Thursday, December 27, 2012

Final Fantasy X - Final Thoughts

And thus we approach yet another Final Thoughts section.
Prepare yourself for my review and passing thoughts on yet another achieved victory over Final Fantasy!
Observe below as I have...

Final Fantasy X - Final Thoughts

As usual, we'll start with the basics and list some game information. Since FFX completely threw out the idea of levels, I'll just list some character achievements instead. I'm also going to list them in order of "most useful" to "least useful".

Game Stats
Hours Played - 81 Hours. That's a new record as far as the series goes! Nearly a third of that is just the last post.
Character Ratings - As I stated, this is the order of characters from "Most useful" to "Least useful". This simply reflects my opinion based on how they did throughout during battles. NOTHING to do with their actual character or personality.

  1. Wakka - Easily one of the best characters...battle-wise. Long range and powerful.
  2. Yuna - Your white mage throughout the game. Also brings the awesome power of Aeons! Became the star mage for me before the end. Has the easiest to get Ultimate Weapon as well.
  3. Rikku - Brings you the ability to steal, customize items, and her Mix Overdrive has the widest variety of uses while giving you the super item "Trio of 9999". Not the most powerful character though...
  4. Tidus - He comes in at about the middle ground for me. He's decently strong, fairly fast, and gains the Quick Hit attack on his lane. I'd put Auron here, but Auron ended up not being nearly as powerful near the end.
  5. Auron - Your strongest powerhouse for like 70% of the game. Ultimate Weapon is fairly easy to get, and he comes with the useful "Break" abilities. However, I got them with Tidus, so Auron lost a lot of his flavor in comparison.
  6. Lulu - She's your black mage, and that's really her only great use. You have to use her a lot because some enemies are resistant to physical strikes and not magical ones. If you get far enough, you can start teaching others magic and put her to the side. Didn't help that her Ultimate Weapon is one of the most annoying to fully power up.
  7. Kimahri - Ah poor Kimahri. Is he the worst character? Probably not. Unfortunately, I made him the worst character. He starts off as being fairly nice middle ground of power, health, and magical ability, but he's too much of a middle ground. You have to make him into whatever you want, and if you build him wrong, he starts to just plummet downwards. I'll say right now..DO NOT MAKE KIMAHRI INTO A MAGE! There's no point in making him a mage. Push him down Tidus's lane or anybody's elses except Lulu's. His blue magic "Overdrive" is kinda useless once you have all the other powerful abilities and attacks. I also skipped his Ultimate Weapon because screw butterfly catching.
Ultimate Weapons Achieved 
  • Obtained and Fully Powered 
    • Tidus's Caladbolg
    • Wakka's World Champion
    • Auron's Masamune
    • Yuna's Nirvana
    • Rikku's Godhand
  • Obtained and Partially Powered
    • Kimahri's Spirit Lance
    • Lulu's Onion Knight
Overall, I did pretty well as far as actual game achievements. I didn't do everything, but in the end, I didn't WANT to do everything. A lot of the side quests turn into too much time. I was ready to beat the game, so I beat it! I'll cover this more as I go through each portion of my review.

If you've read previous Final Thoughts, you'll know how this goes. If not, I was going to go over my process regardless. For Final Fantasy X, I'm going to cover three basic aspects: Gameplay, Story, and Characters. Each part will contain general coverage of said subject followed by opinions containing compliments and complaints. I always try to be fair, but there are times when a game just annoys me, and things need to be said! Anyways, I'll stop wasting time here and get going! Let's start with the gameplay. 

