Two weeks ago I decided that I really ought to play through Final Fantasy X, if only so that I can have an informed negative opinion of it. I’m happy to say that my opinion is officially upgraded to “mixed.” My first attempt, right when it first came out in America, crashed and burned when, six hours in, I found myself walking down a long corridor which is painted like an open field (well, what else am I supposed to call it when the game forces you to stick to an arbitrarily delineated area), talking to people who chuck items at me and fighting monsters who apparently aren’t attacking the item-chuckers. I experienced this weird moment in which my suspension of disbelief violently shattered, turning the game into a completely abstract experience in which I could discern no plot, characters, or gameplay whatsoever.
Things are going much better this time. I realize now that the place where I quit last time was the climax of the game’s first act, if you will, and the game simply has a weak first act. (Also, the grassy corridor hit me while I was still reeling from blitzball, which is a major reason the first act is so weak.) Things do get better from there, much better even. Not that there aren’t still weaknesses. And, despite rumors to the controversy, there is no main map, at least none that I’ve found after twenty-five hours of gameplay.
Bearing in mind that I haven’t finished yet, let me elaborate on the strengths and weaknesses I see in the game. I’m very glad I’m finally playing it; there is much of value here, and I now believe that it does realize my hope that Square would remedy some of the weaknesses of FF8; on the other hand, they’ve slid further in other areas. And in any case, it may be good to have a fair and balanced assessment of FFX firmly in mind, especially as FFX2 is probably about to leave the worst taste in our mouths since… well, anything, really.
I’ll start with a few good points artistically. The soundtrack is an entirely new kind of soundtrack that I don’t think Square has attempted before, and it succeeds pretty well. It is possibly the least “memorable” Final Fantasy soundtrack—I don’t find myself humming very many of the themes—but a catchy soundtrack probably wouldn’t have been appropriate to a game with lots of spoken dialogue. (The dialogue itself is pretty good, with above-average voice-acting. The two leads originally annoyed me, but I’ve mellowed a bit… I’ll address this below.) But it is a very enjoyable soundtrack nevertheless, always appropriate to the action, and it does have a catchy tune here and there (in particular the opening theme and a few character themes). And it’s remarkably coherent despite having been written by, what, three or four composers? It’s kind of fun playing the game of guessing who wrote what track. There are some tunes (the Cloister of Trials comes to mind) which are either Nobuo Uematsu or I’ll eat my memory card. There are some pleasantly bouncy, yet mellow, piano tunes which are clearly the work of the Saga Frontier 2 guy. And so on.
More importantly, there is actually much of interest in the story. The two leads, Tidus and Yuna, are incredibly irritating at first, but I’ve grown to like them, and I think this is at least in part because they’re both actually growing as people. I respect that. Tidus, at the beginning, is a whiny little kid who wants his mommy. He’s also a bit dense, and obnoxiously plucky—Zidane without the charm. Yuna, on the other hand, is a space cadet. Her brain’s off in some other galaxy, and seems very confused by events in ours. She looks confused most of the time, and she’s constantly apologizing for… God knows what. I suppose that’s very Japanese, or something.
But, over the course of the game, wonderful things happen to these two characters. We begin to understand that Yuna has very substantial and serious reasons for relating (or failing to relate) to the world the way she does, and she begins to reach out a bit, especially to Tidus. Here they are trying to strike up a conversation, early on:
Tidus: You know, when you’re in a game, you have to think about blitz and nothing else, you know?
Yuna: Okay.
Yeeeeaaaaahhhh, well…
But they’re good for each other. There’s an early scene where the two of them are getting each other to laugh, something neither of them is very good at; it was there that I first realized they were being very deliberately drawn as damaged people who need each other. The game eventually show that it’s aware Yuna is weird—Lulu, for instance, summarizes Yuna’s personality: “Naïve, serious to a fault, and doesn’t ask for help.” Now, I wish this had been shown more clearly from the beginning, but I started appreciating it as soon as I figured it out. And they’re continuing to grow as characters: this part of the story is quite wonderful.
