Pre-liminary Review                                                                                             By: Keith Wojciech          What can be said that hasn't been said yet about Final Fantasy and its legendary status within the canon of role-playing games?  Exquisite beauty, engaging storylines, intrepid characters, fierce combat, and innovative design, there could be endless adjectives to describe the essence and magnificence that is Final Fantasy.  And I could continue on as every other review of this game, Final Fantasy X, and say that FFX is "no exception" to the past achievements.  Ugg, how bland.           Does one play Final Fantasy games because the last Final Fantasy game was "a marvelous achievement in the field of game play, graphics, and story!"?  Do you play it cause of prior success?  How shallow.  That's like saying you believe in God because your grandmother does.  Is there any depth to you?  I ask.  Then you ask me why I revere a game with such seriousness.  I mean come on, its just a game, you play em cause the last was indeed good and everybody else says its good.   There we go again with the fish swimming with the current.  Do you play because everyone else does, or do you play because you feel it's good?  Do you spend 40+ hours of your short life on a graphical showcase that plays through the cathode ray tubes on your TV, or do you immerse yourself in another world, an alternate dimension of reality?

Some people didn't rate this game high but I really liked "Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday" for the Sega Genesis.   It was an obscure RPG that I got as a gift.  But I thought that anything Buck Rogers had to be cool.  So I gave it a try.   Sure it was no Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger on the SNES, or even a Sword of Vermillion or Lunar for Sega.  But what Buck Rogers did for me was give me an experience, in a fantasy world, albeit the future.  Without getting into the game play elements of BR, this review is of FFX,  I will say that it was a game that I liked.  And to me, to anyone with depth, that's all that matters.  We all have our past commercial flops of a game that we loved and still love; those games that didn't have TV commercials, huge full-page magazine ads, plush toys, or movie tie ins.  They hold a special place in our gaming hearts.  Even though critics and peers saw them as microchip mush, we saw them as masterpieces, and gasp, entertaining?  Now my argument here is not about the greatness of crappy games, this is a FFX review, I know.  I just explore this aspect of gaming to elucidate one point, that games aren't ultimately good because of their superior graphics, multi-million dollar budgets, or company logos.  No, games are ultimately good because we personally enjoy them.  I know some of you pull out that Atari 2600 sometimes to play 'Warlords', or fire up that old Genesis to play 'NHL Hockey', or pull out the Gameboy and play a game of 'Tetris'.  Heck, I just spent $500 bucks on what I think is the greatest arcade game ever, 'Star Wars', and that was made in 1983 A.D.!  I, and some of we, love games because they appeal to us on a personal level, and Final Fantasy X does that for me.              The first thing I must admit to you, because you the reader deserve honesty, is that after the first 25 hours of playing Final Fantasy X, I hated it.  I despised it so much I couldn't even play anymore.  The animosity was so great that I wanted to play Final Fantasy VIII, a lesser of a game by far in terms of production, almost out of spite for the hatred I had for FFX.  Almost like the teenage girl that will maliciously go out with that "punk of a guy" only after father has restricted her dating freedom.               Of course your wondering why I would hate FFX so much after almost praising it as a God send in the previous paragraphs.  Rightfully so you clever gamer!  I asked myself the same question.  How could I hate such an extravagant venture of role-playing gaming?  Well I will give you the practical reasons of my past position, and then I will present the antithesis of the argument, which is my current attitude.

