Final Fantasy X - Game Review
You're probably wondering, why review FFX now? It was released back in 2001, and it's now over four years old. Nevertheless, it remains one of the very best RPGs available for the Playstation 2, and is one of the better incarnations of the acclaimed Final Fantasy series. No review site could be complete without a Final Fantasy X review. If by some awful freak of fate you own a Playstation 2 and you haven't played this game yet, it's my job to convince you: play this game, it is amazing. Hopefully, I won't leave any spoilers in the review either.
The Story
As in all Final Fantasy games, the plot and story are the things that pull you along and keep you playing long into the night. I'm not going to say anything about what happens, but I do want to reassure you that the quality of the story is excellent. Squaresoft have produced some good stories in their time, some a bit strange, others utterly confusing. FFX strikes a perfect balance of the strange and mysterious with simplicity, strong characters and events on an epic scale.
Unlike some of the Final Fantasy games, it doesn't sometimes career off into bizarre subplots that hold up the real action and detract from the importance of the main events. Of course, there are subplots and side quests, but they fit seamlessly into the main story, bar one or two minor quirks involving Cactaurs. When you reach the end of the game, you actually have some idea of what was supposed to be happening, which is uncommon for a Final Fantasy game.
The Characters
Though the 'lead' character Tidus does have a slightly silly lop-sided costume, at least he doesn't have a giant sword with a gun in it or an unexplained monkey-tail. He isn't as deranged as Cloud, and he isn't a sulky annoying brat or some kind of idiot. Squaresoft have occasionally tried a bit too hard to make their protagonists distinctive and proactive, but Tidus is a bit more of a straightforward hero. By the end of the game, you may well find yourself quite fond of him. There's never the feeling that he is annoying the hell out of you with retarded dialogue and ideas, or inability to express any kind of emotion besides teen-angst.
Tidus doesn't carry the burden of the story alone, and perhaps more than any other Squaresoft game, the secondary characters are as important as the sword-wielding protagonist. Yuna and Lulu are beautifully realised, with Lulu in particular being a great character, who also has the benefit of being matched with a voice actress who is perfect for the role. Auron is probably the first real character that you meet, and surprisingly for a role-playing game, they manage to do 'tough and grizzled' without it coming off as cheezy or cliched.
If there was a character I didn't quite hit it off with, it was Wakka. I didn't dislike him, but his vaguely Hawaian or Maori design didn't really work for me amongst the other characters. Maybe it was his voice, maybe it was his visual look, I'm not sure. He has a lot going for him though, and most people will probably like him. I think he has difficulties escaping from the shadow of Barret, but if you never played FFVII you won't notice it.
Yuna, and to a lesser extent Tidus are obviously intended to look Japanese, which is something of a departure for Squaresoft, who have previously been more influenced by cartoon styles than real people in their character designs. To counterbalance them there are various other looks and styles in the player's party. I never felt that I was playing a game that was alienating or foreign. Still, Squaresoft clearly felt that their core audience was Japanese and decided to create characters that would be in some way familiar to them, with Yuna looking very traditional indeed.
Lulu remains my favourite character, and possibly one of my favourite game characters of all time. Her visual look with its subdued and coordinated colour scheme is unforgettable, and her voice acting in the English version is excellent. The personality of the character kept me amused: though she is a very serious character she has some great lines that are hilarious in context, and it makes her all the more amusing when she decides to make a joke. Her moogle attacks are hilarious when juxtaposed with her dry, deadpan dialogue.
If you keep your eyes open there are many details that link FFX to other games in the series. Khimari could easily be a distant descendent of Red XIII, and Rikku's eyes hint at an unexpected ancestry. You don't need to know anything about previous games, but there are many small touches in there for the long-term fans of the series.
Advancement
No Final Fantasy game would be complete without a complex advancement system. FFX eschews the (much loved) complicated equipment system of FFVII, and avoids the tedious magic farming of VIII. However, when you look deeply into the game there is a very extensive system for creating items, which is essential for the top level bonus encounters in the European and re-released games.
You have two choices with the main advancement system: and here there is a flaw in the game. However, it's not a flaw it the player is forewarned. The game tries to tell you that it's an important decision, but without knowing something about advancement you can't choose properly.
When you create your game, you are given a choice to use a complex or a simple advancement system. The game is probably easier with the simple system, but some of the enjoyment is lost. Trying to get the best results out of the complex advancement system is one of the fun parts of the game, and I wouldn't want to give it up.
In the complex system, advancement works by allowing the player to navigate a kind of complex network of nodes. Earning advancement points allows each character to be moved from their current node to an adjacent one. Some of the nodes grant new powers, spells, or increased stats, while others grant nothing. Some nodes require special key spheres to enter, with the keys being found as loot or hidden in game areas as secrets.
Backtracking through the advancement maze wastes advancement points, but sometimes it necessary, or just tempting. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure the best way to move through the maze, getting the powers you need as quickly as possible without wasting advancement.
Once of the advantages of the complex advancement system is that you can choose how each character moves though the maze, and there are even special spheres that allow you to teleport characters about, though they are used up in the process. This means you have considerable control over what types of skill you give to each character.
