The Great Final Fantasy Retrospective - Let's Mosey

Dalisclock

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BTW Final Fantasy X-2 update. I have 24 hours of playtime and I have not beaten the first boss yet.
But are you looking fabulous? That's the point of X-2 right? IDW I gave up after 5 hours. The J-POP concert was fine, the Charlies Angels thing was fine, it was the lack of any seeming purpose to what I was doing and the heavily recycled assets(Preggers Lulu doesn't look remotely preggers because fuck making her a new model) that kinda killed it for me.
 
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CriticalGaming

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But are you looking fabulous? That's the point of X-2 right? IDW I gave up after 5 hours. The J-POP concert was fine, the Charlies Angels thing was fine, it was the lack of any seeming purpose to what I was doing and the heavily recycled assets(Preggers Lulu doesn't look remotely preggers because fuck making her a new model) that kinda killed it for me.
Actually to get 100% you don't actually play as the girls at all. So I look like shit :D
 

CriticalGaming

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Wait, what? I can't tell if this is a joke or not.
The HD version of the game added Pokemon so in order to get 100% you have to catch them all, which includes leveling them and doing tournaments. Then you use overpowered monsters to play through the game and don't actually use the girls in battle ever.
 

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One of the best victory themes that's so unlike Final Fantasy. Am I playing FF, or Gran Turismo?

 

meiam

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The HD version of the game added Pokemon so in order to get 100% you have to catch them all, which includes leveling them and doing tournaments. Then you use overpowered monsters to play through the game and don't actually use the girls in battle ever.
I didn't actually know that, what a pointless addition though, the best thing about the game is the job system and instead of adding to it, they make a parallel system.

Remeber, don't skip any cutscene no matter what. Oh also talk to literally everyone cause you never know which pointless NPC is actually important. Have fun moving those fucking lazy musician to have a concert on the thunder plain for some reason, not like there's, I dunno, some sort of calm plain nearby.
 

CriticalGaming

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I didn't actually know that, what a pointless addition though, the best thing about the game is the job system and instead of adding to it, they make a parallel system.
Don't worry you can give jobs to the monsters.
 

CriticalGaming

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That's a you thing, not a FFX-2 thing though.
Assume I have a problem with it......

Anyway Final Fantasy X-2, a game that is most known for being the first direct sequel to a Final Fantasy game which is not technically true because FF4 had "after years" however that game was mostly a retelling loop of the same story and didn't quite fit what you'd call a continous story from the main game. FFX-2 absolute continues the story of FFX....sort of.

You see X-2 takes place in the same world and features many of the same characters as FFX, however calling it a Sequel is also kind of hard for a couple of reasons. The first being that X has a story that very much ends without leftover threads. The world is saved, the Aeons go to sleep, and the corrupt religion is brought down. So for X-2 to happen the characters almost have to be different for any sort of story to take place.

And in a way, the characters are. Yuna has teamed up with some Al Bhed friends from the previous game and has become a sphere hunter. Sphere's in X-2 take on a very different role than fodder for the sphere grid in this game. Instead these Materia looking orbs can play short movies, and act like VHS tapes that people leave behind after documenting something. Though many of the "films" shown in the sphere's you'll collect couldn't have possibly been filmed by anyone as they showcase events that someone would have to be around to tell.

It's very nonsensical plot that fuels what really in most cases is just a light hearted return to FFX's world. Yuna is joined by Rikku and a new character named Paine and together they are the Gulwings, sphere hunters. The focus being that Yuna became a sphere hunter because she found a sphere that featured someone who looked a lot like Tidus in it. So wanting to find more spheres with her lost love within in order to hold onto hope that he may yet live. The overarching plot is very thin and contrived and isn't all that important really.

FFX-2 is chapter based with each chapter having a main mission or two before the next chapter. If you wanted too you could beat this game very very quickly because the vast majority of the game is optional. The flip side to that is that trying to get 100% completion in the game is an absolute nightmare and what awaits you are boring cut scenes, shitloads of mini games some of which are just as frustrating as in FFX, and a lot of nice little closure moments for the majority of side characters from the first game.

