Final Fantasy X-2

Trying to review Final Fantasy X2 as directly and honestly as possible without pissing off the fanboys and cheerleaders is as likely as trying to find a straw of hay in a large pile of needles without getting pricked and potentially losing most of your blood supply; it is undoable. I cannot provide an honest review without the need to mention how terrible this game is. It’s not just because it’s not even remotely true to the Final Fantasy series or the fact that it’s an underwhelming sequel to Final Fantasy X (which was a decent RPG), but because it reeks of Final Fantasy finally, after 15 years of good games, jumping the shark.

Hmm...Where to start, you may be wondering...I’ll start with the story that reeks of donkey doo-doo. Basically, it’s been two years since the ending of Final Fantasy X. The world is saved from being absolutely destroyed by a monster named Sin, and everybody rebuilds the destroyed towns. In the midst of all this, Yuna and Rikku are sphere hunters...WHAT THE HELL!? SPHERE HUNTERS!? They go around the world in the old FFX airship with the main man of the ship, Cid (FFX, not FFVII Cid), the many illegal immigrants from Mexico they could hire and a room full of monkeys to program the game... I mean operate the ship. Oh, and this virtual nobody named Paine goes along with Yuna and Rikku on their sphere hunting jobs. How the two met Paine, I’ll never know and the game sure as hell doesn’t tell you...okay, there are times where the game tells you about Paine’s past of being a warrior for some squad and why she actually did end up joining, but honestly, who cares? It all mostly feels forced, okay?

So anyway, the entire gang call themselves the Gullwings (pfft, more like the Dullwings), and the three chicks call their little group “YRP” (as in Yuna, Rikku and Paine). Pretty lame, don’t you think? It gets worse, because there are rival sphere hunters. I’m not going to waste my time going in-depth with them, but to make this part short and sweet, they’re general annoyances and really prove to be nothing more than a distraction from the plot, or to be completely honest, a distraction from the fact that there really isn’t a plot besides the rebuilding of the world and it’s basically three people getting spheres and beating up rival sphere hunters as well as monsters that they run into. Oh...did I forget to mention this game consists of 5 chapters? I wonder how you could turn that into 5 chapters...read on.

When you get further in the game, it chucks you some clichéd plot in the form of a sphere. Basically, these two who look a lot like Yuna and Tidus (the latter of which is not in this game at all) are running from some machine. This kind of seems cool at first, but once the characters investigate further into this, it just becomes a contrived storyline about finding out more about this machine and destroying it to save the world. It’s an overdone plot, though being overdone does not necessarily mean that it’s bad, but the overall execution involving betrayals, joining forces with rivals and some crap about forcing memories and subconscious beings out...put it this way; it sounded excellent on paper, but the way it was executed was just horrific.

There was not one cutscene I was willing to pay attention to. Not even this scene where the three encounters this beast, and asks “think we need a password”, then Paine’s response is “how about kick its ass”, since it’s a reference to the mission they just did having to figure out passwords. When I first got this game (I was 12 years old at the time), I thought it was a snappy couple of lines; in fact, I often quoted them! But now I think it sucks. Not in the sense that it tries to be edgy and cool trying to include vulgarity (which is a rarity in Final Fantasy games), but because Paine’s voice acting there (and in general) was just dull and lackluster. I used to like it not just because it said “ass”, but because I used to not care for voice acting. Now, I think that voice acting makes or breaks a game the same way that the amount of chili on my chili dog can make it taste good or like crap. Get into the spirit or go away!

And that’s just it; only few characters have good voice acting. Rikku’s voice acting easily stands out above everyone else’s. I felt that Tara Strong’s voice acting for her was, as her last name should imply, strong. I always found her to be a mixed bag; often she is horrendous, but when she voice acts either somebody as eccentric as Rikku, or a young boy, she does an average to fantastic job. However, the good is far outweighed by the bad, and this is evident in the fact that 80% of the voice cast has NO EMOTION! Square decided to hire their old voice casts (Japanese and American), and to be frank, I thought the Japanese did a terrific job; however, the American voice acting (outside of Rikku’s) is weak! In Final Fantasy X, the voice acting was decent at best. It seems as if when they decided to return in this game and reprise their roles, they forgot what role they’re actually doing, so they just do this stock voice acting.

