Small rant time. Anyone remember how I ranted about Final Fantasy X, and made 2 posts about it? We have this post where I picked apart the games flaws, and pointed out that it really was not all that good, and then this post where I mentioned more flaws, but also pointed out that the characters, art style, story & soundtrack made the game compelling enough for me to see it through to the end.

Well, this is going to be about Final Fantasy X-2

• Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster
  

  38 hours playtime

  11 of 69 achievements

FF X-2 takes place 2 years after the first game, and follows two returning characters from the first game (Yuna & Rikku) and a new character, Paine. Where FF X had a wide variety of characters, all having different “jobs”, FF X-2 has 3 characters, but you can switch jobs for them. In this regard, the game is similar to FF V, a game I quite liked for its “job system”. Unlike FFV, you can switch “job” mid-battle though, so X-2 is more flexible in this regard. This was actually the reason why I decided to install the game, as I was curious about the job system, which on paper sounded quite good.

That was a bad move, from my end.
The game starts with what looks like Yuna on a stage singing some really awful pop music. Actually, this is going to be a trend, awful music. You see the other two characters beating up guards while spying on Yuna, and then they start to fight. It turns out that a villain has stolen Yuna’s clothes, and is pretending to be her. There’s some more nonsense, which I think was meant to be funny, then there’s a chase sequence where you chase fake-Yuna, while getting bombarded with enemies (remember how I complained about FF X’s encounter rate? This is worse), and then the real Yuna shows up. She’s somehow gone from a kind-hearted person who summons spirits to a gun-ninja in the span of 2 years.

After this fight, you’re taken to an airship, where you get to talk to the crew. The music here sounds awful, and the characters are cringe-worthy. As a bit of optional content during this part you can find out about why you’re here. Yep, the very foundation to the games story is hidden in an optional menu when talking to a character who keeps spouting tutorials that were just as bad as that of Final Fantasy X (which had really bad tutorials). The new character, Paine, sounds bored and reminded me of what happens when a bad actor/actress tries to portray a goth character in a movie.

Then after some aimless wandering about, trying to find the trigger that makes the story progress (turns out that you need to talk to characters in a specific order, and then rest… that ended up taking me longer than it should have, as I missed one character’s dialogue as it was right next to another character, and every time I tried to talk with him, the character next to him would speak, which made me think that you could not speak to him. Turned out that you had to find that one specific spot to stand on in order to trigger the right character’s dialogue…)

And then you get taken down to a new mission area. Cue some cringe-worthy dialogue which fails to be funny, bad music, followed by the villain who stole Yuna’s clothes showing up, more cringe-dialogue, an encounter rate higher than an NES JRPG, and me giving up on the game.

So what went wrong? For one, the writing was awful, making the characters, which I thought was the strong point of FF X, a weak point. What about their design though? Well, their outfits seem to have taken a turn for the skimpier. Anyone who played FF X might remember how the camera loved focusing on Lulu’s breasts after combat. Now it does that will all characters instead. And if not their breasts, then their crotch. Something tells me this game was mostly targeted at teenage boys…

Class-switching is done through a on the fly clothes switch for the characters. That was why it was so important to get Yuna’s clothes back, because they are magical. You’re expected to switch clothes a lot during combat. During the clothes transformation animation, the camera really loves to focus on the characters breasts, crotch or butt.
Combat also feels a lot less structured than in the first game. It still has some kind of “active time battle” (meaning that the characters have a bar that fills up, and when it’s full, you get to act), but it feels a lot more chaotic than in the previous game. The animation quality is also oddly poor for the main characters, and their abilities are strange and nonsensical (so the character throws a shoe at the enemy, and now all the enemies take fire damage?). The animation quality for the enemies that returned from the first game was quite alright, but the few new enemies have noticeably worse animations.

So no, I did not beat the game, not even close to it. I got through 6% of the story, but wow, this was bad. It feels like they managed to take most of what was good about FF X, and then got rid of it, and replaced it with gratuitous fan-service and some of the worst music I’ve heard in a JRPG. This feels like a game made on the cheap, to cash in on the popularity of the first game, but with a fraction of the budget, and with a bunch of very out of touch people making all the decisions (Hey, people liked Yuna & Rikku, so let’s make a game about them, and as our main target audience are teenage boys, lets make them as sexy as we can. That will sell!). It might get better later on, but a game can’t leave a first impression this bad, and expect me to not drop it.