Intro
The game starts with Tidus signing some autographs for fans and it’s established he’s a star Blitzball player. During the game the stadium and whole city it destroyed by a giant blob of water called Sin. Tidus meets up with Auron, a father type figure who goes on to give him a sword and tells him how to fight. We get hints that Tidus has a strained relationship with his father as well. In the end they are both sucked into Sin and disappear.
Tidus wakes up in some ruins not knowing where he is and attracts the attention of some scavengers called Al Bhed. They take him in and he’s forced to work with them to activate some sunken machine. Here we get some actual gameplay. When fighting bosses sometimes additional commands are available. For the intro boss he occasionally moves out of range. At this point the party can pincer attack him for extra damage. Once back aboard the ship Tidus gets some more info on where he is. It appears that he’s 1000 years in the future and his home Zanarkand is a holy place but also complete abandoned. The Al Bhed Rikku promises to help him but the ship is attacked by Sin and Tidus blacks out again.
He again awakens, this time on an island. He attracts the attention of Wakka with some Blitzball skills. Wakka tells him to come along as they are going to play in a big Blitzball tournament and maybe someone will recognize him. Wakka is probably one of my favorite characters in the series. While he’s not interesting or especially cool from a gameplay standpoint he’s just a super nice bro. He takes Tidus to the temple to see the summoner Yuna. While Tidus is not supposed to enter the summoners chamber area he does so anyway, worried because she’s been in there for over a day. This brings us to the temples which have these little puzzle solving sections where you take orbs and place them in various places. The trick is that you can only carry one at a time so you need to switch them back and forth in a sort of slot puzzle to make progress. At the end we meet Lulu, Khimari and Yuna. It turns out that Wakka, Lulu and Khimari are all guardians of Yuna, basically bodygaurds as she carries out her sacred duty of visiting all the temples in Spira. They offer to take Tidus with them as she starts her journey. This intro section does a lot of tutorialization, teaching you the mechanics of the combat.
The first stop is Kilika. The boat is attacked by Sin enroute and a boss battle plays out. I the end Sin gets away but Kilika is completely destroyed by it. Tidus is then taught that summoners guide the souls of the dead to the afterlife and if they don’t then the souls remain and become fiends. The next day they set out to visit the temple in the forest. At the temple Tidus runs into another summoner, who is kinda stuck-up. While Tidus is not allowed in the chamber her guardian throws him in anyway. This just serves as a reason for Tidus to do another sphere puzzle because while the party says there might be consequences, there clearly aren’t. They leave the next day for Luca. The town where the big Blitzball tournament is to take place. Enroute we learn a little more about Jeht, Tidus’ father. He was kinda an asshole, but apparently exists in this time too and was a mentor of sorts to Yuna although the connection is unclear. We also get the sense that there’s a bit of a thing happening between Yuna and Tidus.
Luca works to open up the world. An announcer introduces Blitzball teams from around Spira. We’re also give a fairly long tutorial on Blitzball. The tutorial is still very theoretical though, almost like reading a manual. The mechanics at least to me didn’t really come into focus although I was half familiar with them. Yuna says that someone saw Auron and Tidus goes with her. In the midst of it Yuna gets kidnapped while Wakka is forced to play Blitzball without Tidus. It’s a bit of a strange choice. I guess they didn’t want the player to be forced to play 2 whole games which is fair enough but the extra practice would have been nice. Instead the rest of the party has to fight wave after wave of little Al Bhed machines. The boss has a special command which takes away about 90% of its life if you shock a crane into working. I’m not sure how I feel about it, it doesn’t really require puzzle solving skills and makes it too easy but conceptually I like the idea. Next is the championship round of Blitzball. I’m not sure if this is winnable, I assume it might but the opponents stats are much higher than your own and it makes it more frustrating to learn because you’re basically getting your ass kicked. In any case the arena is filled with fiends, and the group meets up with Auron who explains that Jeht is Sin and asked him to take Tidus to Spira conviniently leaving out the other details of how this works. The final part the laugh scene, a scene that is infamous among gamers for having amazing cringe factor. Yuna tries to cheer Tindus up after he learns he’s probably not going back home and they practice laughing really loud together. To be honest though, it’s not even that bad in the context of the game, plenty of other scenes so far have felt awkward like this already but is is indicative of the growing pains of video game voice acting.
