Final Fantasy X - Welcome to Spira

After a long month or so of absence due to reasons of utmost importance, including forgetting and being lazy, here it is. The best thing that has gone on the blog so far: My Final Fantasy X review. A game that received heaps of praise on release, but is now generally looked back on as rather "meh", and one that I myself think deserves a good look at with a more modern perspective. Behold, the opinions of a random guy on the internet about a game you'd forgotten about.

Considering this is my first review, I feel a brief explanation on how this works is due. It's simple: There's two sections, presentation and gameplay, in which I go in-depth on that aspect of the game. I give a score for each. At the end of the review, I'll give you the average and thus my final score for the game. Very occasionally, however, a game where either the gameplay or presentation is more important comes up, and I will weigh it accordingly, taking 75% of the score from one section or the other. Don't worry, I will always tell you about it. That said, Final Fantasy X being both story-intensive and putting a great deal of importance on the gameplay I feel deserves a 50/50 split on the final score. With no further ado, let's jump right in onto the presentation section.

Presentation:

As usual for the series, particularly recently, Final Fantasy X is highly plot-driven. The game begins as the main character, default name Tidus, is transported from his home city of

This is Tidus. Get used to him, he'll be around for a while.

Zanarkand by a mysterious creature named Sin to what appears to be an alternate reality, the world of Spira. In Spira, he learns about the cult of Yevon, Spira's God. Sin is a monster created by Yevon to punish Spira for using Machina (machines), and Summoners, powerful magicians given power by certain temples, must complete a pilgrimage through all of Spira to stop Sin, giving the land a few months of calm before the monster is reborn.

Tidus becomes a guardian to Yuna, a Summoner, due to her connection to his long-missing, and long-despised father. Anything more beyond a brief re-collection of the main characters would be entering spoiler territory. However, because I feel this is important, I will write a full post on it - detailing the effectiveness and failures of the twists - fully labelled as containing spoilers later on in the week.

Perhaps even more immediately noticeable than the plot, a main aspect of the game's presentation is the look. Spira is a unique world, with a very odd combination of technology and lack thereof. There'll be insanely advanced holographic monitors to play a game of Blitzball (an expy of Football played underwater), but you'll need to use an elephant to cross a river because anything more complex is forbidden. Remnants of machina cities litter the landscape in what is otherwise an idyllic, mostly rural world. Spira feels like a post-apocalyptic world millennia after the apocalypse.  

Besaid Beach - One of the many areas you'll visit during your journey

Throughout your journeys, you'll see a large amount of varied landscapes, from the grassy plains of the Calm Lands to the tropical island of Besaid, to the icy heights of Mount Gagazet
and through to the barren, lightning-struck wasteland of the Thunder Plains. Each one is unique in their own way, giving a nice twist to an environment that we've seen in games already, and beautiful in their own way. What's really important here is the sense of desolation everywhere. Spira is beautiful and serene, but there's an underlying sadness and melancholy to it, and this is utterly vital to the overarching themes in the story.

What's best about Spira is the mix of cultures inhabiting it. These are the same races you've seen a million times in Western RPGs - the Elves, the Beast-People, the Humans, and, for some reason, as a distinct race, the Arabs. They're all re-named and colourfully redesigned, but anyone who's experienced Tolkienesque fantasy will be familiar with most of them. What's really unique is the Japanese-flavoured twist upon them. The Elves are beautiful and wise, but they're also mostly made up of corrupt churchmen and shrewd, ruthless politicians. The Beast-People are rather childish despite their much lauded honour, and the Humans are just as boring and vanilla as ever.

Spira is truly a fantastically accomplished world, with an engrossing backstory, amazing visual design and some very interesting culture. But what of the backing? No game is truly great in the presentation department unless the music appropriately compliments the world. Thankfully, the music here is stellar. Final Fantasy X has a soundtrack composed by the great Nobuo Uematsu, together with Masashi Hamauzu and Junya Nakano. This music is highly atmospheric,

Oh, Mr Boss, you're so big and scary - why is your music so boring then?

the melody almost always complimenting the settings perfectly.However, some work could have been put into the battle music. Whilst the main battle theme is fast-paced and exciting like in most Final Fantasy games, the boss themes are mostly made up of slower, plodding sounds. This was obviously done to attempt to compliment the player's more methodical and thoughtful fight style in these tougher battles and is intended to create tension, but ends up making them seem less threatening than the main theme.