Actually, when you start to think about it, do the characters themselves retain the roles they once had? By characters, I don’t mean the ones who are part of subplots (which this game is full of BTW) and minor characters in general, because it’s not as if you actually grow to care about them at all. It’s the main ones you’ll grind your teeth to! I know it’s been two years since the events of Final Fantasy X, but these changes are actually quite unsuiting and very, very poor decisions. I mean, where the hell did Yuna get those guns from? When the hell did she learn to sing...actually, scratch that, when she sings, she sounds like one of those pissed karaoke singers in bars. The point is, she tries too hard to be “free spirited” and “direct”, but fails because the other in-game characters knew her as somewhat of a doormat and won’t let that go, and I think that not only does it often conflict what she was back in FFX or poorly contrast her voice acting, but it also just plain sucks, there is no better way to describe it. Some of you naysayers would be coming up with “that ain’t the best example” Well, unfortunately princess, Yuna is the MAIN CHARACTER throughout the ENTIRE GAME! She IS the best example considering you have to put up with her throughout the entire course of the game.

Let’s be honest, though; the characters try their very hardest to be as unlikable as possible. You can bet this game will find popular personalities they can copy and paste onto its own characters, just screw it up a bunch, hit the delete key a few times and call it a personality. This makes cutscenes virtually impossible to watch. The most self-indulgent thing this game does is that if you want 100% completion, you better watch every microsecond of every cutscene. There’s an option to skip them, but if you really want to complete this game 100%, you’ll have to watch the cutscenes. Often – actually, that’s a compliment, let’s try every cutscene. Every cutscene in the entire game is boring as hell and half of them relate to NOTHING IMPORTANT! You’re not missing out on anything if you skip the cutscenes, aside from 100% completion, but who honestly has the patience to actually want to view the scenes in their entirety without trying to contemplate how Square and Enix could even think of such crap.

The unfortunate thing is that this game markets itself as an RPG. If you have a craptastic story, seasoned RPG veterans and purists will pass it up. The story doesn’t exactly stroke their ego the right way or at all; it actually makes them supposedly lose IQ points. Actually, I felt as if I lost a few hundred brain cells just typing out the gist of the story and the characters, let alone play the game thus experiencing the story in its true physical form on the big screen – an HD screen to be exact – and being distraught at how bad it is compared to, really, any other RPG on the face of the earth. To add insult to injury, the non-storyline stuff isn’t too good either; in fact, some elements make the story look like Shakespeare.

Playing this game is quite a chore. Unlike FFX, FFX2 brings back the ATB from previous Final Fantasy titles (IV-IX) instead of keeping the much easier CTB system of FFX. I honestly found the CTB system to be far too easy. For the impaired, CTB is where the speediest go first and the slowest go last. There isn’t an easy way to explain other than that, and the fact that moves which require recovery time delays your turn by a couple. ATB, on the other hand, is hard to grasp at first since you have to make snap decisions, however, A) once you get used to it, you just have to pick the best abilities and use certain items, and B) this game waters it down to hell. The ATB system is where you have these bars that eventually fill up, and once they’re full, you can have your turn. If you’re doing anything aside from regular attack, you have to wait for this CHARGE meter to fill up before the attack can be initiated. Seems simple enough. It worked quite fine in FFIV, surely, it could work in FFX2, but unfortunately, Square Enix decided to screw around and ultimately make the gameplay as unlikable as possible.

How so? To begin with, Sqaure introduced this thing called a Dressphere, which is essentially a sphere that contains an interchangeable fighting style but you change your clothes as well. Yes, they change their clothes when they equip a different Dessphere... Do I smell Dead or Alive? I sure do! They’re not wearing much in their many Dresspheres (unless it’s something that would require armor – basically, if it requires no armor, they’ll be wearing clothes which cover 1/5 of their bodies...not that that’s bad or anything). In theory, if a hot girl was wearing many of these clothing styles, I’d be turned on beyond belief, because many of them look revealing. In fact, I’m surprised their boobs aren’t bouncing up and down in this game (though I’m guessing the clothes alone would be enough fanservice).

As for the fighting styles, they’re to match their name. Warrior? Expect them to wield a broadsword and cut enemies up with it. Gunner? Give them dual pistols! Whatever the case, expect a fighting style to compliment the name of the Dressphere. Yeah! Aside from a few though, they’re all basically the same thing! The few mage Dresspheres (Black Mage, White Mage, Gun Mage, Alchemist) have differences, but the others are basically ‘hit as hard as you can’. The only reason to get all the Dresspheres to their full potential is to complete the game 100%, even though you’ll only find the White Mage, Alchemist and [insert warrior-like Dressphere here] Dresspheres to be even remotely useful. I mean, this sounded good on paper I believe, but unfortunately in execution, it was terrible. The core isn’t too bad, but everything else was poorly done. That was just bad.

There are these ultimate Dresspheres you can unlock when you find them later in the game, and they seem pretty cool. You even feel enticed to use them! Unfortunately, there are two problems with them - They aren’t that good and it’s tedious as hell trying to even activate them! How?