The party move to their next objective in Djose. It’s just a mostly straight walk to there. At one point you fight a boss which has 2 outcomes, either you fall off the cliff or you beat it. You don’t die if you fall of the cliff but you don’t get a reward either. I failed because it’s not really apparent how you are supposed to fight it (and I didn’t remember) but using summons was definitely not it. As you move the end of the path you are blocked by some guards but Seymore is there to let you in. Up ahead is the command post where a bunch of Al Bhed soldiers are trying to lure Sin into a trap. Here we get some conflict as Al Bhed machinations are considered taboo to follower of Yevin. Seymour basically says he wishes them well and to not dwell on it and much of the party accepts his pragmatism but it does seem to push the player into thinking about his moral position. It goes badly for the Al Bhed. The boss here is actually pretty tough because it’s arms regenerate very quickly. I actually nearly lost with only Lulu left standing but because her dodge was high enough and she was lucky enough to dodge like 9-10 time in a row I slowly wore it down with magic attacks and won. There’s a partial rematch immediately after but this time you get to use Seymour in a Nimbelheim Sephiroth type of scene and using his more powerful magic the fight it easier. At the end everyone gets strewn about, they mourn their loss and they make their way to Djose temple.
Djose template’s puzzle is actually annoying because it gives no indicators. At a certain point you must load a pedestal with 2 spheres and push it off a cliff. If you push it without 2 spheres nothing happens. This actually stumped me, I had to look it up. Afterward the party continues down the road eventually reaching a river which they must cross on a shoopuff, an elephant type creature. There’s a lot of shops here, an unreasonable number in fact, I guess they were hoping the variety let’s you customize your characters a bit. There’s also these blue alien looking guys who take with bad accents in what definitely seems to be capitalizing on the worst aspects of Star Wars Episode 1. In the middle of the crossing Yuna is abducted and the party fights a simple underwater boss and we learn that Wakka is actually a big racist with his anti-Al Behd outburst. On the other side of the river Rikku washes up on shore. We get a gratuitous ass shot of her taking off her wetsuit which despite being skin tight lets her wear short shorts and streamers underneath. The resulting cut-scene was incredibly confusing. Tidus introduces her to the group, Yuna, Lulu and Auron recognize her as Al Behd (something about the eyes). They then talk and immediately ask if she can be a guardian. Given that they don’t know her, and she had just tried to kidnap Yuna this doesn’t make any sense. Being a guardian is supposed to be special, even Tidus had to prove himself a little. Also why would she want to be a guardian anyway? It leave the player very confused as to what’s going on.
