Final Fantasy X - A Retrospective

I have just completed Final Fantasy X, which debuted on the PS2 in 2001, and has recently been remastered twice in a short span, both on the PS3 and PS4. Having played it, I'm not exactly sure why it got the high marks that it did, particularly because of the very weak plot and rather uninteresting characters.

Approximately 1000 years before the start of the game, a cyberpunk metropolis called Zanarkand was at war with the Al Bhed, and in the ensuing conflict, the deaths of so many people resulted in the birth of an extremely destructive creature called Sin. A religion was created around this creature, providing for the means to temporarily subdue the creature only for a decade at a time, only to have it return each time. One of your characters, Auron, has already completed this journey, and realizes that there must be a way to permanently destroy Sin. Meanwhile, a Guado Maester named Seymour has murdered his father, and plans to use Sin to completely annihilate Spira because he believes that killing people means saving them, but he never seems to do anything important, aside from killing all the Ronso on Mt Gagazet. He's more ridiculous than he is threatening. Seymour is no Kefka, who looked like a clown and still managed to destroy the planet 60% of the way through Final Fantasy VI. And Tidus is a dream summoned by the spirits of the dead (fayth) who govern....Sin? This is never adequately explained in the game.

Your party travels from location to location, visiting temples on landmarks on a pilgrimage to collect all of the Aeons required to subdue Sin. Yuna proceeds on the hope that her journey can kill Sin permanently, but Auron realizes that it's all bullshit (again, he did this before), and when Lady Yunalesca tells her how Sin and Yu Yevon (the god-thing that controls Sin) work by taking control of the Final Aeon--which kills the summoner after it stops Sin--and turning it into Sin again, she chooses a different path. Oh, and, Tidus's father is Sin because he was sacrificed and turned into the Final Aeon, which was then absorbed by Yu Yevon.

There is obvious symbolism in this story. Final Fantasy has a long history of expressing anti-religious ideas, but this doesn't make up for an uneventful story, especially when Xenogears did the same thing much more effectively.

None of the characters in the game are particularly interesting, except for Auron, but that's only because he knows more than anyone else. Wakka and Tidus are the most irritating: Wakka is almost worse than Steiner in  Final Fantasy IX (in fact, they are pretty much the same character in different circumstances, though I doubt Steiner would dye his hair red and play underwater soccer). Tidus is kind of a klutz, but only because he doesn't know anything: He was teleported from Zanarkand 1000 years into the future and spends 80% of the game making an ass of himself. Yuna is earnest, but naive. Lulu has nothing in her personality going for her, so the character designers put her in a ridiculous dress to make her interesting. Kimhari was ostracized from his tribe because he's smaller than the other Ronso and his horn was busted. It was never explained how. Guides on the Internet claim that Kimhari is the least useful character in the game. Rikku is probably my favorite character next to Auron: She is very useful with the correct abilities, and she was the least grating character to listen to. Did I mention how bad the voice acting and dialogue are? I swear that nearly every voice actor in the game was reading from a cue card and have never seen their lines before. The only actress who was decent was Julia Fletcher, who played Lady Yunalesca and later played Judge Drace in Final Fantasy XII,  one of my favorite characters in that game.

I don't know if I'm being unfair to a very early RPG on the Playstation 2, but I can't help but notice that all of the party characters are significantly more detailed than any of the NPCs. The NPCs all look like they were transferred from a PS1 prototype.

The combat system did offer one major improvement: Your characters are able to switch out every turn individually. While great for leveling, at points I felt like I was playing Pokemon (though you did get to keep your turn when you switched): Characters must act or be acted upon in order to receive AP, and when you can kill monsters in a single hit, making characters take non-offensive actions just so they received AP quickly became time-consuming and tedious. On the other hand, it is arguably better than waiting until halfway or even 95% of the way through the game to level your entire party like in so many other RPGs.

I have heard it said by some of its detractors that Final Fantasy X marked the beginning of the downward trend of Final Fantasy, but I have to disagree with this because Final Fantasy XII was such an incredible step up, and that is at least partially why I am being so harsh: Why, exactly, was Final Fantasy X so widely remembered, when XII was almost completely forgotten?

Final Fantasy XII told such a complex, interesting story that went far beyond earlier FF titles; it strongly resembled Game of Thrones and threw in nuclear proliferation just for fun. Its graphics were incredible, the combat system was completely different (it played more like Knights of the Old Republic than Final Fantasy), the characters were all great--all of them!--and it had more sidequests than some Western RPGs. And few people have played it.

Skip Final Fantasy X, and play XII instead.