Final Fantasy X-2 was the first game in the series I ever played. After having bought it - with perfectly good money - and tried to play it for a few years, I can now say I'm ashamed that this is the game that turned me onto the Final Fantasy franchise. What could have been a great sequel to Final Fantasy X is an uninteresting suckfest bogged down with minigames and miniskirts.
In its defense, the game does have a good battle system, a timed turn-based sort similar to that of Final Fantasy VII or VIII. I feel that this adds to the urgency of turn-based games and encourages the player to think on their feet, which earns my praise. Needless to say, the graphics and cutscenes are also completely gorgeous, just as FFX's were. However, these are the only redeemable qualities Final Fantasy X-2 really possesses. You play as Yuna, Rikku, and some new girl named Paine as they fly around Spira doing STUFF. Seriously, just stuff. There really isn't much of a goal to any of it, you're literally just shifting from one minigame to the next and fighting a fiend or two between sidequests. Don't get me wrong - I like minigames and sidequests just as much as the next gamer - but if the entire plot is composed of them like with FFX-2, it's hardly an RPG anymore.
Another problem about the game is the fact that it seems to revolve completely around the female body. Yuna and Rikku have turned into some fanboy's ideal, wearing very revealing clothing (in Rikku's case, a bikini and what could almost be called a skirt), and the members of your party regularly undergo contrived "magical girl transformation sequences" to change to some different class for n turns until their abilites wear out their use. To mae matters worse, the characters seem to have been hit by a steamroller in the past two years, because they're all about as three-dimensional as a sheet of rice paper. Yuna used to be a deep, thoughtful character - now she's prancing around giving whiny J-pop performances for the masses (this also lends to the terrible soundtrack). What happened to the girl who beat Sin and saved the world? Rikku hasn't changed much, but that's not saying a lot when she was one of the most annoying characters in FFX. And Paine? Well, I had hoped she'd have some dark secret past, and that this dark secret past would lend to the storyline in some way, but let's just say that the minute I heard her say "Ice ice, baby" while casting Blizzard, I was pretty sure that she wasn't too far from everyone else in the game - that is to say, being a wibbling mound of sex appeal and "cute" phrases. (I would say more, but I don't want to spoil it for those of you who are masochistic enough to play this game through.)
Granted, some of the dresspheres (yeah, I gagged too) are pretty cool in terms of design - for instance, I really like the looks of the Samurai and Gun Mage outfits in particular. The problem is that most of the others are either hideously flashy or extremely skimpy (I need only offer up the Gambler dressphere to prove as much in either case). Even the so-called "ultimate" dresspheres are a disappointment. After getting Rikku's, I thought to myself, "This is awesome! Now I'll be invincible!" And I wasn't, because one of the glaring flaws of the dressphere system is that you have to level each outfit up individually for them to gain power, rather than them all just leveling with the character. It's not like you can go "I'll just use these three dresspheres and nothing else," either, because each battle calls for a different set of abilities. This is not only an unnecessarily convoluted system, but it's annoying to boot, because you can only take so many dresspheres into battle with you (and even then it usually takes three or four turns to get to the class you need, since you can only advance to one at a time on the grid).
So overall, Final Fantasy X-2 could have been good, and it has its fine points; but it seems like the developers could've gone for great and settled for mediocre, and then failed to even reach THAT bar. When your main goal is to wear a Moogle suit and hand out balloons to random passers-by, you know there's a problem with your video game.Get more detail about Final Fantasy X-2.
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