seymour may be an ugly boring villain in a relentlessly dull and poorly designed game but his final fight also has some of the dumbest music in the entire series so it’s impossible to say if it’s bad or not
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tbh, i kinda like this battle-theme, since it could fit into FF8 or FF9 without any problems (sure, that might be a problem since it isn’t distinct enough to stand out, but people love Uematsu’s scores because he’s Uematsu and not Sakimoto), so count that as one more ‘pro FFX’ vote. It’s a dumb early 2000s jrpg, true, but considering the circumstances (the tanked FF movie, Uematsu and Sakaguchi handing over the baton (in)voluntarily, the sloppy PAL release with a dub and sub that have been taken from different language versions, the 50/60Hz lag and resulting letterboxing) it has an honesty about the way how it wears its heart on the sleeve that few other JRPGs of that period can match, for better or worse.
Don’t ask why i thought it might be a good idea to play it 3.5 times, that’s another story, and one can only be so apologetic at a time ~~~
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I don’t think I will ever be able to explain why I played FFX enough to rebuild the entire sphere grid for (nearly) maximum stats.
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god I forgot how abject the way it encouraged you to grind was on top of everything else
I don’t claim that FFIX is an essential masterpiece or anything, but I was shocked at the time (and continue to be when I grapple with their respective reputations) that FFIX contained basically every inventive or redeeming aspect of the franchise for me and FFX contained virtually none of them
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I appreciated X’s focused pacing and art direction where VI and VII especially feel disjointed and padded out. I don’t think I like world maps perhaps because I played Pokémon and Earthbound before any other JRPG.
XII was the first I played on release but I was all-in on Ivalice by then
IX is my favorite “last disc” for sure
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If anything, this made me question less some of my life choices, so You Shall Be Forgiven.
…
Come to think of it, maybe the PS4(5?) Rererelease of FFX, maybe that’s worth anoth… nope don’t go there, my wretched mind 
Srsly though, absolutely agree with IX being the better package, product, game and experience - the difference really is about the target audience, where IX panders to fans of yore, X tries to lure in new folks - both have their valid reasons to do so, and i think both are as consequent/laser focused about that first and foremost - personally think that X came off worse, because it is easier to harken back to the good ol’ days than keep the old guard happy while completely overhauling most core systems of your storied series.
I mean, kimahri, Lulu and Wakka and Auron are tough sells on their own, but as a combo, oooffffff…
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It’s funny, I played both FF IX and X relatively near release and didn’t mind them but I can recall so little of either of them. I recall Vivi being a neat character design, someone being named Steiner, a few moments of the main guy being a perv, some play stuff at the end, I think the female lead changed her name and there being a giant sphere secret boss that I couldn’t even touch, of yeah a vague recollection of a chocobo hunting side quest that I liked in IX; I have no recollection what the story was at all. With X I remember dodging lightning, the religion being crazy, Auron looking cool, everyone being secretly dead, the word blitzball, and a metal-esque song at the end where you fight your dad after saying that you hate him. I recall something about a cyclical destruction of the world and like… one world being a dream or something?
The thing I remember most clearly from either of them was the visual turn order in X which solved a lot of problems. If you were to ask me who the antagonist was in either game I’d probably stammer for a bit before trying to change the subject.
It also strikes me that I played FF XV two years ago and don’t remember who the villain was in that game either. Maybe the true villain is my shoddy memory.
Anyways I’m near the end of XIII and I feel pretty certain I’m gonna forget this villain too, heck I’m this deep in and I still can’t recall his silly name.
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I will be forever alone in just… not liking ff9.
I want to like it. there’s a lot to like about it! I always just get bored after disc 1
I wish the combat wasn’t so slow
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I’ve noticed there’s a pretty big difference between how FFX was received and remembered in America vs Japan. For example, recently on Niconico, Wakka has made a comeback as a trendy meme character. In both countries FFX is a joke, yes, but it’s a matter of whether this joke is funny or not
Some of that comes down to taste, but I also have the theory that a big reason is voice acting. It was one of the earlier fully voice acted games and they only managed to get decent acting in the original language. When you have mediocre voice actors loudly yammering at you for 40 hours then it’s no surprise that the characters seem charmless, the story stakes unengaging and so on.
Note that I’m not claiming any of the other reasons people dislike FFX aren’t legitimate criticisms. On the contrary, they ring true to me too. I’m just saying if the atmosphere is less grating, it’s easier to love all those flaws in the same way we love dragging around floppy corpses in Demon’s Souls
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not to be pedantic but it is certainly bad direction and not acting in the case of FFX’s dub
also love the trivia that the game required the audio files to be the exact same length in English so some lines are said like they’re a kid trying to leave the house without their folks asking questions
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I’ve always played it with one finger on a fast forward button after the year 2000 but the recombinant ways that it uses its ensemble and its geography (in stark contrast to FFX which is actively uninterested in both of these things) make it move way faster for me. like it has so many great little dovetailing plots, there are multiple spots in the story when it makes you wonder which of your characters are up to some new nonsense and how they’re going to play off of each other, and that goes a very long way.
9 and Tactics are my favourites by miles, hasn’t changed in 20 years
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it’s kind of a miracle that XII’s voice acting is so buttoned up considering three years later they had Vanille’s English actor doing breathy efforts to imitate the Japanese
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XV is so uninterested in its villain that its easy to forget he exists for most of the game
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as someone who was ’ the old guard ’ that wasn’t getting pandered to in ff x i used to absolutely hate it. i hated the idea that new people were coming to play MY final fantasy and so i made fun of it and took shots at it whenever i could until. . .i realized that i couldn’t stop thinking ab it?
i watched my brother play it. i still need to actually sit down and get past mt. gagazette but i watched a friend stream it recently and finally saw the end for the first time and thought it was a neat thing that’s just a product of it’s time.
i love lulu, auron, and racist ass wakka ( at least he apologizes to rikku eventually ) and this is honestly one of my favorite ff games. also it’s cheating to post seymour’s theme while not acknowledging that absolute banger that is yunalesca’s boss theme:
not uematsu but they can’t all be. i feel like the other composers outshined him in this one tbh
anyway, i have all these nostalgic reasons for liking x and that boils down to ’ god soap opera ’ in which i can laugh very inappropriately at certain points. i’ve never actually played x-2 despite owning it at least twice with the remaster but uh. . .one of these days.
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Hamauzu is definitely the GOAT in my book
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hell yeah
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sorry for all the extra posting but i realized i didn’t address all the thoughts oop
i was gonna tell a story about how like, i spent MONTHS thinking ab this game and whether all the hate i gave it was truly warranted until i eventually waited until ab this time of year and walked to the other side of town where game stop was and finally picked it up, played it to the seymour fight and absolutely had a blast doing so.
also the only funny x joke is that wakka meme where’s he’s making that disgusted face i literally found it on livejournal like 3 days ago as an icon and i’m using it on dreamwidth now lmao
oh yeah, wait shit, y’all don’t like seymour?
lmao, i think he’s p creep and kind of really annoying to fight but i also wonder if y’all missed when every mixed kid was like ’ that is me ’ and when around like quoting him and stuff. it was a time. i like seymour as a villain but i p much only like him BECAUSE he is a villain, if that makes any sense. he’s got weeb villian swagger.
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hamauzu and uemetsu are so totally different from each other but they do their respective things so well. I can’t imagine xiii with an uemetsu soundtrack. it just wouldn’t work.
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I think I’ve tried to play FF10 like 3 times and each time have put my foot through the television set during that part in the lightning field or whatever
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