Gameplay takes a step back in favor of story presentation. Problem is, this is the worst soap opera I've ever seen.
*Character X kidnaps character 1 from your party*
*Your party tries to save character 1*
*Character X in a giant, robotic machinery tries to kill your entire party*
*Your party defeats character x’s machine, saves character 1*
Character X: “Hey, no fair!” *whines*
*--Character X joins your party!--*
And that it. No questions about why character x kidnapped one of your party members. Absolutely nothing. I mean what the heck? Later you’ll find out the answer as one of the game’s many dumb, illogical surprises, but to keep the revelation till later on, they made all the characters this dumb. This is frankly just ridiculous and very lazy on the writer’s part.
To make matters worse, the voice-acting is just plan bad. The story tries to create a lot of sentimental dialogs, but the voice actors speak them as straightforward as possible. Sometimes when the voice actors do try, they overact and the whole thing just gets worse. For example, in one very long sequence Tidus cries over something that probably won’t likely happen anyway (and the game’s main orchestrated music is wasted on this scene). That sequence is so embarrassingly bad. It’s so bad that I feel I was the one who helped made it through paying money for this game.
At the end I couldn’t help but feel that I’ve finished watching the worst soap opera ever made rather than played a game.