There was a time when I used to have Final Fantasy X and couldn’t play it. I’ve never done this before and I doubt I’ll ever get excited enough to do it again. I bought this game long before I had a PS2 (it took Dragon Quest VIII to finally get me to buy one). When I finally played it, it was… alright. So many people love this game, but I found it to be just alright. To me, it was the end of an era. Final Fantasy was losing its touch. This was the last Final Fantasy I played (although I own its sequel, XII, XIII, and XIII-2. I’m crazy). I couldn’t care enough about it to beat it, unfortunately, something that I might remedy in the future.

The battle system goes back to being turn based, but more like the Tactics games. You can see who will act next and how the action you choose on that turn will affect who comes next. There are four elements on top of physical. There’s also a sort of strange Pokemon-ish feel to the summons, where it’ll take over the party when one comes out and stay out until you call it back, it wins, or it dies. It’s not too bad, I suppose.

The graphics are alright. The environments are now fully rendered instead of being still CG backgrounds like the PS1 Final Fantasy games. Somehow, that removes some of the magic from the environments and they become just another beach, just another ice cavern, just another desert. There’s no overworld and so travel is largely limited to walking from one point to another on foot. Sometimes, it feels like the entirety of Final Fantasy X’s world is just a giant spiral…

The sound for this game is pretty standard stuff. Nothing to write home about. The music is good, but I can’t remember it. I guess it all just works.

The story is… Well, it’s… I don’t know. You’re a star “Blitzball” player, which means underwater soccer, and one day, your world is flipped inside out and you’re thrown into another world or dimension… something. And you meet some people and go on an adventure with your girlfriend who wants to be the very best that there ever was. And on the way there, you have to try to keep yourself from strangling some obnoxious jerk called Seymour. You also learn about your father while you travel, because that isn’t an overused trope.

Considering that I’m not a fan of the game, I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. But I would, to some. If you like how Kingdom Hearts looks like and want to know who those kids from the beach are (the ones you eventually forget all about), then here you go. I don’t know if you should play this version or the PS Vita remake/port, but if you do have a PS Vita, that one’s supposedly in HD. If you’re a fan of the older Final Fantasy games, don’t go into this one expecting too much.

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