After 25 hours of playing FFX, I began to question my sanity.  This game was amazing I told myself, yet why do I still have this empty feeling in my heart about it.  The game possesses cutting-edge graphics, an impressive spoken dialogue, cool characters, and a highly addictive and fun mini-game.  Gosh, who in their right mind wouldn't like a game that encompasses all that?  Then I regretfully raise my hand slowly.  I not only didn't like FFX, I hated it.  Again you ask why?  Well I'll tell you.  For one, I hated the battle system.  Most reviews hailed it as a welcome change to an evolving series.  I don't like evolution.  I like to know that my relatives aren't monkeys in the trees and amoebas in the sludge puddles.  I like stability, like the Roman kingdom in power for almost two millennia.  I don't want change.  Maybe that is a flaw in my personality, I don't know, but probably yes.  Anyways, what made Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and almost every other RPG before it great; those elements were wistfully taken away from me!  Each character didn’t have the same abilities, and they didn't improve and advance like we've all come to know and love in standard RPG’s!  Instead Squaresoft created this weirdo system that has each character maintain a separate role.  We got a healer here, a fighter there; get your magic user for half price!  Separate roles.  Ugg, I couldn't take it.  I tried but I couldn't.   I wanted everybody to have that blistering attack, or super kill spell.  And come on Square, only one person can summon!!!  Utter disappointment and sadness.  I won't even go into the fact that characters don't get stronger on the normal system of gaining experience points; I still haven't really resolved myself with that aspect.             Well enough of each character having different roles, I maybe could live with that, but the next qualm is one that I felt was a knife in the back from my Japanese friends at Square.  Remember Knights of the Round?  Perhaps the coolest summon spell to ever grace a 32-bit console.  Or Bahamut 3, or Tonberry, or Doomtrain, or Odin, well where are they?  Oh yeah, some of our old friends do make an appearance in FFX.  As I've said, I only got 25 hours into the game my first time around so my old good demon friend, Ifirit, is the only comrade that I've had the pleasure to meet in FFX so far.  Some of the old cast do come back later on in the game and I wonder if it will sway my opinion when they appear.  But for now, my disappointment only rose.  What did most of our old summoned friends from FFVII and FFVIII have in common, other than the fact that anyone could summon them?  They all kick some major @r$$.  Watching Knights of the Round pummel helpless Sephiroth over and over and over and over again was bliss.  When Odin came in the ruckus to apply some double-edged chop suey luey, I was fulfilled, overly fulfilled.  Yet when you get your first summon creature, Valefor(an Aeon as they call them in FFX) you get an alright intro from it and a little more than pop-gun of an attack, easily matched by your fighter or magic using characters.  Yeah it has a short unimpressive yet strong "Overdrive" attack, but it takes time to fill and isn't very appealing.  Aside from the Aeons' lackluster performances on the battlefield, they are also wusses.  They are very weak creatures indeed that died on me a lot.  What kind of Final Fantasy game is it that you can't depend on a summon spell to grab you out of a hole and finish the job?  Complete disregard of my RPG wants Square, how could you double-cross me like this?  Putting such a beautiful coat of paint on the outside body, yet failing to mention the terminal structural rust under the hood.  That's darn right wrong.               Now you’re really asking how I could possibly love this game after hearing a few reasons for my aversion towards it.  Well, just like the song goes, "I once was lost, but know am found."  Those words of course refer to the spiritual enlightenment the writer felt when he finally saw the world with eternal eyes, and realized grace was what saved his soul.  But it can also be used as an applicable metaphor to describe my conversion from FFX hater, to FFX follower.  Like Saul of Tarsus, I was hit with a beam of light, and now I see the world of FFX not in opaqueness, but succinct translucence.  My persecution of FFX has ended and I am now a follower of the very thing I was fighting.  My salad days were over.

