What happens when a game tries a little too hard to be too many things?
You've got that in mind? OK, good, let's dig in.
Final Fantasy X was one of the best RPGs I've ever played, and since I played it on PS4, it came with FFX-2 as well. So, hot off the last game, I launched FFX-2, with reasonably high expectations. After all, the game reviewed well, so what's to worry about?
First Impressions
...The name sucks. Why bother mixing Roman numerals and Arabic ones? I know this is FF10, but I honestly pronounce the 'X' half the time just because it's dumb. FFX-II would have been fine, or am I just crazy? That's not the game though, that's just the name. You can have a good game and still have a bad name, so let's just move on.
We start with a... dance? OK, I'm going to probably keep coming back to this point, but this game loves to make the main character dance for some reason. I get that that was kind of a part of her role in FFX, but it feels like every character gets a rise out of her on stage.
Once we finally get a shot of one of the main characters doing something other than dancing, they were... trying to break into the concert? Why is security after them? They seem really careless, how are they not caught?
OK, backing up a bit. The main character, Yuna, is on stage, her cousin (and also party member from the last game) Rikku is there and apparently unwanted, and then there's a third person for some reason. Her name is Paine, and by the time the game starts, the three of them are already really good friends.
Cut a little later, and we find out that the person dancing on stage is an impostor who stole Yuna's "garment grid". From the start I had a pretty good idea of what that meant, and I was right. The clothing the characters wear is tied to their role in battle. I'll get to this later, but I'm not actually wholly against this idea, but it comes off as weird.
Long story short, they get Yuna's garment grid back, and start fighting. This is where the core gameplay is revealed, all at once.
Battle System
FFX-2 uses the series' staple battle system from the PS1 era, the Active Time Battle system. It's pseudo turn-based, set up so that each character's turn happens after a certain amount of time, rather than as a function of who else has taken a turn. This game starts you off with a very short turn time, set to "active" mode. This means that the timers don't stop when you're reading through the menu, you're on the clock the whole time.
On its own, this isn't actually a horrible idea. FFVIII and FFVII use the same ATB system, more or less. Both of them are quite playable. However, "active" mode isn't the default, and the turn times are very long. This gives you plenty of time to process what's going on and what you're doing, but it doesn't make the battles boring, since you're watching closely for when your next turn comes up. However, in this implementation, the ATB time meters are running at full speed, and having spent a couple hundred hours playing ATB Final Fantasy games, I have to admit, I was overwhelmed from the start. However, I quickly figured out what the menu items were through some exploration and quick reading of the UI, and that was the extent of my trouble with this version of ATB. Actually, I'd say this is one of the best forms, since enemy actions can be interrupted by using a basic attack, letting another character use a potion, or attacks can be chained together to increase their damage. It's a balancing game based on what shape the party is in and how much damage you intend to deal.
I touched on this briefly, but the game uses a role system for each character. Each role can be collected as a "dressphere", and switched on the fly during battle. This provides an excellent amount of flexibility during battle. However, there's an extra twist. The available dresspheres aren't all accessible at once in a battle. Instead, each character has a certain selection available on a grid. The grids themselves act like items, giving special effects to the users, and additional abilities or attributes if the user travels certain paths along the grid. It feels a lot like the sphere grid in FFX, but for roles rather than just as a level up mechanism.
The biggest criticism I can level at the battle system is the dressphere transitions. They are long and obvious fan service. Fortunately, you can turn them off, so I can't complain too much.
Spira
The game's world is indeed quite deep, with lots of little things to do. I firmly believe this is the type of player the game is aimed at.
Spira in this game is in recovery, in turmoil, and anything but calm. After all, <insert events of FFX here> so there's a lot of changes that just got forced on everyone all at once. If you left FFX and felt like you wanted the answer to what happened next in Spira, that's what this entry is all about.
Death By 1000 Cuts
That's where I'll end the positives, though. It's unfortunate, too, since most of the things I like about the combat system I like enough to overlook quite a lot, but there are too many areas that just lack polish, seem pointless, or are just plain fan service, often out of nowhere.
We'll start with some easy stuff.
Sountrack
Up to this point, I've enjoyed the soundtracks in the Final Fantasy games I've played, they all have been pretty consistent with themselves, sticking tonally to the same basic instrumentation, and leading very well from one scene to the next without feeling completely out of place. Final Fantasy VIII specifically has a few areas in the game where the theme for the area is pretty clearly crafted to reflect the main character's reaction to the environment in the context of the story, which adds a huge amount of depth to the entire presentation.
