I think the pre rendered backgrounds in ffx are one of the best parts actually. when you first hang out with Seymour and are wandering around the guado village it’s so pretty, the game has a really neat summer vacation palette when it’s not grey ass lightning dodging or desert time
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Do you need to do the lightning dodging or is that just something everyone did because it was there and they were a teen?
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Optional in FFX, mandatory in FFX-2 for some godforsaken reason
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you need to do it to get the best weapon for lulu, are you really living if you don’t get all the celestial weapons
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i feel like the seitengrat in 12 is a reaction to how many people wasted HOURS on the lightning. be careful what you wish for…
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rudie drew my attention to this thread and said he wondered what were my thoughts were re: this game. they are, i guess, complicated.
ffx disappointed me when i was a teen, though my expectations at the time were of course unreasonable. i bought a playstation 2 for it. i had anticipated something profound (ff7 had, after all, changed my life) but found myself playing something asinine. i had a crisis of faith. perhaps jrpgs weren’t literature after all, et cetera.
as an adult who has spent a terrifying amount of time thinking about final fantasy, i have concluded that ffx is a lot better than i once recognized. a lot about it is still asinine.
some of what’s asinine is maybe okay. tidus’s character more or less works, i think, because the guy’s kind of a naive dope. it is hard to countenance that most people in his position would take as much time as he does to pick up on what yuna is actually trying to do, but with tidus, you can sort of believe this.
some of what’s asinine is maybe a function of the english voice acting. one could try to argue that it’s not “that bad,” and by 2001 videogame standards it’s not. the problem, of course, is that the voice performances are critically important to ffx. the script is written with voice acting in mind. it is remarkably terse compared to what you see in your average psx-era squaresoft game, where a typical conversation between characters might entail ten or so text boxes, overflowing with ellipses and repetition, spilling across the screen.
(it’s too bad the ffx re-release from a few (actually almost ten) years back didn’t let you switch the voice language. it’s possible the game works better in japanese. the voice acting, i sometimes think, might be the reason for the apparent disconnect in reputation between ffx in japan, where people seem to like it a lot, and the states, where it has its fans but isn’t, as far as i can tell, routinely bandied about as the best final fantasy game.)
some of what’s asinine about ffx, let’s be clear, is fucking indefensible. i’m thinking particularly of those “cloister of trials” puzzles and their dumb-fuck “logic” that always boils down to: put a sphere in a slot and some arbitrary thing will happen.
at a high level, ffx holds together thematically about as well as final fantasy ever has (which is to say, not that well, but look, you take what you can get). i find jecht a compelling, complicated character - the different sides of him, the different ways that yuna, auron and tidus remember him. the civilization under siege by a metaphysical horror literally called “sin” is extremely my shit.
i am not sure final fantasy has ever had great “combat,” but the ffx bosses, at least, are consistently interesting (the regular encounters are largely boring and pointless, and if you cut the number of them in half it would still feel like there were too many).
i did not really revisit ffx until after i played ff13. there is, i think, a pretty clear lineage from ff8 to ffx to ff13, with ff13 representing the terminus of a particular kind of design sensibility. i think all three of them are worth playing and interesting to think about. at the same time, all three also contain a fair amount of weird, bad, dumb shit. ffx is probably the most successful of the three.
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the funniest mechanic in ffx is just being able to pay yojimbo to 1hk literally anything
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and that’s as interesting as the combat ever gets
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my three favourites !
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now i’m curious how things would cluster out in terms of which FFs a given person would be more likely to favor
i think personally i’m all in on 7, 4, and 12, probably in that order? 8 and 9 are probably next in line. never had much fondness for 6 outside of the soundtrack. keep getting derailed every time i start up a playthru
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3-5-12 seems like another logical trio somehow
1-2-9-16 for real sickos
7-10-15 seems like another logical throughline imo
i think i have come to peace with the fact that i don’t really like final fantasy, i just like final fantasies 4-5-6. it’s ok that in the long run those have turned out to not really have much in common with the rest of the series as a whole, they constitute a ‘trilogy’ of rpgs that is basically perfect and improves in interesting ways (to me) with each increment
i love talking about final fantasy on here because everyone seems to approach the series totally differently. there’s not really a single fb hivemind attitude about which are considered the best.
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objectively I think the Hiroyuki Ito ones all have the best touches on them, and he’s directly credited on the last release on each console (6, 9, 12), though 12 is really not great in a lot of ways, and I’m extremely endeared to 9’s presentation and story but only somewhat to 6’s.
both the mid-generation ones (5 and 8) are imo very good, probably top 5-ish in terms of representing the series and how well put together they are, but neither are my favorites
4 and 7 rule and I like them slightly better than 5 or 8, in terms of sheer ambitious goofiness.
(tactics) > 9 >>> 6 = 7 > 4 > 5 = 8 >> 12 = 15 >>> rest
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Here’s a team breakdown of which teams worked on which games that I saw posted on Reddit a few years ago (so, you know, take it with a grain of salt) but I think follows a lot of what’s being said about the way the games fit together.
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I love how every specific final fantasy thread turns into a WELL WHICH ONE IS THE BEST THEN THREAD
this series does something to our brains that nothing else does. EVERYONE has a final fantasy opinion
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befor xiv i was definitely in the 6-9-12 block
the only curves are 10 and 13 because of the soundtracks
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FFX’s story is about having to dance and marry and die for the whims and traditions of the long dead ruling class communicated from beyond the grave. it’s a little cathartic
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i was going to write out My Rankings but i think they’re all pretty great except 15, 10 and 9… they fuckin’ stink!!!
(though i’m prepared to give 15 another go at some point)
had the ideal experience of mainlining 7 as a 12 year old at christmas and rinsing 4/5/6 during peak zsnes, good times…
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i came to the conclusion a few months back that there are no actually-bad (mainline) Final Fantasy games and it feels freeing
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a big part of my final fantasy journey has been learning to love 8
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with a better script and vo it’d all have clicked i think
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