The biggest problem with completion here is that the tinyiest, stupidiest things count towards 100% and missing even one of them fucks up your save. Thankfully there is a NG+ which continues your % and you can grab specifically the small things you missed if you did, but that does mean replaying the whole game a second time...which it not the best to be frank. And 100% completion is basically impossible without a guide, but the basic jist of how to go about it works like this....

In chapter 1 the story wants you to visit two locations on the map, Besaid and Zanarkin. These are labeled as "hotspots" on the area list, so in order to get 100% what you actually want to do is visit and do side shit in every OTHER zone first, going down the list getting all the treasure chests in every zone and completing all the objectives you encounter along the way. Once you do that, THEN you do the main missions which lead into a new chapter with a new "hotspot" in which you will rinse and repeat.

A few of the mini games will persist throughout most of the main game like promoting a tourist attraction in the Calm Lands and trying to find a wife for some loser. However thankfully most of the side stuff is specific to that trip to a given zone, and once completed can be marked off.

Gameplay wise FFX-2 brings back the job system in the most fan servicey way possible. Throughout the game some of the spheres you'll get are called Dress Spheres and they contain a new outfit/job that the girls can change into to become whatever that "dress" lets them do. For example, Thief, Gunner, Warrior, Mascot (which puts them in literal mascot costumes), and so on. Each Dress has a wide range of unlockable abilities earned by killing enemies in combat. Some are active abilities like more powerful magic or special attacks. Others could be passive like immunity to Darkness or what have you.

It's kind of a cross between other job systems we've seen as well as the ability unlocks on gear we saw in FF9. And for the most part it works really well.

Oh at we are back to normal ATB-based battling so RIP turn-based combat forever.

Now all that being said. I did not ever use Y.R.P in combat throughout the whole game. Because FFX-2 HD collection edtion speical release edition, also has an exciting new feature called POKEM....errr Creature Creator which is a bit misnamed if you ask me, but essentially you can leave different size traps around the world and grab a bunch of monsters from all over Spiria, then you can train them and make them enter tournaments and even assign them "dresses" except obviously they just get some job abilities and nothing sexy. Through this system your creatures level up and after a few levels they earn stories, in which once you release a creature you get a segment of special story for them as well as marking that creature "complete". This gains you really powerful accessories, and items and is available before you do the first mission in the game. Meaning with a bit of time you can do a bunch of tournaments build a team and grab powerful nearly end-game items before you technically start playing the game.

So I played the game mostly with an Elemental, a Chocobo, and a Tonberry. Together they destroyed this game without me having to lift a finger.....after the first 20-something hours.

The creature Creator is also on a separate system of 100% completion and isn't required for 100%ing the main game. Hell the creator can't even be done in a NG playthrough as some things are only available in NG+.

Frankly I like this system and as a whole I really like X-2. It doesn't fit into the rest of the series really, and only gets the FF name due to setting and characters, but in doing all these games almost back to back it's a completely different FEELING game that was refreshing for me in this dumb fucking thing I'm doing. But even before this I liked it as a goofy side game with not a lot of seriousness and high world-ending stakes (though it kinda gets there in the end).

I can see why it gets a bad rap though, because it does feel like a joke almost entirely. But it's so playful and charming in a lot of ways that I can't help but really enjoy playing it.
 

meiam

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FFX-2 could probably be an okay game if it was stand alone, but making it a sequel really sank the whole thing. But then again it only exist because its a sequel they could turn out for cheap by recycling asset/map from FFX.