In the game, you have a Garment Grid, which stores your individual characters’ Dresspheres, and in battle, you can access the Garment Grid to change your clothes mid-battle. Fair call except these take like a million years to happen! Not only must you wait a bit while leaving yourself vulnerable to attack, but you must also sit through a lengthy transition scene (unless you’ve already accessed that Dressphere in the battle – yes, in the battle, not the game, so you must watch lengthy scenes over and over again – what a horrible night to have a curse FFX2). I don’t what’s worse; that or running a cheese grater up and down my nuts.

The “ultimate” Dresspheres are not only tedious to equip, but they are also useless! They’re not worth going through the tedious crap you’re forced to go through to equip it, because they are only for one battle, and they don’t exactly do as much damage as you’d like to hope for. I also find that there is no motivation to actually want to use these, because the battles (whether it be an enemy or a boss) are pitifully easy as a whole even without the “ultimate” Dressphere to begin with! Furthermore, it’s a cheap win, which is the lowest form of win. If you don’t care for fun, then go ahead; equip this. While you’re at it, why don’t you go play with dog turds? If you want fun, don’t bother equipping them. In fact, the only real use I can find with them is to drag the battles on for longer, but why would you want to do that? I thought these were fast paced?

Honestly, you would hope that Square would at least keep the Sphere Grid leveling up system to keep with the theme of spheres (Dresspheres, sphere hunters, other sphere related things), but unfortunately, they didn’t. Too many people complained that it wasn’t “traditional” and it was too “complex”, so Square decided to dig up the traditional level up system, cook up a random level up system to mix things up a bit, ditch the Sphere Grid and put the new ones in instead. The whole having to use certain abilities to get more abilities is a good idea and getting EXP for battles again sounds good and all, but it really feels inconsistent with the fact that FFX had a Sphere Grid plus this game is themed around spheres! Jesus! The execution was good and all, but just...no.

You know what RPGs usually have? Shops! Alright, maybe we’ll buy ourselves some new armor, weapons and items...WRONG! Aside from item buying and the occasional armor buying, shops are useless. They don’t even sell weapons because you cannot even access your weapons as...well, there’s only one weapon per Dressphere. This is quite a tease because if you’re remotely accustomed to the ATB battle system, you’ll be able to get a crapton of Gil (the currency of the entire Final Fantasy series), yet the shops are bloody useless unless you’re low on supplies and need better armor. That’s just...oh, lord, this is just bad.

This game adds in some stupid half-assed platforming elements by forcing you to jump over certain smaller jumps. You can basically hold O and move towards the other side. That is absolutely pathetic and shouldn’t have even been in the game, considering... IT ADDS NOTHING TO ANYTHING! Why did Square include this? Were they trying to make this game as pointless as possible?

...don’t get me started on how pointless a lot of crap is in this game. About 80% of this game is all sidequests! It has as much point to anything as climbing through a barbed wire fence while the gate is obviously open and unguarded. Well, I guess the main point is to get 100% completion plus to reveal a hell of a lot more backstory and sidestories, but really, you’re not missing out if you don’t do 80% of this game. The backstories and sidestories are equally as boring as one another and are both even more boring than listening to someone ramble on about creationism, especially for an Atheist like myself, because it is all half-done and just in there for the sake of being in there. I guess it’s nice to see how FFX characters are doing 2 years later in this game, but honestly, after hearing the first couple of minutes, you’ll run for the hills. The sidequests themselves are menial little tasks like ‘protect’ and ‘kill a bunch of enemies’ and really, I do enough of this during the main quest.

Okay...there is a little variety here and there. Let’s try...Sphere Break! Yeah, this tedious as hell game! Basically, you have to...break the opponent’s sphere? Actually, what you’re doing is, using the power of mathematics and numbered coins, you try to break the opponent’s sphere! If that doesn’t sound like your thing, don’t worry, it isn’t my thing either, though points to Square for trying to be unique. Blitzball makes a return, however, it plays like the unlikable cousin of Football Manager. See, you have to manage a team and watch them play. That is bland, and in a way, a complete rip off. Everything else to do with sidequests, you’d have encountered in the main quest, just slightly harder. There is little more to say about sidequests, because they are truly a waste.

Now, I’ve been told that this game isn’t linear. Well, no duh Sherlock! It isn’t nonlinear either! What is this blasphemy I’m speaking of? Well, there really isn’t any direction in FFX2. I mean, yeah, there are places you have to go to, but then you’ll be missing on other things (yeah, we want to do tedious, repetitive sidequests, don’t we? They are the main point of this game after all!!![/sarcasm]) and won’t complete the game fully.

