Square's popularity exploded on the Playstation, with VII being regarded as one of the greatest games of all time and raising interest in the series to new heights. Two followups came, though they met with a more mixed reception (balance issues and overly drawn-out gameplay and animations at the forefront), the series attempted to branch out into the realm of film (with less than stellar results) and just about every prior game in the series got a port to the Playstation as well. When the shiny new Playstation 2 rolled around, however, Square was not ready for the occasion, attempting to hold their fans over with a mediocre beat-em-up called the Bouncer while their next big game was in the works.
Final Fantasy X was released in late 2001, and would probably become one of the most divisive games in the series after its release. While the game undeniably looked gorgeous and had a stellar soundtrack - that had all but become Square's moneymaker at this point - its gameplay was simplified in many respects and made unnecessarily complex in others, while its narrative was hampered by irritating voice acting and just feeling like it was just going through the motions of a generic JRPG plot yet again. And as those who know me know, I did not care at all for the new direction it took the franchise in.
From Final Fantasy VIII on, the franchise's main selling point was seemingly only its aesthetics, with immaculately-detailed backdrops and characters and animations drawn out to the point where they've basically become a running joke among genre fans. Final Fantasy X continues in that trend while seemingly going out of its way to add as much detail to every aspect of the game as possible, even when it makes no sense. To that end, virtually every object and character is rendered with frills and asymmetrical details that are seemingly designed to lend it a whimsical fantasy feel rather than feel practical in the slightest. It lends the game a showy feel at first, but before long I just found it unnecessary and distracting.
Another change for the worse comes in the game's overall design. Simply put, Final Fantasy X is far more linear and railroaded than any prior game in the series, almost to a comical degree. The whole game is basically just one linear path, with only a few chances to stray off and do sidequests. Even when the airship is unlocked late in the game, there is no "world map" to travel across, instead just giving you a list of previous checkpoints you've encountered and letting you warp straight there. This, again, seemingly ties into the game's presentation, with Square wanting to show off graphics as much as possible even to the detriment of gameplay and the feeling of exploration that has been central to the RPG genre since its inception.
Combat is also changed up in many ways, for both better and worse. Encounters are still random, which by 2002 was beginning to feel very dated. The famous Active Time Battle system is traded in for a more traditional turn-based one, though it still operates on something of a time scale - characters get turns at set intervals based on their speed stat, and certain actions taken can make turns come faster or slow down others. For example, Tidus has an ablity called Quick Hit that does less damage than his standard attack, but causes his next turn to come more quickly, while Delay Buster will cause the target's next turn to come later if it hits. This adds a bit of strategy to fights by letting the player sneak in turns more quickly or delay an enemy's strike if they're about to use a big attack, affording an opportunity to put up a barrier or heal the party before impact. Characters can also be freely swapped in and out mid-fight, which can occasionally help get a weakened character out of harm's way; however, the game still ends immediately if all three active characters are incapacitated.
Other hallmarks of the series are changed up as well, for both better and worse. Summons now work much differently, essentially replacing the party temporarily with a new single character until they die or are dismissed. I generally didn't find these too useful, however, as having a single target for multiple enemies to hit just means they die that much more easily (and some bosses just kill them instantly, making them even more superfluous). Overdrives (limit breaks, essentially) work as they did in Final Fantasy VIII, with some taking the form of simple damage-dealing minigames while others work as more traditional Final Fantasy mechanics - Kimahri can cast Blue Magic while Rikku can mix potions together for a variety of powerful supportive or damaging effects. The best effects generally require spending rare and expensive items, so they are best saved for difficult battles.
Another clever change comes in the fact that, in some scripted battles, puzzle elements are occasionally worked in. One early boss is knocked back after taking a big enough hit, and enough hits done in this fashion will allow the player to knock it off a cliff and kill it instantly. Others come into play over the course of the game as well - using Lightning to activate a crane to damage enemies, teleporting between various pads on the field to evade a bosses' big attack, and so forth. Sadly, these only appear in scripted events - random encounters are just the typical line-up-and-fight Final Fantasy fare.
The mechanics outside of battle are more of a mixed bag. One notable changeup is the Overdrive Modes; simply put, these cause your Overdrives to build in ways other than simply taking damage. Warrior will cause the Overdrive gauge to fill when you take damage, for example, while Victim causes it to build when a character is inflicted with a status effect. For the most part I didn't find these worth bothering with - they either take too long to build up to be useful or just require the player to be at a significant disadvantage, and since limits are not nearly as grotesquely overpowered as in earlier games, I generally just stuck to the standard setting of Stoic.
(It should be noted that another ability causes bonus experience points to be gained instead of filling the Overdrive gauge, and when used in combination with the Loner setting and a turbo controller, the player could get absurd amounts of XP in relatively short order by simply killing off the other two characters and repeatedly passing turns. That said, this was only present in the original Japanese release and removed from all later releases.)