Also wonderful are the many, many recurring characters you meet on the road. The story, all of it I’ve played so far, follows the course of the Pilgrimage that all summoners take, to get all their Aeons, which are the summoned monsters this time around. (I’ll sketch the plot loosely below, trying to avoid major spoilers.) Those characters who chuck items at you on the High Road are doing so because they’re fellow pilgrims, and they’re your friends. You keep meeting them periodically on the various roads, and I’ve grown to like them. I also really like the supporting player characters, each of whom gradually reveals a genuine personality, and who interact with each other in interesting ways. Particularly interesting is Auron; but to understand him, we need to delve into the plot a little.
So, in the opening sequence, our hero Tidus is whisked away from his home in Zanarkand to the land of Spira, in a mysterious event of uncertain metaphysical significance. Spira is being menaced by a monster called Sin—apparently has been for thousands of years. And apparently everyone there believes that Zanarkand was destroyed by Sin a thousand years ago. So have we travelled in time? It’s not yet clear, but in any case, Tidus is special because of his link with Zanarkand. And there’s his father, who was something of a jerk (says Tidus), but also apparently was in Spira some time ago and is remembered there as a hero. Except that apparently, he is Sin now (not clear what this means, exactly). And then there’s Auron, whom Tidus also knew in Zanarkand, but who belongs to Spira and who apparently knows Deep Secrets. The game follows the journey of Yuna and her guardians (including Auron and Tidus) to collect the Aeons and challenge Sin so that he’ll be dead for a few years (and then, presumably, be born again with some other innocent bystander’s soul). As a background to all this, there’s the Church of Yevon, which organizes the summoners against Sin, and their antagonists the Al Bhed, a civilization that uses technology (“machina”), something forbidden by the teachings of Yevon.
Now we come to the central paradox of Final Fantasy X. Each and every one of these plot threads has much of great interest, and each and every thread is marred by a creeping incoherence the likes of which I’ve never seen in a Final Fantasy. (There’s no one element as egregiously arbitrary as Time Kompression, but then, you can simply ignore the last few hours of Final Fantasy VIII without much damaging your appreciation of the game.) The problem is that Weird Stuff happens and Tidus doesn’t care. His hated father’s name is Jecht. Yuna says “Oh, Sir Jecht was a great man.” Why does everyone assume they’re the same person? We later find out there’s a reason Tidus knows (or feels) it, but why does everyone else assume it? Fortunately, this is one of the arcs that gets much better after the first act. We learn more about Jecht’s adventures in Spira, and start to gain a real understanding of his character, how he can be both the beloved hero and the obnoxious, neglectful father. Some of this, actually, is genuinely touching. Similarly everyone’s reluctance to fill Tidus in on the details of the pilgrimage: there are revelations here which are fairly powerful.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t excuse the constant emotional wrong notes. If you’ve seen the beginning of the game, you’ve seen the worst of it, but it does continue sporadically. We can be in the middle of an interesting, powerful scene, and then Tidus decides to be impulsive and do something counter to the rest of the group, and everyone just lets him. He’s the protagonist, after all! But this is screwy—why don’t they just slap him down and tell him to stop being a jerk? (Actually, at 20 hours into the game, Auron does finally snap at him, and I was cheering.)
It’s as if they just got lazy in places and decided to ignore character motivations, which is a real shame because when they don’t ignore motivations, we get delightful dialogue like:
Tidus: But doesn’t this go against the Teachings?
Seymour: Then pretend you didn’t see it.
Tidus: But—begging your pardon, sir—that doesn’t sound like something a maester ought to say.
Seymour: Then pretend you didn’t hear me say it.
And this brings us to the Cosmic Plot because, hey, it’s Final Fantasy and there’s gotta be a Cosmic Plot! I hope I’m not spoiling anything by revealing that the Church of Yevon is evil and sinister. This is handled subtly and interestingly half the time: for instance, the dialogue carefully avoids referring to Yevon with pronouns for about fifteen hours, and then, at one key point, smoothly calls Yevon “it.” Whoah. But the other half the time, I’m uncertain whether the Church is intended as a parody of Catholicism or just as a generic Evil Conspiracy. There’s a scene that should be the great revelation, when we meet the leader of the Church (whom I’ve taken to calling the Space Pope) and he makes a big speech about the power of Death. This should be shocking and revealing, but instead it’s just confusing. These people are so obviously deranged that you can’t understand why anyone would look to them for spiritual guidance—there’s nothing even superficially appealing. This part of the game simply needed more work to make it convincing.