There are a couple other uninteresting tracks. The track that plays during Blitzball is an obnoxious fifteen-second loop, and a few of the area themes were plain boring, like that which plays in Luca. Others seemed dissonant with their areas, like the strangely  happy music playing in the dark and threatening Thunder Plains. This does provide an interesting, unusual feel to them, but it doesn't seem intentional. However, this doesn't detract from what is otherwise an amazing soundtrack.

However, let's come to the real meat of the story: The characters. Final Fantasy X for me marks the point where Final Fantasy stopped being about the plot, and became about the characters. Not that the main plot in Final Fantasy X is bad by any means, but the people inhabiting Spira are by far more interesting than the things that happen to them.

Left to Right: Auron, Rikku, Wakka, Tidus, Yuna, Kimahri, Lulu

As mentioned previously, the main character is Tidus, an ace Blitzballer from the city of Zanarkand who is mysteriously transported to Spira and soon joins Yuna as a Guardian. Saying anything else would be a spoiler, but in Tidus lays the main problem of the game, at least in the presentation department. He's just not very interesting at all, and we spend the overwhelming majority of the game with him. To be fair, he is there largely to serve as a conduit for us to talk to the rest of the cast, but he's clearly meant to be a big character as well, considering the amount of development he's given. Tidus isn't the traditional Final Fantasy whining hero, but he's still a generic protagonist at best, and downright annoying at best. The main problem is his voice acting. Either the voice actor wasn't very good, or he was horribly directed, but Tidus seems to not convey emotion through his voice normally. I am not referring to the infamous laugh scene, however, as that was a very obviously intentional bad piece of acting, and I think was one of the best moments in the game, if amazingly cheesy. That said, every other line Tidus says feels stiff or clumsy. Something quite amusing is that because of your ability to re-name him, Tidus's name is never said in the game, and as such all the voice-acting has to awkwardly tip-toe around that. Paraphrasing the great Yahtzee, it's quite amusing to play through an entire game as "you over there"

The emotional lead of the game is Yuna, the Summoner Tidus takes to guarding after arriving from Zanarkand, because of the fact a man very similar to his own father and going by the same name guarded Yuna's father in turn. She is the one who carries the traditional mopey protagonist's role, but is not as irritating as someone like Cloud, Squall or Lightning, being both a lot more justified in the sentiment, considerably more polite about it, and occasionally showing some emotion other than poe-faced misery or steely determination. Her voice acting is mediocre at best, but is leagues better than that of Tidus. Anything to do with her character beyond this could be considered spoilers, but let it be known that in my opinion Yuna is one of the best characters the series has been graced with, up there with Vivi of IX fame and Kefka from VI.

Attention, Duelists! My hair... Wait, wrong franchise.

Then follows an assortment of Yuna's Guardians, characters who get less time for development, but are still ultimately interesting or endearing. Wakka, a blitzball player, is basically a good guy, but is too zealous in his belief in Yevon, ignoring logic to follow the teaching. Coping with the death of his brother at the hands of Sin, he's become somewhat racist against the Al Bhed, and despite this, becomes an older-brother figure to Tidus. He's amongst the most interesting characters in the game due to his copious amount of flaws covering up who is otherwise a top-notch guy, and goes through a genuinely moving amount of growth.

Lulu, the black mage, is somewhat of a typical story: The cold ice-queen with a heart of gold. There is more to her than simply that, though, as she is to Yuna what Wakka is to Tidus, and her dry, witty one-liners are amongst the funniest things in the game. That said, she is a relatively predictable character.

Kimahri's a Ronso, a beast-man whose horn is broken. His is the typical story of the exile, as well as being the most stoic member of the party, having literally no lines for the first five hours of his presence. He might be the least interesting member of the party, going through a rather predictable "honourable exile" arc. He still has the potential for very endearing moments, as well as a couple brilliantly intimidating shows of how strongly he's commited to protecting Yuna.