The simple advancement system replaces the maze with a simplified grid, making each character's path simple but limited. You can still use the teleport spheres to mix things up though.
Combat
The FFX combat system is for all intents turn-based. You can tweak some speed settings, and modify whether using certain menus pauses or not, but in practice most people are going to play in a pure turn based mode. This has the advantage that you can walk away from the game at any time without having to pause. It doesn't matter if your girlfriend starts talking to you half way through an important combat. It doesn't matter if something comes on TV you want to watch, and you can just wander off and make yourself a coffee whenever you like. This is ideal for a game that lasts as long as FFX.
In some ways the combat is very similar to that in other recent Final Fantasy games. In each round your character can make an attack, use an ability, cast a spell, use an item or use a potion. The types of magic will seem very familiar. Your exact choices, and the precise effects vary. For example, you do not rely on spells that effect the entire party to pump up your defences and heal. Spells are for all intents, single target only.
Summoning is also different, but that has always been a variable in the different games. Summoned beings are called 'Aeons' in FFX, and their role in the game world is important and well explained. In FFX, Yuna is the only character that can summon, and there is no way to change this or give summoning power to anyone else - which makes perfect sense within the game world. Your repetoire of summons is strictly limited, and each summoned entity needs to be powered up with advancement points - fortunately they earn these themselves. Special items are also used to empower summons.
Characters and summoned characters all work in much the same way: when they are not in play they remain in a kind of limbo or stasis where nothing changes - though you can heal and cast spells on characters between combats without having to swap them into the party. During combat, you can take a turn to swap a character for another. This wastes a turn, but the character who is swapped in retains the action bar state they had before they were swapped out (if they were), so they may be ready to act quickly after a swap, or have to wait a long time.
The manipulation of who is ready to act can allow you to engineer it so that you get multiple attacks on an enemy before they can react, or allow you to pull a badly injured character out of battle to keep them safe, popping them back in exactly when you have somebody ready to heal them. Overall, it's quite simple to work and when used properly can provide major advantages. Swapping characters in and out correctly is essential to complete the high-level bonus encounters.
Summons are like extra characters that can only be swapped in by having Yuna summon them, and who effectively swap the entire party into limbo while they are in play. You can only have one summon present at once unfortunately, as once one is called, Yuna is in limbo and cannot be used to summon another. This technique is excellent for defending yourself from monsters with overwhelming area attacks: the monster can now only hit the summon. If you misjudge and the summon dies, it's not game over. Summons can leave whenever it's their turn, returning the party from limbo. Summons cast magic and perform attacks in almost exactly the same way as players. I'm surprised there isn't a hack to make Bahamut a party member.
Let's play ball
Instead of a collectable card game, we are provided with an underwater sport called Blitzball as a distraction. Conveniently, Tidus is a professional Blitz player. At a certain point in the game you become able to play the game whenever you like, outside of combat. There are points where games are crucial to the plot, and a good outcome can also help you within the game. Apart from these obligatory games there's no compulsion to play the game if you don't want to. Other than the satisfaction of becoming good at it, there are few compelling reasons to play Blitz unless you enjoy it. There are one or two things you can earn from the game, but none are strictly essential, and so if the game bores you, you can avoid it as much as possible.
You can recruit new players as you travel around the world, not unlike earning special cards for a magical card game. However, you have a lot of freedom as to how you treat this, and it never interferes with the game at important moments. I didn't think that this entirely made up for a lack of a chocobo breeding game, but there is a chocobo training game instead, so chocobo fans will not be completely disappointed.
Visuals
FFX remains one of the best looking games on the Playstation 2. Even now, when people are so much more knowledgable about how to get the most from the machine, it still looks fantastic. The special effects, such as the different fires and spells are very well done, with convincing heat haze and smoke. When it comes to visuals, FFX set the bar, and most other PS2 games are still trying to make the jump.
The characters are well designed, well animated and are excellently rendered with some nice looking textures. You often see PS2 games that have one character on screen of this standard, but FFX often has several. The only downside is that there is quite a gap between the enemies and the real characters in terms of detail. I understand why this is, and given the limitations, the game does better than most - still it would have been nice if the minor enemies and NPCs had been a little more detailed. At least there is still plenty of room for things to improve with the next generation of consoles.
The use of polygon characters was still a novelty when FFX was announced, though it had already been done in many games, even on the PSone. What struck most people was how FFX brought a new level of detail and polish to proceedings, adding facial animation and lip-synch.
The way the characters fit into the backgrounds is excellent. The backgrounds are a clever mix of 2d and 3d effects. The camera angle is mobile in certain locations, and fixed in others. It's almost impossible to tell which bits are which, and the overall result is like that of the beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds of earlier games but with the advantage of more freedom of movement.
By swapping to a battle setting, the game frees up memory to use for rendering more effects and larger numbers of detailed enemies. This has the downside that you still have to wait a short while for battles to begin, with the battle start sequence doing its best to conceal this. It conceals it very well, by cleverly phasing the way elements are loaded things start appearing right away. However, there's still a bit of waiting for the DVD drive. There were rumours of hard-drive support when the game was in development, but of course Sony never released a Playstation 2 hard-drive worldwide, preventing such plans. Even in Japan the take up of the two different hard-drive models was strictly limited and support sketchy at best.
