This being the second Final Fantasy game I ever played, skipping VIII and IX, I was very excited to be playing another game in the world renowned series. I have to say I came away from the experience with a sense of completion, but on the other hand there were some things I just plain didn't care for in this game. Luckily for this game, the good far outweighs the bad, and I will explain why. The game play in this game was excellent to say the least. Although it took a while to get into, once I had a clear understanding of what was going on I was very satisfied with the way this game handled. The battle system, although still similar to the games before it had many new aspects. Trigger Commands for instance, and the ability to change equipment and characters during battle were among this games greatest attributes. As I mentioned before the turn based battle system of this game was very similar to the FF games before it, with the exception of the afore mentioned changes and some other interesting aspects. Summoning for example was handled in a very unique way. Only one character (Yuna) was the summoner, which was nice in the respect that all your summons were organized, but hurt badly in that if she was dead, you were unable to ask for their aid. This of course was because of how the story was set up, there was no choice but to have Yuna be the only summoner in the party. Another aspect of the game play that was great, but at the same time somewhat detrimental to the game, was the sphere grid. Simply put, Great for character customization, bad for ease, and at times downright frustrating. Your characters in this game do not grow in level, they grow in AP, you spend this AP on the ability to move around on the sphere grid. While your moving around, as the name would suggest, you have to have acquired certain types of spheres to activate the nodes to make your characters better. This is where it can get frustrating. You spend time getting AP, then spend AP to get to a place only to realize that you don't have any, or enough, spheres. You then have to decide if you want to wait and leave that character lacking, until you get said spheres, or you can waste more AP getting back to where you were to begin with. The best extra feature in the game was definitely the blitzball games. It's easy to spend tons of time playing blitzball during the course of this game. Definitely a great extra feature to keep the game exciting.
The graphics in this game at the time (and somewhat still today) were excellent. CG sequences looked only slightly less impressive than that of the Advent Children or the new FFXIII and FFvsXIII trailers. Character models were greatly improved over the PS Final Fantasies, and the environments looked larger than life as they always do in FF games. The one drawback was the draw distance (no pun intended), of course this is typical of most if not all PS2 games. Sound was a shining area for FFX. Never once was I annoyed with the quality of the music or the tunes that were played. This game also contains one of my favorite FF songs, you can hear it in the beginning when the CG blitz ball game starts, and at the end when you fight with the Final Aeon. One thing I disliked about the sound was the voice acting. It was dubbed over the Japanese very poorly in my opinion. In most places it looked like Square didn't even bother to try getting the voice timing right. Another thing I really hated was Tidus's voice. He had a very womanly appearance, plus he cried all the time (exaggeration), and put that on top of bad, and slightly girlish voice acting, I sometimes wondered about his masculinity(joking). Of course these examples are just the extremes that I notice, but on the whole there was no major problem with the sound. <
Story wise this game was great. You start out your journey as Tidus, a blitzball player from the land of Zanarkind. Soon his whole world turns upside down and his homeland is destroyed and he is transported to a far off place and time. He then starts a journey with two of he new found friends Yuna and Waka that takes him the journey to find his purpose. It's a very good storyline with much political and religious intrigue. If you like RPG's this is a must play!
All these reasons add up to my score of a superb 9 out of 10.
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