The first step I took in my transformation was to stop playing the darn game.  I couldn't continue on hating a game in the very series I loved.  It's like the father that watches his son miss the game winning shot.  Even though temporarily the father is disappointed in the son, his love is unconditional, and the depth of the relationship maintains it’s mutual adoration.  And so that was the way I felt with FFX when I stopped playing.  You can’t win them all I thought.  I loved the Final Fantasy series and I loved Square, not in the adoration a father and son feel of course, but an admiration more like it.  I calmed my hatred and realized that sometimes a lemon comes out amid all the gems.  That is the very reason I never got into FFIX.  I knew I wouldn’t like it with all them squashed characters and all, but that was O.K. with me.  I could wait for the next installment.  But when I realized FFX had fallen short of my expectations, I became a little dismayed.  Was Square losing it’s touch?  Will I have to wait for FFXI?  But wait, that’s an online RPG, not a traditional.  Will I ever get a chance again to walk in the shoes of a Squall or Cloud?               And know your asking why I hate FFX so much again?  Yeah the points I mention are good, but that’s not the whole game.  True, battling isn’t all the game, even though it’s a lot, and my personal favorite aspect.  But there were some other little nuisances that flustered me.  Take the intro first.  It was alright and stuff but nothing special.  The whole blitzball game FMV and Auron hanging out was pretty cool, but nothing overly spectacular.  And it was short.  Plus, you had to walk around a little before any action actually took place, some thing that kind of annoyed me.  I want to be immersed instantly in a game by the cool intro.  I mean I was almost in a hot sweat after the FFVIII intro finished.  FFVII threw me right into the action also.  I want a Namco-esque intro, something that makes you say, “Wow, I’m glad I bought this game.”  It’s not a major pick, but something I notice.   Another aspect was the characters themselves.  Yeah the main character Tidus was cool and all, but he lacked a connection with me.  Maybe some people would connect well with a guy like that, I don’t know.  I’m more like a Cloud Strife, or Squall Leonheart.  I’m an apathetic guy most of the time, a bit on the selfish side, and in my own little world, like Cloud and Squall were.  Auron is a cool character, and during the first part of the game I really was digging what he brought to the table.  But when he comes back in the story, he seems distant from Tidus, and not willing to help the guy.   Yuna I think is a good female lead, although her personality is almost too naive and innocent, almost too non-human.  She’s pretty attractive but more in the “average to pretty” range.  I guess I was hoping for a hot female lead with the advent of the 128-bit graphics processor.  And no, I don’t mean a buxom Lara Croft, although Lulu could be a Lara Croft in a different costume with a prettier face, but I guess I was hoping for a Rinoa or Quistis babe-like character.  Lulu is very attractive in more ways then one but her gothic and stoic personality is a real turn-off.  Although as the game goes one, Lulu is becoming more caring and her outer shell is breaking away to her innate female nurturing nature.  I will say I like Wakka a lot.  He’s just an all around good guy, always wanting to do his best and give it his all.  An extremely outgoing and friendly character, he just brightens up the mood when he’s around.  Rikku is another character I like.  Yes, she’s hot, but she also brings a joy to the group as well as a more believable attractive innocence then Yuna.  The last of the bunch is Kimahri.  He hasn’t said very so far in the game so his personality is one of almost absolute isolation, but we see his brotherly love and commitment to protect Yuna, a very good trait indeed.  Also he has an ongoing mental battle with his Ronso counterparts.  It will interest me to see how that turns out.  There are a few other characters, mostly minor that add to the mix, but nothing notable.  I don’t like Seymour, you could tell he was a bad guy the first time you saw him.               Another unwanted change as I mentioned before a little is the advent of the Sphere Grid that renders gaining EXP points in battle obsolete.  Nothing like fighting a hundred battles in a row to build your party into a monster-mashing machine.  But FFX took that away from me too, kind of.  They implemented this weirdo Sphere grid, very alien to any RPG’er.  Yeah you gain “Ability” points like experience points, but you got to play ‘Scrabble’ with them the AP points on a maze-like grid to make your characters more powerful.  Just something that seems tedious and overkill to me.  Sure you can customize your characters more than ever, but then I’ll be getting into the whole “separate roles” debate.  I would prefer not to open that chest of drawers again.                 My last major quack is weapons.  Unlike previous Final Fantasies and RPG’s, FFX has many weapons, but their physical strengths are all the same.  No super weapons here.  The only differences between these ones are they’re abilities.  Some have fire ward, others have HP+10%.  Not much to write home about.  I really miss the old weapon system, where you could upgrade, buy, or find a cooler weapon that was more powerful physically then the last.  I want my Ultimate Weapons back!

