It’s been nearly a month since I beat Final Fantasy X, since I made this post talking about my thoughts on the game. With such a massive game it’s hard to give a great overview of the games strength and weaknesses right away. Sometimes you just need a bit of time to think things over. And the more I think about FFX, the less I like it…
So consider this a part two of my “thoughts on a game I recently beat”.
How we’re introduced to the game world
Tidus is not from the world of FFX, he’s an outside from a long time ago. He lived in the world before Sin (the big evil) came to it, and was transported to 1000 years into the future when Sin attacked. We start the game in the “past”, or whatever you might want to call it, in the time period that Tidus is from, and here we’re supposed to get to know who Tidus is. The problem is… it’s boring. We start by seeing Tidus interact with some of his fans, and I guess this is meant to give us some idea of how he is as a character, but it’s poorly paced. Tidus is a star Blitzball player (think underwater rugby), and he loves the adoration of his fans. Sadly the way we’re introduced to this showcases one of the issues with FFX’s voice acting, the long gaps between sentences, which just makes the entire scene feel stilted and a bit off. Then we get to know a bit about the fact that Tidus always feels like he’s living in the shadow of his father, who was an even greater blitzball player, and Tidus hates him. Then comes the scene where I think the game should have started, it’s a CG cutscene showing Tidus play blitzball. They could have incorporated all the things from the previous scene here had they wanted to. This cutscene is actually the first time the game feels a bit engaging, and this would have been a good first impression, rather than the long boring scene before that.
Then we get what’s basically a tutorial, and I mentioned the issue with the tutorial in my previous post, and how awful I think it is. Had they cut down on most of the text the tutorial could have been a lot better, because as a safe introduction to the basics of the games mechanics, this would not have been so bad, they just bogged things down.
And then Tidus gets transported into the “future”. And you get another part that feels overly long for what it accomplishes. I guess we’re supposed to learn that the word has changed and is a dangerous place, but this should in that case have been more dangerous, and shorter. I had actually forgot about this entire scene when I wrote my previous thoughts on, because really, you could have cut it and it would not have hurt the story at all. You get introduced to one of the groups of people here, and spend a little bit of time with them, and I feel like this part actually undermines later portions of the game.
After that you get stranded on a beach and this is where I think you should have ended up after getting transported into the future. The story would have had a better flow that way, as it’s here you get introduced to most of your party, and your motivation for doing the things you’ll end up doing. This part also helps set the tone a lot better for the world than the previous part.
So in short, pretty much everything before the beach was handled poorly.
Tidus acts as a narrator though most of the game, but he only narrates a select few moments. And his narration always feel out of place, and pointless. They hurt every single scene they were in. And really, it makes little sense for him to narrate things in this way. The narration should have stopped when he reached the beach, if they really wanted some narration.
Lazy balance
The characters in FFX all feel useful… but not for the right reason. A lot of the regular combat in FFX comes down to hard counters. Wakka is a ranged character, so he can hit flying enemies (and usually 1 or 2-hit kill them) while other characters struggle with hitting them, Tidus is speedy and agile, so he can hit fast enemies, while other characters struggle with hitting those, Lulu is a mage and can deal elemental damage, and some enemies take next to no damage from normal attacks, and finally we have armoured enemies and only a character with pierce on his weapon will deal alright damage to it. This just feels incredibly lazy. Yes this sidesteps the problem of some characters just being better than others, but it feels lazy, you don’t really have to apply any tactics, just hit the enemy with its weakness and you’ll 1-2 hit kill it. Hit it with something else and it will take a while. There are some enemies that don’t quite fit into this, usually large enemies or bosses, and these fights are more fun. They’ve actually got a good system underneath this to ensure that all characters should see some use, so it’s a shame that most of the fights just boil down to “use the hard counter”.
Why the leveling “sphere”?
As you level up, you get to move through a rather big and complex looking skill-tree. This FF game does not quite have levels in the traditional sense, instead if you get move 1 step in the tree for each “level”, and you can chose to active the node you land on, or any node next to it. The choice of activating the node you land on or not is not a choice, really. You activate it. Not activating it is pointless, as the resources you use for activating nodes are plentiful. The only thing that might happen is that you run out of the resource needed for skill nodes right at the start of the game, but that’s the only point where it could potentially be a problem. The tree is also mostly linear. Yes, you can in theory deviate from your tree and move into another neighboring tree but you won’t get the thing needed to unlock these “branches” into other trees until quite late. So up until that point, this game just gives the illusion of depth, you’re moving through a pretty linear path and just take everything along it.
