I never had a chance to play Final Fantasy 10-2. While I had a couple friends with PS2 that had Final Fantasy 10 none were interested enough for Final Fantasy 10-2, or at least I grew apart from one that might have. This game was quite a surprise as I recall. The initial reveal showed Yuna no longer in her traditional clothes but in short shorts dual wielding pistols doing a backflip. It was a shocking change of character. It would later turn out that most of this was from the intro part of the game. The intro itself is probably one of the most iconic in the Final Fantasy series despite the game being in a spin-off game. Before Yuna’s reveal it actually tries to mislead the player by showing what appears to be her doing a pop song “Real Emotion.” This catchy little song is heavily associated with Final Fantasy X-2 and even as someone who hadn’t played the game I was very familiar with it because it was played a lot during the commercial. The intro definitely sets up that this is a different sort of game with a very different tone than Final Fantasy 10. It’s definitely a lot less serious but also the emphasis on dress-up was probably a turn off to some of the audience. It also takes a lot of inspiration from Charlie’s Angels being an all-female trio of “sphere hunters.”
From a tech perspective not much has changed. It clearly uses the same engine as Final Fantasy X and re-uses a significant amount of assets, including backgrounds and character models in fact, many outside of the main cast are complete verbatim. In at least one case this leads to a strange meeting with Lulu who is supposed to be far along in pregnancy. Since she’s using her exact same model she doesn’t look very pregnant but is also wearing a corset which I’m sure is probably an awful idea. Still, 2 areas where they were able to upgrade things a bit are the lighting which is significantly less flat than Final Fantasy 10 and in the animation which is generally better looking and characters have more facial bones and can make a much wider and customized range of emotions even if they are a bit exaggerated. Design of new characters is pretty bad though. While some effort went into the dress-sphere models which look good, characters like Nooj and La Blanc are just absolutely awful.
Voice acting has been upgraded and sounds a lot less stilted but overall thanks to better timing and direction. However the music takes a massive dive. It’s more pop and rock to suit the game but it’s also clearly coming from the B-team.
The gameplay, on the other hand, is very different. It reverts back to the ATB system and the dress-sphere system builds on the job system of Final Fantasy 5. The main upgrade being that you can change class in the middle of battle. But you can only switch between jobs on a particular pallet called the “garment grid” which you can equip to each character and you are only able to switch between dress-spheres that are adjacent on the grid. This means that while each character can have multiple classes, care should be taken to determine which classes as well as in which order you expect to switch between them. Some garment grids forego slots in order to add certain buffs as well. To be honest I found the battles to be extremely hectic at first, especially coming off Final Fantasy 10. The turns feel very short, almost Final Fantasy 4 short so there’s a lot of simply mashing confirm to have so characters do their default ability while you wait for the turn of the character you want. Since characters can take turns simultaneously each ability has it’s own cast timer which adds to the confusion. The other thing is that there is no lineup on each side. Characters simply exist in the middle of the battlefield and will move each other around as they attack and use abilities. This makes it harder to visually understand the field of battle as things are moving around forcing you to pay much closer attention to the menus.
The battle system takes a bit to learn but you do get used to it. Early battles are easy, just attack to win. Early bosses aren’t too much harder. The strategy that’s given to you is to use a dancer to inflict darkness or silence depending on the type and hack away. However, that soon stops working as bosses are either immune or just use attacks that are always accurate and it’s not really clear what you are supposed to do. White mages overall are too fragile, one hit and they go down and get stuck in a revive loop. Bosses also start getting more nasty with status effects, often hitting you with multiple times, stop, death, wiping out MP etc. What I relied on was just rapidly cycling the dress-spheres until I got the special dress-sphere. These basically take all 3 party slots but allow you to heal, inflict status effects, inflict buffs, debuffs and magic and all at no cost while making you immune to many status effects. It makes mid game bosses really easy while fighting them normally feels stupidly hard compared to fighting enemies. Toward the end of the game though I tended to rely more on the dark knight. These have the ability “darkness” that hits all enemies for a lot of damage while doing a bit of damage back to you. They also have built-in skills to resist status effects so you don’t need to waste slots. Having 2 dark knights and a white mage was basically how I cleared out the late game. The game doesn’t seem to expect too much from you with regards to equipping and mastering classes which is good because I missed a lot of stuff.