So now my selfish complaining is over.  Did I just admit to my selfishness?  Why yes, I did.  And that was the first step in my rebirth.  Yes, I mentioned earlier about how a game should be loved because it’s a game that you like, not the masses necessarily.  But the true enjoyment comes when you are attracted to a game not because of what you want to like in it, but because of what it is.  You’ll notice a lot of the reasons I initially had disdain for FFX was because it wasn’t what I wanted it to be.  I compared it to my past glories that were FFVII and FFVIII, my comfort zones.  But in life, as sometimes in video games, things that aren’t originally what you expected or wanted are the very things that make us stronger.                   I took a few days from playing FFX.  I found myself only enjoying beating up the Ronso Fangs in blitzball time and time again.  I had to stop playing.  So during my respite, I thought about the game that I wanted to be so much.                   The first step in my reconciliation with FFX was getting the game guide.  I am a RPG purist.  I need everything.  I need to play every mini-game, get every item, and find ever secret under the smallest rock.  And the game guide is the only reasonable aid to accomplish that.  Some nuts may say that’s cheating.  It’s true; the guide helps me cut about 100 hours of aimless searching for things that may not even exist.  I don’t use them for everything, but for the secrets I’d never find on my own.  I don’t walkthrough the whole game with the help of the guide.  I am extremely qualified to get through an RPG thoroughly by myself now.  I just like to get everything, that’s all.                  Anyways, with the game guide in hand, I had that security blanket I needed.  I figured I could at least go through the game again and get everything I could ever want.  Maybe that’d fulfill me.  Thus begins the opening of my eyes.  It is when I started over that I began to realize what I had missed the go around before.                  The first thing I began to notice was Tidus himself.  The quality that manifested most in him I realized was his friendliness.  Despite being sucked into a foreign world with things he didn’t quite understand, he did his best to cope with it and its inhabitants.  He realized a universal truth, that we can’t control life, only what we do with the time we’re given.  This profound thought hadn’t even crossed my mind the slightest when I first played the game, or any other game for that matter.  But the second time around, it hit me.  After recently seeing ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’ I had that whole “do the best with the time given” sort of thing in my mind a lot.  But I didn’t even ponder that point could be driven across in a video game, but it has.  Tidus does make the best of what he’s been given, things beyond his control.  And instead of being spiteful to everyone he meets, he greets them with hope.  His carefree yet determined attitude resonates as the party traverses through the game and the story unfolds.  His character shows amicable traits.  He exhibits brotherly love between his friends and commits his life to protect Yuna despite not knowing her very long.  And I found myself realizing that yeah I’m not very much like Tidus, but gosh, I wish I were.  I began to realize that I envied Tidus and his admirable qualities.  Even though I wasn’t like Tidus, I wanted to be like Tidus.  This revelation not only made me appreciate Tidus much more, but also served to point out the faults that I have.  Yes, it was discouraging that I had so much to work on with my attitude towards life and others, but it was very encouraging to realize that I make my own choices and that I could choose to change my attitude.  Tidus doesn’t go without faults of course though.  His unforgiving attitude towards his father, whether justified or not, is what holds him back from reaching his potential as a person.  But I haven’t finished the story so I don’t know what will unfold.

GO Besaid Aurochs!!!!