Ah! The gameplay! Without gameplay, you don't have a game. I guess you'd have...a movie. Final Fantasy X takes a strange turn in the series and goes back to purely turn-based play. It seems strange with several of the titles before it (since FF4) went into Active Time Battle. It's not a bad move though. I honestly really like how the battle plays out, and with it being on a more powerful console, they were able to give it a live-action look. The battles play and flow incredibly well. At many points of the game, instead of shattered glass, the game simply melts into the battle and immediately goes from there. A nice change from the turn-based aspect is the ability to see all the upcoming turns for the next...ten turns or so. With that visible, you're able to see how certain actions can delay your character's next turn or an enemy's turn. It's possible to improve the turn order by just doing different actions. The battle system is probably the strongest point of the gameplay. It feels fast, plays fast, and is pretty cool to see in comparison to previous titles. Overall, battles are fun and well done.

Up next though, we have to cover the system that it all runs on. First and foremost, I don't get this game's super fascination with the shape known as a sphere. Seriously...the game is obsessed with them. They are all over the damn place. Glossing past that, the Sphere system is an interesting and new take on level ups. It allows full and utter customization on a micro detail. This makes the system very "love or hate" though. On the plus side, it's a new and interesting system. There's a lot of room for customization, and it's possible to teach everybody everything if you have the time and huge amount of patience. The Sphere Grid is littered with all forms of useful attacks, abilities, and magic. Unfortunately though, I have to bring up the bad part of the Sphere Grid.

It's a lot of work for generally not much reward. It's a big board game where you mover your pieces around to enable them to grow stronger and more powerful. At the same time though, it's an insanely slow process. Without a current level, it's hard to gauge if you are strong enough to move on or should take time to do more leveling. Kimahri brings up the worst part of the Sphere Grid. He's in the middle of it all and has access to basically everyone else's path. If you aren't careful though and build him like I did, you come out with a big pile of crappy character. Thankfully, only Kimahri truly suffered here, but it's possible to do it with anybody if you make a wrong turn.

In conclusion, the battles are great and all, but the Sphere Grid is...a mix of good and bad. It's really only a good system to someone who wants to fully and totally micro-manage their character's stats. With enough time, patience, and an absence of life outside of game playing, you could maximize your character's to insanely powerful levels. All-in-all though, it's a huge time suck and generally offers little reward as you slowly putter through it. With the gameplay said and done, I'd normally move on to the story review, but I've got a special mention to make for the side quests before I move on.

In Final Fantasy X, the Side Quests are probably among the most annoying ones ever conceived. Seriously, before I was said and done, I really had little enjoyment in any of them. Monster catching was okay, but it wasn't really any different from normal battles, minus a weapon change. Blitzball is a horrible game and just feels badly done at times. You often get cheated because of AI or bad mechanics, and you have to play a LOT of freakin' Blitzball if you want to get Wakka's weapon fully powered. If it weren't for that, I'd have left it behind and never gone back. Lightning dodge...I won't even go into a lot of details, but I'd like to say the following. LIGHTNING DODGE SUCKS! It's not fun. The rewards are minimal and not worth the time or effort. True, I might just suck at it, but it's a purely not-fun mini-game in the end. Chocobo Racing would be okay if I was allowed full control of the bird rather than "turning rights". If that were fixed, it'd have been okay. The Cactuar Hunt was borderline pointless. Luckily, it lets you have Rikku's Mercury Sigil regardless of how you do, but it just felt...blech.

The only thing I'd be nice to in all of this is earning the extra Aeons. The extra Aeons were more than worth the minor amount of trouble involved. Doing Aeon battles was cool too! It was cool fighting Aeons versus other Aeons! There should have been more of this throughout, but you really only have one opponent in most cases...Belgemine. Despite that, it was still cool to see all these big FF figures finally able to duke it out. And that's all I have for Side Quests. They were either not worth the trouble or insanely annoying. That's enough about gameplay though. Let's move on to STORY!

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD! 
(Just warning you)

Ah! The story is the key aspect of the RPG (next to characters). With an RPG story, you get to feel like you are a part of it all. You learn about the world, the characters, and all the events around you. In Final Fantasy X's case, it's a huuuuge pile of religiousness. I've read that the Japanese version was incredibly hefty in religiousness, and they ended up editing and toning a lot of that down. Overall, it's really not a bad story. Guy gets caught up in something and is teleported magically to another time. From here, he learns all about the problems of this period. He meets a pile of new people, and he gets caught up in a huge spiral of religion, hatred, and lies.

