Final Fantasy XII came out last week. The timing couldn’t be more perfect, because I’ve been itching for a jrpg fix. Unfortunately my copy of the game was preordered, which means I get to wait until next week to play it. To fill the jrpg shaped void in my week I dusted off one of my old favorites, Final Fantasy X.
To date Final Fantasy X is my favorite of the series[1. for reference - I've played III, VII, IX, X-2, and XII.]. It’s not the best in the series, that is an argument I don’t want to get into, but it is my favorite. It is also the first one that I played, but I don’t buy into that whole the-first-one-is-always-the-favorite thing[2. in fact the second of something is usually my favorite because it gives me a better reference point from which to judge things, but I digress.]. Oh yeah, and here is where I ought to put a spoiler warning, just so no one gets mad.
On the surface FFX’s story is another run through of “boy’s village burns down and he teams up with an unlikely group of adventurers to take down the big bad responsible for the burning of said village.” It’s the plot of just about every Final Fantasy game, and every other rpg out there[3. for complaints about recycled plots, please see the Hero's journey.]. In this outing we are first introduced to Tidus, a Blitzball[4. basically water-scoccer.] player with father issues, enjoying his stardom. One beautiful cut scene and kickass song later, and he wakes up to find himself in Spira – a post-post-apocalyptic world that occasionally experiences minor apocalypses in the form of a giant monster called Sin. There he meets the Yamato Nadeshiko Yuna, who can summon monsters and also has father issues. He falls in with the usual band of unlikely adventures and sets off to a legendary city, which may or may not be the city he came from, to save the world.
Around the three quarters mark it’s revealed that Tidus isn’t from the past, or an alternate dimension, but that ultimately he doesn’t exist. For such a huge revelation it gets very little emphasis, and soon gets overshadowed with the revelations of one of your other party members being dead, and the goal you’ve been working towards is futile, being merely the continuation of the cycle of destruction. It’s pretty heady stuff, and it’s all done without amnesia. Then you get to the end of the game, and just after the adrenalin thrill off three or four consecutive bosses, the game delivers its final blow – the act of defeating the Big Bad once and for all seals Tidus’s fate, and you’re treated to a piognent scene where he briefly explains at he doesn’t actually exist to the dumbstruck party and the girl he loves before vanishing[5. there is a HEA, but it's short, nebulous at best and after the credits.].
Final Fantasy X’s CTB is one of my favorite battle systems of any games. It’s by no means perfect, but I like the medium it presents – newer RPGs have been leaning heavier and heavier on the action elements, and the older ones are either simple, or lack flow. I’ll also applaud the game for not only filling out the party with all the major classes, but actually making the characters matter to the story. I’ve seen far too many RPGs lately where your extra party members were either useless, interchangeable, or simply didn’t matter[6. I'm looking right at you, Infinite Undiscovery. That game threw so many characters at you that you could put together four parties of four characters and still have some left over.].
It is far from a perfect game by any means. Seymour is one of the weakest villains I can think of[7. he's a watered down Sephiroth with more daddy issues. And a side helping of mommy issues!], and while the voice acting was okay for 2001, back when voice acting was so new it still gave us starry eyes when it was including, it doesn’t really doesn’t hold up now. The scene-by-scene writing isn’t terribly stellar either – the whistling scene near the beginning is downright painful to watch. While I love the two main songs, Otherworld and Suteki De Ne, it’s already been proven then I have a strange and varied taste in music.
Where it shines it shines, and where it doesn’t… Well, there are reasons for the game getting so much flack. So far it’s the only Final Fantasy that I’ve voluntarily replayed more then twice. Even if I find a new favorite it will always be a special game for me.