The party moves next to Guadosalam where the Guado are. On the way there Auron notices a special place where Jehet hid a sphere. In the video Tidus is able to understand that his father did actually like him even if he couldn’t express it to him. In the big tree of Guadosalam Seymour is there are tells Yuna he would like to marry her. Yuna considers this as a political marriage to make the people happy and everyone but Tidus goes along with it. To help she visits the farplane where the sent spirits go. This is used to fill in some backstory to a few characters. On the way out the spirit of Jeskyl follows her out and she sends it off. Afterwards she wants to see Seymour with her response but this requires going to the next temple. So they cross the thunder planes, an area with lightning strikes. I’m not sure what getting struck does but it’s a wider area for once. At the rest stop Tidus overheads Yuna using a sphere and gets caught. The next areas is a cold one and upon entering it by Al Bhed, specifically Rikku’s brother try to kidnap Yuna. The party chases them off as Yuna and the Guado minister head to the temple. There is a scene her of Tidus and Lulu on a snowmobile that I think is probably one of the better ones, it’s short but we get to see a little into the characters and how they feel about one another. At the temple the party sees the sphere Yuna did with Lord Jeskyl confirming the Seymour killed him and is basically planning something evil. So they bust in and fight him. This is I think the mid point of the game and this boss battle is really good. It starts with Seymour and two Guado guards. The guards cast protect and will take shots for Seymour and heal him but they have auto potion which heals quite a bit making it a bit of a puzzle. You can either build up an overdrive to kill them in one shot or you can use Rikku to steal a hi position which prevents them from using auto potion which is pretty clever. The second phase is Anima which can be defeated much more easily if you use the new aeon that appears in the summoning menu (it’s listed as ???? but it’s Shiva). The 3rd phase is Seymour using multi-cast magic, it’s too powerful to tank so you need to use nulfire, nulschock, nultide, nulfrost in the order he casts magic. It’s not about stats but about noticing and execution which is where the battle system of the game shines. In the end Seymour is killed and the party is chased out as murderers. In the escape they fall into a cavern under a frozen lake where Sin happens to be chilling (literally) for some reason. It wakes up and everyone is transported across the world.
The next area is a desert. Tidus has been split up but quickly collects everyone except Yuna. This area is really to show off Rikku. With Yuna gone you probably don’t have a healer so they had out Al Bhed potions like candy, I had probably 60 from traversing the area. Only Rikku can use these though but they heal the whole party for significant HP and remove status effects. Rikku can also one shot machina enemies with steal. This area is pretty wide open and there are a very difficult enemies that can appear. It’s actually a bit overwhelming, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to explore the whole thing or not. At the end an Al Bhed city is under attack from the Guado and followers of Yevon. The party enters the complex where they think Yuna is. It’s here the true motive of the Al Bhed comes out. They kidnap summoners to keep them safe, because getting the final aeon to fight Sin will kill them. It doesn’t make sense given that it’s literally their choice to fight Sin knowing they’ll die and they are doing it for the greater good. I guess they are protesting the system? But the broadly telegraphed revelation hits Tidus hard. Yuna isn’t in the complex so the party and some Al Bhed survivors take off in a hidden airship and blow up the complex.
The airship flies to Brevelle where it gets intercepted by the dragon Evrae which is the protector of Brevelle. This fight has you maneuvering the ship to get closer and further, basically Evrae will send a tell before an all team poison attack and if you move the ship back in time you can avoid it. Moving back means close range attackers can’t attack, but you can get the ship to attack up to 3 times for extra damage. This makes sense up until the second phase where Evrae casts haste on itself and you cannot dispel it. This means there won’t be enough time to move between turns but also Evrae will use a new attack to close the distance making moving the ship pointless. I’m not sure what the strategy is here but I just tanked with huge stocks of Al Bhed potions. The ship drops anchor and the team grids steel cables onto the wedding venue. You face several back-to-back battles to move yourself to the front until some cutscenes play out. I was worried for a moment there would be another boss battle. Rikku thows a smokebomb and the party just leaves, like not even fast or far, they just go inside and apparently nobody can find them? Rikku remarks that there are machina inside the temple. Huh. There’s even time enough for the party to complete the puzzle. This one is super annoying because there’s a lot of waiting for the platform to move and some poorly chosen camera angles. The party exits and is finally caught. Instead of killing them they are thrown into a very simple labyrinth. Tidus, Rikku and Waka in water and the rest in a grid of rooms (how thoughtful). Both parties fight a boss and exit. Seymour fights the party (after a very long pause being impaled by Kimarhi for me to grid a bit). This battle is a bit of Seymour says with part of him throwing out a weak elemental attack before he hits you with a much harder one. You just need to nullify that element.
