Time changes everything, one way or the other.
The game begins in a music concert with Yuna from FFX singing a rather cheese filled pop song in a tiny dress. You soon discover however that this is not the real Yuna, but a fake who has stolen her dress sphere. Upon tracking her and her goons down after the concert using Rikku and new biker girl Paine the real Yuna shows up. These 3 form a group now known as the Gullwings, they hunt spheres, and more importantly spheres that seem to be showing a certain someone...
The game is layed out in a chapter system, with 5 in all. This, like Yuna's drastic personality change, is a large turn in direction from FFX. My main problem with this is that in each chapter you must re explore the areas in Spira, the same areas you may have already explored in FFX. The same areas with very similar bad guys. My point? There is very little that is new. The few new areas that are in the game are few, far between, and not very big. Meaning that the game gets old fast, especially if you already played the original.
However what holds this together, the core to this game, the key stone if you will is the battle system. It has, in my opinion, a rather old school inspiration from FFIII / V. For those of you who have not played these, each characters stats, skills and even appearance depends upon what job they have, or in FF-X 2's case, what dress they are wearing. These vary from classes that hit hard, like Knights, Dragoons and Warriors, to those that use magic or other unique skills like White mages or Mascots.
Each of these jobs has skills to be learnt from using them in battle. But must be found or gained through the course of the game while hunting for spheres relevent to the story. During the course of battle if certain classes are not working, then they may be changed on the fly at your choice, showing a small scene of them changing clothes in an almost magical way.
Although these scenes are not to over the top, they kind of add to the rather cheesy feel to the game. It has a very "Charlies Angels" over the top female vibe to it. While this actually appeals to me, the game does not acomplish this well in many areas, making it feel forced, and quite frankly unbelieveable.
The music adds to this effect, with many pop and even Jazz like tunes playing along, even during battle. However, it somehow works. The fight tempo is rather upbeat thanks to it, and helps alot with the atmosphere of the game, even if it seems ridiculous.
The voice acting is very similar to FFX, and so it should be, as most of the voice acting and an awful lot of the characters are the same. All in all a very good job is done, even though alot of the dialogue is kind of cheesy. However it's full of fun moments that would not be the same with different actors.
Visually the game, although good, is not really different from FFX. With no suprise as most of the areas are exactly the same. The character models though are a vast improvement, with far more detail, especially around the eyes and in their facial expression. The cutscenes are also breath taking, with great motion capture and immense detail showing through out. And as this game has alot of them, that is a big bonus.
Despite this game boasting many hours of game play and multiple endings, it's value is not all that high, I mean would you want to play the same area over and over for hours? It is a fun game, but if more thought were put into adding new dungeons and expanding the world of Spira, then it could have been so much more. However despite this it is still somehow greater then the sum of it's parts.