Squaresoft for PS2

Adventure

1Player

Hours and hours of in-game cutscenes… oh yeah, and there’s some gameplay in there, too.

I don’t hate RPGs, but I do like to play my games. I sat down to play a little more Final Fantasy X (FFX) today, and I played for just over an hour. I timed the amount of actual gameplay control I had compared to in-game cutscenes, and this is the result: 20 minutes of gameplay, and just over 53 minutes of non-interactive cutscenes. That’s absolute truth. In fact, as I type this paragraph, a cutscene is still running. It started about 7 minutes ago. The extent of my involvement with the game over the past hour has consisted of me moving my character from one point to the next story scene trigger. There have been no battles and very little else for me to do, except solving a simple puzzle that makes no sense in the context of the game. Excuse me for a second… I need to move my character through a door… and, what’s this? Yep, another cutscene kicked in. Argh.

The game looks great. The in-game graphics are so good that they can be used for near CGI-quality cutscenes… and they are… with great frequency. Admittedly, some of them are very cool, like the destruction scenes that occur early in the game. The battle system is also good – similar to past FF games, but with some new touches like party member switching and a revamped summon system. I like Blitzball – hey, it beats the mediocre card game from FFVIII and the horrible one from FFIX. I don’t like that the first time you play Blitzball, the game is very nearly fixed so you’ll lose – way to make people want to ever try playing it again, Squaresoft…

There’s no role-playing to be found in this "RPG," which is why I’ve classified it as an adventure game. You simply do not make any key decisions for your character, rather you sit back and watch as the game does everything for you. Tidus, the main character is even whinier than FFVII’s Cloud Strife, he’s a fashion nightmare that would make Joan Rivers’ head explode, and he stammers his way through the many, many cutscenes with profound statements like "ah," "uh," and "urk." And when he’s not trying to dislodge a coherent sentence, he’s whining like Leonardo Dicaprio when his PA forgets that he likes only sparkling spring water ice in his Evian spritzer. The increased amount of cutscenes and lack of an overworld means that this is also the most linear Final Fantasy game so far. FFX is as linear as Mario 46… maybe more linear!

More control over your characters actions, decisions and conversations would be nice. This is supposed to be a role-playing game, after all – it seems like all you do in FFX is move your party from one plot point to the next, and there’s very little choice in how anything plays out – you’re herded from the beginning of the game to the end in a very tidy manner.

Sin, the main enemy in the game is Tidus’s (the main ‘hero’) father. Gee, we’ve never seen that before…

Graphics – 9 (There’s no denying it, the game looks very nice)

Sound – 7 (What’s this? The characters now actually speak? Too bad they’re just as whiny and mopy as they’ve been in the past few FF games)

Replay – 0 (Once you’ve beaten this game, there’s no reason to go back and do it again – you barely play it at all the first time through, and subsequent times would be exactly the same)

Overall: 5