After beating him the party escapes. There’s cutscene between Tidus and Yuna where they become a bit of an item. It’s interesting because I feel that Final Fantasy 8 and Final Fantasy 9 tried to build more of a tension than Final Fantasy 10 does. I guess Tidus and Yuna are just more well-adjusted. Next is the Calm land which is supposed to be an open section. It’s really just a big flat square you take a linear path across, maybe it looked more impressive back then but it’s not even Hyrule field levels of open. At the end is another boss. This one is a physical attacker but it’s annoying because darkness didn’t seem to work which breaks the rules. You can inflict it but he’ll still hit you, maybe I was just really unlucky but after 4 tries I gave up and basically tanked with phoenix downs magic and armor break. I think he has a second phase but I made sure to save up my overdrives to end it quickly.
Next you head up the mountain. The Ronso talk big but back down immediately. You fight Seymour again on the other side. He’s pretty annoying trying to zombify characters and then full-life them but you can poison him. He also has an attack total-annihilation which at the this point in the game would be an instant kill so you really need to store up your aeon overdrives. Next you go through a cave and there’s some really pointless minigames here. Another boss but he’s easy as long as you cast reflect to stop him from healing. Then you finally get the context of the intro scene as the party rests up for Zanarkand. You learn from the faythe that Tidus is actually a dream from Zanarkand past but he doesn’t seem to care. And in the temple of Zanarkand you meet Yunalesca who gives you the final aeon, or so it seems. In fact one of the guardians has to become the aeon which itself becomes the new Sin and this doesn’t sit well with anyone. We learn that Jecht, Auron and Braska went through the same ordeal which is why Jecht is Sin. Yunalesca is an annoying 3 parter where she turns everyone into zombies and cures them. You can avoid being a zombie and cure yourself but she also has an attack that will instakill the party and while it is on a set pattern you probably won’t know this until you are hit with it. After defeating Yunalesca to end the cycle we get confirmation Auron is dead and just sticking around as an unsent. The party insists they’ll figure it out.
On the ship the plan is to ask Mika so you travel to Bevelle. Mika isn’t pleased you killed Yunalesca and refuses to help. The party comes up with the plan to use the hyme of the faythe to quell Sin and get aboard to fight Yu Yevon, the mastermind behind Sin itself.
At this point you can go back to places you’ve already been with the airship in a menu. There’s a lot of side content but it requires a lot of grinding. The first big thing is that you need to fill out the monster arena which means going back to every area and getting a killing blow with a special weapon ability. This is super tedious because the enemies can be in different parts of the path, you don’t really know without walking it again and even then they can be a bit more rare. A guide is almost necessary to save yourself going back and forth. The other annoying part is the that airship doesn’t let you go to any save sphere and so you still need to walk long distances and with no ability to turn random battles it’s really grating.
To get inside Sin you need to fight it which requires you to do significant damage in a short amount of time. I could don’t this and so I hate to grid getting monsters to get gil and items to make equipment and then to grind AP. It completely wrecked me as it derailed the whole game. After 5 or 6 hours of doing this I was able to get Tidus to reliably deal 9999 damage which was enough to clear the boss and pretty much the rest of the game without too much trouble. The ending is pretty bittersweet, but I think pretty fitting for the theme.
I had played Final Fantasy 10 twice but never to completion. The first time was at a friend’s house. This was the first and only time I had ever been to his house. He was a bit of a weird dude and basically dropped out to play games but he had an interesting sense of humor. I remember him telling us his essay for the ACT was about getting a medal at the male youth stripping Olympics. Just a random thought that’s besides the point. For some reason me an a few of our other mutual were hanging out at his place. I didn’t own a PS2 so I was always trying to play what I could on other people’s system. Final Fantasy 10 was one of the few PS2 games I really wanted to play, he had it so I played. I think the rest of them were watching a movie or internet gore videos or something. I remember his system was hooked up to a TV in a walk-in closest and I played for several hours. His mom offered us spaghetti with ketchup. I wonder where he is now…
It was a long time before got to play again. I got the Final Fantasy 10 Remaster on PS3 and I played through probably about 75% of it. I specifically remember where I ended, on the boss Yunalesca because it was a difficult boss but there was an enormous amount of unskippable cutscene before fighting her. After 3 tries I got too frustrated and eventually started playing something else. I probably would have gone back to it, but I didn’t want to hook up my PS3 again. So with the momentum of finishing 9 other Final Fantasies I was ready to tackle it again.
