Exciting World of Micromanaged Combat

There is a huge problem with the combat in FFX. Characters can only get experience if they are actively involved in combat. For example, if you had three people in your party and only one person killed the enemy that person would be the only one to get experience. Your other team members would be left with nothing. This violates a convention that RPG gamers have gotten used to over the years. That standard is everyone in a party splits experience regardless of what they did during the battle.

While this new system may be innovative, and slightly more realistic is makes battles a pain in the ass and utterly tedious. This is because you have to swap out party members during battle so they can do something. This requires constant juggling of characters and a lot more micromanagement that I’d like to think about while grinding. My preferred method is what was used in FF7: everyone in the party gets full experience, and everyone not in the party gets half experience.

Wretched Crystal Room

I do not even know what you would call this area, but people who have played the game will know what I am talking about. Within Sin there is a room you have to run around and collect gems that appear, and disappear (usually just before you get to them). While you are running around trying to collect the gems before they fade away there are crystal shards that jut up from the ground at random. Normally, this isn’t that big of an issue, but the way it is setup is just sadistic. You spend almost the entire time running blind across the circular area trying to find the gems, because the camera is facing your character so you cannot see where you are running. I can only assume the game designers did this to be dicks, and to increase your chances of running into shards.

If you hit one of these shards you are instantly propelled into battle. And, these battles are nothing to laugh at. Most of them just force you to spend precious items you have collected. But, one in particular is just sadistic. The Great Malboro is an insidious creature that has a special attack called “bad breath.” This horrible ability utterly screwed my team, as it inflicts various status ailments, including some kind of confusion. The result was that it could slowly pick away at my characters while they slaughtered each other, and all I could was watch.

Sadly, I had never encountered anything like it in the game up to that point. As a result, I was not at all equipped to face it. Luckily, I happened to have a return sphere so I was able to add first strike to one of Auron’s weapons. I charged his overdrive and held it until I fought the creature. I was pretty strong when I faced it, so that over drive was usually enough to get it before it could get me. Ugh, I still get furious just thinking about it.

Moonflow

Be careful what you name things. I have read several books that use the term “moonflow” to refer to menstruation. Unfortunately this made much of this sequence of the game quite disturbing, and / or just gross. The thought of moonflow glowing is just wrong. And, riding a creature the lives off of organisms in the moonflow, ugh. The stories about Yuna repeatedly jumping into the moonflow as a child…and then, when Tidus and Wakka just jump into the moonflow…the thought of that battle still makes me feel dirty.

Although this should be an unwritten rule, it is an important one: do not name things after menstruation.

Spare No Expense

The worst movie I have ever played.

Over the past week I have made a short pilgrimage to hell and back, all in the name of gamer camaraderie. Vanlandw decided to play the game because he has been suffering no end of torment from others that have completed game. Apparently, during his college years he played the game near completion but walked away. Thus, the goal being to complete the game and shut people up. Since the game is so old, and I had never played it, I agreed to play through it at the same time so he had someone to discuss it. What a mistake that was.

I have been playing video games since the last 80’s and I cannot think of another game that was as miserable to play as Final Fantasy X. Sure many games have glitches, bad stories, linear gameplay and a variety of other issues but Square really kicked it up a notch. Throughout this post I am going to break down the major issues of the game and try to explain why they made the game so unbearable. I hope you enjoy.

Video Games Should Not be Movies

Not everyone agrees with me on this, but I fervently believe that videos are for playing not for watching. Granted, I don’t mind a small cut scene that shows up between major levels to give you a little breather. Final Fantasy X takes cut scenes to the extreme. Rather than having gameplay occasionally interrupted by cut scenes FFX has cut scenes intermittently interrupted by gameplay. A vast majority of the game consists of you either walking for a couple of seconds to get to the next cut scene, or fighting a battle in the middle of a cut scene. Periodically, the difficulty is ramped way up so you have to grind by walking back and forth in a small area that is between a cut scene and a boss battle.

To add insult to injury, not only are you constantly being forced to endure cut scene after cut scene, but you cannot skip them. That’s right, you are forced to watch hours of cut scenes. Many of them do not even contain dialog, or advance the story at all. I clocked a lul in one cut scene that consisted of five minutes of nothing more than the camera panning around. How emo of Square.

FFX is the first FF game to contain voice acting. I think they must have paid a fortune for it, because they really wanted you to experience it. While you can hit X to advance dialog in some places (it doesn’t speed up the cut scene it just clears the text and ends the voice) you cannot in many places. The really frustrating part is the inconsistency. You may have a cut scene where you can skip every dialog line, and others where there are certain lines that you are forced to listen to. And, in some cut scenes you cannot speed up anything, you just have to suffer through it. In many ways it reminds me of Xenogears, where you were frequently forced to endure long stretches of text that you could not speed the advance of. The main difference being that Xenogears had a compelling story.

If You Lean on Your Story it Better Be Good

Since you’ll spend 90% of your time “playing” FFX watching cut scenes it would have been nice had they actually crafted a compelling story. You play as a homeless person who isn’t actually a person. Apparently his father treated him like shit when he was a kid. But, its ok because his dad isn’t real either. Also, you get to kill him. I laughed aloud when Tidus slew his father and then informed him that he hated him. For some reason your character decides to follow some woman on her quest to kill a thing that will only get resurrected immediately after she kills. By the way, in the act of killing that thing she’ll die. Sounds a like a great plan. Not surprisingly a corrupt religious organization is behind all the bullshit.