Something I noticed the first time through the game, which I still find annoying, is that Tidus has an incredible lack of curiousity. We see Spira through his eyes—he, like us, is a stranger—but he doesn’t ask any of the questions we would. As soon as I found out Yevon was an “it,” I would ask what it is. As soon as I heard that the Blitzball tournament is “sponsored by Yevon,” I would have asked “Huh? Yevon’s still alive?” I would ask Auron for clarification of the time warp thing. I would ask him about my father! I would ask… ah, you get the idea. This incuriousity allows the game to be lazy, and shock us with things that simply shouldn’t be shocking, and in fact a priori aren’t shocking—they just feel arbitrary. Okay, the Space Pope is evil. Okay, this entire race of mystics is now against me. Okay, all the summoners hate me now. Again, I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m just spoiling everything, because these developments are not shocking when they occur—you just make a mental note that they’ve revealed a bit more of the premise that you should actually already know.
This is really too bad, because there are some things about the Church that are genuinely mysterious and intriguing. Life after Death, for instance. The Church teaches that, when we die, our souls dissolve into glimmers of light called Pyreflies (which we can see when we defeat enemies—that’s cool right there, that I was seeing them all along and just assumed they were graphical glitz) which migrate to a place called the Farplane, where they retain much of their personality from life. One function of Summoners is to Send departed souls to the Farplane, lest they linger and become ghosts or monsters. You can actually visit the Farplane in life—there are mystics who will physically take you there—and you can see the ethereal forms of the dead, and even talk to them.
Now, that’s one explanation. The Al Bhed have a different explanation. They claim the Pyreflies “migrate” to the Farplane simply because that’s their home. They’re independent beings who like to linger around the recently deceased, but who mainly live the the Farplane, and who feed on memories. The reason we see images of the dead in the Farplane, the Al Bhed believe, is that the Pyreflies mimic our memories of the dead.
Here’s the cool thing: we get first-hand evidence for both positions. We actually visit the Farplane, in a genuinely haunting sequence, and see some of the dead souls. They’re pretty vague—it could be smoke and mirrors, or a mind trick. On the other hand, there appear to be people in the world of the living who truly are “Unsent,” who, after death, linger on. There’s even an intimation that Auron may be one such. Seymour, the ruler of the mystic race that travels to the Farplane, when he meets Auron, stares at him for a moment, and asks, half-frightened, half-bemused, ”Why are you still here, sir?” The way he says it, we know he doesn’t just mean here, in this room. He means Here with a capital H. But there’s been no further mention of this, making a genuinely creepy little metaphysical mystery that I really hope will be tied up elegantly. (Auron is an interesting enigma in and of himself: he is very cynical about the Church, but at the same time believes in their goal of fighting Sin, a goal which the Al Bhed dismiss as futile, which it may well be. Auron knows something, but I don’t know what.) Part of my enthusiasm here is that everything about the mystic race, the Farplane, and the Pyreflies is so beautifully rendered that I get chills thinking about it. This is an awe-inspiring sequence and deserves a more polished context.
(Incidentally, it also won’t be a spoiler to reveal that Seymour is pretty evil. When my brother first saw Seymour’s Aeon, he noted that it’s just… wrong. When we get to see the Aeon’s ultimate attack, later on, it’s even... more… wrong.)
There are also a lot of little details that the game gets right. One of the recurring fellow travellers is a scholar who will fill you in on the details of each area. His voice actor gives him wonderful little mannerisms, like how he ends each explanation with “And that, as they say, is that,” or, sometimes, after relating a particularly fanciful tale, “Or perhaps not. Who knows?”
