Final Fantasy Meme Day 2

[moonwise]

Not even a question on this one: FFX-2, or Pretty Pretty Princess Dress-Up Magic Go!!!! (as I call it.) I should probably save this for Day 11, because it's my least favorite and a gross disappointment.

FFX was such a sad, sweet story, which made me very excited for FFX-2 when it was first announced. I was so happy that Tidus and Yuna might get a second chance. Then the weirdness started. Yuna... a pop star? Really? Rikku wearing even less than she did in the first game? LeBlanc getting orgasmic over a back rub? Really really really? The game was so... sexist. Yuna was never one of my most favorite characters, but she had a backbone of solid steel, and to see her turned into a vapid singer with hot pants on was disappointing.

The Dress-spheres were pretty terrible too. Being able to change jobs in the middle of a battle was a nice idea, but the truth of the matter was that battles usually didn't last all that long. Plus, you couldn't put on your Super Special Prom Dress until you'd passed through all the other nodes, by which time either the battle had ended or the monster had eaten you. Some of those Garment Grids had eight to ten nodes on them, which meant you'd have to change your dress seven to nine times, and so Limit Breaks were more or less useless. If the turn-based battle system had been retained, it might have been better, but there were so many options to scroll through that I could never find what I needed in time.

The creators wanted to get away from FFX's themes of sadness, but FFX-2 didn't balance that well enough. If it hadn't been FFX's sequel, maybe it would have worked on its own. But it didn't work at all for me, and it ended up on eBay.

Comments

[maeveth.livejournal.com]

NGL, my reaction to X-2 was something along the lines of "Tidus, are you SURE you want a second chance? Really? Seriously? Did you see this?"

[arafel.livejournal.com]

Well, he probably digs the Daisy Dukes she wears.

[mountain-hiker.livejournal.com]

All of them :P

[arafel.livejournal.com]

But you played them anyway...?

[rydain]

Aw man. I loved this game. I liked the Charlie's Angels vibe, the chance to enjoy the upbeat Spira aesthetic without sitting through half a trillion cut scenes and Blitzball matches (never finished FFX after I accidentally ate my 20+ hour save and got bored of the replay to that point), and the way it got into the issue of two competing factions struggling for control of a postwar world. There were boatloads of side quests and missions - most way more fun than not - and I loved the battle system. I enjoyed the speed, and the garment grids came in handy for various difficult optional fights - such as this notorious pain in the ass who I LOLPWNED.

Sure, FFX-2 had its share of cheesecake, but I saw it as more of a Girl Power game than a heterosexual male gaze droolfest. Thus, it never pinged me as sexist. Yuna may have been lovestruck for Tidus, but that's within reasonable belief for a young woman, and I don't remember that being the focus of the story. It wound up being about the faction schism and your typical Squeenix Gotta Save the World(tm) schtick - this time, from a malicious Tidus lookalike (actually, his precursor!) that the spheres were leading our heroes to.

[arafel.livejournal.com]

See, this is exactly what I was talking about - from your perspective, FFX-2 was a fun game, but you also say that you never finished FFX. If it had stood alone, then I might have liked it better, but it didn't. It was a sequel, and IMO it took everything that made the first game poignant and threw it out the window. I liked Sphere Break, but the matchmaking and the carnival sidequests rubbed me the wrong way.

I did play a fair amount of the game, though, and I also pwned Angra Mainyu with two tricked-up Gunners and an Alchemist. :D

[rydain]

Very good point, and I might be inclined to agree more with the FFX-2 disliking crowd if I had finished the first game beforehand. Tone dissonance grates on my nerves. (For instance, I can never enjoy SRS BSNESS fanfiction based on children's books whose canon seems to exist in a floaty idealistic world rather than a sticky and messy realistic one.)

Glad you also had fun with Angra Mainyu. ^_^

[ladyofthesea.livejournal.com]

I detested X-2's storyline with a passion, but it was a lot of fun to play. That's about all I can give it.

[arafel.livejournal.com]

The only reason I was playing the game was to get the perfect ending, and when my percentages didn't add up, I abandoned the game. :P

[ladyofthesea.livejournal.com]

The writer in me loved FFX's ending because it was so tragic. To bring them back together in X-2 sort of negated how tender that ending scene was. When Yuna told Tidus she loved him I fell to pieces.