Final Fantasy X
- Final Fantasy X (2002 on PlayStation 2, 2013 on PS Vita)
Description official descriptions
Tidus is a young athlete who lives in a futuristic city of Zanarkand - "the city that never sleeps". He plays blitzball, a ball game where players throw the ball while flying around. Suddenly, a terrible disaster happens. A huge dark wave engulfs the city, spawning monsters. Tidus comes in contact with the mysterious creature, and as a result finds himself in a different world, a thousand years into the future. The civilization he is used to doesn't exist any more. He learns that the world he knew was destroyed by Sin, a terrible being that is believed to be indestructible. Tidus meets a young summoner named Yuna, and joins her as a guardian on her quest to put an end to Sin.
Final Fantasy X is Japanese-style role-playing game set in a world somewhat similar to South Asia. Only individual locations can be physically explored; there is no "world map" in the game, and exploration is fairly linear. Enemy encounters are random; the game abandons the series' traditional ATB (active-time battle) combat in favor of a Conditional Turn-Based Battle system, in which the turns of the participants are determined by characters' stats and actions, with turn order displayed in the upper corner of the screen.
The game also departs from the usual leveling up system. There are no character levels in the game: instead, experience points received after battles can be allocated by the player directly to upgrade the characters' parameters. Each character has his or her special "sphere map", with straight or branching paths containing spots that increase the character's personal statistics, or teach him or her active and passive abilities. The characters are given distinct class attributes, and it is possible top switch between all the party members during the same battle. Monster summons (called aeons in the game) now behave like playable characters, have their own hit points (HP), and can fight for the party until defeated.
Conversations that occur during cutscenes have voice overs, for the first time in the series. The game features various mini-games, the most prominent of which are blitzball tournaments.
Spellings
- Финальная Фантазия 10 - Russian spelling
- ファイナルファンタジーX - Japanese spelling
- 最终幻想10 - Chinese spelling (simplified)
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Credits (PlayStation 2 version)
561 People (537 developers, 24 thanks) · View all
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[ full credits ] |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 92% (based on 53 ratings)
Players
Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 240 ratings with 19 reviews)
This game is over-rated garbage!
The Good
Gorgeous eye-candy as always. Square does visuals very well, as the games, FF the (disappointingly lame) movie, and FF7 Advent Children prove. The setting was interesting. That aside...
The Bad
Where to begin? The dialogue and voice acting were terrible (ie. "You will hurt no one!") ! The main character Tidus is a lame, watered down Cloud Strife. There really isn't enough to do, since the game is mostly cutscenes. The music is the worst Uematsu has ever written, especially the lame battle music. Blitzball sucked my ass! It was so tedious and pointless. And Wakka! What a lame-o character with his stupid Jamaican (Jar-Jar like) accent! And that horrid scene where whats-her-nuts tries to get our hero to laugh... AWFUL AWFUL AWFUL. I cringe just thinking about it! I hope the titles after this one are much better, because otherwise I won't be bothering with the FF-series any longer. KOTOR was much, much better in every respect! The voice-acting in that was brilliant, the dialogue well-written and the music cool! Take a hint, you people at Square. Seems the North Americans are beating you at your own game!
The Bottom Line
Basically an overlong, interactive movie. There are more cutscenes here than gameplay it seems. Nice graphics and not much else really...
PlayStation 2 · by Chris Parent (5) · 2004
Cho mon, where deh world map, yah?..
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.
PlayStation 2 · by Unicorn Lynx (181771) · 2016
The Good
Back when Sony made better business decisions for their PlayStation brand, they realised that it's not only the hype and technical specs selling a system, it's also carried by a company's most successful game franchises. Just to compare the PS2 and PS3, a fully-fledged Final Fantasy game for the PS3, though announced, is still missing in early 2008, almost two years after the console's release. When FFX hit stores in 2001 it was a mere year after the PS2 had started selling in Japan.
Game designers at Square (which then was "only" Square and not Squareenix yet) realised that they had to take the series to the next level. Graphically they certainly succeeded. Final Fantasy X plays in an oddly anachronistic world that appears to mix sci-fi, elements of the legend of Atlantis and the Bible and contemporary culture, all set before a colourful and lush tropical backdrop. For the first time in the series, the entire game world is rendered in real-time 3D, getting rid of the until then standard overworld map. For their time characters and scenarios were breathtaking in terms of design as well as technically. How much attention was paid to the overall presentation can easily be seen in another first for the series, a voice-over.
Diving into the world of FFX, the experience feels entirely fresh. Its world is interesting, the characters and architecture visually exotic, the cutscenes and overall FX as stunning as players have come to expect from the Final Fantasy franchise, and then some. The story, a religious quest to redeem a world that is flawed in the eyes of the evil opposing it, greatly benefits from the overall oceanic feel.
