As I beat a really big game, I guess creating a roundup post here might be appropriate. These are the 3 last games I played and beat! (although one came in a set of 2, and I only beat one of the games)

• Sigi - A Fart for Melusina
  

  30 minutes playtime

  9 of 17 achievements

• Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation
  

  10 hours playtime

  21 of 26 achievements

• Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster
  

  37 hours playtime

  9 of 69 achievements

Sigi - A Fart for Melusina
Ever thought your classic platformers needed more fart sounds? Well that’s a really odd thing to want, but here you go. Sigi is a platfomer roughly in the style of what you would find later on in the NES’s lifespan, or possibly more like an early SNES title. It’s simple, it’s straight forward, and it’s also really easy. There’s not much to say about this one, apart from all the fart sounds, it’s just an alright platformer.

Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation
As far as I can tell, this is a rather faithful rendition of a series of board games that’s been released. I’ve got one of the earlier releases in my game shelf, but I think this one is based on one of the later versions. In either case, Tales from the Candlekeep is pretty good actually. You explore dungeons that you end up building as you go along (drawing random lines when you reach the edge of one), fight monsters and hopefully make it out alive. And it’s fun. Fun but a bit frustrating. For some reason I decided to play this at the highest difficulty, and towards the ends there were cases where it felt like I really could not have prevented a loss, because the RNG was against me. But apart from that little detail, I feel like I can recommend this for people who are specifically looking for a digital version of a dungeon crawling board game.

Final Fantasy X
And now for the big one. Final Fantasy X. And it’s… alright.
Let’s start with the bad, shall we?
The tutorial sucks. Seriously, it’s terrible. It’s slow, it’s wordy, it does not put things into a good context, and at one point (when it explains blitzball, more on that later) it gives you a huge info dump, then waits long enough for you to have forgot half of it before you’re able to put things into practice. But I ended up just zoning out during the regular tutorial bits because of how slow and boring they were. When I say tutorial, I really mean “the game shows you how the menus work in a really really slow way”).
The encounter rate is far too high. It gets tedious.
The game might have a lot of depth to its systems, but at least if you’re just trying to beat it normally, none of that really comes into play, because there’s literally no tricky parts at all in this game. It’s too easy, which means that whatever depth might be there is just wasted.
Who’s good and who’s bad is really obvious, just based on their visual design. It feels like the writers did not want it to be quite that obvious, but the character designers really went overboard here. This is particularly clear if you’ve played FF 6 or 9.
The voice acting is spotty at best, and the long pauses between characters speaking just make the conversations seem unnatural. I guess this was done for localization reasons, as sentence length can vary a lot between languages, but it still sounds bad.
The game loves talking about Blitzball, because everyone loves blitzball, and blitzball is amazing, and you really need to know how important bliztball is. And then when you’ve played it it’s not such a big deal anymore, tis a silly game after all and we’ve got more important things to worry about. This is clumsy world building.
Blitzball sucks.

But I did beat it, so what’s good?
I did find the story compelling enough for it to keep me pushing on, even when the random encounters had worn out their welcome, and I did not see all the plot twists coming, which was a nice change of pace! Most of the characters did have enough personality for me to care about them (although Tidus & Kimahri were the least interesting of the bunch, and frankly both could have been replaced with someone else and it would not really have hurt the story). Don’t get me wrong, this is no Bioware/Obsidian/Black Isle game, the characters are not on the level of what those studios have made, but they were still mostly good and varied, with distinct personalities that could play off of each other. I doubt I’ll be able to tell you much about them 5 years down the line though.
The art design is quite nice, and the soundtrack also fits well with the game.

So wow, that’s quite a laundry list of bad, and a short list of good. But a strong story can carry an otherwise mediocre game, and that’s what I feel happened here, I was interested in seeing what was around the corner, and had the character designers been less keen on telegraphing if a character was good or bad through its design, it would have been even better!
The game is aggressively linear though, with long winding paths that you can’t really deviate from more than a few steps to pick up a chest, so this is not “your” story, it’s the games story, you’re just along for the ride, and the only input you have in what’s going on is if you beat an enemy or die trying. There’s nothing wrong with linear games, but the best ones don’t make you think about how linear they are. This one made me think of how linear it was.
But the impression I got after having beaten FF X is that FF XIII basically tried to copy this game, but made all the bad parts worse. Many of the good parts are still in FF XIII, it’s just that there the bad parts really dominate. With even worse tutorials, even more obviously aggressively linear levels and even more tedious battles (FF XIII does become good after about 20h… that’s after more than half the game has passed. FF X did at least have enough common sense to be interesting from the start).