Oh, speaking of fully completing the game, this is the absolute pickiest % increasing thinga-majig I’ve ever encountered in my many years of gaming. Not only must you view every cutscene (which is self-indulgent to the extreme), do every little sidequest and (of course) finish the main quest, you must also basically talk to everyone in every level at every chapter to increase it by .00000001%/person. You must examine every pebble on the ground to get .00000000002%/pebble...okay, I’m just exaggerating a bit, but it’s basically how it feels. Shouldn’t it be enough I bothered to do the crappy sidequests and viewed every boring cutscene? This is just like the time where an Atheist got stoned by Christians because the Atheist told the Christians there was no god...sounds like a bad example, but trust me, that’s how it feels. I often feel like the Atheist (hah, maybe I’m the Atheist I’m talking about).

But all of that is absolutely nothing. My honest to God biggest gripe with the game is that if you’re even remotely skilled at all this, you can breeze through the game without much trouble (some of the sidequest bosses MAY give you problems, but don’t count on some battles which have challenge). The game on my first playthrough is approximately 20 hours, but I’m willing to be 10-12 hours were spent on cutscenes. I only completed the game at 60% at that time, but when I got to 100%, I looked and it clocked in at...100 hours. 100 hours of tedious gameplay that I am not willing to ever experience ever again for any reason whatsoever. At least there’s a New Game+ which allows you to start again but with all your items, Dresspheres and the like, but what does it matter if you didn’t like it the first time?

*sigh* How people find this game’s gameplay excellent, I’ll never know, outside of the stereotypically obvious (sometimes humorous) and delusional fanboy responses such as “it’s my opinion”, “because it’s newer”, “because it’s Final Fantasy”, “because Square made it” and “you suck Vergil”. Speaking of Square, do you think enthusiasts of Square jump up and down in excitement over this gameplay? Well, depends. The old school ones who stuck by them since the first Final Fantasy game for the NES (hell, maybe even King’s Knight and Rad Racer, two of the many games that almost forced Square into bankruptcy until they made Final Fantasy) were certainly not because it is outrageously terrible and watered down. The newer fans probably would, though, for reasons unknown to everyone but them. Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of it, but since I was practically raised RPG-wise by Final Fantasy I-V (hooray for Japanese imports =D), it’s understandable.

What can I say about the graphics? Do I hate them? Well, yes and no. Yes because of the superficial appearance of the 3 main characters plus the recycling of 95% of levels (with 5% of new content to the levels), but no because everything else is nice to look at regardless of recycling.

The graphics are only slightly better than FFX’s, which still says a lot considering the graphics are excellent in execution and textual scenery. Even to this day, I have to say that FFX and FFX2 have some of the best graphics ever known to man, up there with Legend Of Zelda: The Ocarina Of Time and Shadows Of The Colossus (although both are superior to the FFXs in every other way possible). The level designs are still as good as they come, although aside from the dungeons of Bevelle and the rebuilt village of Kilika (among a few other things), everything is practically recycled. They had maybe a slight revamp, but that’s all they got. I don’t really think that’s a problem though (more of a nitpick if anything), because FFX was tough to top graphically.

However, the awfully superficial appearances of our heroines are just the icing on the cake of an already horrible story. Square took a bunch of clichéd plots, and add in some airheaded cheerleaders of varying personalities (the valley girl, the spas and the wannabe-tough girl) who decided to become heroes, and what you get is an even MORE clichéd plot! They took some seriously sweet characters, took a big dump all over them, and put them in revealing outfits. Jesus Christ, Square! But don’t even get me started with how much I hate the soundtrack of this game!

...okay, it appears I got myself started with that. The soundtrack is basically all this poppy stuff that a typical teenybopper would listen to. It sucks, alright? The soundtrack is horrible, yet some of the songs are catchy (like the enemy and boss themes for example), just so you don’t forget how bad of a soundtrack it is and so your eardrums bleed like a fresh leper. It’s like the Captain Planet theme song; a horrible song, yet it’s catchy at the same time so we don’t forget the horrendous theme song.

I think this is, more or less, revenge for being too ambient in FFX. I have to say, FFX had too much ambience and not enough flair or not enough catchiness to it, and although it did suit whatever situation the songs were all played in, it just wasn’t as catchy as earlier efforts. What did FFX2’s soundtrack do? FFX2 basically added in catchy pop instrumentals with slight ambient influence and not even remotely suitable in the situation it’s played in, just to annoy people! It doesn’t even suit the superficial context of the game; it’s just a bad tumor. Actually, this game as a whole is just one big bad tumor.

Honestly, why is it that developers make their worst games the most hyped up of all time? This, Kingdom Hearts 2, Sonic The Hedgehog (PS3/360), it’s all hyped up with cool and edgy cutscenes and action galore, making it out to be the game to buy that year, but all that was gotten out of it was a travesty. Disappointment is considered a compliment at this point, because this game is far more than that; it was, in a word, disasterific! The gameplay was boring, the story and voice acting felt clichéd, labored and robotic, the graphics are only marginally better (but still outstanding) and the music sucked! For shame Square...for shame...