Outside of battles the game is both hyper linear but also not. It basically gives you the whole of Spira to navigate from the get-go but only certain areas contain missions. These missions are usually short 15 minute quests that give you items and experience. You can tackle them in any order but the only way you would know they exist is to simply try going everywhere as all areas have at least some sort of scene in each chapter. However the game highlights very specific missions it wants you to go on to advance the story. So in most cases you pick a location, talk to some people to get a mission and then complete it. Since the order isn’t well defined the difficultly has to be relatively flat. You do level up in a traditional way but leveling up does not feel like a significant change and you hit plateaus pretty quickly which tends to signal you should progress the plot.
A lot of the content isn’t battling though but often various mini-games or time wasting side-quests. Very little of it is compelling. The game also doesn’t really impress upon you that you really do need to do the side missions. If you don’t you will miss out on important stuff like items and dress-spheres which makes the latter game much harder. In fact, not doing early things will often limit what you can do in the later game too and it’s never clear what those things are. It’s all tallied in the completion percentage which goes up a little bit after doing certain things. This is supposed to encourage multiple playthroughs but I don’t feel the content is good enough to warrant such things. I got in the mid 60 percent so I missed quite a bit and even then the game really felt like it was wasting my time. I cannot fathom getting 100%.
What I found particularly disappointing is that while it reuses a ton of Final Fantasy X content they didn’t really use it for anything. The plot is a completely and uninteresting mess about New Yevon and the Youth League about to start a civil war and their leaders awakening some ancient mecha. Each other area has a little side story going on that feels like an episode of Pokémon. maybe the most interesting was Cactaur Nation which also has a minigame so bad that they mercifully don’t make you need succeed to get credit. A good developer would have used the lack of asset creation issues to delve more into game fundamentals and expanding the core gameplay with interesting things. This does none of that, there is pretty much nothing that this game does better than Final Fantasy X. Even the basic of design of things can be awful. For example:
There’s one area in Le Blanc’s hideout that has you looking for 3 switches. This is a typical waste-time puzzle in Final Fantasy X-2 where there’s no real challenge, it’s just making you walk around and engage in random battles. And I did, for a very long time. The stupid part was that there is a trap with a spike wall. You need to actually let the spike wall hit you to trigger a cut-scene that gets you to the area with the third switch. I had to the look up the solution because it was so unintuitive. Not only that but most posts online tell you to revert the save to reset the wall which scared the bejeezus out of me because I had saved and had no backup. However, it seemed walking a certain distance from the corridor does reset the trap. Absolutely, terrible design.
Other things just seem thrown in there without any purpose:
There is a minigame that you need to play at one point called Core Break. It’s not half bad in terms of playing it but it’s so strange because the game presents this as you challenging NPCs even though the game itself is literally one player. I guess they just had the idea had to figure out a way to mash it in there.
The game itself feels like a Disney straight-to-video sequel. It has the veneer of a quality piece of work but it’s clearly much cheaper. Nearly everything feels like filler content. The real saving grace is the battle system which is reasonably well thought out and contains lots of elements from prior titles while adding some of it own but it just can’t really hold up the game. This isn’t to say the game is completely bad per-se. I found it enjoyable enough to finish and part of that is thanks to a pretty forgiving difficulty (dark knights) but I skipped a lot of minigames I am not going back to 100% it. I watched the true ending on Youtube and it’s exactly what you think it is. There’s definitely worse games (Final Fantasy Type-0) but Final Fantasy X-2 also doesn’t really need to be played either. It doesn’t even really meaningfully add to the Final Fantasy 10 universe. I had higher hopes that’s for sure.
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