Lets start by the obvious problem, FFX-2 is an incredibly dumb game, every characters and events in it is dumb. Very dumb. Aggressively dumb. And that would be fine, if it wasn't for the fact that it occasionally tries to be serious. But it just can't pull that off because its so dumb, and then its just sad. For example, at some point you need to rush to a location to stop the bad guy from destroying the world, so every character jump into action and... start doing a cheer leading routine. That scene is treated as serious. Other example, some civil war is about to happen, so the decision is to... have a concert, once again this is treated seriously although the idea comes from Yuna's cousin who spends the entire game trying to sleep with her and in general just being a weird pervy dumbass, he deliver this idea while... dancing/convulsing around for some reason. The concert then happens in the thunder plain, an area constantly hit by thunder strike, ie the worse location in the entire world. Once again, this is treated seriously (no doubt there were no mention of the thousands of casualty). I could go on but you get the idea, its very dumb but it doesn't really realize, much less take advantages, of how dumb it is.

Yuna is the biggest casualty of this dumbefication. She's essentially super Jesus in Spira, she killed the very real Satan that was literally destroying part of the world on a regular basis and at the same time she exposed the fake religion that was keeping the entire system alive by sacrificing summoner. The people should be worshiping the stone under the ground she walked on. Yet no one really give a crap about her, unless she's doing a pop concert in skimpy clothes. As for her, gone is the caring person who was willing to sacrifice her live to buy just a few years of relative peace to the world, now she just want to essentially pull lame prank and find old VHS tape of grainy family re union. You could probably make something interesting of this all, but again, its so dumb and just sink Yuna character. I'm just glad Auron is dead, can't even imagine what they would have done to him.

The game itself just consist of going to various location you've already been in the previous game and doing dumb shit there, this is the good part of the game. The other half involve some ghost/mirror image of Titus wanting to ride a giant cock/gun for, you guessed it, dumb reason. This is the part of the game that you could entirely remove and it would only make things better. There's also a civil war between reformist and progressive faction, this could be interesting but the game is just too dumb to be able to do that, so it fall flat and would also probably make the game better if it was removed. I also won't cover the fan service, but let just say that almost every job costume is a bikini and the game has a mini game where you have to give someone an orgasm.

The job system is nice, but with a big problem, most jobs are useless and there's no system to encourage people to use a large variety of them. FFT gives every job a bunch of passive ability and let you carry over ability from one job to another, this gives you good reason to constantly shake up your party composition and use some less useful class so you can learn the good passive. But X-2 doesn't bother with this and so most job aren't worth using even once, a few jobs are also so broken they trivialize most of the game. Shamefully you start with one of them. Otherwise the jobs variety is really good and being able to change job on the fly is a fun system, but again kinda useless since you can just use the same job the entire game and do just fine. I don't know why they added a pokemon system to the game, I honestly don't really see the point since the job system was fine and shoving it aside doesn't really make the game better. But then again, why not, they were probably already working on it when the game was originally release and just dusted it off for the HD version.

It's not the worst things square has done, especially considering what follow, but its pretty crass. The best thing I can say about FFX-2 is that at least its not as bad as FFX-3 novel, where apparently Yuna as sex with Titus corpse and get pregnant. Square, just stop doing sequel.
 

bluegate

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I didn't enjoy FFX-2 much when it originally released on the PS2 because it wasn't near what teenage me was expecting from a FFX sequel, but I came to enjoy and like the game when I replayed it as part of the HD collection on the PS4.

Maybe it's because I played it directly after FFX, but what I liked about it was the ability to revisit the world of FFX after its events had concluded. I thoroughly enjoyed retreading Yuna's pilgrimage from Besaid to Zanarkand at the start of the game ( I didn't go to the Hot Spots first, I visited each location ) and seeing how every location had changed, how its inhabitants were doing and in general, how the world was trying to move on from Sin's defeat and Yevon's mask falling off.
 
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09philj

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Now I have to look at FF12 and I really don't wanna. Spoilers....I dont like this one.
I'm Captain Basch!

I noped out of FFXII after abour 25 hours. It was very brown. The combat system was OK, but a bit tedious (although I think this about most FF games). The job system was very lacklustre and really didn't open out that many interesting decisions despite the size and complexity of the skill trees. The story was fine I guess. The main things that wore me down were how stingy the game is with resources, especially gold, and how long dungeons could drag on for.