They try to do a little philosophical stuff relating to peace, order, death, and hope but it rings pretty hollow because all their explanations are either glazed over or poorly thought out. I spent most of the time feeling like I was being lectured to by a stoner. Not just any stoner, an OLD stoner.

Pretty Graphics Do Not a Good Game Make

FFX is an excellent example of why companies should focus on game play and not worry about trying to make pretty graphics. The problem with fancy graphics is that they do not withstand the test of time. Sure, FFX may have been cutting edge at the time, but where is the replay value? It just looks dated. And, it is painfully obvious that the gameplay they cobbled together sucks, so the whole experience is just dreadful. Some may argue that it is enough to have fancy graphics to drive sales shortly after the release of the title. To a certain extent that argument makes sense, but it does not add lasting appeal.

FFX would be a capable Commodore 64 game. Sure the game has fancy, “lush” 3d environments but they are horribly ridged. You cannot just walk around an explore, you have to follow the set path laid out for you. This would be incredibly frustrating if you were just wondering around bumping into invisible walls, but they were nice enough to put a 2d map in the corner of the screen. So, if you are like me, you just ignore the 3d environment and look at the 2d map to navigate. The nice thing about the 2d map is that the controller tends to reflect the direction you need to move is better reflected than it is in the 3d environment. In some of the really zig-zaggy areas you had to hold up to go down on the 3d map, and visa versa, truly maddening. Everything else could have easily been text. Like I said, the graphics just do not hold up.

Follow the Blinking Red Arrow

Role playing games have a rich history of exploration and character building. Part of the fun is talking to people and puzzling out what you are supposed to do to advance your quest. FFX decided to go in another direction. As I mentioned a moment ago, even though the game has a 3d presentation it is actually strictly 2d. Worse yet, the paths you are constrained to are painfully linear. Rarely does the road actually fork, and when it does you get a blinking red arrow telling you where to go. A few places don’t give you an arrow, but they are pretty mundane.

At each one of the temples that you go to get new creatures to summon (long uninteresting story behind that), there is an extraordinarily lame puzzle you have to solve using “orbs” that fit into “slots.” There are no random battles during these puzzles, so you cannot get any grinding out of the way, and the puzzles themselves were all very easy, but very time consuming and / or tedious. Imagine you are making yourself a sandwich. But, you can only make the sandwich on your porch, and you can only carry one ingredient at time. Sure you could do it, no problem, but it seems like a pretty ridiculous way to make a sandwich.

Blitzball, Worst Game Ever.

If you create a stupid minigame, you should not force anyone to play it. Blitzball is kind of weird twist on water polo and soccer. The gameplay is absolutely dreadful. For the most part the game plays itself, you have to change the mode to actually take control of someone and that only works when you are on offense. Swimming around is periodically interrupted by “encounters” where everything stops so you can figure out what you want to do. There is some math involved but it usually doesn’t matter because the odds are stacked against you. You can level your characters, pick up different character, and learn techniques. But, the game isn’t fun so you probably won’t do this. And, if you take a moment to think about it, the game does not even make sense.

Before I get into the longer description, you should know, the characters in the game can apparently hold their breath forever. I am not exactly sure why of this, I do not recall an explanation. This is critical to note, since an entire game of blitzball is played underwater. That’s right, they take an enormous sphere and fill it full of water. It’s an interesting concept, but they do not capitalize on it. The game field is a 2d sliver in the center of the sphere. So, you have this interesting 3d environment and you are once again constrained to a 2d scape, sweet. Aside from the annoying aspects of this, there are all kinds of physics problems.

Since the players are swimming around at the center of the sphere, there would be all kinds of pressure changes. This would not only affect the trajectory of the ball, but it would horribly effect the players. I am fairly certain players would suffer a nasty case of the bends from a regular game, even though its only 10 minutes long. The ball itself I can only imagine is magic. I cannot think of any substance that it could be filled with that would allow it to follow its intended path when thrown through a pressure gradient. Even you do manage to maintain your suspension of disbelieve there are some other issues that are just plain silly.

I have never jumped into a body of water fully clothed. Have you? Apparently every single person in all of Sphira (what they call the archipelago of the game world) only owns a single outfit (which the exception of Rikku, I guess she got lucky). The outfits look like something you would scrounge together out of bits of clothe must be unitards because no one strips anything off before they jump into the ocean, or blitzball sphere, or any other body of water.

There is a really weird scene in the game where Yuna (the chick you follow around for some reason) is wading in a pool of water. She is in this pool fully clothed in a kimono. I cannot imagine how much water all those layers of clothe would soak up, or how miserable it would be walking around in them while you wait for them to dry, if they would even ever dry while layered like they are. Can you imagine how bad it would smell to walk into a room full of people that have been wearing the same clothes in and out of water in various states of moistness?

Conclusion

Finally, Its Over

I decided to cut my feedback on the game short, and only pointed out the issues that I felt the most strongly about. Video games really need to focus on excellent game play, and put visual presentation in the back seat in order for games to have lasting appeal. And, when they are making a story element the forefront of the experience, at least allow people skip things once they have seen them, and do your best to uphold the suspension of disbelief. With these things mind I will issue my final verdict.

According to my standard rating scale, everything starts as a 0, thats “average” in my book. From there things can go up or down five points, resulting in a -5 to 5 scale. I have played some bad games before, but I think this is going to be my first official -5 ranking. Not doubt I will get some nasty comments from fan boys, but everything I stated needed to be said.