Rikku, the thief of the party, is an Al Bhed, which causes a large amount of trouble with Wakka once he finds out. She's the resident Genki Girl, upbeat and cheerful, but her motivations are something trully different. A lot of the game's discussion of Machiavelian logic comes from her, and she's often put as the ideological opponent to the rest of the party, not willing to follow Machiavelian principles. It's refreshing to see an energetic female who is not an airhead in Final Fantasy, and Rikku is honestly one of the most endearing characters in the game.

The Chuck Norris of Final Fantasy.

Finally, Auron, my own favourite Guardian. Having been one of the two Guardians of Yuna's father, Tidus's father being the other, he is the only member of the main cast apart from Tidus who seems to know Tidus's Zanarkand. He acts very much as an Obi-Wan to Tidus, but with a lot more snarking, and a good dose of badass. Auron is the only character in the entire Final Fantasy series who I would consider a real badass, and it's pretty damn glorious.

There's a large roster of villains, made up of priests and politicians, as well as Sin himself, of course. They're varied and interesting, and the main human villain of the game is damn intimidating, with a fight scene in which you get to use him cementing him as a real threat before breaking him loose on you as a devastating boss fight.

Presentation verdict:

9/10

A truly fantastically presented game. It's showing a couple cracks, either through old age or small design flaws, but it's damn good.

Gameplay:

 

Final Fantasy X is, big surprise here, a JRPG. All the usual genre tropes are here, including turn based battles and semi-open world exploration. However, gone is the Active Time Battle system from previous Final Fantasies, replaced by the rather confusingly named Conditional Term-Based Battle system, or CTBB for short. Rather than inputting commands in real time and waiting for a gauge to fill up, you now have as much time as you need to think your strategy out. The twist lies in how turns are given out: A scale on the right of the screen tells you the order turns play out in, and this is changed depending on both your actions and the actions of your enemies. Pretty much every single thing you do but using a regular attack alters this, some actions being "faster" than others. For instance, using an item tends to move that character's next turn up, whilst using magic tends to move your next turn down.

That Gauge you see at the top right, that's the famed CTBB gauge

In theory, this puts a lot of emphasis on efficiency of actions: If you're going to be hitting an enemy with a magic attack that delays your next turn by two slots, you're going to want it to be as effective as possible, right? Yes, of course, but there's two major problems here. Because you outnumber foes in most battles (very rarely do you fight more than three enemies in regular battles, yet alone boss fights), dropping, say, your mage's turn by two slots often just puts her behind your other party members, and does not give your enemy another turn. Please note that this is another dimension to the system when it works as intended: occasionally you're going to want to delay your party member's turns to either buff them or debuff the enemy for maximum efficiency. 

The second, and major problem, is the difficulty of the game. The CTBB system could really work for a brutally hard game, forcing you to kind of "juggle" the boss, not allowing them to attack for as long as possible in the style of say Grandia or the Penny Arcade games. However, Final Fantasy X is not a difficult game. Most boss fights can be cleared with a simple strategy of attack-heal-attack. What few bosses have gimmicks thrown in there to prevent this can usually be circumvented by simply using a magic of a certain element, or giving a couple context-sensitive commands. What's most frustrating is that there are a few rock-hard encounters near the end of the game, and these are truly magnificent, forcing you to make the most out of every turn, and struggling to delay enemy attacks to the point where you can heal your party up enough to survive the next one, and it's hard not to look at these and wish more of the game was this way.

Tidus, quite unsubtly telling you to use Trigger Commands

An interesting idea the game has are the context-sensitive combat commands mentioned above (called "Trigger Commands" by the game itself). These will pop-up during certain boss fights, and will allow your characters to take specific actions during combat - for instance, in boss fights against humans, you could have your characters talk to the boss, thus either buffing themselves, or debuffing the enemy, or in battles against huge enemies you could control your positioning. These are extremely rare occurences, but when they do happen they add a welcome layer of complexity to the battle system.
 

Following the tradition begun in Final Fantasy VII, the game has "overdrives", the name given in this particular installment to limit breaks. These are extra-powerful attacks that can be by filling up the "overdrive gauge". Acting in certain ways in battle unlocks new ways to fill up the gauge, including the default and traditional "fill up on taking damage" mode, and the "fill up on attack", "fill up on ally taking damage", and "fill up on defeating enemy" modes. These also offer a good amount of customization, each character having a different way of unlocking new overdrives with new effects, from collecting items to completing side-quests or story beats. Overdrives aren't as powerful as limit breaks of old, but do give a modifier I estimate to be in the *3 or *4 range on your regular attack to speed up battles or help finish off bosses. They add disappointingly little to the game, considering the amount of effort that went into animating them and allowing you to customize them.