Tech
Final Fantasy 10 was the first Final Fantasy on PS2 so there were big expectations for it. At this point it was probably the single most important franchise for the Playstation brand. I remember it being covered a lot in magazines. As one might expect from the jump from PS1 to PS2 it was pretty big but not as big as going from Final Fantasy 6 to Final Fantasy 7. A lot of stuff had already been done a few times by them, just not all in a single package. Most notable were of course the graphics. Models had enough polygons to form real hands, but also facial movement. In fact the game make a big point of zooming in on faces to show expressions, maybe more than one might expect from a modern game. Though this can have its issues especially in the remaster as other NPCs suffer from “flat-face” where they simply don’t have the polygon budget and resort to almost entirely textures. The other was the it finally shed itself of the 2D backgrounds. At this point the series had almost a reputation for those backgrounds so it was a very refreshing change and I could really feel it on the replay. This also allows them to have full control of the camera and so cutscenes are a lot more dynamic and modern with panning, zooming, cuts etc. There are still a few prerendered backgrounds that sneak in, but they blend in well enough that you have to be looking for it.
The animation also seem to utilize mo-capping at least in some scenes so characters move around with a real sense of weight, for example Auron moves slow and takes a nice grounded swing instead of a massive sword swung like it’s a foam prop. The increased framerate really adds to this. There’s also little things like in battle multiple animations can trigger at the same time so characters can be moving back to place while being attacked or while someone else attacks. It’s a bunch of little things that just make the animation of Final Fantasy 10 feel good in a way even most modern RPGs don’t. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case, sometimes the more artificial movement and turning is used in cutscenes I assume as budget allows. It’s never fully consistent. While they can do most things in engine now and use it to good effect there’s still FMV. This is interleaved with in-engine animation usually to show something big or complex that the engine itself couldn’t handle. It’s honestly a little jarring because it’s often just a cut between in game scenes. This is further compounded by using completely different face models. The FMVs clearly used Asian face models while the in game at least in the remaster are not quite as racial pronounced.
Sound is of course higher quality but getting into the realm where they have the ability to be as high quality as they want. The main draw here though is full voice acting. Voice acting was not new at the time, plenty of RPGs had it but what was different is the sheer volume of it. Nearly all dialog spoken among the main case is voiced, not just big cutscenes and there’s a lot of it. What’s more is that they actually were a bit considerate with the way they added it. There is some dialog in battles for example but unlike most games at the time which became hyper repetitive they were surprisingly relaxed with it and it’s all the better for it. The quality of the acting is perhaps a product of it’s time. It’s definitely better than a lot of it’s contemporaries but it still feels very stilted. At least part of this is due to implementation. Each line is essentially an audio clip that gets played but sometimes the timing is unnatural during a conversation. It’s also the case that editing and direction was just not as good as it could have been. I have confidence the voice actors could have done better, after all some of them are pretty big names today. The main cast can sound good but many times the direction is off or they should have used a different take or just a better script. Whatever the case, it’s not up to the standard one would expect in a modern game despite how impressive it seemed for the time.
The other thing that was very noticeable was the music became far more thematic. While Final Fantasy always had various themes for characters and titles, Final Fantasy X pulls heavily from two main themes “To Zanarkand” and “Suteki da ne.” These are heavily remixed throughout the game to the exclusion of more variety. Both themes are excellent and hearing them outside evokes the game to me but it is interesting how much more they leaned into this sort of composition. And of course the battle theme is a banger but the bosses take a back seat again, except maybe the screamo final boss music “Otherworld” which comes out of left field.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Final Fantasy 10 is not a huge departure but it is surprisingly novel for the series. After 6 games using the ATB system Final Fantasy 10 does away with it and returns to a very classic turn based game. I find this specifically interesting because if you continue the trend the series becomes more action-based over time, so this one is an outlier of sorts. Like with Final Fantasy 9 characters are sorted into very specific classes, but unlike Final Fantasy 9 you are given freedom to change that. This is done through the spheregrid, which is the game’s focal point. Instead of a traditional level up system you are instead after each battle you are given some points to spend on traversing a graph of nodes, with some nodes unlocking abilities or increased stats. In this way it shares a lot of similarities with Final Fantasy 2 except that you get to allocate things yourself.