However, FFX-2 alternates between "traditional" pseudo-classical game music, J-pop, and a variety of other styles. It's not consistent at all in its presentation. Furthermore, while a few themes are well placed, the structure of the game centers around the bridge of an aircraft, whose main theme is bouncy and silly* no matter what just happened in the story. There could be some beat that really hits at the end of some subplot, only to then launch you onto the bridge with blaring trumpets and gull noises.
Tl;dr, there are individual moments that are good, but the soundtrack on the whole is bad. I don't think I've found a game that gets this quite this wrong.
Fan Service
In his video Trials of Mana Weview: A Pwetty Guwd Wemake I Gwess, YouTuber Nerrel speaks about the presentation of the game as something that "harkens back to a time when video games were designed exclusively for, and by 13 year old boys" and man oh man does that sound familiar. I'm not going to go into detail about what I mean because it should be obvious. A brief internet search will show you a screenshot of the game, but it really does love to just sit on the fact that the main characters are young women. I mentioned that the roles system was centered around the concept of "Dresspheres", and almost every single one of the outfits the characters wear seems to be designed with sex appeal as the first priority.
I'm going to be honest with you, that's not why I play games. Not only that, but 3d models don't need to be sexualized like this, it just doesn't feel natural, in the same way that one of those humanoid robots feels off. I won't dwell on this any more than I have to, but seriously, this game doesn't need this stuff, messy as it is, even if it were a positive.
Not only that, but the game seems aware of the absurdity of its fan service as well. The leader of the group the playable characters are in is named "Brother" (he's Rikku's brother, I believe, but that's also his name), and the game shows him repeatedly suggesting that Yuna dance for everyone, and he really does seem to relish it... far too much. I think he's supposed to be the funny comic relief guy, but he feels more like somebody at Square pitched him in protest and got taken seriously. Besides, aren't they cousins? Eeeegh... moving on.
Listen, if this is your thing, I won't judge, but I cringed so hard whenever he was on screen. He's probably the flattest character in the game, including some that only have one line, and it's just weird.
Story, Tone
In a word, whiplash. The game will set up a serious problem, and then Brother will say Yuna should just dance to fix it. Dancing must really be one of her top 3 favorite passtimes, since almost every time she just goes with it. Half the time it works, too, which just feels like one of those awkward feel-good movies that end up getting shown in public school music classes.
Worse than that, however, the game will show a character getting emotional or frustrated, then someone will speak up and just say "we're the Gullwings, remember?" and get a unison "Yeah!" like they're prepping for a sports match with a new player. Emotions? Ehh, we're the Gullwings, we can just forget about those and everything's fine!
I think the best example of this is the character Paine. She isn't really introduced at all, but ends up being pretty relevant, if only because she was friends with the three guys who are playing world leader at the moment. Go play FFX if you want to know why that ended up happening, however, it's never really explained why she's there. Not only that, but the whole time she acts like she's both having fun and extremely bored. She'll make quips about leaving if a random encounter happens with an under-leveled enemy, and she's presented like a person who likes a challenge and gets bored easily, but she still jumps in on the cheesy unison lines. I wonder if her character would have been better without voice acting, but I'm not sure it matters. Her character manages to perfectly illustrate the apparently normal levels of toxic positivity in the world, and it just highlights the total lack of balance even more.
I'm going to gloss over pretty much the whole main story, but the biggest conflict in the game basically gets resolved by everyone stepping onto a stage and declaring that everyone should just be friends. I don't necessarily think that would be a bad world to live in, but it feels forced, like nobody is able to think individually except for a few characters who happen to be on top. The other half of the story is a compelling extension to the world of Spira, but not exactly a consequential one. It's probably mostly presentation issues, but I didn't feel compelled to see it through to the end, at least for the story's sake.
Yuna's motivations are actually pretty compelling, on the other hand. She's busy dealing with the fame she received from the events of FFX, and tears herself away from it in search of someone she lost along the way. I'll put the spoilers in here, I'll let you figure out how to read it if you want, but you have been warned! This is a test... ok ahem here goes.
At the end of FFX, we see Tidus simply fade away. I don't have any sources for this, but it's said online that Tidus was simply a summon of Yu Yevon the whole time, meaning that (in theroy) he might be summonable again. So, when Yuna sees a sphere recording from Rikku showing images of what appears to be Tidus, she's immediately interested. Not only that, but she believes the sphere recordings will lead her to him again. So, when she eventually finds out that the guy she saw was just a shadow of a guy from 1000 years ago who looks the same as Tidus, she's crushed. However, hitting a button at just the right time during the ending will let Yuna speak to the Aeon for Bahamut, who expresses regret in letting him fade away, after seeing her desperate attempt to find him again. Maybe in return for saving the world from Vednagun, maybe just out of pity, the aeons do their best to reconstruct Tidus again so that she can summon him. If you pick the option to bring him back, it's not stated explicitly how this happens, but Yuna apparently begins summoning Tidus unconsciously, bringing him back to life again. I don't have sources for this, it's just something I heard online, so do the research and come to your own conclusions, but it's been confirmed that canonically, Tidus comes back. Writing that makes me want to do a review of FFX, maybe I will at some point since the story, gameplay, and presentation are all much better there than here. I feel like that should be pretty clear by now.