You see how even those levels are? That's the result of a lot of pain.

Another feature that has a big effect on combat is the limited party, and the ability to switch characters at any time. You can only ever have three characters on the field, but you can switch them out at any time, with no loss of a turn. The agility stat of a character affects the CTBB list, so switching to a faster character will result in you having more turns, and vice-versa, so there is some risk in changing to another party member in the form of getting your turn balance out of whack, but this is often negligible. I personally really like this ability, but would prefer the SNES Final Fantasy philosophy of having every single character in the party fighting at the same time. The ability to switch gives some nice strategic choices on who you want to take damage: Would you rather risk your healer being knocked out, or do you pass up healing your tank on her turn? Can your mage finish the boss off this turn, or should you bring the healer in to ensure you survive the oncoming attack? However, this once again makes the game easier, allowing you access to pretty much any character's ability whenever you need it, rather than having to wait for their turn a la classic Final Fantasy.

The biggest problem with this system is how utterly it kills the pacing of the game. Only characters who participate in battles in any way, be it attacking or using an item or ability, get any experience for it. This makes every random battle a slow slog of cycling through every party member and making them do some meaningless action to ensure they gain experience, making every single enemy take twice or thrice as long as it really should and making the story move at a glacial pace. This is, in my honest opinion, the most glaring flaw Final Fantasy X has: It hurts both the gameplay and presentation sections in a colossal way. It also adds an artificial layer of difficulty to boss battles. I'd often get into an endless cycle of having to revive my thief to cycle out to another party member, with her getting knocked down repeatedly. This didn't make the battles hard, but it did irritate me enough to throw me off balance and make me commit some dumb mistakes.

Believe it or not, one of the most content-packed areas.

That is about all that can be said for combat. But what happens in between combat sections? Well, it's a rather traditional Final Fantasy experience, in which you wander around areas searching for items and running into incessant random encounters. This is as annoying as ever, and is not helped by the stupid, stupid way experience is handled. That said, one can hardly blame a Final Fantasy game for having random encounters. Areas are well designed, with plentiful secrets. However, this is a much more linear experience than that in previous Final Fantasies, perhaps being the start of the descent into the nightmare that the Final Fantasy XIII saga is. There is no world map, and as such you're going through a linear series of areas. The areas are far from the corridors of Final Fantasy XIII, allowing you a plentiful bit of exploration around them, however, and there is the occasional optional side-area with a few goodies or sidequests, though these only really start being a factor after the halfway point of the game. Strangely enough, there IS an airship in the game, but you aren't allowed access to this until almost the end of the game, when it merely acts as a teleport between different areas, and the short span of time when you have access to it before locking in to the endgame is when you'll be doing most of your sidequesting, in particular seeking out your ultimate (or, as the game brands them "Celestial") weapons.

Not all of the weapons you'll be collecting will be ultimate. Every character has a unique weapon and armor type, and you'll find equipment throughout the game. About halfway through you'll gain the ability to customize your gear. This is done by using up items you collect during the game, mostly by stealing from monsters during combat. You can only upgrade weapons with empty slots, putting a single upgrade into every slot. 

Customizing weapons also gives you a nice cosmetic change.

This creates an interesting balance between using pre-made decent weapons and holding on to weapons that are currently not very good in the hopes you'll be able to upgrade them into completely amazing tools of destruction. It also makes you consider your use of items, as some of the most powerful items to upgrade with are also extremely powerful in combat, having to consider potential long-term benefits against short-term rewards. It's a brilliantly implemented system, and allows for some really powerful items. By the end of the game, I had Wakka's armor auto-medicating him without using up turns any time a status effect was inflicted,  automatically healing without consuming items when his health was under 50% and giving him 20% boosts to both HP and Strength, which was a truly godlike experience. Conversely, I had Auron carrying a really nice pre-made sword that boosted his strength by a pretty large amount, which wasn't quite as useful as Wakka's equipment, but had cost me considerably less, both in time and money.