Since the gameplay is more execution based some of the necessity of the grind falls away at least in the early game. Though sometimes it gets replaced with gimmicks. One of the new features is that there are special commands in boss battles and you can beat them in special ways if you utilize them and this becomes necessary in some. This helps make bosses feel a bit more unique. However, even though sphere grid which has significant customizability it is a bit misleading. It’s really designed for multiple playthroughs as you probably won’t get enough key spheres to even get the alternate paths unless you know what you are doing. That, and planning is not feasible with the UI given. What would have made more sense is lying thing out linearly based on class and showing the bridges between classes. Instead to keep with the sphere motif the paths are winding making it hard to tell how long you have before the next major ability, how far you are along the track and whose track you’ll cross into at certain gate points. This leaves you mostly sticking to the happy path because it’s just less confusing. It’s also misleading because each step is essentially a level, you need to earn progressively more AP to take another step so backtracking is highly discouraged to avoid getting stuck with low stats and high AP requirements. This eventually stops at the endgame (especially if you factor in AP gain hacks) but you have to consider it through most of the game because you will hit diminishing returns grinding.
With the sphere grid being the main focus items take a back-seat. Equipment doesn’t have stats at all, it just boosts stats which in some way makes it easier to understand. Later in the game customizing equipment becomes more and more important to counter boss abilities. This customization comes from items and the main source of these is stealing. So, in some ways random encounters are not just important for AP to move the character on the sphere grid but also to get items for customizing items, both of which can require significant grid. Battle item management is also significantly reduced. Healing items are cheap, phoenix downs are plentiful even early on. Save points will automatically heal you which removes the need for tents, item rationing or any sort of backtracking to towns for supplies. In fact all status elements are healed after battle so you often don’t have to use items if you are certain you will win.
The actual act of battling is mostly similar to the other games. The main change here is that you can freely switch between party members in battle. That means even on the same turn you can switch and attack. This makes it feel like you are using the whole party even though only 3 are out at a time. You are also highly encouraged to switch. Each character’s class has a specific role and you want to take advantage of them. Yuna can heal but is bad at attacking, Tidus is good at attacking fast enemies, Wakka is good with flying enemies etc. So you do spend a lot of time switching characters in and out. It feels good and strategic rather than the constant attack, attack, attack pattern that much of the rest of the series gets into, you always feel like optimizing and not having to wait a turn further incentivizes this over, say, Persona where you sometimes just stick with what you have because it’s troublesome to switch. This also helps the problem of leveling up the party as you are always high incentivized to switch. Thought I found that Kimarhi doesn’t have a solid niche and that meant he was difficult to use. Lulu has the reverse problem where she often feels too useful. As a black mage with all elements she’s your go to for magic enemies but she can exploit weakness on other enemies too. The downside is that battles require this switching meaning that even for normal battles it’s not enough to attack, attack, attack as even at much higher level enemies will still hit hard and you’ll deal poor damage if you aren’t exploiting weaknesses and this means spending more time than necessary when attempting to grind.
Summoning aeons feels like it would be overpowered because they have their own HP and powerful attacks but it’s actually the opposite. They are slow and take damage quickly meaning that outside of very specific situations they are just a waste of time, literally because the summoning animation takes so long. The new limit break system is the overdrive system. It’s more or less the same as limit breaks but they are much more scaled back in terms of effect and they take longer to charge but aren’t as useless and slow as Final Fantasy 9’s trance. You can even change how they charge based on taking attacks, doing damage or killing enemies etc. You can upgrade aeon abilities but it’s not worth doing especially because late game bosses will instakill them anyway. The main strategy is to only use them for a single overdrive attack. Since you have a stock of them it’s usually best to store their overdrives for bosses and sacrifice them one-by-one to deal massive damage or occasionally sacrifice them against an attack you can’t survive. Since bosses often have nasty patterns in later phases you can often skip them by have stores of aeons ready to go.