The customizability certainly doesn't stop there. Instead of weapons with fixed effects, Final Fantasy X has something of a crafting system, with each weapon the player finds having a set number of slots. These can be equipped with various abilities - stat boosters, inflicting status effects, and so forth - and doing so will change the weapon's appearance and name to match. This ends up being downright broken in some cases, as one can acquire an item that give the Stone effect early on and equip it on their weapons, giving them a 30% chance of an instant kill against any random enemies they encounter and chopping a huge portion of the game's challenge.
Final Fantasy X also (in)famously attempts to retain the open-ended character growth of its predecessors, though its handling is less than stellar. Rather than traditional levels and skills, Final Fantasy X utilizes the Sphere Grid - a sprawling "board game" of sorts where the six playable characters, represented by "tokens", move across the grid and can spend points to unlock stat boosts and abilities on any squares they land on. A novel idea, but a lackluster execution, as it's largely pointless; for much of the game, characters are all but locked to specific regions of the grid and forced into a particular archetype (with Kimahri infamously being closed into a small portion with only eight or so spaces until about a third of the way through the game, rendering him all but useless). But even once the locks begin to open and grant characters access to different choices, it only presents a non-dilemma; do you want to be really good at, say, Fighting, or be mediocre at both fighting and casting White magic? And if you change your mind later, it's not as simple as going back to the previous fork and going back down the other path instead; you actually have to earn more levels and spend more points to backtrack and go down another path. In essence, it chokes off one of Final Fantasy's defining features and just adds a lot more grinding to the game.
Worse than this, though, are the numerous minigames and sidequests seemingly crafted as exercises in pure frustration and tedium. Blitzball is a hybrid of an RPG and a sports game (and a near point-for-point ripoff of Tecmo Cup Soccer for the NES) that proves to just be infuriatingly slow-paced and tedious with its drawn-out animations and terrible starting team stats that the player has to slowly grind up to acceptable levels. Lightning dodging on the Thunder Plains requires split-second timing lest you get knocked down and forced into more random encounters, while the chocobo racing minigame is a frustrating affair of fighting against non-responsive controls in an effort to get bonuses and ultimately achieve a time of less than 0.0 seconds. Worse, all of these are required for full game completion, and often to absurd degrees - Wakka's ultimate weapon requires completing 200 games of Blitzball while Rikku's requires dodging lightning 200 consecutive times. It's one thing to require a hefty grinding component of gameplay, it's another when the game makes no attempt to make it fun. It's all just slow, tedious and, in the case of chocobo racing, disc-smashingly infuriating.
But by far the most grevious of Final Fantasy X's flaws, at least in my eyes, is its storytelling component. While I generally try to avoid talking about the story element in great detail in these reviews to avoid spoilers, I'd be doing a disservice by not mentioning it here. Final Fantasy X's story, simply put, is awful. The game's protagonists are the most generic of archetypes, with personalities that are bland at best to downright sociopathic at worst, which makes it awfully hard to care about their plights and get invested in the journey. It certainly doesn't help that all the dialog and acting has a smarmy, cutesy tone to it that really grates on me, and they don't ever shut it off even in the story's serious moments. In particular, I think of one scene:
Rikku's ancestral home is being burned to the ground and everyone she knows and loves is dying horribly as a direct result of our actions, and we're actively mocking their fates. But they deserved it because they have different beliefs than us, right? Hooray for hate!
Other, substantial portions of the game's story simply don't make sense, either. It is established early on that the spirits of the deceased must be sent to the afterlife in a ritual that only priestesses can perform, lest they become the mindless beasts that roam the world. However, this idea is casually discarded at the midpoint with no satisfactory explanation - characters both good and bad can now die and come back at will, not mindless and in fact seemingly no worse for wear. The big reveal of movers behind the game's plot was a twist I saw coming a mile away, and it only became more cringe-worthy after the later reveal that Auron knew what was happening behind the scenes the whole time and said nothing. Even when he drops a direct hint to Tidus the guy asks no followup questions whatsoever, because he's apparently more interested in masquerading as a hero than actually caring about what's going on. This of course means our protagonists have a lot of blood on his hands as, should he have spoken up at any point prior to the bads making their move, he could have saved quite a few lives from being needlessly lost. Even the moral dilemma of going through with the ritual anyway because literally no other weapon is shown to be capable of even harming Sin is handwaved away with a sappy deus ex machina that would make Hallmark cringe with its mawkishness. Really, what reason is there to get invested when a story doesn't even care enough to follow any rules or ask any interesting questions about its premise? And did I mention the untold numbers of people who died because of inaction and apathy on the part of our 'heroes'? Yeah... You don't get to play the moral high ground card when you're more concerned with spouting off trailer quotes than you are about preserving life.
