9 / 10
05 Nov 2004 at 19:17
Review by: LeonardQuirm
Final Fantasy comes to the PlayStation2. And what a transition.
This is, quite frankly, an amazing game. You put the disc into your console. A beautiful meledy drifts out of your speakers. You start a new game and within a few minutes you enter the first FMV (Full Motion Videos; a trademark of the most recent entries of the series and, as a rule, showcasing the best graphics possible at the time). Your brain becomes confused as to whether the people at Squaresoft (as it was) have actually hired actors and filmed the sequences. Well, not quite. But not really that far off at points.
The story is moving, surprising and well-crafted; as are the playable and non-playable characters, who develop and change through the game. The gameplay is varied, with the most tactical battles in the mainstream series yet (including this game's sequel, X-2) contrasting to the speed of the minigames, such as racing Chocobos (large yellow birds that are the horses of the Final Fantasy series). Powering up through the Sphere Grid system (you move a marker for each character around a ridiculously large network of "nodes", and activate adjacent nodes to provide your characters with better stats and new moves) is innovative and extremely flexible - and your progress is permanent; unlike Final Fantasy VII and VIII, in X, when a character learns an ability, they keep it for good.
So what's it all about? The main character, Tidus (pronounced Tee-dus), is a famous "Blitzball" (an underwater sport with similarities to rugby and football) player - possibly the world's best - in a technologically advanced world called Zanarkand. However, during a Blitzball match one evening, a mysterious entity appears and wreaks devastation upon the land. Tidus meets up with an old friend of his father's, Auron, and is told this creature is called Sin. With the mysterious message from Auron "This is your story", Tidus is sucked into what appears to be a little like a wormhole. He awakes in a strange place, where most people shun technology, called Spira, and discovers that Zanarkand was destroyed in a vicious battle between machines and magic...1000 years ago...
Be warned - this game will not be appreciated by certain gamers, in much the same way as first person shooters or sports games aren't. If you don't like the battles, then you won't like the game - most of it is fighting, and the rest is mostly watching or walking down long roads, interrupted by random encounters. If you don't like role-playing games (RPGs), do not bother with this.
On the other hand, this may well not be a favourite with more hard-core RPG gamers. The game is far more streamlined than its predecessors, with no world map to explore, and considerably shorter - just completing the game at a leisurely pace will take about 30-40 hours, as opposed to the 60+ of VIII and IX. It is also quite different to its predecessors, so if you think there was nothing wrong with them, you may find this one doesn't live up to your expectations. It is also, largely, easier.
However, if you are a fan of the genre and not worried about a certain lack of freedom available in much larger games like "Morrowind" or "Fable", or the relatively easy difficulty setting, then this is a very worthwhile game to get - especially now it's on Platinum. It could also be a good game for people who have never played an RPG before - there is absolutely no requirement to have played the previous games, and it is far more suitable for novices than VIII or IX. However, if you haven't played others in the series, and don't know if you will like the battles, it can be a good idea to see if you can get hold of a demo disc for the game, and see if you like that.
Overall, to the right audience - which is large - this is one of the greatest games on the PS2. Just don't mention FFX-2.
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