The Bad
Although visually absolutely stunning in 2001, FFX's gameplay fails to bring as many innovations. Before tactical real-time combat made its debut in FFXII, FFX took a step back and exchanged the then standard ATB system in which characters' turns in battle were determined by a decreasing and refilling time gauge. Battles in FFX are strictly turn-based instead, a feature which hadn't been used in the main series since Final Fantasy III. New elements include being able to exchange characters in-battle and small quicktime events to further empower special abilities, harking back to the team roster and special abilities from FFVI. All this, however, doesn't really make combat a lot more dynamic. If anything it feels even simpler because weary fighters can be exchanged for fresh ones and a sort of ticker on the top of the screen constantly provides players with information on how to best beat the monster they are up against.
The battle system in combination with character development makes the game feel sluggish sometimes. All characters possess only two item slots in which only items from a predetermined class can be placed for each character. Although weapons get customisable later on, very little ever changes about the characters' appearance. Furthermore, the Sphere Grid used to level up characters by spending ability points to move a counter and unlock new abilities or boost old ones appears needlessly cryptic and labyrinthine. One might argue it is little more than a glorified and overcomplicated ability tree.
Stepping away from the series' pre-rendered backgrounds allows for a more immersive feeling while travelling the world. However, this doesn't change anything about the fact that paths are still largely laid out for players to tread. Linearity and formula in general have been and still are a problem of the FF series. This becomes apparent in FFX because gameplay especially in the beginning is often a mere sequence of walking a few steps, fighting a random battle and engaging in one of the many and long-winded talks or cutscenes. While the game certainly gears up later, newcomers will have to muster some patience.
As mentioned before, the story is carried by its exotic setting and diverse plot elements - sadly, the characters aren't always that interesting. The hero is an RPG standard, clueless, blade-wielding youngster with daddy issues, his mentor a silent swordsman, his best friend a lovable oaf and his love interest a mild-mannered, staff wielding enchantress. (Or summoner in this case.) The sometimes awkward English dubbing doesn't help much.
The Bottom Line
Final Fantasy X makes a bold effort to be for the PlayStation 2 what Final Fantasy VII was for the original PlayStation and the series. Graphics, design and music are without a doubt worthy of the series but it seems as though too much effort went into those areas because gameplay as such is lacking interactivity. As such FFX is a mediocre console RPG, albeit on the high level players have come to expect from developer Square.
PlayStation 2 · by Kit Simmons (249) · 2008
Discussion
Subject | By | Date |
---|---|---|
Stealing from robots | St. Martyne (3648) | Sep 11, 2009 |
Favorite character | Jacob Gens (1115) | Feb 16, 2009 |
Favorite song of FFX | Jacob Gens (1115) | Oct 15, 2008 |
Mystery photographer | Jacob Gens (1115) | Mar 6, 2008 |
Thunder Plains | Donatello (466) | Dec 26, 2007 |
Trivia
1001 Video Games
Final Fantasy X appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Al Bhed language
During the course of the game you have to learn the "Al Bhed" language. The language in actuality is a simple substitution cipher. All the vowels equal other vowels (to make actual pronunciation easier), and the rest are the normal letters. Anyone that can do cryptograms can decipher the language right from the beginning of the game, without find all the Primer books. But finding the books makes it a lot easier to read the subtitles.
Cut content
There is an un-intended sequence at the beginning where you can defeat the monster that chases you into the ruins. Obviously they had a change of plans when developing the game. You can view this sequence by using a PS2 Gameshark and enabling high stats.
Music
Final Fantasy X is the first game in the (main) Final Fantasy series where the music is not exclusively composed by Nobuo Uematsu, only a modern remix of the prelude is present (not the actual prelude) and there is no trace of the traditional "a a a a a a g g" battle theme baseline. Although the battle theme of Final Fantasy VII & VIII does not start by this baseline, there is trace of it in songs herd during some important boss battles.
Also, it's the second game in the series where there is no presence of the Final Fantasy theme since Final Fantasy II.
References
While in the Besaid Village the first time, go to the Crusaders Tent. Talk to the first character in the door, and he'll tell you "I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in". Obviously a few of the programmers were Beatles fans.
World map
As of 2002, Final Fantasy X is the only Final Fantasy game that doesn't have a world map with a character moving around. The world map is actually a menu with a locations to choose and a "search" option, that allows you to go to any location on the map.
Awards
- GameSpy
- 2002 – Z.Flo Award (for Yuna)
Information also contributed by Aaron A., Bregalad, Unicorn Lynx
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Related Sites +
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FF-Fan
A fansite that offers all kinds of information on the entire Final Fantasy franchise, including walkthroughs, game media, discussion boards and fan art. -
Final Fantasy Extreme
Site that contains movies, wallpaper, codes, guides, walkthroughs, and general information on the Final Fantasy series. -
Final Fantasy X
Official game website -
Final Fantasy X Memories
Alex describes why Final Fantasy X is a special game -
OC ReMix Game Profile
Fan remixes of music from Final Fantasy X. -
Wikipedia: Final Fantasy X
Information about Final Fantasy X at Wikipedia
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Syed GJ.
Additional contributors: Chris Martin, Unicorn Lynx, Exodia85, Bregalad, DreinIX, —-, Patrick Bregger, Thomas Thompson, FatherJack, A.J. Maciejewski.
Game added January 25, 2002. Last modified March 4, 2024.