it’s great how i literally never need to play another ff game because all the interesting monsters and locations will probably end up in xiv in good time
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If X had a proper overworld map and some kind of sailboat based transportation option it would be remembered as a classic and everything people hate about it would be considered a charming quirk
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If x was “fun”… people would “enjoy” it
You are absolutely right tho I remember being real miffed that you can’t equip any armor at all in ff8, and they had that “junction swap” thing that made you actually able to switch characters without tedium (I made it so every party member had 1, then 2, then 3, GF equipped as my stock allowed, according to “compatibility” stat. And of course had to unjunction and rejunction from everyone during the Laguna segments. And I liked it!!!) but you could drive a car and a garden and an airship and probably some things I’m forgetting. Maybe even chocobos too right? Anyway now it’s fully classic cause I’m boomer or w/e
In FFX your airship menu has X Y Z coordinates (extremely gauche) cause it went full gamefaqs mode. The “PlayOnline x Prima Strategy Guide” era. Not even lat/long cause it’s not a world, it’s a map screen
Nowadays you check your bestiary to find the best monsters from which to harvest scraps after S rank victories and upgrade your your crit rate from the save point’s “shop” menu from 1.25 to 1.50 percent… it’s my fantasy
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Waiting for the life moment where I have played enough Final Fantasies to completion, engaged in enough conversations with people who “were there” during the SNES era, entered into combat with my own suppositions based in FFX being my first FF and the first one I loved, all to understand like 80% of issues people have with it.
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blood potioning a lot of posts i disagree with in this thread because they’re points made well or are funny
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i don’t like final fantasy x very much. i’ve had it ‘explained’ to me how ‘good’ it is a few times, and yeah, i think if you schematically write out the themes and everything, it’s structurally sound. but then there’s the execution, or, y’know, actually the experience of playing it. the voice acting is terrible, of course. but i think the biggest weakness, for me, of the story was that there are a lot of very simple questions that people have no good reason not to ask that they either don’t ask or dont’ ask until like 20 hours of game time later than they should have. i get that tidus is a himbo dipshit or whatever, and i’m not opposed to that, but too many of the plot machinations rely on people being almost superhumanly, irrationally dumb, imo.
i do remember the combat being at least somewhat interesting. i hated those gd dungeons tho.
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I really enjoy that Khan says “yo, the voice acting is good!” and everybody else is “it’s awful!”
Because I can see it both ways. It’s something that if it hits for you, it hits.
(For the record, I think some of it is good and…most of it is bad.)
I find the map screen to be non diegetic in the worst way. If you want me to care about a world and the characters in it, I need to have my hand held a little bit. I guess you could say maybe it’s the screen that they’re using in the airship to navigate, it doesn’t feel like it though (and with something like the Sphere Grid in the game, am I really picking the right element to complain about here/). My real gripe with it is that this is supposed to be a reward, you hit the point in the game where you’ve spent enough time/mastered enough strategy that the game lets you zoop around the game world, and you get a menu screen.
The last 5% of the game is fantastic though. Just hallucinatory and bombastic and maybe, maybe, the most compelling final boss in the series in terms of actual connection to what has happened over the course of the game.
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I can assure you those of us who like FFX like the experience of playing it, not an abstract idea of it
A thematically interesting interpretation of this one is that the characters are so bought-in to a religious cult that they spend a long time denying what’s right in front of their noses
Even if you don’t buy that, more fundamentally, the majority of pop fiction cuts corners in plot/character mechanics somehow or other because the overriding priority is that cool events keep happening. I’ve noticed my mind latches onto this kind of problem only when I’m not enjoying the rest of the experience in the first place
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I see how this sounded like I was accusing people of saying they enjoy something they don’t, and I regret suggesting that, and I didn’t intend it
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I liked the battle system in FFX. Didn’t much like the rest of it but I haven’t played it in ages and I never finished it. I watched a friend beat it at his house once just so I could say I saw the ending. This was pre-YouTube of course. Having no context for what I was watching was interesting. My friend was trying to explain who the boss was and what was actually happening on screen and I wasn’t really processing it. I may have been drunk.
I remember seeing this EGM magazine cover before the game came out:
And thinking “there’s no way FFX is 1000 hours long” and I was right of course because they were talking about FFX and the 20+ other RPGs they were covering that issue. But then I thought what would it have been like if it really was a thousand hours long. Like a never ending Final Fantasy that just kept going and going. That sounded kind of cool to me.
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i just realised ffx was the second ff i ever played (first was 6 obv)
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i firstly just imagine that someone believes this is an example of “bad voice acting” but then it’s like
what even is taste, anyway
sometimes shit just makes you feel something, moves you somehow
want some rye? course ya do
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No worries, I didn’t take it that way.
I actually think there would be nothing wrong with a fandom that really did enjoy imagining/talking about a past experience and its implications rather than experiencing it. I only meant to clarify that FFX is not one of those
Usually it’s a mix and the best involve some of both. Games which are a pleasant experience in the moment but never thought about ever again even get disparaged as “forgettable”. I have at least never heard FFX come in for that specific criticism
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yeah, that’s a good one
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suuuuure let’s go
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I couldn’t help but say the line out loud without even watching the video
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something I don’t see mentioned enough re FFX criticism is that in addition to having pretty bad sound design and VA, it’s actually a much uglier game than 9 for the most part due to very inconsistent texture resolution and square abandoning their prerendered background designs at their absolute peak.
I know I’m an extreme outlier here since I’ve judged 9 the best and X the absolute worst numbered installment out of the entire series since I was like 14 years old, but it always jumped out at me on top of everything else
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Hmm, I believed this about FF6 for a long time too and then at one point I realized, “wait, this game is only consistent by the low bar set by other Final Fantasies”
Senselessly detailed criticism of this random screenshot I got off google:
- Enemy: Excellent Amano design traced as verbatim as possible from the concept art. Totally static image that uses cheap tricks like shaking and blinking to give the impression of movement
- Party: Very nice-looking sprites with great animations. Out of scale with the enemy and they don’t look like their concept art portraits in the party menu at all
- Menu: Generic blue/white/yellow menu. Fine but note that the game provides an inexplicable option to customize it to make it much uglier, like with a wood texture, if you want.
- Background: Looks drawn from a photo reference. This and the monster art make me think a scanner was probably involved but then they heavily cleaned up the output. It winds up looking much better than famously scanner-based games like Mortal Kombat, but it still retains the feel.
- Color palette coordination: I actually think color coordination is in general one of FF6’s greatest visual strengths, but this screenshot demonstrates how there are also many forgettable moments where it doesn’t try as hard to remain consistent.
Don’t get me wrong FF6 is my favorite FF! It’s just that I have to admit that, like all games, FF6 must be loved because of its jank, not just because of its not-jank
(I think Chrono Trigger is the peak in terms of visual consistency for Square instead, although I’m sure I could discover some jank there too if I wanted)
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How do you prove that you exist? Maybe we don’t exist
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6 is the most artistically consistent but it’s also unusually elliptical in its structure, and X is probably the best comparison there, except X is only elliptical at the very beginning and very end because the majority of it minus those bookends is so straightforward. again, I really can appreciate what they were trying to do with it in broad strokes, and I totally hate both the way it came out as a contemporary showpiece and how they decided to fill it out mechanically
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