| forevercloud3000 said:
wha? I find people's hatred for FFX completely suprising at times. Do tell why this game is lessor than FFXII?(I like XII, just wouldn't put it above X for me). Yuna and comany were all really strong characters to me. They all had their personal reasons that made them invested in Tidus and Yuna's journey. Combat was some of turnbase's finest work. And Sphere Grid was a really good non linear progression system. And then there is the game lore which very few gams get as in detailed as this one. |
This was the first Final Fantasy I played that truly pushed the linear aspect. It's something I've gotten used to now, but after a previous generation of playing things like VII-IX; Wild ARMs, it was a completely shock to me to be pushed down corridor after corridor and never have any real choice on what I should be doing. When I finally got a awarded an airship towards the end of the game I thought "Great! A little late, but better than not having it at all", only to be presented with a static map which I could point and click at to go places. It might as well not have been in there at all.
I didn't enjoy the story much at all. XII's was all over the place but I appreciated in the start it was trying to tell some greater themes that it unfortunately got tangled up in towards the end. X, on the other hand, was a very straightforward story by Final Fantasy standards. Not particularly convoluted at all; and also a bit of a drag for me to play as a result. It felt so focused on the goal of "get the final summon and defeat Sin" that it rarely ever deviated to anything more interesting; save for a few curveballs involving Tidus and Jecht.
And speaking of Tidus and Jecht; the characters weren't any that I could connect to at all. That may be rich coming from someone who enjoyed VII-IX, but I felt that on the whole this was a particularly unlikeable cast. I enjoyed Auron and Lulu in a "they're really badass" kind of way, but otherwise I could've taken or left the main cast in X. Tidus was... by far and a way the worst character I'd come across in a JRPG at the time, and the fact that the story pushed the whole love aspect between him and Yuna so much also dragged her down. Wakka was fairly average (didn't have any particularly strong feelings one way or another); Kimahri was just a background character until that one bit (Mt. Gagazet or something?) where they actually did something with him; and I felt like Rikku was interesting but never explored properly. I felt Seymour was a poor man's Sephiroth in both design and the way he was conveyed in the story (and had some incredible wtf moments too - that wedding still felt incredibly out of place to me)
With all that said, the game had some good points. Sin was an interesting villain to keep track of. The battle system was solid. The music was good. The graphics were great. But I came away from the game feeling so disappointed with all the design choices they'd made. This was not the next generation Final Fantasy game I'd wanted. I wanted a game which took the foundation followed by the previous 3 and run with it; made the world even bigger and more fantastical the first time you saw it (think about when leaving Midgar for the first time in VII and seeing the world map; or being given Ragnarok to drive in VIII); I wanted a story which took different routes and didn't reveal its main purpose until later on in the game etc.
I've come to appreciate X more as time goes on because I've played linear JRPG's since then that I've thoroughly enjoyed (XIII-2; Xillia) so that isn't of itself a massive deal anymore. But as a game from the time when it released, I could not have been more disappointed with the decisions they took with it and I think that will always taint my view of the title.
