Final Fantasy X (PS2, 2001)

(Howdy RGB. It's a new decade and I'm ringing in the year by keeping the ol' girl running.)

Don't let that iconic picture of a sartorially challenged beach bum standing in the ocean with a hundred-pound sword fool you, and fight that urge to rip out your eardrums so you can't hear yourself scream when he speaks. Get ready to suffer some bad voices and a clunky early-00s control scheme, because despite its flaws, this one is really great.

The clock has just turned on making this game nine years old instead of a mere eight. I'm currently a little sour on the whole experience as I'm at the very end and the difficulty hits an inflection point right at the final dungeon. While I understand the motivation for the game suddenly becoming pretty hard right at the moment the majority of the sidequests become available, if almost all the game is going to be such a walk in the park, it really throws me when out of nowhere they expect you to grind and explore the crap out of every last corner.

Up to that point I had been enjoying the game more as an extended interactive movie than a grindfest, and I was unhappily forced to switch gears just to see the end. By the time I was actually ready to take the final boss down, I had lost the narrative thread. It's certainly a credit to the game's hold on me that I stuck with it through to the bitter end...which in my case judging by the play clock, consumed a full 1/5 or so of my total play time. (I was somewhere around 64 hours when I hit the last save point and lost, and at a robust 81:16 when I came back with the goods.)

Incidentally, DQ8 suffered from the same thing. I'm too easily swayed by what the NPCs are telling me to do, in games and IRL, but when all anyone I find in the game wants to talk to me about is beating that final boss, it's hard for me to remember that I'm trying to collect some monsters on a mountain I went through 15 hours ago so some guy will give me this item that I combine with another item to open two seals to get the best summon. Or worse, they're still talking to me about beating the guy after I already beat him! I mean, come on. Next time don't set your world up so that winning the game means the immediate end of all possible enemy encounters. Actually that would be pretty great, a game where you go through all this trouble and then you beat it and playing after the "end," people are all mad at you because they expected you to solve all their problems.

I enjoyed some of the mini-games (the Cloisters of Trials were very Myst/Ico-esque, a huge plus in my book, except they should have taken a cue from those games and cut out the aggravating music) and hated others (Blitzball...just so, you know, wtf). There are a few moments where an ambitious or at least interesting attempt to change up the gameplay falls flat, due mostly to not giving the player any clue how to proceed. I.e., don't just stick me in a room with randomly generating icicles and spheres and a number in the corner of the screen and expect me to know what to do. If this was Wario Ware, maybe; but again, the game to this point has been all but holding my hand showing me how to play it, and in that context it just seems cheap to go another route without warning, rather than "challenging" or "difficult." More to the point, the execution of that room in terms of presentation is so bad and out-of-the-blue that it feels like a half-finished demo screen or a beta version of a future final version.

And how hard would it have been to include navigating the world via airship? I get that the maps are 3D-rendered rather than the 2D overworld maps of previous games, but I would take the fade-out/in to switch between the two over what the game gives you--a button saying "board airship" at save points and a list of locations on the airship's nav screen. Not once do you see the airship move outside of the cutscenes, and you never get to control it. I might as well be teleporting to places in Spira from another dimension, or Tidus's mom's house, given how poorly this mechanic integrates the airship with the map. There's no sense of "let me explore this world!" when you get the airship, which is a classic FF moment in games where you can navigate the world map. Instead it's "let me teleport to this save spot so I can run backward trying to remember where this place I have to get to was."

So that's all the sucky stuff. And Tidus being a complete tool until he grows a pair, which still doesn't make his voice any less whiny. And not being able to move the camera, which I'm sure was an innovation a few years down the road, but which would make doing things like finding treasure chests or, say, avoiding randomly generating icicles much easier.

What's good? The characters, story, and world. The music (hearing "To Zanarkand" at the Distant Worlds concert last month, scored to the FMV of Yuna performing the sending at Kilika, prompted me to get this game from a friend, finally overcoming my nigh-irreparable Tidus turnoff). The battle system and sphere-grid leveling system. Some of the visuals, particularly if you're a generation or more behind like I am. As far as landmark PS2 RPGs go, I still prefer DQ8 because there's a bit of uncanny valley to the faces in FFX and inconsistency between how they look in the in-game cutscenes vs. the FMVs (Tidus gets bony and Wakka gets jaw-y), plus I prefer the old-school-cartoon feel and music of DQ8 overall.

Basically, there is more than valid reason to love this game. I focused on my gripes because it's not perfect. But I was surprised at how good it was. Despite its flaws I think it's better than VII. Eat that, Eight Winged Angel!

PS YouTube is so great. Watching an FFX-2 walkthrough as I write this so I don't have to actually play it. It's like a surreal alternate-reality FFX, or like a bunch of random junk that should have just been optional material after the end of FFX. "How much can we undermine the mood of the visuals from the first game with wildly inappropriate music? Funk, anyone?" And this is coming from someone who doesn't mind J-pop, but as a soundtrack to a slog up a barren rocky mountainside it's just off. And, still the faux airship.