November 22, 2004
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Not long ago I saw the ending of Final Fantasy X-2. Not just any
ending, but THE ending. I had completed the game long ago and to be
honest though there were lots of cool aspects in the game I hadn’t been
that impressed. It’s clearly a high quality game but I didn’t love it
the way I loved other Final Fantasy’s. In fact I felt almost neutral to
it. Just too much seemed to be missing…Now though through watching my brother play through with the aim of
getting 100% story completion on one run through, I’ve seen much more
of the story. I’ve watched many scenes that I never go the first time
through, learned many things I never knew the first time through.
Pieces of the puzzle fit together that never did before. And what’s
more I got to see a lot of extra movie videos and an entirely
appropriate ending that tied in more closely to the prior game. It
was… immensely more satisfying than the first time through, even
though I spent a lot less time and didn’t bother watching my brother
play through a vast majority of the game.The ending still wasn’t quite what I wanted and there were some things
that were msising but overall it was much more what I have come to
expect from a Final Fantasy. That is a detailed entertaining story even
if it doesn’t actually make all that much sense.In the end I now find myself just as well inclined toward X-2 as I am
toward all the other Final Fantasies. It doesn’t rank as one of my
favorites but it does not rank as one of my least favorites either.
It’s a good solid game and I can say that I greatly enjoyed playing it.But it really really ticks me off that the game’s structure is such
that it took me this long to really enjoy it. I can’t believe that the
game designer’s felt it a good idea the basically deny me a great deal
of the enjoyment I should have had in the game the first time through.
The whole Story Completion idea will go down in history in my book as
one of the worst ideas in video games at least in the way it was
executed in X-2.In many ways X-2 felt like a game that was activily fighting against
the player. It seemed like it was purposefully trying to withhold story
from you. The game made it entirely to easy to miss cogent important
parts of the plot and not even realize that you had lost something. It
stuck significant plot scenes at the end of large dungeons or behind
strangely locked doors that you have to collect a large number of hard
to acquire objects in order to enter. The game makes it so that
selected the wrong option to a query or choosing to go to the wrong
place in the wrong order can just make it impossible for you to unlock
a good portion of the plot. LAstly the game even has the audacity to,
even if you do everything right and get to 100% story completion,
refuse to give you the good ending just because you forgot to press a
damn button at one point in time. “Ha! No story for you!”This isn’t good design. Its arrogant offensive game design. It doesn’t
respect your players, rather it like holding a treat over the head of a
dog and making them jump for it. It’s cruel and disgusting to
create a game that requires you to either replay it multiple times in
order to get a decent amount of the story OR play the game with a huge
complex guide in front of you the whole time afraid to make a single
mistake that would mean you have to start all over again.Again don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying X-2 itself is a bad game. It
has many many great elements. I love the characters. I like the
dresssphere system. The cut scenes are amazing. Some of the mini-games
are a lot of fun. It is a worthy sequel in almost every way and in a
number of ways it surpasses the original. It’s just that I absolutely
despise the story completion system. I despise the way the free form of
this game turned into a detriment rather than advantage. I think it is
just bad design all around, and I hope to never see another RPG that
adopts these tactics as part of its mechanisms.*********************
Spoilers Ahead:Just some random observations about the end:
Vegnagun is unquestionable the most idiotic machine ever conceived of.
It is incomprehensible how such a device could ever come to exist in
any universe. Yet it did. In Sphera. If I ever had any doubt about how
stupid the people of Sphera are, the existence of Vegnagun totally
erases that doubt. It’s just generally a planet full of really dumb
people. Maybe that’s a good thing because it means that the people can
stop killing each other by listening to a single song. If people on
Earth are that impressionable maybe we could totally solve the worlds
ills by gathering everybody up into a giant plane with lightning
striking down all around them and pooring down rain and have them
listen to a famous person sing a good song and that’ll be that. No more
problems.Anyway, one of the big problems in this story is not only is Vegnagun a
really stupid design, its also in no way scary. I felt no fear
whatsoever that the world was about to be destoryed. At no point did I
feel as if there was some danger that required haste or something
horrible would happen. At no point in the entire story did I have any
doubt of the main character’s ability to easily whup Vegnagun. After
all two of them had been a part of defeating Sin. What’s a big stupid
gun supposed to do to them? Most of the game I was kinda
wondering why the heck weren’t the main characters just totally bored
out of their minds. I laughed out loud when I heard the characters
exclaim like it was some amazing revelation, that vegnagun could be
destroyed because people built it. Really? Wow what would ever make you
think that?
Shuyin in the words of my brother is “just as much of a whiner as that
Tidus.” That pretty much sums it up. I think it is a good symbolic
aspect of the game to make Tidus and Shuyin’s personalities similar in
some ways but it doesn’t help my sense of the significance of this
final battle. Once again just as Vegnagun wasn’t that scary. Neither
was Shuyin. So what if he’s a ghost that can possess people? He’s also
a fool who spent a 1000 years whining because he got killed in cold
blood. Big deal. Get over it. What’s more he’s so damn dumb he couldn’t
even have guessed once in all those years what Lenne’s last words
probably were? Come on. That’s a little dense. Not the mention that he
never admits that the reason he got shot was his own damn fault for
trying to… oh I don’t know… DESTROY THE WORLD! Oh sure maybe he
just thought activation vegnagun would help him save Lenne but can you
really blame the soldiers who know the capabilities of that gun from
overreacting? Ok yeah you can blame them but that doesn’t absolve
Shuyin of blame either. He’s just a dumb ghost with serious emotional
issues. “10,000 years of agony” Whatever. How exactly did he
suffer? He died once in cold blood. Then he wandered around acting like
a fool when all he had to do was rest. I’m just not that impressed.Ok so the villains in this game aren’t all that impressive but in a way
that kinda fits the mold too. Afterall X’s greatest weaknesses were in
its totally lame completely unbelievable villain structure.Seymour
still tops my books as the worst villain ever divised. And Sin being a
big mindless beast although a bit scary just couldn’t engage the viewer
like a real villain could. It was more like fighting a hurricane or a
force of natur, a challenge yes but not a matter of right vs wrong
or good vs evil.One aspect of the ending of X-2 that I really love and the part that
really made the ending in my opinion was the way you hear the voices
of the dead through the final battles. That was just really cool.