There’s the Al Bhed angle. So on the one side, we have a monolithic Church, several of whose rulers are dead, and which forbids most research and progress. It’s got crusaders and stuff. And on the other hand, there’s Al Such-and-such, preserving scientific knowledge and stuff. This isn’t bad, this is a nice little allegorical set-up; sometimes they use it well, sometimes not. They use it well when we meet Cid. This Cid is a good Cid. Not as good as IV’s or VII’s, but in the same league, for the duration of his brief appearance.
And there’s the shupuf, an elephant-like beast that you ride at one point, which, we are told, doesn’t eat anything. Cute. The scholar tells us that perhaps it absorbs sustinence directly from the water it wades in. Or perhaps not. Who knows.
So there we are. There are many, many good things running around in the plot, and for the first time since FF7, we have metaphysical elements that may actually make sense. (In IX, who cares that it’s incoherent? That’s not the point. But in VIII it’s a problem.) Unfortunately, they don’t consistently make sense, and the incoherence problem I noticed on my first attempt at a playthrough, which includes but is not limited to the weird lack of curiousity (it’s like Tidus had a union deal by which he agreed not to ask questions that Yoshinori Kitase can’t answer), is quite real. And this is most frustrating when we get to the Church of Yevon and its metaphysics, which is sometimes apparently a ham-fisted and half-hearted commentary on Christianity, and is sometimes riveting high-concept fantasy.
END OF PART I. INTERMISSION.
One man breakthrough!
Action?
Pass!
Break to Letty!
Keepa gets a hand on it!
Break to Graav!
He’s LEAVING the SPHERE POOL!
END OF INTERMISSION. PART II.
Now for the gameplay. (Sorry, uh, about the intermission… had to get that out of my system. Blitzball is still the stupidest mini-game I have ever seen. I think it’s possible to pay attention to either the “reality” of the game or the formal system of the mechanics, but not both simultaneously, like some sort of quantum uncertainty. Of course, neither aspect makes much sense. As a video game it’s unplayable due to shoddy controls, incomprehensible rules, and lack of a useful practice mode. And as a model of a “real-life” game, it makes even less sense. It’s utterly unclear how the game would actually be played, even by people who can hold their breath indefinitely.)
Fortunately, blitzball aside, there really is some very good gameplay here, it’s just that it’s all in the battle system. At twenty-five hours into the game, there has been no exploration. None. Zero. 100% linear. (Well, okay, just recently there has been exactly one place where I can backtrack—so it’s still linear!—for a screen or two, and get a bonus item, but that is absolutely it. Oh, and you can play Blitzball any time, but you can also gouge out your eyeballs any time and you don’t even need a PlayStation for that.) Even the towns are linear—just one street runnin’ through ‘em. And no interesting people to talk to. There’s plenty of fascinating dialogue, as I’ve discussed, but it’s all in the main plot. There’s no sense of a world outside your immediate concerns, lurking in the corner of your life, as there was in all the great Final Fantasies, even FF5. Blah. Feh.
But wait! I promised that there are good things! Well, yes there are. I understand Square got some Quest guys to revamp the battle system, and it shows. ATB was showing its age—the battles were to my mind the least interesting thing in FF9—and the new system is quite refreshing. It’s turn-based, non-real-time, and largely perfect-knowledge, including knowing exactly when each player will get a turn, like FFT. Commands are executed immediately. And the character-swapping feature allows strategic thinking: I want to bring in Lulu to cast a spell, for instance, but she’s low on life and bringing her in will expose her to damage until I can get her back… Summoning, for the first time since the SNES, does not unbalance the game. There are battles where you more or less have to summon, and it’s still challenging, because Aeons have hit points, and are actually rather weak in that department, even though they deal massive damage. And yeah, I said challenging. Now, I didn’t die even once until more than twelve hours into the game. But since then, most boss battles have taken me a couple tries. Maybe my party is underpowered, but I don’t think so, because every time I finally beat a boss, it’s not luck: it’s because I actually had to come up with a good strategy for countering attack X or dealing with defense Y or timing things so that character Z isn’t around to take damage… or perhaps a tactic to make use of gimmick W, like fighting on top of an airship that you can steer toward or away from the boss, a gimmick of this sort which gives you a genuinely pleasant bit of variety… there’s genuine thought going on here, on Square’s end and on mine. I dig it.