Mini Games
I've heard that Final Fantasy games were, as a policy, always one-off worlds. Sequels to FF games weren't allowed for the first nine games in the series, but FFX is the first game where this policy was relaxed.
Because of this, the game feels like it's trying to justify its existence by adding in mini games everywhere that don't lean on the established combat engine. There's a shooting game, a detective game, a... mining? game, etc. etc.
None of these are as polished as the main game loop (I'd be extremely impressed if they were, however, since like I said, I like the main gameplay loop quite a lot, it's very polished), but not only that, they are absolutely everywhere.
To use an example, the Gunner's Gauntlet game in Besaid, while a game of skill, has points where the gun will just stop firing. There's no spot in the tutorials or documentation that mentions this, there's no visual feedback at all on screen, the gun just stops for a moment. I'm assuming that this is a cooldown or reload period, but it's not clear at all and the game does not telegraph what's going on to the player, leaving them guessing why they only have 6 shots or so at a time. It's not that Gunner's Gauntlet is bad in concept, but the execution is terribly sloppy, and this is true for virtually every mini game.
Minor Stuff
At the beginning of battle, Yuna sometimes starts speaking... Japanese? I'm not sure, but it's the same person voicing her in English who says this stuff, so the pronunciation sounds awkward, and needless to say I don't speak Japanese, so I have no idea what I'm supposed to get out of that. It's not that I believe that everything has to be centered around me, I understand that this is a Japanese game, but it feels a little lazy to just fall back to that rather than make her say some quip in English, or just nothing at all.
There are also a few... off phrases from some characters towards the end of battle. This is another one of those things that bothered me, but I could look past.
It's a Follow-Up to FFX
Part of my disappointment with this game stems from the fact that it's a sequel to Final Fantasy X, which brilliantly presents life and death with a cast of characters trying to make the most of the time they very much aren't guaranteed. I'll try not to spoil anything here, because no summary is going to convey just how brilliantly Spira is presented in the base game, and therefore you should play it yourself. However, its presentation, blessedly few mini games, characters, and story all weave pretty much perfectly together. It's not flawless, but it's close.
If FFX-2 weren't tied to FFX, I would never have considered playing it through, it's just... mediocre. It's not even the bad writing, cast with very little reason to stick with the party, bad tone, inconsistent soundtrack, or heinous overuse of fan service without the guts to commit to it**, any one of those things wouldn't ruin a game for me. Instead, it's the fact that it's a sequel to such a great game, and it has all these flaws.
To relate this to books, as an example, it's like if Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets or The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers were awful. There's a great framework in the first one that builds a world where the characters it presents belong, and the story it tells is believable, then the author veers off and tells some side story in order to just keep talking, with nothing left to say. I pretty firmly believe this is the trap the early games were trying to avoid with the no sequels policy.
Conclusions
The game was critically pretty well received, so there's obviously somebody out there who loves this game, and I honestly think I get at least some of that. It's a great battle system, a decent, if forgettable story, and a bunch of other content wrapped up in a pseudo-open world with some sloppy presentation. None of the individual problems with the game are so damning that you can't enjoy it.
That said, it has a lot of issues, even with its core concepts, which led me to put the controller down and switch the game off multiple times in frustration.
With negative reviews, I hear a lot of people ask why a person would finish a game they so obviously don't like, and I think I have an answer now. Previously, I would do just that, but (of all things) the Persona series and Final Fantasy VIII changed my mind. Both of them were bad enough to me from the start that I put them down, and had I not finished at least the main story in FFX-2, I would forever be wondering if there was some magic later in the game that I was just missing. I certainly wouldn't feel qualified to talk about the game like this had I stopped partway through.
Part of me played this hoping beyond hope that it would improve part way through, but honestly, my first impressions held up this time, and I know for sure I won't be playing this game again unless something pretty big changes.
* Read: annoying after the first 2 seconds
** The game is rated T, I feel like the creators wanted that from a corporate standpoint, but the character vision was much more explicit. These things don't belong together.