There is no overworld which definitely limits some of the perceptions about freedom. Instead you essentially go from dungeon to dungeon. These dungeons too are very linear or at least they appear more linear even if they are not dissimilar from past entries. With the 3d graphics it’s very clear that you are locked into a path, almost literally the path and not even the hills around it. While this actually isn’t any different than the paths through each screen of the Playstation trilogy and gentle branching to treasure chests the series has had since Final Fantasy 3, it’s made much more apparent how limited things are especially since a lot of areas look like straight paths. I still think when compared to Final Fantasy 9 there’s less of a locked-in feeling because you are given opportunities to grind and save beacons will automatically heal you letting you hang around them to level up without worrying about resource management but it does little to hide the fact that it’s shuttling you from point A to B. What it does miss is the ability to backtrack until the very end. There are some special pads that can teleport you a short distance but if you forgot to buy something a few areas ago you will be traversing back through the entire thing if you can at all. Even the airship doesn’t fully alleviate it and it leads to a lot of wasted time.
The templates themselves are an odd inclusion. These are basically logic puzzles where you have to shuffle items (spheres) around to be able to take the one you want to the slot you want. I feel like they disrupt the flow a bit but they are never so hard or so long that I could keep a grudge. Except for one in particular where you need to push a pedestal off a cliff with 2 spheres in it. There is no indication that this would do anything other than force you to reset. In fact I tried it with just one sphere and there was still no indication that it works. That required a guide and I go a bit frustrated but overall they are just padding.
The real issue with the game is how the boss difficulty scales. Toward the end you start getting herded into particular strategies and if you don’t catch on you won’t win and you cannot grid your way out of it. This sorta violates part of the RPG tenant which is that if you can’t optimize you can always put more time in. Not so here, you must have the optimized strategy. But part of that also requires that you know how the boss works and you can’t know that without failing. This is very frustrating because you will need to fight each boss multiple times before you get the whole pattern. This again is why I think they really expect people to play this game multiple times. For example Seymour Flux has an attack that he does at a certain point which is pretty much a guaranteed party kill based on where you are in the game. The strategy is to know when he’s going to do it and bum rush him with your most powerful attacks to end the battle before he can do it. But you’ll spend a few times playing out the rest of the fight (and maybe doing quite well) before this inexplicable party wipe. Yunalesca as I mentioned does this too where if at least on character isn’t a zombie (because you knew to equip anti-zombie items) she has an attack that casts instant death on the whole party and you can’t make deathproof items yet.
The plot
The plot is quite simple. Tidus a blitzball ace gets isekai’d into Spira where he meets the rest of the team to visit some shrines and defeat Sin. While there are a couple twists they are well telegraphed. For example, it turns out Tidus’ drunkard father is Sin and why details of exactly why is is doled out over the course of the game. Given it’s simplistic nature it works quite well but it’s surprising to see the story-telling regress in a lot of ways. One thing that I stood out to me was that they are again trying to tell a love story but it doesn’t feel fully setup. Whereas Squall and Rinoa had a particular banter even early on, Yuna and Tidus feel platonic for much of the game. They didn’t really know how to write it. They do get a little more bold and resolve the relationship about 2/3s of the way through the game instead of trying to drag it out. This probably worked better because the ending is pretty bittersweet.
Thematically it tries to hit players over the head with lines like “Spira is the spiral of death” which ham-fistedly lays out the core theme of death. A bunch of dudes who should be dead think they know what’s best for the living, should one read some political commentary into that? I dunno how much was intended but it had its relatability.
