Developer: SquareSoft Publisher: Square
Reviewed by SailorMur on 3/18/02

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First Impressions:

So, all babbling aside, I was quite excited about Final Fantasy X. I expected the normal take from the FF series: a mysterious woman who has a somewhat doomed destiny, a guy named Cid, and a dire threat to the entire world that has to do with either machinery, treachery, or moral failure. Graphics and music that blow your mind are a given, as well as a magic system that will take about ten minutes to figure out, then make you wonder how you ever got by in the other games without it. Plus, over 70 hours of game play that includes character building, side quests, mini-games and - oh, yeah - plot. I mean, it's Final Fantasy!

Graphics:

The English language fails me here. SquareSoft is always above everyone else in the graphics department, and Final Fantasy X leaves all the other games I've played in the dust. If you sat through the painful movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (painful because of plot, not because of graphics) you know a little of what I speak. The game's cut scenes amaze with realistic facial expressions and lip synch technology. The lip synching is, of course, to the Japanese script, not the English, so don't get all mad that the technology doesn't work and it looks like a dubbed movie cause, well, it is.

The 3D environment is eye-popping, too. Everything, from the textures to the camera angles to allowing the characters to flow seamlessly from game play to cut scene, is next to flawless. You want a game for eye candy? This is it.

Sound/Music:

The music is, of course, done by the famous FF soundtrack composer, Nobou Uematsu. If you're not familiar with the name, you are familiar with his work, assuming you've ever spent over 50 hours on a Final Fantasy title. It's his tunes you're humming when you go to bed, and you wish you could get them out of your head in the morning. In FFX, he expands his genres by adding heavy metal thrash music to the final boss fight as well as some other choice areas. And the chocobo music is fun, as always.

Sound is one of those design elements that you usually only notice if it's badly done. Fortunately, the sound design for Final Fantasy X is seamless, with proper background noise blending in and transitioning as you go from area to area.

However, the most impressive sound achievement of this game is the voice acting. The storage capacity of DVDs made it possible for Square to put thousands of lines of voice acting along with the game, and not just for the main characters, either. Minor characters will speak to you, often times more than one sentence. The acting is well done: the only hindrance was matching the length of English sentences with the Japanese. It is common to hear "Hai" in a very short, clipped tone in Japanese, but translating it to a very short, clipped "Yes" doesn't quite flow well.

Gameplay:

It's difficult to summarize the gameplay of a Final Fantasy game. Instead, I propose to tell you about the main plot and game play, and will provide side notes when I reference a mini-game.

Final Fantasy X is a simple console RPG: the player guides young Tidus (I quickly changed his name to Spike), a star blitzball (1) player in the high-tech city of Zanarkand, through the adventure. During the game, a beautiful CGI creature - um, an evil menace - destroys Zanarkand, and a mysterious man with one eye saves our hero, then throws him into the eye of the storm, so to speak. Tidus wakes up in a land of a heavily religious people who live without technology (except for the technology to power things like the Blitzball arena). The people he meets are about to undergo a quest: they must go to every temple (2) in Spira and pray for the help of huge monster-like creatures called aeons. These are called "guardians" in other FF games, just to keep you updated: there's still Ifrit, Shiva and Bahamut, with some neat new ones, too. Here is where we get to the main RPG element of FFX, which is to run around, kill things, level up (3), and run around. As you run around, of course, you also reveal plot elements, often so confusing you have no idea what's going on, but it's still worth it for the end movie.

Yuna, left, is our heroine: she is the white magic user, and the only one who can summon the aeons. There's also Lulu, the extremely buxom black magic user who likes to put everyone down, as well as Rikku, the very perky thief (4). Wakka, the simple blitzball captain with a heart of gold, has a strong religious faith that is tested many times in the story, which adds depth to the character. Khimari is a large horned cat/man kind of creature; I never did find out what he was good for. Other members of the company include Auron, the grumpy one-eyed guy who is deadly with a sword, and Tidus, the young hero who, as he romps through the world that isn't his while doing a job that he didn't really choose, insists that this is "his story."

The battle design in itself is a finely polished one. No more will you enter a battle and think, "Oh crap, if only I had [insert dormant character here] in my party!" Just hit L1 and you can choose who you want. This does, however, make the status attacks such as poison and darkness be nearly harmless, as instead of wasting a turn healing the character, you can just switch them out for a fresh face. There are also no inns or tents (well, there are inns, but you don't need them). In this game you can heal by just touching a save point.

Most of the mini-games (5) are fun. Like the chocobo breeding and racing that took up so much time in FFVII, many can take up more time than the game, if you let them.

One of my biggest complaints about the game is the usual with FFX - I can't play it without the strategy guide. The puzzles and side quests would be impossible without it. There are quests that you can undertake only if you know the XY coordinates on a map. This is not intuitive stuff. Many of the things you must do to obtain your characters' Ultimate Weapons (like dodge lightning 200 time in a row for Lulu), you would never think to do. So instead of the usual $50 or so bucks, if you want to fully appreciate all of the details of FFX, you need to spend $70 to add in the strategy guide.

Perhaps my biggest complaint is a spoiler. It's not a plot spoiler, but it does involve the final battles. If you don't want to know, skip down to the Enjoyment section.

Spoiler: In one of the final battles, the player will face a big boss with 80,000 HP. However, if you've done a side quest to get the aeon Anima (that's the one that looks like a fish in a strait jacket chained up in a clam shell with a picture of the Virgin Mary around its neck), you can do 99,999 points of damage in one blow. Not a threat. However, the biggest problem is that during the final battle, all of your characters automatically have Auto Life cast upon them. Auto Life is a spell that causes you to come back from the dead once, and then you must cast Auto Life again. In the final battle, you don't need to cast it, and if you happen to die, you get resurrected with Auto Life recast on you by some little snake/boy angel. This means, of course, that you can't lose. After 70+ hours of playing a game, I was a bit disappointed to discover that the end battle had already been decided for me.

Enjoyment:

No doubt about it, this game is hours and hours of "just till I get to the next save point" fun. The main plot kept me very interested, and I thought that most of the side quests were well worth the effort for both rewards and entertainment.

Multiplayer:

N/A

Overall Impression:

The necessity for the strategy guide and the view of women as sexy magic users is troubling, but the richness of the game, the intriguing (if sometimes confusing) plot, the art, the replayability, and the depth of design all make up for the fact, in my opinion.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

Women nothing, they're marketing this puppy to everyone. Yuna is featured almost as prominently as Tidus in heavy television advertising. The art for several of the women leaves much to be desired, as mentioned in the Gameplay section of this review. Also, three women are in your group, and the designers didn't see fit to have any of them be able to make worthwhile physical attacks.