Final Fantasy X

Now that I am settled in another new job and city, I can once again turn some of my attention to gaming and blogging. I have recently started working my way through my video game backlog. This backlog started building up over a decade ago during the second half of engineering school. After graduation, I was able to burn some of it down, but this was also a period of time in which PS2 games were available cheap as Blockbuster stores struggled to remain in business. The PS3/360 era backlog grew quite large while I was in law school, and I have moved three times for two different jobs since then.

The idea that a Final Fantasy game could ever find its way into my backlog seems ridiculous; the Final Fantasy series has been my favorite game series since 1990. The only games in the series, available in the US prior to FFX, that I did not complete were FFV and FFVIII. The PS1 release of FFV was so poorly translated, and had such long loading times, that I eventually stopped playing, and FFVIII eventually bored me to death. Sadly, FFX just fell at the wrong time. It came as I transitioned into my junior year in engineering, the most intense period at Clemson. I actually played almost the entire game; my file is saved at the last save point.

I know why I stopped. I made it through the icicle room, and was slaughtered by Brasca’s Final Summon’s second form Overdrive move. Faced with the prospect of going through the stupid icicle room again, I put it aside and never came back to it.  

Over the past few weeks, I finally played FFX from start to finish. While you could probably spend well over one hundred hours on FFX, if you wanted to do all the side quests, I decided to just to the straight story play through. My play through took a little over 50 hours, I did grind a bit towards the end so I could get Ultima and a few other abilities that I wanted to play with. I can say, without reservation, that I thoroughly enjoyed the game.

My perspective on this game, playing it over Christmas, is very different than it was in 2002. It is very clear that that Square-Enix was trying to recapture the success of this game with FFXIII. The advancement system in FFXIII is superficially similar to FFX’s Sphere Grid, but is far more constrained, gating the player to prevent character advancement from outpacing story advancement. This makes FFXIII’s system far less satisfying, and makes that game feel even more linear.

Make no mistake; FFX is a very linear game. Like FFXIII, you run down corridors that allow for only minor diversion and you have no real ability to do anything out of order. FFX feels less linear because of the late game introduction of the airship (which does actually allow for free exploration), the open nature of the Sphere Grid, and the early availability of full gameplay. Like FFXIII, FFX features an open field area (Calm Lands/Airship Map) where side quests can be pursued late in the game. I think the main difference here is that the side quests take you back to earlier areas, and some new areas, so that it feels more open. Overall I think that it is the open nature of the Sphere Grid and the lack of a 20 hour tutorial that make FFX feel less linear. The story and overall structure are every bit as linear as FFXIII, but character advancement is non-linear and gameplay features are not gated by story considerations, so it does not feel like you are playing a novel, even though you are.  It also helps that FFX is a much better novel, with more interesting characters, than FFXIII.

At the end I wound up getting wiped by the boss’s Overdrive again and having to go through the stupid icicle room to retry. The reason that the icicle room is so annoying is that is deviates from all of the gameplay in the main story up until that point. You have to run around, with a very tight camera view, and avoid icicles that appear out of nowhere. FFX actually has a lot of this kind of stuff in the game; chocobo racing, and dodging lightning bolts both require a totally different type of gameplay, but these are confined to optional side quests. The annoyance comes from gating the end boss from the final save point with this annoying gameplay mechanic. I pushed through and used my aeons as sacrificial shields against the boss’s Overdrive attack, the rest was easy.

I glad that I went back and played through this. Even playing the original PS2 version on a modern TV, it is a great looking game and a lot of fun.