Final Fantasy X Review

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            Final Fantasy X

Review by Jen September 2002

Squaresoft’s Final Fantasy is arguably the most successful game franchise ever, not to mention serving as the genesis of the turn-based console RPG. Besides the Final Fantasy games proper, there have been offshoots such as Final Fantasy Tactics and Chocobo Racing, and even a feature film. The next Final Fantasy, slated for launch later this year, is scheduled for online-only play. Besides the millions of units sold, the series boasts probably the most fervent fans of any video game in history.

I played most if not all of the original Game Boy version of Final Fantasy Legend back when it was first available, hard on the heels of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda, which I had loved and which opened my eyes to the world of video games outside the arcade and led me to seek out other “questing” games. I remember being dismayed by the turn-based battles that popped up seemingly out of nowhere in that early Final Fantasy; in Zelda you could see the beasties before you fought them in real time.

Now, older, wiser … okay, more carpal-tunnelly … I am no longer very adept at action. Besides, the intervening years of playing point-and-click adventures almost exclusively have shown me that electronic fun can be had without the hack-and-slash, and now if I must have combat in my games, I vastly prefer turn-based over real-time. And since I have recently fallen in love with my PS2 as a gaming platform, I thought I’d revisit the Final Fantasy series with this latest incarnation.

The game opens with a young Zanarkand Abes blitzball star, Tidus, running into the stadium and being waylaid by his adoring fans, one of whom is rather spectral in appearance. Tidus signs a few autographs and promises to return after the game and give some kids some pointers, and he turns to enter the arena. The blitzball game begins. Tidus executes a particularly well-timed move and as he is suspended in midair, he spies a giant ball of water hovering in the sky. Threw off his timing something fierce … Death and destruction are rained down upon the city of Zanarkand, people are fleeing for their lives or paralyzed with fear, Titus joins the stampede … and is stopped by the no-longer-phantasmagorical ghost child. And thus it begins.

All during this opening sequence, we learn that Tidus’s dead father was the Pele of blitzball (blitzball is kind of like soccer but played in a giant sphere filled with water; somehow the players are able either to breathe under water or just hold their breath a really long time) and not such a nice guy. Tidus is torn between his own struggle to live up to his father’s sports greatness and his utter distaste for his “old man.”

As Tidus runs to escape the fate that is befalling Zanarkand, he is stopped by the enigmatic Auron, an old friend of Tidus’s father. Auron, a man of few words, looks up at the thing in the sky and remarks, “We called it Sin.” After a few basic learn-the-controls battles, Tidus and Auron and half of what remains of Zanarkand are sucked into the now-swirling-vortex that was once the hovering water ball and Tidus finds himself alone, stranded on the sunken ancient ruins of a once-great city.

As we progress, we learn that Tidus has been dropped a thousand years into the future. The people of this time remember the Zanarkand Abes … as the stuff of legend. “Sin” is a force of destruction in the form of a gargantuan being that lives in the ocean and periodically surfaces long enough to lay waste to coastal towns. The sorrowful island peoples of this age build and rebuild their small towns, all centered around temples to Yevon, their god.

A few people are called to serve as Summoners. These harness the power of the fayth, which are the ever-dreaming souls of the dead, by entering Yevon’s temples and completing a set of trials that result in a bonding with an Aeon. Aeons are powerful magic creatures that may be called upon by their Summoners as the Summoners embark on pilgrimages to the ancient ruins of Zanarkand, where one Summoner must obtain and call forth a final Aeon to do battle with Sin and quiet it for another couple of decades. Ultimately Sin arises again and a new batch of Summoners sets off on the pilgrimage to buy a few more years of peace for Spira, the land in which they live …

Early in the game, Tidus lands on the shore of one of these island towns and coincidentally happens upon the practice session of a blitzball team. He shows them a couple of moves and is befriended by the team captain, Wakka. Wakka takes him to the town of Besaid and introduces him around. Turns out the Besaid blitzball team is about to travel to another town to play in an annual blitzball tournament, which they lose year after year. Here too Tidus meets Yuna, a Summoner fresh from obtaining her first Aeon and Tidus’s love interest, Lulu, Yuna’s older sister and a powerful sorceress, and Kimahri, Yuna’s Ronso (another race of people with cat faces and unicorn horns) guardian. These become Tidus’s first permanent party members.

The course of Yuna’s pilgrimage just happens to coincide with the voyage to the blitzball tournament, and thus the game begins.  The party is beset by misfortune, besieged by monsters at every step, and yet bound by adversity they become stronger and better able to meet the increasingly more difficult challenges that face them as they journey ever onward to the final confrontation with Sin.

When the party arrives at Kilika, the next town after Besaid, Tidus is forced to actually play blitzball. Luckily, it doesn’t matter if his team wins or loses, and after the first forced game, blitzball becomes a minigame. Needless to say, I never played it again, and blitzball became an increasingly distant and finally forgotten factor in the game, aside from the fact of Wakka’s weapon being, you guessed it, a blitzball.

