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EX's Final Fantasy X (PS2)
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| [February 10, 2007 02:03:50 AM]
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After playing some more of Final Fantasy X, I realized how long it would take to beat the game. Even though the game is progressing through in a roughly linear manner, through the overall linear structure of the storyline, the designers hold a fairly tight reign on how fast you can play through the game, although you are free to explore areas as much as you want before moving into the next one. What I have found rather irritating is that--much like shmups and many side-scrollers--you're forced through the storyline in a similar manner; once you proceed past a certain area, you can't return to previous areas. If FFX is similar to some of the older games, it will probably have a segment that unlocks free exploration later on, but the 'invisible hand' pushing me through the game at the moment feels rather pushy, particularly when I run into event trigger locations unknowingly and get pushed into the next area before I have a chance to finish checking out the previous area...
Different from every other RPG that I’ve previously played, there haven’t seemed to be any rankings of strength for the weapons/armor. Not only that, but the equipment system has been stripped down to merely 1 weapon and 1 piece of armor, largely simplifying that aspect of the game. Probably more noticeably different, however, is the level up system, which is represented as progression along a sort of board-game, with each ‘level’ you gain being a space to move on the board and getting upgrades as you go, allowing a players to form their own customized web of character upgrades/abilities. This adds a new dimension of challenge and strategy to the game, in terms of choosing how you want to play with each character. At the same time, however, it leaves me rather confused and curious as to whether there is something along the lines of a ‘level cap,’ which exists in all other RPGs (that I’ve played, any way)…
Overall, in terms of progression of the game, the big ‘epic’ cut scenes and battles that ensue are definitely very exciting and fun to play with, especially when you can summon some powerful Aeons and inflict massive damage with ‘Overdrive’ attacks. However, the overall pace of the game feels very slow for the most part, outside of the big events, leaving me wanting both wanting to throw the game out because it feels like its taking forever, yet want to keep playing because the story being told is so interesting. I think much of what contributes to this is a large number of completely unnecessary cut scenes of film-like nature that drag out too long. While the character development in such cut scenes contributes to the story very well, I think that there’s just too much of it. The first few hours of gameplay were definitely by far the most exciting and inducing into the game because of the excellent integration of cut scenes with battles and its adaptation to the assumed player skill level on the standard learning curve. After those first few hours, however, the game play started to drag out and feel very slow, well reflected in the music, with comparatively very short cut scenes that actually drew me back into the game. For example, one of the boss fights had roughly 5 minutes of cut scenes, and took less than 2 minutes to beat with a double Overdrive attack using an Aeon grand summon, while it had taken hours and hours of running around and other boring cut scenes to get there. Personally, I would prefer a game that balances the cut scenes, story, and battles in a more equal manner. While addictive and fun to play, I simultaneously hate Squaresoft for making their stories so damn slow…
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| [February 9, 2007 07:40:25 PM]
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I borrowed a copy Final Fantasy X, which turned out to be the beginning of a long and arduous night. From the get go, the FFX gave a very epic, film-like feeling in the opening scene, showing what was--at the time--assumed to be the protagonist/hero party sitting around a campfire in a mysterious/magical land. This largely set the scene for the setting and type of game that it would be. The detail and quality in the graphics and animation was initially very good, setting the expectations for the game to be pretty high. Although impressed, I was slightly annoyed that when fading between two different camera shots, the previous shot froze while fading out and the new shot was fading in simultaneously--a minor detail that left me wondering why, even though it didn’t have any bearing what-so-ever on the rest of the game experience.
The game experience turned out to somewhat like what I’d expect from a Final Fantasy game, and an RPG in general. Many of the RPG standards were clearly apparent, with the tutorials of the combat interface, leveling up, and other game-specific features while assuming the player to understand the control system and basic UI, leaving it documented for reference in the help section but giving no formal instruction to the player. This poses a certain initial challenge to new players who are not yet familiar while being relatively easy for players experienced in the genre to learn--something pretty typical of the RPG genre. Progressing through the game, I found it to be extremely linear, with room for some side-tracking--which took place in the form of exploring areas other than the indicated target location, looking for extra treasure chests with some extra items in them--but remained for the most part, a game of progression, following the plotline laid out by the game designers. I did find there were a few occasional dialog options given to the player such as naming the player character and the different ‘Aeons’ (summoned creatures) as well as a few story-related options, including either winning or losing the first ‘blitz-ball’ tournament game--one of possibly several mini-games?-- which, as far as I could tell, only affect specifically related dialog or cut scenes but not make any evident change in the progression of the storyline.
While FFX, as an RPG, is a game of progression, each individual battle and mini-game plays out as a game of emergence within the RPG as a sort of sub-game. However, different from other RPGs that I’ve played before, not all of the battles were spatially segmented from the visual game-world. The prior RPG standard was to deliberately cut from a game-world map where the player can run around and interact with NPCs etc. to a battle screen where both random and event battles would take place, separated by some kind of screen effect symbolizing the initialization of a battle. In FFX, this was present in all of the random encounters and some event-triggered battles, but, in addition to those battles, there were battles that took place in between event-triggered cut scenes, which essentially cut directly from a moment in the cut scene directly to a battle with a small screen effect over the view to indicate the start of a battle, but with no formal transition, cutting back to the cut scene after the battle was completed.
This aspect of integrating battles into the cut scenes made the game feel like an interactive movie, where the highlights of the movie were shown in cut scenes and other smaller tasks and battles were made into intermittent activities for the player to engage in during the movie. While this was definitely an interesting concept that I found rather enjoyable, there was one thing that annoyed me to no end. The cut scenes were divided between cinematic and non-cinematic (in-game), and the game seemed to lack a distinctively effective separation between the two. This was largely because the cinematic sequences could not be skipped /sped up in any way, while you could skip through the text line by line in the in-game cut scenes. Largely this became a problem if you died in a certain part and had to repeat and view all of the cinematic cut scenes all over again, unable to skip them--and some of them are pretty long--making it rather tedious and completely unnecessary. This is predominantly the case because most of major event battles are in between medium to long cut scenes, often several sequentially. I would have included at least some way to skip through the cinematic cut scenes if you’ve already seen them before. Probably the worst case of this I encountered yet is in the tournament blitz-ball mini-game event, where you are given just a tutorial of how to play and no opportunity to practice, and then thrust into a long cinematic cut scene followed by an in-game cut scene followed by another cinematic before you can actually play the mini-game. Should you lose the mini-game, it doesn’t hold any bearing on the progression of the storyline, but in trying to win, I had to bear through the cut scenes 5 times, essentially compelling me to drop the controller and go refill my bowl of tortilla chips after resetting and loading up my save file…. Which I’m going to go do again before starting up again.
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EX's Final Fantasy X (PS2)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Thursday 8 February, 2007
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