Blitzball Teams

Luca Goers

Ronso Fangs

Guado Glory

Al Bed Psyches

Kilka Beasts

Zanarkand Abes

The next major turnaround was when I started battling again.  I wasn’t looking forward to battles now that I despised the revamped system, but something happened in me.  I began to see things differently again.  I don’t know whether it was my new found respect for Tidus or what, but more life lessons flooded my jaded gaming conscience.  I saw how each character had his or her specific abilities to aid in the struggle.  Whereas before I only concentrated on the guys with the most powerful attacks, now I saw how each person contributed, with equal importance.  Then I realized how in life we always wish we were someone else.  We envy traits that other people have, whether good or bad, but we neglect to see the attributes we have ourselves.  Each person is unique in FFX, as in life, and each person brings to the table some different yet important, as in life.  Lulu uses her magic to defeat only fiends she can defeat.  Tidus, Auron, and Kimahri tackle the tough opponents with steel and strength.  Rikku lends a more tactical hand and Yuna is the resident healer and summoner, both integral cogs in the party’s mechanism.  So you see, I finally saw the use of each person and the equal worth of each person, and with that nugget of knowledge I was able to enjoy the battles now.  In fact I look forward to fighting now to see how I can involve each person.  It’s a joy to battle in FFX, not like it was in FFVII or FFVIII, but a different yet equal joy.               I could go on for a lot longer on how after seeing things differently in Tidus and the battle system the rest of my FFX experience was increasingly fulfilling, but I won’t go too much longer into it.  But to touch briefly I realized the little things that annoyed me the first time around were actually enjoyable the second time.  Yes, many things were changed out of the tradition of the Final Fantasy series, but I learned to accept those changes.  They weren’t detrimental changes in any way, just different.  And that difference is what I now enjoy.                 So now your wondering how I could spend three pages ravaging FFX and only one praising it.  Well you see, I needed to get that hatred off my back.  It was haunting me, chasing me, making me it’s slave.  Until we acknowledge our demons and faults, there is no chance for us to improve or see things the way they were meant to be seen.  We need to become vulnerable before we can become conquerors.  Just as Tidus accepts what is thrown at him, we need to accept our circumstances and not sit around complaining, but get up and progress.                  Now your wondering how I could possibly turn a stupid video game review into a philosophical epiphany.  And I don’t blame you.  I wonder myself how it was possible that FFX has now engaged me so, in many different ways.  Yeah I could sit here and review the game just like every other reviewer, “the graphics are amazing, the sound is great, the game play is different but great, and the story is awesome”, but I haven’t.  I think you, the gamer, deserve the underlying motives, whether directly inserted by the maker or indirectly.  My first take on the game was one of selfishness, what the game could do for me.  And I’m not going to go as far as saying what I can do for the game, that would be ludicrous, but I will go as far as saying enjoy the game because of what it is, not what it isn’t.                     The last thing you are wondering if you’ve read this dreamer’s review as far as this is how I could pull out such deep truths and metaphors from a video game.  Well let me tell you that we’ve come a long way since ‘Pong’ folks.  Let me give you this last metaphor.  We go to movies to see life played out, whether fictional or nonfunctional.  All of us can point to at least one or a few movies that touched our heart or even our souls.  Yet a movie is only a form of entertainment really.  Some try to get a point across others don’t.  With technology where it is, video games( RPG’s) are now not only a form or depthless entertainment, as most movies still are, but another medium where we can see stories played our and people live.  One-advantage video games possess over movies is the element of interaction.  I can actually be there, and make decisions in my fantasy world.  That’s what has and always will attract me to RPG’s.                      So my tentative review of Final Fantasy X has included two parts really and I’m sure you can delineate between them now.  FFX is in fact a game of beauty on all levels.  It does what RPG’s do and takes you to another place.  It has similar traits that the vein of Final Fantasy games possess, yet it is it’s own entity.  I’m not playing the tenth game in a series of games.  I am playing a game called ‘Final Fantasy X’.  So I want you to go out and buy this game and play it like I’m playing it right now.  I don’t know how to convince you that it is such a good game, but I hope I’ve opened a realm within you concerning video games that you never knew existed.  And that may be now you’ll see games differently and at least give FFX a try.  It may or may not be for you, but please don’t make the mistake I initially made.  Play the game like you’re about to enter something you’ve never seen or heard before.  Believe me, it will make the experience infinitely better.                       And to the scattered few of you that have had not only the privilege to play such a fine game but have also realized the truths I have, I commend you and respect you for the depth you possess.  Take these truths and look for them in other forms of entertainment and in life.  Don’t just know about them either, you must live what you know is right.                 So to those that are about to be consumed by the world of Final Fantasy X, I leave you with this quote from one of the greatest arcade games ever, 'Dragon’s Lair'.                                                                             “Lead on adventurer, your quest awaits!”

LINKS: Final Fantasy Online Squaresoft Videogames.com Sony Back to my HOMEPAGE