It would be nice if there were some role-playing in between the boss battles, rather than lots of very-pretty-live-CG-but-it’s-still-live-CG cutscenage, and lots of peon battles that are handled logically, and have decent variety of the which-character-or-sword-is-best-for-this-monster sort, but are still repetitive peon battles. Oh, and mini-games. Of course. Blitzball aside (well aside. Break to Tidus!), there are the sphere puzzles in the temples, some of which are well done. There’s cool stuff like a sphere puzzle which has been damaged, so it “doesn’t work right,” and that’s the puzzle. And also there’s fairly lame stuff like time trials riding wild chocobos, stuff that was clearly tossed in at the last minute. But even Blitzball seems to have been grafted on at the last minute: after your first and (thank the Maker) only mandatory Blitzball game, next time you reach a save point, you’re told: “Traveller’s Save Sphere Level 2: Thanks to the Besaid Aurochs’ achievements, Save Spheres are now able to teleport you to the blitzball stadium.” Uh, oh-kaaaay… so, we’re not even trying to make a little sense as a living world to explore, any more? But I have to stress that the boss battles really are very well done. I’m getting a genuine sense of satisfaction out of dispatching them.
Also, I actually like the Sphere Grid, even though it makes me wonder about this obsession with Spheres. Sphere Grids! Ability Spheres! The Sphere Pool! Sphere Trials! Memory Spheres! Some of these are system elements, some plot elements, some both. All are weird and abstract and random. (”The sphere is his will!“ This is an actual line!) But I like the Sphere Grid. What it really is, if you shake it loose of the caballistic geometry and just look at it as a mathematical undirected cyclic graph, is a way of doing multiclassing. You can follow your default, mostly linear path, or you can go off on side paths, spending levels to get interesting bonuses, or at certain points you can jump the rails and go on a different character’s path temporarily or permanently. This is well-balanced, flexible, easy to understand, and fun. And it doesn’t pretend to be “a system” like the Junction System. It’s just a way of doing multiclassing.
So there it is. Final Fantasy X has some really good points. The battle system genuinely is the best in a while (and the boss battles may actually attain greatness, as a self-contained element), the metaphysical fantasy has some of the best elements in a while, the main characters could possibly be the best ever, once you get over the awkward first chapter; and, at the same time, the way the intriguing fantasy elements are handled is often a mess, and the compelling characters are sometimes drawn lazily, and there is no. gameplay. at. all., except for the battles. I’m glad I’m playing it. Unlike the first time through, I really do care about the characters and want to know what happens to them, and I really want to know what’s up with the afterlife, although I’m pretty indifferent to the rest of the Church stuff. And the boss battles are frequent enough to keep me engaged on a gameplay level.
Heh. I haven’t even mentioned the much-touted graphics with real-time facial expressions. Hmm. What is there to say? The world is pretty. It’s often visually cluttered, to the point that you can’t make out individual objects, but I think this is on purpose, and conveys a nice sense of chaos sometimes. And other times it’s just cluttered. The characters look cool, except Tidus, who has the worst fashion sense since… oh, pretty much ever. The facial expressions are of course robotic, but once you get used to that, they get the job done, and very occasionally even surprise you. I miss Amano portraits and Amano-inspired sprites. I miss carefully painted mountain backdrops. On the other hand, FFX’s depictions of the night sky are genuinely beautiful, whether a dim sky above a futuristic metropolis, a romantic canvas for a love scene (a love scene which is, alas, otherwise cheesy), or a mysterious, mystical void haunted by spirits. And I like the futuristic metropolis itself, what little I’ve seen of it. As for the rest, eh, as I say, it gets the job done, but there really is something genuinely wrong with the minds of people (and I know such people) who used to enjoy the SNES Final Fantasies and now “can’t play them” any more because “the graphics are so bad” compared to FFX.
I like a lot of stuff in FFX, and wish that the rest of it were less clumsy. It’s a decent game so far, with some memorable highlights, and a possibly great boss battle system lurking within it. A jumble of stuff, sometimes frustrating, but I think worthwhile. Or perhaps not. Who knows?