All in all, it's really just making fun of a certain highbrow religion that runs today. Talks about how people are blindly following a set of teachings but rarely question it. How there are others who believe different and are persecuted for it. It's good stuff. The world of Spira is run by the religious leaders, but the people live their lives in constant fear of...SIN. As you get further in, you learn that things aren't what they seem. Everybody has been lied to, and the solution they all preach is just a big damn lie. Controversy! Romance! Religion! This should naturally be a really good story, but then the game throws in a screwball. A huge...stupid...screwball.

We have all the stuff happening in the real world, and then we find out that...some of the people aren't real. They're all ghosts and spirits that have lived on miraculously without anybody noticing. (Keep reading. This isn't the screwball.) I could get past that honestly. They explain that people's spirits tend to not want to move on and they become fiends and demons who strike out at the living. I could get past that almost, but then they throw a huge character twist! TIDUS ISN'T REAL! HE'S A DREAM! Somehow, a dream of a ghost-statue made it into real life and is real there...but still a dream. Why did they do this? Why was this deemed a great twist? It's not a great twist. It's just...weird and complicated. They should have just worked it around where he dies at the end. Maybe he dies because of a sacrifice needed or something. Maybe there is more to the time travel bit and Tidus can't stay in the future or it ruins the past. Why not do that? That's better! They decided that Tidus being a dream was the best solution here for some reason. Thanks Square...Thanks.

Glossing past my obvious complaint here, I enjoyed a good portion of the story. It wasn't the best story of the series, but they did some interesting bits. The whole religious aspect of it all was interesting to see from all the different character's points of view. Some of them were all up about it. Some of them questioned it all. Seeing as I'm talking about characters now...let's wrap up the story and dive right into it. To finish up story though, it was good but not perfect. The twist should have been different and better. Now, let's get to those characters.

Once again, Final Fantasy brings us a whole roundabout cast of characters. We've got all kinds of people here of different shapes, sizes, creeds, and beliefs. It's a good mixture of differing people. That being said...it's not the best Final Fantasy cast at all. It's hard to really point the finger at any one character because none of them are beyond amazing. Of the group, my favorite characters were Rikku and Auron. They seemed to be the better done of the group. Rikku feels like she's the one with the most put into her. She voices herself quite often and doesn't let herself get pushed about. Auron is just your badass samurai guy. However, he lends a guiding hand to the group, and it's always funny when he deflects things. Like when he admits to know what was going to happen but not telling them because "It wouldn't change anything". He also brings the most jokes to the table throughout. In my opinion, he's one of the best in the group, However, with good...comes bad.

And if I were to complain about the rest ...Tidus just feels like a bad combination plate. It's a mix of Cloud and Zidane with a touch of Squall's clothing to top it off. (Seriously, what the hell is up with his outfit?) Lulu is okay really, but she spends most of the game being a massive dictionary of everything. Anytime a person asks something, they basically just look over at Lulu and await an explanation. At least she has a decent backstory and character problems though. Wakka isn't the best character, but he has an annoyingness about him. It's the fact that he's the strong believer in this religious adventure. Kimahri is the strong silent type, but he randomly talks at times. As far as character goes, he's really nothing new here. He is also the only non-human one among them. So...bonus points for that I guess? I don't get why Final Fantasy neglects the idea of non-human characters. I'm not saying to bring in something ridiculous, but it'd be nice to see something different in the group. That only leaves...Yuna. She's more of an inbetween for me. She's not a bad character, and she definitely grows throughout the game, but she doesn't really shine at any point. I didn't really find myself liking her that much. Maybe just comes down to different people like different characters, but I'd say a lot of them are just weak characters in general. I have one more point to cover on this, and then I'll wrap up this section.

