasies are known to have touching story with many nice moments to encounter, yet this one simply lacks them. Maybe that's one of the changes too, but they just didn't manage to achieve the level FF8 or FF6 had to touch a player. What, a war against Sin, with heavy casualties on both sides, and now you go cry 'cos it's sad when everybody dies. Well, that's a crap. But I still like this game a lot more than most other Final Fantasies so I guess that gives me the right to criticize it a bit, too.

As for the music, well, fans, I understand you like Nobuo Uematsu, I like his music too, and I too have some favorite composers of mine. But still, don't you think there should be time to quit listening to the same stuff over and over again? I mean, themes are so similar and same-fashioned as those in previous of the series that it can't stop striking you that you heard it in some of the other FF games already. Exception goes to "Suteki da ne" which is really wonderful song, but hey, such themes usually differs. Maybe it would be time to finally change the battle theme and others, huh? Music as a music is perfect, but too similar to what we used to hear. I mean, take other game series, Gabriel Knight, WarCraft, Command & Conquer, they all have almost entirely different music score from each game in the series. Final Fantasy on the other hand, starts creating a powerful universe almost as powerful as Star Trek and Star Wars which also can't accept to change some of the songs that we all probably heard zillions of times, and will continu hearing them. Sure, soundtracks exist for that purpose, but let different games have different music. For sake, FF games aren't even sequels to each other. Why treating them as such.

Cinematics in FFX are most of time useless as graphic ingame doesn't differ that much. Well, for Tidus it does, but for most of others, not that much. Square should rather make the cinematics a bit longer than 2sec and use them at right needed moments, and not having them all over game you don't even know what's what.

This game isn't something that I expected it with so much joy to be - unique. (sigh)

The Bottom Line
Not the finest game that came out of Square, but could be considered finest in the Final Fantasy series up to date quite easily. It brought so much more to the FF titles, many differences and kept most of stuff still the same (enemy types which probably drag their way from the early FFs, like that giant tomato from hell... hmm, did Id took it from Square or was it vice-versa). On the contrary to prequels, this one is much more linear and even gives you the mini-map that constantly points your needed direction. Hardcore fans might not like that change, but many of you probably will. I know I do. The truth is that you cannot find too big of a choice for PS2 games as you can for PC, so this one can be considered among the top of PS2 games so far. If you would exclude some really creative PS2 achievements like Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, or a few more rare, this one would be on top of it all. And you probably should have it in your collection no matter whether you like Square or not. Personally, I ain't so attached to them, but they made one of my all-time fav games, Parasite Eve. Gotta love 'em for that matter.