The writing/storytelling/dub/character designs are abysmal, seymour and tidus’s dad are lame as both characters and subplots, and I am just kind of neutral on blitzball. But there were a couple good kernels of ideas hiding in the game–I still think a giant typhoon monster called SIN, a game where you on a pilgrimage and solve puzzles at temples while uncovering a corrupt church, and tidus’s whole origin story/zanarkand made the game kind of mysterious and interesting. I like the idea of a jrpg being completely linear with a good ludonarrative justification but I admit they just didn’t have the material to pull it off without being boring. I can imagine a much better game with some of the same elements I guess. Also some of art direction is very unique and cool, I like glowy magical new millennium asia with all those steppes and coastal cities.
Clicking around on a longplay video now, I imagine experience of actually having to play this game is way worse than I remember (I was 12).
the combat is actually decent in this one. there’s a lot more consideration needing to be given to types and statuses and tactical elements regularly come into play in regular encounters, not just on bosses
some of the music is incredible
the art direction is stunning
pretty much everything else is intolerable though, oops
X was the first US-released Final Fantasy that I completely skipped. I’d been on board with the series since the NES. Everything about X seemed like red flags back when it first hit. It seems like a major major touchstone for some of my friends who are a couple years younger though.
FFX would set a personal trend of getting to the penultimate boss battle in jRPGs and no further, which to my shame would also include FFXII a few years after. I mean I even completed Xenogears despite disc 2 containing little gameplay between hours of philosophical wankery and I still couldn’t tell you what any of it was about beyond some attempt at a Freudian Hero’s Journey or something that included a Kung Fu Scientist, Pirate Catholic Priests With Guns and a Pink Chu Chu. Oh, and a post-coital conversation between two villains, which was fresh.
FFX to me is the meme of Tidus laughing like That One Bit with Haley Joel Osment’s character in AI; nothing more, nothing less.
i got xenogears used from gamestop after arguing with the salesguy that $40 was a rip-off because they take out the sleeves and manuals and shit, and they would put their dumb-ass stickers on the case. anyway, i stopped playing when i saw how long it took for anyone to execute an attack. i don’t want to sit in random battles for any longer than i have to!
maybe with emulators i can just speed up through battles
it should be illegal for rpgs to have voice acting. dqxi has proven this.
i liked the battle system in X a lot. I had like 95 hours and was on my way to 100% it in 2002 when my friend accidentally overwrote my save file and I never played it again. I would probably never go back to it as adult because of the embarassing VA though.
hmm. I don’t remember it very well, but will take your word. perhaps we can work out some sort of rigidly enforced permit system for RPG VA instead of outright illegality
anything to prevent Star Ocean 3 and 4 from happening again
I liked it at the time and I still find myself liking it when I occasionally catch snippets of RPG speedrunners playing it on Twitch. It’s earnest and has its heart on its sleeve. It seems based on a story template from girls’ manga (romance between a chosen woman and her guardian team in another world) – adjusted for gender-appeal-balance by making one of the male guardians the POV character, but clearly not with success given the venom many men still have for it. A scene like the guardian team swooping in from above to stop Yuna’s wedding ceremony with the villain is so over-the-top cheesy and romantic that of course reactions to the game are divided.
I don’t think the problem is actually that the game doesn’t respect the players’ time, has bad VA, shoddy minigames, or is somewhat cobbled together incoherently out of different art assets – every ambitious RPG from that era had those same problems. And for those reasons I won’t be replaying any of them including this one. But in context, it’s more whether the foundational fantasy and style was something one desired to wallow in or not, that determined whether one was willing to overlook the bad aspects and focus on the good, or vice versa.
yeah X actually has some really interesting concepts and art design but the execution was a crushing step down from PS1 era square which they took like 15 years to recover from, more of which was down to the hardware than I think people appreciated for a long time. it was right at the start of the period when square decided every jRPG actually had to be a deconstruction of jRPGs and oh boy were they up their own ass for a while
I’m glad I no longer have to beat this drum the way I did for so many years because everyone itt is making the point more richly
