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by Bitter 05/02/2003, 2:47am PDT

Yeah, well, I haven't played anything good in a long time. I can't be
bothered with screen shots or witty-ish captions.

FFX: a yearning-to-be-white Jap seeks demure pussy in a far off land

Subtlety, thy name is Square Soft. Though I haven't played any of the
previous games in this series, and will very likely not be playing
any of the future games, I enjoyed the gentle, subdued majesty of a
game that names its main villany thing "Sin" (or Shin, which as anyone
whose tried running in thin-soled shoes knows, is the source of all
pain in life).

Seriously, laying out the plot of this game, which resolves around a
journey to defeat the Big Bad (don't they all?), makes you curious
about the kinds of drugs available in Japan, which from the TV appears
to be full of short, polite people who are into some seriously
fucked-up sexual shit.

We start with the main character. I named him "Fruit", although I
think it's supposed to be Tidus or something. We see him playing some
trippy version of underwater soccer called Blitzball in a floating stadium
in some near-future type city, when the Big Bad begins to devastate
said city. Fleeing for his life, Fruit runs into Auron, an
associate of his (missing) father. Battles with bugs end with the two
heros being sucked into a vortice created by the Big Bad.

So our hero wakes up in an unknown land, blah blah blah, associates
with band of misfits banding together to take on the Big Bad against
the manipulative hand of a conspiracy, duty, honor, country, the Corps,
the Corps, the Corps. It fits together about as well as the movie of
the same name: i.e., who cares.

The only marginally interesting take here is that Fruit is more a
sideshow to Yuna, a female "Summoner": that is, someone who can
harness the power of the dead (known as the Faith) incarnated in
the forms of some really fucked-up but visually impressive creatures
called Aeons that do very well in the Blowing Shit Up department. It's
a rare game that doesn't have the player in the role of Determined
Protagonist, and one of a few nice touches that decorate the
nonsensical plot at points.

The main arc of the story follows Yuna's journey from shrine to
shrine, where at each shrine she goes through some trial -- causing
you to endure some truly monotonous puzzle elements -- that gives
her access to more powerful Aeons, leading to a Final Summoning which
will provide her with access to an Aeon mighty enough to drive Shin
away for a time, providing peace to the people of the planet but also
killing Yuna, boo hoo. Unless there's an alternative?

The cutscenes in the game are visually stunning, quite magnificent. A
nice feature provides access to all the cutscenes that you've seen all
at once, which helps when you've been power levelling for awhile and
forgotten what the heck it is that you're about. There is a similar
feature for the game's music, which is okay, I guess, but not
particularly memorable.

Sadly, the general atmosphere of the game is one of desolation: there just
doesn't seem to be much in the way of people around, and your interactions
are quite circumscribed. There's basically one town in the entire game,
it's very small, and all the people just echo a few pat phrases. There's
a whole world, but there're apparently only about four topics of any
interest, and you keep running into the same dozen people over and over
again.

The game's characters are fixed: your choice of party members is not
at all alterable. This makes it possible to have a more coherent plot
I guess, opportunity lost, oh well, but does somewhat limit your
options about having that lesbian half-orc illusionist/bard. This is
supposed to be compensated for, I think, by the variety of choices
that are potentially available in the game's character upgrade system
(more in a moment), but to me left a number of the characters feeling
undifferentiated and bland.

The levelling system, in my thoughtful opinion, slurps goat nuts
through a coffee stirrer. What you are given is basically a series of
nodes of varying characteristics connected by lines that you traverse.
Each character starts in a different spot, and the choices they make
as to direction through these nodes (many nodes have multiple
branches) affects character attributes and abilities. The attributes
of each node change things like character strength or other abilities,
or can teach a character a new spell or special move. In order to
power up a node, a character needs "spheres" that are collected from
defeating enemies in battle, with different types of nodes requiring
different types of spheres that come from varying categories of
enemies. Mostly it doesn't matter after a short while: you'll more
often than not have quite a surfeit of each kind of sphere.

Also present on this sphere grid are locks: nodes that cannot be
progressed through until you've gotten an appropriate sphere to unlock
it. This directs progress and serves other purposes, I'm sure. At
various points you get special spheres that let you do things like go
back to any previous node or move to a node activated by another
character, etc. It's reasonably complicated and probably accounting
students will cream their pants, but mostly it is dull dull dull.

Combat is at first reasonably fun: at least to someone used to PC RPGs
as opposed to console fare. The visuals are quite interesting and the
menu system is a snap to negotiate. Sadly, it pretty much devolves
into rock-paper-scissors toward the end of the game, where the right
combination of moves and matching of special abilities against monster
weaknesses will result in instant death for the monster(s) and no damage
to your hardy crew. However, there are tons of different abilities
and whatnot that can be added to weapons and armor, which should allow
tinkerers to wile away many an hour in pasty-faced contentment. Magic
and spells, on the other hand, are all quite similar and consist
mostly of blasting the baddie with one of four different colors of
light at a couple of different levels of intensity. The protections
spells are a little cooler.

The minigames are imps of Hate from the lowest levels of the Edgy Ass
Pirate level of Hell. For instance, there are "ultimate" weapons
available in the game for each character, "hidden" to a degree, and of
course the Powers, Yea They Be [on] High, have declared that balloons,
diving birdies, and fucking surreally colored butterflies are to be
their protectors in an Ironman of the Drool Cup Worthies. If you've
always thought that precision navigation with an analog stick or D-pad
was hootin' good fun, well then, pardner, you're in for a heck of a time.
I ultimately gave up on a couple of these to save what little sanity
remains to me.

I think at the end of the game there's a showdown and probably a cut
scene or something that resolves everything or whatever, but even
though I bought the game over a year ago, I haven't gotten around to
beating it yet, and every minute that I play it, I know that on the
status screen there will be a counter in the lower left that is
counting up the minutes and hours I've spent shuttling around my perky
band of misfit upstart hero people around the empty world, which
contains (roughly) 42 hojillion monsters for every normal person.

When considering this game, budget for the amount of paper you'll need
to print every single reference guide from gamefaqs. My own list
includes:

final_fantasy_x.txt
final_fantasy_x_aeon.txt
final_fantasy_x_affection.txt
final_fantasy_x_al_bhed.txt
final_fantasy_x_bribe.txt
final_fantasy_x_cactaur.txt
final_fantasy_x_equipment_remodeling.txt
final_fantasy_x_i.txt
final_fantasy_x_mix_list.txt
final_fantasy_x_monster_arena.txt
final_fantasy_x_monster_encyclopedia.txt
final_fantasy_x_overdrive_a.txt
final_fantasy_x_sidequests.txt
final_fantasy_x_sphere_grid.txt
final_fantasy_x_steal_a.txt
final_fantasy_x_ultimate_weapons.txt
ultimania_butterfly3.jpg
ultimania_remiem.jpg
ultimania_thunder.jpg

and I wouldn't even consider playing this game without them. I mean,
the only point in the game is to play it thoroughly -- rushing it
through this game is like speed-reading Kant, you are Missing the
Point -- but cruising the hideous crap like the shrine/temple puzzles
makes the game a bit more palatable.

Overall, I would rate this game Infamous Taco.