I just finished Final Fantasy X and can I just say:
How on earth did that game do as well as it did? I mean really.. it was huge and for some reason it got a sequel! I was so disappointed with the ending, I'd been told it was sooo amazing and it just wasn't. I dunno I think I got very annoyed at it cos I could see that there were some glimmers of genius in it but it was just all done so badly.
The characters were, overall, pretty crap. I hated Tidus. He's a douche and he really doesn't have very many endearing traits. Lulu is only cleavage. Wakka could have been cool if he didn't turn into a whiny bitch for the second 3/4 of the damned game. Yuna and Rikku were both pretty meh and I found them rather bland. I really wanted to like Kimahri but it just didn't give him enough of anything really, what little back story he had it basically just trampled before you got to know anything interesting, and he was basically just a background character. Auron.. yeah Auron was pretty cool I'll give him that. But he was about the only one -.-.
The battle system was pretty fun, and if I'm honest im not sure why. Might have had something to do with the speed the characters moved. Though I have to say, I did find myself more than once getting kinda bored in the middle of a fight and just wandering off, getting distracted and leaving the game running for hours on end.
The equipment system in 10 is Balls. Just balls. One of the great joys of a good rpg is getting to the next town and running to the weapon shop to see what they've got and see if they've got a better weapon than the one you're wielding. You never got this in 10. Not once. I want my weapons to have stats really, and I didn't really care all that much about any of the crappy little abilities you could get for your crappy weapon and/or armband.
The FMVs were too short, and most of the time shit. This is a game that obviously put a lot of effort into looking pretty, so why are the fmv sequences so crushingly short!? The longest one in the damned game was Yuna and Tidus kissing in some sort of magical lake that was far deeper than it should have been to some J-pop music.. J-pop.. in a Final Fantasy.. -.- ugh. At one point in this game near the end I was treated to a one second fmv of Tidus crying.. now as much as I like the idea of that prick crying, seriously couldn't they have used the budget on making.. uh i dunno.. Bahamut look good?
Oh by the way, Bahamut looks shit. Seriously, he's got bulging man muscles, and stands like a complete prick. Also his wings are needlessly colorful (like a lot of the game actually >>) He looks like Odin and Pheonix had some sort of horrible love affair and produced some sort of gay pride mascot as their progeny. He looked badass in 9..
Where was the world map? Now don't get me wrong, I understand what they were trying to do. They thought that if they could get rid of the world map and make the entire game actual location then it would feel really big and impressive and it would be cool to have an entire game with the locations actually having some sort of feel to them. But it really didn't work. The game was horribly linear, mostly because the world they made was basically a big straight line up the one continent they'd made. I also thought it felt really small as a result. There was no sense of scale, just a series of big corridors with different backgrounds. This less annoys me in 10 and more annoys me in the subsequent games where they didn't bother to fix it.
The Sphere Grid was good, but flawed. I like the Sphere Grid. It was cool. However it had some problems, which should have been simple to pick up on and change during development. Firstly, unless you're playing the expert one, you're basically following a set path for each character for most of the game (except Kimahri, but he basically ends up being a worse version of one of your other characters for a while) so why can't we just be levelling up? I kinda missed having a level by a character to tell if you're over levelling someone etc, but that may just be my preference. I think the Sphere Grid was really cool, but I personally would have liked to see it as more of an ability tree system using AP (maybe with some thrown in stat bonuses) alongside an exp level system. Also I got a little frustrated that pretty much every time I levelled up I gained one stat, and no more than 4 in it mostly. I know that in 10 1 extra stat point goes a long way but I like big numbers =B
Which brings me on to the weird damage curve this game has. For a very large portion of this game you are doing not much damage, and then suddenly near the end your party starts to just do loads, out of nowhere. I can't quite figure it out, but when I was playing I found myself wondering when I was gonna break the big 1000 and then suddenly I was getting disappointed if my characters weren't doing like 3000+ damage. This isn't really a problem, I just thought i'd mention it as it was weird.
No enemy in any game ever, should be able to berserk and confuse your entire party in one hit leaving you with no controllability in a fight quicker than you get a go.
Why is everything so colourful? Even the ancient city that was destroyed long long long ago is all pastel pinks and pastel greens and such. And while this is perfectly plausible, it was supposed to be very advanced, from a purely artistic standpoint this is a pretty stupid decision, since it kills the mood. The game actually has a reasonably dark plot in places but it just feels rather twinkly the whole way through because of the quite frankly weird as fuck colour palette they've got going on. Also. Bahamut's wings >>
Right well most of this is stuff that I guess they should have learned from the game (though it did so damned well for some reason -.-) and i've kinda been dancing around the big issue:
The story is very badly told.
For a large portion of the game I was assuming they'd tell me more about the plot later on. And a fair amount was explained, but not all of it. Now me and my friend both finished the game and had to go onto the wiki to find out most of the plot. I kid you not, there was a 4 paragraph plot summary, and literally 2 paragraphs was not explained in game. This is not redeemable with excuses like "oh but you had to talk to npcs" or "it's all in the post-game scenario" because these weren't little random bits of plot or side story, these were plot integral elements. Things like who the main bad guy was and why he was doing what he was doing are not explained in the main story. This is just really bad.
Now the plot, having read it is actually quite good, it's got some interesting elements and it has some interesting little lines of story (even if the bad guys motivation for fucking people up for 1000 years is a bit flimsy) but it just isnt told to you during the course of the story.
Now there's a couple of other things I could rant about this game, but you've probably already stopped reading so I'll leave it at that.. for now >>