Blitzball sucks! (Or does it?)
Blitzball gets hyped up to a downright silly degree during a lot of the early game, it’s this amazing sport, everyone loves it, it brings the world together and so on and so forth. Basically the game makes it seem like without Blitzball the world would have no reason to exist. And then it forgets about Blitzball altogether. And I hated blitzball. But now that I’ve had a bit of time to think about it, I don’t think I really hated blitzball, no the fault was with how it was introduced. During your first attempt at Blitzball you go up against a team that’s far better than yours, meaning you’ll lose. So you’ll spend 10min of just watching your team get clobbered. This is a terrible way of introducing something. Combine this with the blitzball tutorial being extra long and boring, and happening so far in advance of your first game that you’ll have forgot a bunch of things by the time you get to play and you’ve got a recipe for failure. I did not touch blitzball once after this terrible first impression, but now I kinda wish I would have given it a try, there might be a fun minigame underneath it, and the blame might just have been on how poorly it was introduced. Or it might really have been terrible, I don’t know.
So, summons are a thing… right?
Through the game you’ll get a bunch of summons. I did not use these. Or correction, I used these twice. The problem is that if you use a summon, your characters don’t get any exp unless they acted before you summoned the thing, and this discouraged summoning so much in the early game that I forgot about them in the late game. FFX is a really easy game, so it did not really matter though. But they should really have found ways to encourage you to use those summons, after all they’re an important part of the story. But the poor introduction of this mechanic sadly just made me ignore them later on.
Wow, all of this just makes the game sound really bad. And really, FFX is not a good game. It has a strong story, and the rest is really flawed. So I’ll re-evaluate my ranking of the FF games once more (I did not post my ranking here on Backlog assassins after I beat X, but I did post it elsewhere). So this is how I would rank the FF games that I’ve played:
9, 6, 5, 7, 4, 8, 10, 13, 1
Where right after beating the game I placed 10 after 7.
FFX always has an inflated reputation with me since it was my first JRPG. Somehow I went through the PSX era without knowing they existed because I was reliant on what other people bought me and what was available to check out at the grocery or video rental store. I have to admit that your criticisms are valid, though. My younger sister and I used to say stupid Tidus-narration quotes to each other.: “Your words that day, Yuna…I remember them well.” “THIS IS MAI STORY!!!!”
For Blitzball, it actually gets easier the more you play it because you should rise in level much more quickly than your opponents. If you keep them from getting a chance to do anything with the ball as much as possible (especially scoring a goal), you can make it so the other team doesn’t really get any experience at all to catch up to you. Plus the team members can learn special abilities, like making the opponent fall asleep when you tackle the ball away.
The Ronso team is the worst, so you can easily beat them 10-0. Playing Blitzball is required to get Wakka’s special weapon and his special/overdrive moves, but it wears out its welcome long before you get all of that.
Making the matches 5 min, rather than 10 min, would probably have made the blitzball grind seem less unappealing to me. But mostly it comes down to how it was introduced. And the fact that they placed the tutorial so far before the actual match did not exactly help either. There are so many ways they could have made this better. Come to think of it, they could have had a game, then let the thing that prevents you from participating in the match happen, then the game could have thrown you against the champions. This seems like a far better way of introducing the game, rather than placing the infodump of a tutorial more than 30min of game time before the actual match!
I’ve played Final Fantasy X a long time ago and can’t remember much about it except that I quite liked Blitzball. It was a decent, fun-ish mini game, and I normally don’t like anything related to football (which it reminded me off), though it does become repetitive and boring after a while.
After the introduction, 10min of just seeing my team getting clobbered, I just did not feel like even trying to play Blitzball properly :P
I never thought of it that way, but I can’t say you’re wrong. Introducing you to a game by facing you against the hardest opponent with almost no chance of winning is a strange way of introducing something new. I think it may be meant to motivate you to play Blitzball so you get good enough so you can win and have that feeling of satisfaction of finally beating them. That’s what it made me feel I think.
For me it just felt like I had no real input in what was going on, like my actions did not matter.