There are two main categories of gameplay in Final Fantasy X, monster battles and the temple trials whereby Yuna gains new Aeons. These Aeons are powerful in battle and can be summoned by Yuna when and if she gets a turn to fight. The temple trials are puzzles. I did five or six different temples in my game, and these were by far the most enjoyable part of the game for me.  As an example, in the first temple at Besaid, you are presented with two or three different spheres that each have different powers.  You may carry them but you can only hold one at a time. You have to place them in the correct locations and manipulate the environment a little based on what happens with the spheres, and you are rewarded with entry to the chamber of the fayth, where Yuna gains a new Aeon.

Aside from the temple trials, the rest of the game goes like this: monster battle, take a few steps, monster battle times five, walk some more, monster battle times twenty, cutscene, boss battle, boss battle, cutscene … and on and on. You occasionally will find treasure chests containing items that will heal you or make you stronger, or you can gain these things in battle, or you may buy them from merchants you encounter with the money you earned by fighting the fiends.

About halfway through the game, the regular monster battles suddenly became as difficult as the boss battles had been previously and the boss battles became nearly impossible for me. I quit the game for a few weeks, then I got a Game Shark, a device that allows the use of cheat codes for PS2 games, and loaded myself up with cheats. Unfortunately there was no god mode, so while I was able to make my party very strong and eliminate the random battles altogether, I still had to use my wits to formulate strategies for the boss fights. And there were boss fights ad infinitum …

Monsters come in two varieties: regular and boss. Really, their physical appearance is varied and somewhat interesting, and some of them are human or pseudo-human. The early monsters have elemental characteristics where you can cast spells of the opposing element and do major damage, but later in the game the monsters are all immune to practically everything, and you just have to wear them down or summon Aeons. However, if you let one of your Aeons die during battle, it has to sit out for some number of battles, five or ten, before you can summon that particular Aeon again. Many of the Aeons can cast their own black magic on themselves and restore their strength.

Ultimately your party grows to a total of seven members, each with different strengths and weaknesses. For most battles, you can choose three participants from among the seven, but occasionally one or more party members will be removed; for instance, Yuna will be kidnaped once or twice and then she and her Aeons are unavailable; also, only three party members can swim and so they are the ones to fight all underwater battles. In most cases, though, you can switch characters at will even in the midst of a battle to give your party the best advantage.

After some number of attack turns, your character will build up an “overdrive,” which, if executed properly, can deal double or triple the damage of an ordinary attack. Use of some of characters’ overdrives requires you to complete a little arcade thing; for example, to use Lulu’s overdrive, you must rotate the right analog stick as many times and as quickly as you can; the higher you move the gauge by doing this, the more powerful your attack. Others, such as the Aeons and Kimahri, can just use their overdrives “out of the box,” so to speak, with nothing required of the player beyond selecting the action.

As your party gains experience, the members gain “sphere levels.” This enables them to move about the “sphere grid” (shown in one of the screenshots to the right) and collect new abilities, more health points, more agility points, more mana points, or what have you. Each can move one step for each sphere level and activate the adjacent nodes if the party has the appropriate type of sphere to use on that node. (The party shares inventory but each has his or her own weapons and armor.) The spheres are gained like any other inventory item, as battle booty or by finding them on your journey.

Final Fantasy X just wasn’t very fun for me. The graphics and music are both first-rate, five-star material all the way, by far the finest I’ve ever seen or heard in any video game. There was a decent story, doled out in periodic cutscenes between the battles. The voice acting was very well-done, and amazingly enough there were full voices throughout for all but the most insignificant NPCs. The game ran without a hitch, even with umpteen million cheats enabled.

The main characters, however, were all pretty one-dimensional.  Tidus came across as shallow and immature, constantly saying “whoa” or using other similar “dude”-type surfer boy slang exclamations, and it was hard to attribute to him the deeper emotions and personal growth he was supposed to be experiencing. Yuna rarely cracked a smile and when she did it was not believable. Neither was the purported love between the two very convincing, even by the end of the game. Both were trying to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, Yuna from a position of love and admiration and Tidus in a quest for one-upmanship, and yet their periodic displays of feeling were not persuasive. Perhaps the pacing was too slow; even with the Game Shark it took me well over 60 hours to play through, and of that I’d estimate maybe an hour and a half was actually devoted to story via cutscenes and another hour and a half to the aforementioned temple trials. The rest was just battles, battles, and more battles, on top of battles.

I am giving Final Fantasy X a thumb up mainly due to the high production values throughout—it really is an extraordinarily beautiful piece of work. For me, though, it missed the mark. I got bored with it about halfway through, and finishing it became a distasteful chore. So a thumb up but not recommended to anyone who doesn’t absolutely love difficult turn-based fighting …  because that’s really about all you’re going to get out of this game. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Squaresoft Publisher: Squaresoft Release Date: December 2001

Available for: PlayStation 2

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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