A way to gain some of the most powerful upgrade materials is Blitzball, a proxy to Football, and an important part of the world of Spira. After a single compulsory  plot-driven match, you're allowed to play games as you wish. Blitzball is a rather simple, semi-turn based football sim. It consists of two modes: moving your characters around in real time (though movement is set to automatic by default), and deciding what actions they should take. Upon meeting an opposing player (both teams consisting of 5 players plus goalies), an action menu where you can choose to shoot, pass or dribble opens up, though you can open said menu at any time. I won't go into much more detail, but it's a pure numbers game, with very little randomness thrown in, though when it comes in it comes in pretty majorly.

I don't think it's ever explained how Blitzballers can breathe underwater

There's also a team-building component to Blitzball, in that you may recruit certain characters you meet during the game into your team. The problem is, these are quite rare, and there's next to no indication as to who can be recruited, so more often than not you'll completely miss any possible recruits. The few times I managed to find players, they were already signed to another team. It's a system I want to take advantage of, but I'm simply not given the possibility by the game itself. This seems to be the theme in the overall game design - great ideas are sadly marred by incomplete or underwhelming execution. Another problem of Blitzball is its lack of use. You are given some of the most powerful items of the game - placing 1st in a League will give you Dark Matter, which can be either a really powerful useable nuke - the best one in item-form in the game, in fact - or allow you to customize items with the Break Damage Limit ability - which allows you to do more than 9999 damage in a single hit, which becomes relevant with some of the higher level summons. However, you gain only one unit per league, and customization takes a good few more than that. Late in the game, you can gain them considerably faster through normal gameplay. This means that there's next to no reason to play Blitzball outside the enjoyment of it, and this is an extremely time-consuming game. Supposing no actions happen, the very minimum amount of time possible for a game is just above 10 minutes, and actions stretch this out to closer to 25. If you're anything like me, you'll find yourself not playing it after completing your first league.

Of course, no amount of item upgrading will carry you through the game without properly leveled characters, and the leveling system is by far one of the greatest achievements of the game. Apart from the magnificently stupid way XP is distributed, every aspect of the level system is brilliant. You level through the "Sphere Grid", a massive board your characters

Look at that grid. It's so beautiful.

move around. Each level you gain represents the ability to move one node on the grid, or four nodes that you have already visited back. Most nodes have stat upgrades or, more rarely, abilities. Your characters can activate nodes one space away from them using spheres found in battle or around the world. Occasionally, you'll come across a lock node, for which you need a rare key node of the equivalent level to open it. This creates my favourite leveling system in any Final Fantasy: You have a great amount of flexibility to turn any character into what you want (You want your mage to be a tank? Great, get them to Auron's section of the grid and you've got it), there's a large amount of hard decisions to be made (do you have your character sit at the beginning of a powerful path until you get a key node, falling behind in power until you do, or do you have him go down a different, less useful path in the meanwhile and waste levels that could be spent on better things in the long term?), and there's more than enough ability to create hilariously powerful characters to bring what to me is the most satisfying aspect of JRPG gameplay to life.

So, there we go. This is, to me, what Final Fantasy X is gameplay-wise in a nutshell: A well-intentioned but ultimately failed attempt at innovative combat backed up by a really impressive item customization and leveling system, with magnificently decent on-foot gameplay and a fun if ultimately pointless minigame. It seems like such a simple game this way, but it's honestly a rather enrapturing and complex experience, with a good share of frustrating and glaring flaws.

Gameplay: 6.5/10

It won't blow you away, and the flaws are really huge and glaring, but when it works it really does work. You can still see the heart of a fantastic game here, but the unfortunate results of some of the mechanics do their darned hardest to cover it.

Overall Verdict: 

(6.5+9)/2 = 7.25

 7.25/10

A relatively average game in the Final Fantasy series. There are some excellent points to it, mostly in the story and look department, but a series of what initially appear to be minor design flaws turn into huge, glaring problems upon closer inspection. It is definitely worth your time to experience both the world of Spira and the story of Yuna and Tidus, but those with less patience for overdrawn gameplay will find it unpleasant. If you're a fan of the series, or a big fan of JRPGs, check it out. If you can deal with a slow game, check it out. If you're impatient when it comes to levelling and exploration, don't bother.