Worse still is the fact that the game is just so full of itself, seemingly thinking it's so brilliant and amazing when in reality it's just treading once more down the whole "evil organized religion" plotline that, by 2001, had already been done to death across anime, manga, comics and video games. Final Fantasy X brings absolutely nothing new or interesting to the concept (except perhaps a new low for unlikable, arrogant protagonists), which is all the more baffling when one considers Squaresoft already did this idea in the past several times, and much better at that - Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears and Parasite Eve all indulged in similar themes and never once felt preachy or pretentious while doing it. By contrast, X is just Squaresoft taking a victory lap and congratulating themselves on how smart they are because they've found a formula that sells and they know you're going to buy it no matter how lazy and complacent they get with their game design or writing. None of these characters are relatable or interesting, there's no complex dilemma to linger on and wonder if they made the right choice after all, it's just smug propaganda selling itself as storytelling.
But the single most damning thing about this whole disaster, in my eyes at least, is that I know this heavy-handed message isn't one delivered in earnest. It's something far worse - a ploy thought up by Square's marketing department in an attempt to squeeze angsty atheist gamers for a quick buck by pandering to one of their hobby horses. Their audience wanted a game where a monolithic church of nihilists pushes a hollow lie, an incurious quasi-intellectual immediately sees through the bullshit, they solve the entire problem in a matter of days and get revered as heroes forever, and by god, Square delivered. Making a polished and fun game or writing a decent script with an earnest message was clearly not a priority here; earning an effortless buck for their rich (and in all likelihood, religious, conservative and politically donating) board of directors was, especially since they know the people they're selling it to will just buy anything that validates their hate and deem it a masterpiece regardless of its actual quality.
"Wait a minute, the big evil church in this game is a thinly veiled straw man of the real life Catholic church, which means every last person in that is also a one-dimensional nihilistic supervillain! I've figured out something at age thirteen that 99.9999% of people are too stupid to ever figure out, that means I'm a GENIUS and Squaresoft is on my side in the culture war! One day soon I'm going to lead the charge to abolish all religion and install myself as the ubermensch and Square's going to help me because I buy 15 copies of all their games! Surely the next one won't be a completely different scenario, story and theme because it's a product they're selling for money and not a political manifesto, right? RIGHT?!"
I hate to be the bearer of bad news here Mr. I-read-too-much-Nietzche, but you're not some transcendent super-intellect; you're an easy mark. The sociopath protagonists who talk entirely in labored comic book dialog about how they're morally and mentally superior to everyone else are standins for the audience Square's pandering to (ie you) and the hate-hocking nihilistic villains are just the other component of your lame hero fantasies. Straw men versus a different but equally intolerant and insufferable type of straw men. Nothing in this hack script is being said in earnest, it's just a piece of cynical garbage they made in the name of exploiting the lowest common denominator of 'intellectuals' (you, again) for easy money. They don't respect you or your beliefs whatsoever, they just view you as a commodity - a bank account to tap into and nothing more. If you want to actually change the world to fit your ideals it's not gonna come from playing with a giant corporation's digital toys; go start up an organization or something instead of buying hypocritical pap and posting actionless tough-talk on your Tumblr page. As for Square, shame on them too: pandering to shallow prejudice for a quick buck is a bigger insult than any amount of bad writing or underdeveloped design, and it's for that reason that I deem FFX one of my most despised Final Fantasy games and one of the worst games I've ever played. Not the worst of either category, mind, but it's certainly an experience I'm perfectly happy to never come back to. The next time Yoshinori Kitase feels the urge to disparage his audience he should at least have the courtesy to do it for free; hey, if nothing else at least the real Catholic church has never charged me for that privilege...
The one you thought was the worst Final Fantasy until you were proven SEVERELY wrong the following year. And again eight years later. And again ten years later. And again eleven years later (twice!).
Developer: Square
Publisher: Square Electronic Arts, Square Enix
Platform: Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, PC
Released: 2001, 2002, 2013, 2015, 2016
Recommended version: If you must check it out, the more recent HD versions polish up the visuals and music and add some extra content, and both also come packed in with X-2, which I have heard is a closer match gameplay-wise to the older games in the series in that it has dedicated job classes and abilities reminiscent of games like Final Fantasy 5.
Publisher: Square Electronic Arts, Square Enix
Platform: Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, PC
Released: 2001, 2002, 2013, 2015, 2016
Recommended version: If you must check it out, the more recent HD versions polish up the visuals and music and add some extra content, and both also come packed in with X-2, which I have heard is a closer match gameplay-wise to the older games in the series in that it has dedicated job classes and abilities reminiscent of games like Final Fantasy 5.
PS: If you want the same overall story but actually done well, just pick up Grandia II. Seriously, play it and marvel at how Squaresoft managed to rip off just about every character archetype, plot point and emotional beat from that game and make every single one of them worse; it's mind-blowing. Even Final Fantasy Tactics did the "shady church" plot without reducing everyone in it to a lame Saturday morning cartoon character. It even makes an effort to humanize its cast and give them actual motives, which is way more more thought provoking and realistic than this hokey, disingenuous drivel...
PPS: Keep your lame straw man arguments about how I'm just a brainwashed sheeple who should fuck off back to the dark ages to yourself. I'm as non-religious as they come. Hell I'm probably even more non-religious than the raging idiot 'atheists' who spout shit like this, because unlike them I don't replace a belief in father, son and spirit with their holy trinity of Dawkins, Durden and Tate...