Final Fantasy X - Retro Review

When I was but a child it was the RPG that grabbed my attention, specifically Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy II on SNES (Well, IV, but I played it as II) was my first RPG, and I've loved Final Fantasy ever since. I even enjoyed Mystic Quest (I am fully aware of how wrong my opinion here is). Seeing advertisements for Final Fantasy VII made me want a Playstation, and similarly Final Fantasy X was my reason for wanting a PS2. When I finally got my chance to play it, I ended up hating it. While not my least enjoyed Final Fantasy game, that goes to VIII, me and this game just never saw eye to eye.

The first problem comes in with the main character, Tidus. Coming from Zanarkand, a city that is apparently destroyed in Spira, Tidus remembers living there before a giant creature appeared and destroyed the town. Ignoring any issues I have with his story, Tidus as a character is insufferable. He complains a lot, doesn't really seem to show any respect for the society around him, and is incredibly stupid. There is almost nothing redeemable about him, and any attempt at a story is hampered by how unlikable a human being the protagonist is.

Pretty much the entire cast of Final Fantasy X makes up one of the series worst. Most characters feel pointless to the plot and have very little to them, the only two exceptions to this are the characters Yuna and Auron. Yuna, the real main character of the game despite how much it wants to insist it's Tidus, is on a pilgrimage to stop a giant rampaging monster known as Sin. By obtaining the final Aeon, a Summoner is able to stop Sin at the cost of their own life. I don't think Yuna is a particularly interesting or good character by any stretch, but at least she's important to the events of the game. Auron, on the other hand, is just awesome. A Guardian of a former Summoner, he seems a bit more aware of the truth about the Church of Yevon and Sin and has some pretty awesome twists about his character arc. He is the one good thing about the game's story.

To hammer the point home about Tidus, he is actually pretty pointless in regards to the game's plot. You really could just take him out and the narrative would not suffer at all, just leave Yuna and Auron as the main characters and pretend the 'Dream of the Fayth' twist, which I don't want to spoil for you, never happened. It's especially frustrating hearing Titus remind the audience 'This is my story!' multiple times throughout the story, only to near the end get corrected by Yuna who says, 'No, this is our story!'. No, it's not, it's her and possibly Auron's story. Everyone else is pretty much just along for the ride.

A key point of the story being told is that whenever Sin shows up after a period of calm, the world is constantly on edge. However, at no point do you really get the impression the people of Spira are suffering all that much when Sin shows up. The whole world kind of feels happy, outside of the couple instances, you see Sin attack a town. I'm not saying Sin feels like a non-presence, but he doesn't come across as enough of a threat to justify this plot. He is supposed to be putting the entire world in a state of fear, but he just kind of feels like a poor mans Godzilla.

This isn't even getting to the Church of Yevon and Seymore, the most obviously evil group of people in an RPG ever made. Specifically on that is trying to tell you that they are the good guys who are trying to stop Sin. No, I don't feel like this is a spoiler since almost immediately you are likely to guess that the guy with this haircut is the bad guy.

I want to give praise to the games combat, because there are a lot of great ideas here. The combat is fast, the ability to switch party members in and out of combat as it goes was very new for RPG's at the time and gave a feel that all your characters were constantly fighting. The problem is the game basically tells you how to win every fight right at the begging by using characters whose attacks are strong against certain types of monsters, and for the remainder of the game I didn't feel like I was putting any thought into the combat throughout most of the games run-time. There could be a lot of room for fun and interesting tactics if the game changed things up a bit or made combat more difficult, but as it stands it's a lot of great ideas that feel like it had gone to waste.

My praise, however light, of the mechanics of the game end there. The Sphere Grid is kind of a mess of a system that offers far less choice then it first appears, at least on an initial play of the game. You don't gain strength the same way you do in other RPG's, what happens is you increase investment in the Sphere Grid to gain your power ups. A few things to note is that in order to upgrade to a new node on the grid, you need certain types of spheres you can get, usually in combat, and spend those to gain abilities and stat boosts. The thing is, while it at first appears you can grow how you'd like, so much of the grids are locked away being level nodes, so you need to find an appropriate sphere to unlock the paths.

Everyone, technically, uses the same grid but start at different points. But because of the locked paths, you are pretty much forced to go down a certain path with most characters for the majority of the game, which makes the process of leveling up your characters rather tedious. If you had more control early on it wouldn't be so bad, but even if you did there really isn't much reason to mess around with the preset paths. This changes for the end game content, where there is a fair bit more challenge, but this is a long game so the whole aspect of the Sphere Grid just ends up feeling like busywork when most of the game automating the leveling up process, as most games before it did, is going to net you the same effect. I will note that for those more familiar with the system going into the game will be able to get a bit more out of it than others, but by the second playthrough it feels too little, too late.

There's also a fair few mini-games, most of which are terrible. Dodging lighting on the Thunder Plains is a bit dull and obnoxious, for example, though for the most part, they are all forgettable. The exception here is Blitz Ball. I do not know why people like it, because it feels nothing like the spectacle you see in cutscenes. It's basically playing underwater Soccer where players can swim all over the place, including up and down. However when you take over there is no 3D movement, you move around on a flat plane. And rather than being fast like an actual sport, ever time you near opponents or try to shoot, it goes into, essentially, turn-based combat. It's well put together enough, but it lacks any kind of excitement or thrill.

Something else that bothers me is how often enemy designs are re-used and just given a new color pallet. I haven't sat down and counted, but it feels like this game has the least variety of enemy design than any Final Fantasy prior, and this is when compared to games on the SNES. Beyond that, there actually are a lot of pretty fun designs in the game, even if some of them start to look a bit goofy (I'm looking at you shorts with one leg shorter then the other).

Final Fantasy X is one of those classic games that a lot of people love, but at the same time, I was never able to really get it. As I said, the game does have some great ideas with its combat, and it's music and visuals are wonderful as is normal for the franchise. But nothing that I find good about the game comes close to getting over its problems.