I also want to call out the setting. For some reason this period in video game was very focused on tropical island settings. My guess was that with newer rendered tech they could more convincingly render water and it just made sense but it shares peers with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine and a few others. I want to say that inspiration is taken from Okinawan culture though I’m not too versed to really analyze from that point of view. The outfits definitely have a lot of old fashion Japanese influence versus the more obviously western influences of the rest of the series. Although some are just bizarre. Like Dona is basically just wearing lingerie. I get it’s a warm climate but it doesn’t really fit with anything or seem to have a point. She’s also a bit low poly for titilizing teen boys but then again Laura Croft was a icon. There’s also a bit of fan-service camera work which feels amusing today. I guess they couldn’t help themselves with the PS2 power. But otherwise I really enjoyed this setting’s mix of tropical Japanese steampunk, it’s very unique.
The port
The port is very good overall. It updates some of the graphics to be more HD friendly. There are some complaints I’ve seen about the faces but having little reverence for the original they seem fine to me. The port does lack some of the niceties of others namely random battle toggles and fast-forward. The later would have been really appreciated because the game has some cutscenes that can run long and there is no way to skip them. Traversal is also really slow because it is so linear. If you want to backtrack it’s a frustrating affair of constantly running from enemies as you make progress of 10 steps at a time, the airship makes it possible but traversal to get to important places like the monster arena are an absolute slog.
Technically I did have two crashes but thankfully did not impact progress since I had been saving very frequently and under multiple save spots.
Overall thoughts
The game starts off strong but the later parts of the game really put the strain on. Bosses become difficult and require multiple tries to understand. If you need to customize items that can be difficult because then you need to do a lot of backtracking and the endgame basically becomes a lot of chores.
A specific issue I ran into: There is a late game battle with Sin that functions as a damage check, you need to do enough damage to Sin in set number of turns or get an auto-game over. I wasn’t strong enough, not even close. So I consulted a guide and the two main suggestions are “level up lol” or “use Anima.” So I looked up how to get Anima and unfortunately because I didn’t get an optional chest in the temple it’s now locked behind a dark aeon uber boss. So the only option is to level up. But leveling up is very slow, especially because I can’t beat the harder enemies in the Omega Ruins and I can’t get inside Sin to fight those enemies which should be closer to my level. But there’s a trick to leveling up using Don Tonberry but now I need to collect all the enemies in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth which takes forever. Then I need to get more money, which requires capturing more monsters to get items to customize armors to sell and then I need to get items to customize Overdrive -> AP which requires getting 6 areas worth of monsters. Then I can actually perform the trick to level up. Grinding on top of grinding and utterly derailing the game. Beating uber bosses goes well beyond this as some have ridiculous requirements like capture 10 of every enemy. I didn’t have the patience for this and there’s no quick auto-attack strategy due to how the battle system works, and no speed multiplier so you can’t do any low-effort grinding. I guess if it was the only game I got for months as a child maybe I could justify this, but no one these days should. I’m sure I could avoid this problem earlier next time though. It’s really optimized for multiple playthroughs.
Overall I was enjoying the game a lot until the end. I loved the settings, the battle system and the characters. The voice acting could use work but the plot overall was pretty good. The sudden difficulty wall and pushing the player into grindy and unfun activities really soured me. I pretty much felt like I had to push through to finish it and did not even attempt any optional stuff beyond what I had already done. But it’s also surprising how much of that post-game content there was. They were really padding it out, it felt similar to something like Disgaea or I guess chronologically Tactics Ogre where the main game is just the tutorial and all the best abilities and items are for the post game and require copious and boring grinding. I never did break the damage barrier or any of that endgame ability stuff because it’s not necessary and takes too much prep to acquire. The padding also seeped into the main game as most enemies are just pallet swaps. It was very strange to see such a small bestiary which made the capturing all the more offensive. I could maybe have forgiven it if all that stayed optional. A very frustrating end to what could have otherwise gone into my top 3 Final Fantasy games.
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