Final Fantasy actually uses the same tactic in some of their other games as well, mostly in the form of unwinnable fights. I don’t think the point is the win, but rather for story exposition or in this case exploring the game mechanics without having to worry about winning (since you can’t). It’s quite liberating if you think about it, you can just mess around without any consequences. Still always feels crappy when you’re forced to lose though.
Most of the time in games when you’ve got an unwinnable situation, where you’re supposed to lose, it’s handled quite differently though. Either the game smacks you down right from the get go, hitting you with an overpowered attack that clearly indicates that you’re going to lose, or it lets you have some small successes, then the big bad turns around, changes form and shouts something about getting serious, and then smacks you down really hard, or the game just handles it in a cutscene or something. And it’s usually fast, the game kicks you about for a moment, and then you get to go on with something else. The first blitzball match gives the impression of it being something you could possibly win (and you supposedly can, if you know the ins and outs of the game, and you’ve played it before), and it’s long. And that final bit is really one of the biggest issues, you have to sit there for 10min.
These things are all true. It’s been quite a long time since I played the game so my memories of it are quite vague, but I probably did try to win the match if it’s winnable, which is maybe why I kept playing it afterwards. But I probably got as frustrated as you in the beginning. But should you ever revisit the game, it may be more fun (after that initial match) than you though :)
I see why Blitzball has a very frustrating introduction. But somehow… I liked that. In every hollywood movie or something similiar when all hopes are almost gone but one character still believes in the team and then they magically win…! That’s cliché. So I liked how tough it was to beat the Al Bhed. Tbh it’s not even hard if it’s not you first playthrough and you know how the game works. So I’d even say it would kill the concept if they’d let you play some matches before. But I totally understand why ppl get frustrated and don’t even want to try anymore. It’s not easy to get your team up the ranks.
Btw Tidus wasn’t in the past, he was in a really big summon called “Zanarkand”. I guess they made the beginning the way they did to let you think the way Tidus thinks or similiar at least. But it’s beginning is slow. Very slow. I hate the beginning too :D
Narratively, sure, it makes sense to see you get beaten early on as it gives you something to strive for, but gameplay wise, it’s a terrible introduction, and placing the (frankly terrible) tutorial more than 30min before the actual match just made things worse. They could have let you play some practice matches before, with just members of your own team on both sides, or anything of that nature. Just something to introduce the mechanics better.
I know, but I intentionally did not mention that bit about Tidus because it’s a pretty heavy spoiler, and you’re supposed to think that that’s the case through most of the game :P
Yeah, the tutorial was terrible… Slow, boring and you don’t even play right afterwards. I don’t know what they were thinking about that either…
Maybe it’s all about patience in the first place. Every minigame for obtaining the celestial weapons take some time and are hard (still can’t believe why anyone thought Catcher Chocobo would be fun…). So maybe introducing Blitzball the way it was, was to be frustrating as every other minigame is too? You have to be very eager to get the best weapons in game.
At least Blitzball can be fun while Catcher Chocobo or dodging 200 thunders just are not…
The only time I tried to play FFX I dropped it shortly after the infamous laugh scene - not because of it but because I found the entirety of the time spent in that city to be really boring, blitzball included.
Sometimes I think of starting another playthrough and try to force myself to give it a fairer shake, but I can’t avoid thinking that I’m probably right in assuming that a lot of the hype and fame the game has comes from the fact it was the first one played by an entire generation of young PS2 owners.
Yeah, I do suspect that the hype is at least in part due to that. It’s not awful or anything, it’s just got some glaring flaws.The story is still pretty nice, but there are other games out there that has that covered that also have better gameplay.
My sister hated Blitzball so much when she played the game on the PS2 lol, and the chocobo minigame too. Agree that the way they introduce it is really frustrating, it’s your first time playing but against the former champion along with the pressure of helping Wakka have a great final match, you are very likely to lose if it’s your first playthrough. They should have had a few small matches before that in my opinion, at least then you can be a bit more familiar with the rules. The Final Fantasy games van be grindy and frustrating but they are awesome in term of story and writing.
Yeah, just some training matches with your own team should have been enough. Or they could have made the blitzball match Tidus is a part of right at the start of the game playable, and let disaster strike just as you’re about to win (make it a really easy match, to show how awesome Tidus is or something).