With most Final Fantasy titles, I take the time to look over the villain of the game. It's really hard to do that since the "villain" is a never truly just one person. Seymour presents himself as a main villain for a bit, but he is just constantly killed to immediately come back later. His evil is that he believes suffering and pain will end with death. It's true that those end in death, but life also ends in death. Therefore...his logic is kinda retarded in most cases. Seymour just doesn't really ooze an evil or villainous aura. He's more like...just an insane and power hungry individual. Sin can't really be personified past talking about Jecht. However, you really only see a little bit of Jecht throughout, so it's hard to form an opinion on him. He's cooler and better than Tidus, but maybe that's just me. There's Yu Yevon, but he doesn't actually have any form of talking at all whatsoever...so yeah.

There are the random NPCs with names to think about, but they are just minor players in all this. It's interesting that you can change their destiny throughout the game, but it doesn't really matter to the end goal. You just...get to see part of their story through. The only one I'd make a mention of is the scholar guy you see throughout. He's got very little story to him, but he does offer up some interesting facts on the side. Chararacter-wise though...he's just a big history book with nothing more to him than that. Sure, these NPCs are a massive enhancement to something from the far-flung past of the old-old titles, but they aren't that great when you compare them to NPCs of more previous titles. (See FF8 or FF9.)

I'm being overly mean on some of the characters, but there are past characters who are much better done. Again, see anything in Final Fantasy 8 or Final Fantasy 9. Most of these main guys just feel a bit lazy when it comes down to it. Overall, you can never truly call any character 100% unlikable. Somewhere out there is someone who just adores the lesser-liked characters like Yuffie or Wakka or Tidus. If I were to give some form of grade or judgement purely on characters, I'd just give the game a pass. They could have given more to each of the people, but they didn't. In the end, people are going to pick who they like out of the group. I liked Rikku and Auron. All the others...pretty meh in comparison. Now...on to the final review!

Final Fantasy X brought the series on to the next generation when it hit the PlayStation 2. It brought highly detailed characters with facial expressions and gave them all voices. It's not the best graphics of the era, but they did a fairly good job making it all work. The battles are probably the highest point of this game. They're quick and fun with lots of options while reviving the classic turn-based style. The Grid Sphere is an innovative and interesting way to level, but it's a lot of work for little pay off and is better for those who want a micro-managed character. The story brings in the usual controversial issues and does them quite well without being too far (technically edited BUT WHATEVER), but I feel that they dropped the ball by making the twist what they did. There are better ways to twist the game, and that wasn't it. Unfortunately, the weakest link for Final Fantasy X is it's array of characters. You'll end up picking favorites as always, but none of them truly shine through as a classic Final Fantasy character. Rikku's about as close as they get in my opinion.

What would I say about Final Fantasy X? Honestly, I'd say to give it a shot. None of the games so far have ever been "DO NOT PLAY", but there are several that come in at higher spots over the others. I'd say that FFX hits somewhere in the middle ground. There are better FF titles, but there are some worse ones. I'm afraid that a few of those are coming up soon...Maybe I'm wrong though. Final Fantasy X gets a pass, and I urge you to give it a try before you pass it up.

This has been another wonderful Final Thoughts of a Final Fantasy titles.
As far as goals go, I only lack two more in the series, and then we can look towards the future of the blog!
I've got an idea brewing, but I won't reveal it yet. You'll find out soon enough though. I thank anybody who took the time to read this and implore anyone to comment on it and give me an idea of what you think.
Seriously...I'm up for anything.

As a final side note before closing, I'm planning a one-shot play of FFX-2 to give a small insight into this strangely placed and very first sequel in the Final Fantasy series. After that though, I'll be picking up Final Fantasy XII and continuing the journey. Thanks for reading and see you soon!

~May the Crystals Guide Me~

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