There are several pre-rendered cut-scenes in FFX, but they aren't quite as frequent as they were in previous games. The quality of the normal game graphics is so high that cut-scenes are almost redundant, and they are mainly used to set up really complex crowd scenes and massive detailed landscapes filled with action. The cut-scenes are of the high standard you'd expect from the company that gave us Advent Children, but in the end cut-scenes are not what the game is all about - and that's a good thing.
Sound
Pretty much every single line of dialogue in the game is recorded as voice acting - not just for the main characters but for everyone. I believe there may be one or two lines that were added later, and so appear only in sub-titles, but that's it: one or two lines out of thousands. People say it's still hard to use up all the space on a DVD, but with its many lines of high-fidelity dialogue, and numerous cut-scenes, FFX struggles to fit on a disc. It's likely there would have been even more content if there had only been room for it. The BluRay format on Playstation 3 may allow Squaresoft to finally run wild with content, and seeing what they did with FFX makes me very eager to see what they might manage in the future with even more space to work with.
The voice acting itself is fairly decent. Some characters are going to be your favourites. I found Rikku's voice a little whiney and hard to live with, though this was no doubt partly intentional. Auron on the other hand sounds great. I'm almost tempted to believe that they cast Odama in the new BSG after playing FFX, because the characters have more than a passing similarity in both voice and appearance.
Extra Content
The 'bonus' content in FFX is no afterthought. In fact, when you're ready to complete the game, and have probably finished it once, just to see what the end is like, it's time to start playing 'for real'. In the late stages of the game a massive range of optional content opens up, and the difficulty level on it ramps up exponentially. The optional monster battles make the end of game bosses look like babies. This goes way beyond a couple of 'Weapons' to beat. There's a whole arena of awesomely hard monsters to fight, a set of Dark Aeons that are powerful beyond belief compared to the enemies from the main game plot, and a secret bonus dungeon loaded with vicious beasties.
A long series of bonus quests deals with obtaining a special weapon for each character. These weapons are very powerful, and are useful mainly for defeating bonus content monsters. There are some places where if you miss collecting an item during the main story sequences you simply cannot progress on these quests. Some items can only ever be collected at one time, and though it was possible to go back and get them in the original Japanese version, if your game has Dark Aeons, there are some places you won't be going back to. Because the most difficult content relies on unlocking the stat caps for various characters and aeons, if you miss the necessary items you can't even begin to fight the monsters that are guarding them.
Part of the ultra-high-level advancement system revolves around making items from ingredients that you steal from monsters. There are certain monsters that you only get one chance to fight, and so if you don't steal from them, you will be significantly disadvantaged later. However, it's all optional content. Finishing the game is very easy and doesn't require you to find obscure secrets or grind through hours of power-levelling. I was easily able to complete the game without looking at a single guide, walkthrough, cheat guide, or hint book - which is as it should be.
Iceskating Uphill
You can make the game even more difficult by choosing to play with extreme restrictions. One variation is to complete the game without ever using the advancement system (which is done mainly through summons and items). Unbelievably, this is possible. Another variation is to complete it without summoning except where the game makes it happen. There is also a target to beat for the fastest completion, and various other obscure and frustrating challenges. That people did all these things shows just how much they loved and enjoyed the game and they kept finding new ways to keep playing.
Overall
If you like RPGs, or you enjoy a good story, or you just want to see what the Playstation 2 was capable of at its best, then you should not miss FFX. The balance of everything is just right. There's enough story, enough combat, enough cut-scenes, and enough bonus content for anyone. The game is long enough to be great value, but not too long. The game is easy enough for most people to complete, but rarely feels trivial or boring. You aren't forced to spend ages levelling up so you can move forward, and you aren't forced to pursue esoteric and demanding side-quests to get equipment that you'd feel lost without.
In the end what I loved most about FFX was the epic scale. The characters really feel like they are doing something important, and they act like people under pressure: people who feel responsible. The only annoying brat in the game is Rikku, and even she has some pathos. There are many other games where people have to save the world, but in FFX you really get the feeling that the characters feel the weight of it, which makes it all much more dramatic.
Even the magical FFVII isn't as tight and perfectly balanced as FFX. In FFVII the cast gets too big, and side stories can diminish the power of the overall story; the Chaplinesque comedy scenes are at odds with the main character's tortured nature; and the limitations of the 'silent movie acting' are clearly apparent. FFX is the first game to really follow in the footsteps of FFVII and deliver a story where you genuinely feel for the characters.
FFX-2 clearly requires its own review, but you really should play FFX before even considering FFX-2. They are very different games, and in the end FFX-2 does not deliver the magic of FFX, being much more of a game you dip into rather than a consuming passion. There's really no comparison, for the moment FFX remains the greatest of the Final Fantasy series. Now that the life cycle of the PS2 is nearing its end it's increasingly likely that FFX will remain my number one PS2 game of all time.