.......
I honestly don't know where to start. I suppose I should say right off the bat, I really disliked this game. A lot. For a Final Fantasy game, I honestly can say I was completely and utterly disappointed. While the graphics were amazingly beautiful, the music score incredible, and the new "sphere grid" system a fun change, the story and characters completely killed everything.
What a waste of time.
The charaters were bland and totally uninteresting. Tidus, the main character ceasless whining and irritating drivel was distracting. I often turned off the volume just so I wouldn't have to listen to him talk. His simpleness made it very hard for me to connect with him and his story, leaving totally unsympathetic to his plight. Yuna, the other main character was equally annoying, with her constant stuttering and breathy, emotionless voice. I pushed mute when she talked as well. Seriously, the only characters I actually enjoyed were Auron and Rikku. Auron was interesting, with his mysterious past and Rikku was enjoyably spunky. The rest of them, Wakka, Lulu, and Kimahri all sort of faded into the back ground.
The story had potential. Had, being the operitive word here. However, it turned out to be flat, dull, and boring thanks to poor dialouge, weak characters, and less than spectacular writing.
So why did I waste fifty hours playing this game? Well to be honest, I've had the game since it first came out, but since I was on vacation, I decided to finish it now that I had the time. Not to mention, the new FF game will be out this fall, so I sort of felt guilty for not finishing this one. Thankfully, despite the bad story and stupid characters, I amused myself with the cool sphere grid and created my own game of leveling up my characters and aeons to be utterly unbeatable. That was the only redeeming quality of this FFX in my opinion. The nifty tools and the new leveling system were a stroke of genius, and a refreshing break from the norm.
As bad as this game was, I can forgive Square, since their history with FF games has been realitivly decent. There've been a few bad ones, FF8 comes to mind, but when the really to hit a winner, it's worth the money to spend on the disk. I certainly hope that this new game will be on calibur with FF7 (the best FF game IMO) or FF9. Those were both incredible entries to the FF world. Lets keep our fingers crossed.
Have you played "Final Fantasy III"? Even though it's an old SNES, I consider that to be the best Final Fantasy game I've ever played (FFVII comes in second). Definitely a classic, IMHO.
Posted by: Arxane at June 4, 2004 02:40 PMYou know, I haven't played that one yet. I started playing them late, so I missed the earlier ones. I'll have to check it out, I'm a pretty story driven RPG fan. If the story is cool, I'll enjoy it! Thanks for the tip!
Posted by: Zoso at June 4, 2004 08:19 PM> Have you played "Final Fantasy III"? Even though it's an old
> SNES, I consider that to be the best Final Fantasy game I've
> ever played (FFVII comes in second). Definitely a classic,
> IMHO.
Agreed. FFIII (US) was probably the very best of the bunch, in my opinion.
FF9 (US) was also great - much better than any of the other 'modern' entries in the series. I actually _did_ like FFX, but not as much as some of the others (I bought FFX-2 but the MTV-esque nature of the game has somewhat put me off on playing it - maybe I'll get around to it soon...).
Posted by: Jeff at June 4, 2004 09:17 PM