Related to my last point I like how Jecht’s voice says “Put that
crybaby to sleep,” when you’re fighting Shuyin. I really think that
almost everything that was said was highly appriopriate and really made
the ending much more entertaining than it otherwise would be. Another
favorite line of mine is Auron’s “He’s panicking. Yuna. End it now.”
This was just great.The battle against Shuyin himself was a very nice touch to the ending.
Getting to see all of Tidus’s limit breaks again was just cool no
matter how flimsy the execuse to put them in.My favorite part of the ending of all was Yuna’s speach. The main idea
of the speach is summed up with the words “I don’t want battles where
we have to lose in order to win.” It is a really potent part of the
story and a great way to introduce the ghostly external voices that
Yuna hear’s throughout the end of the game. Most importantly in this
way does the game actually serve as a thematic completion of the first
game. The transition from somber shadow to true happiness is completed
by banishing the last lingering darkness of the first game, the loss of
so very many significant characters. It is particularly
cool because so often this is glossed over in stories. So many times we
are faced with tragedy after tragedy and then when the enemy is
defeated we’re just supposed to chear and be happy even when our
favorite characters just aren’t there anymore. They’ve sacrificed
themselves or been killed or lost. Sometimes their ends were noble
other times they were just tragic, but always in the end we are
supposed to swallow the chearing partying happiness knowing that there
are those who just aren’t there anymore. Most stories just end with
that. No one even bothers to acknowledge the losses. X-2 is different.
It is this that I like about this speech even though it was still kinda
cheesy. I can’t believe she ended it with the words “Believe in Yuna.”
Come on.This game has serious issues with excessive power boundaries. It is far
too easy to become level 99 in all of your characters and have every
dress sphere mastered. And even then you don’t feel all that powerful
unless you stupid trigger happy catnip nonsense. The game could
really have benefited from an engine that allowed power levels to raise
above level 99 and the removal of the cheesy tricks or if not removal
of those at least more threats that take into account their existence..
Also on the mechanics side, the game would certainly have benefits from
greater differentiation between the characters. Although its balanced
its just not as much fun to deal with characters who are when stripped
of all abilities precisely the same. It also strains realism.Now about the very end,end. It was definitely a very pleasant ending. I
like how it solves the question of the final scene in X, but then I
also really liked how X ended in a mystery too. So it’s a trade off.
There’s a lot of cheesyness in the final ending. A lot of images where
you’re like “What the?” “Where did they come from?” It was clearly in
many ways a reward ending for those who stuck with the game. Still I
fell for it. I really enjoyed it. It helped that it was all full motion
video too of course. I really like some of the ways in which they
completed the circuit too, like “It all began when I saw this sphere of
you.” and the way the final scene is totally reminscent of the first
scene in X. It definitely reinforces the idea that X was Tidus’s
story and X-2 was Yuna’s story. But then again didn’t Yuna kinda
commandere the story at the end of X? Maybe we’ll just say that both
games are both of their stories. I’m not sure I like all this
possessive ownership of stories anways. Seems a bit selfish.I’ve got to say one last thing. Sphera is definitely one of the wierder
worlds in all of fantasy. I was really disappointed that they
never do explain what Sphera’s true nature is because I really want to
know. This is a world where dead people can walk around with living
people, and can dream up people who become real enough to walk around
with the dead and living. Dead people can possess living people. Dead
people can turn into giant monsters. Dreams can turn into giant
monsters. Dreams can becomes killed by other dreams allied with dead
and living people when they are giant monsters that threaten to
destory the world. Dead people can travel into a dream world pull out a
dream’s son so that that dream can help fight his dad who happens to be
a monster now. Dead dreams can have their thoughts pulled together by
dreaming dead monsters who faded away and become real people
again.Death clearly is not much more than an inconvenience in this
world and the distinctions between monster and person, dream and
reality, life and death clearly aren’t very strong ones. That’s part of
the world’s charm of course. But it’s also a blank check for the
creators to do whatever the heck they feel like and totally not spend
an ounce of time striving for any kind of coherence. It’s good and it’s
bad. No one wants to blur the distinctions between dreams and reality
more than me, but I really want to understand things as well. I want
logic even in the illogical. I believe that a dream can be as explicable
as reality and their relationship can be well defined without losing
any of the mystery of the connections.Anyways X-2 is a game worth playing, especially if you’ve played X. A
little too cheery, a little too cheesy, a little too incomprehensible
and with a stupid story completion system that will drive you insane,
but none of this distracts from a game that never fails to keep you
interested and greatly entertained. It is one of those great games that
has many flaws that will always be forgotten because of the
extraordinary quality of it’s good features.Can’t wait until XII.
