Final Fantasy X

Review - The latest RPG from Square comes under the spotlight.

I have been waiting for this game for too long. This game, or rather, the promise of this game is the main reason why I bought a PS2 in the first place. Final Fantasy has been with the Playstation right from the start, it is one of the main reasons why the consoles have been such a huge success. FF VII blew people away on its release, it was a fantastic looking game and it also played like an absolute dream. When VIII was launched it raised the bar even further, many said it wasn’t as good as VII, but no one can deny that the game was a fantastic achievement. In Final Fantasy, you live the character’s lives. You feel their passion, you become one of them, and most people are truly saddened when they finish the game. They are that good. So then, it’s only fair that we all expect amazing things from number ten. This game should, by all rights, blow us all away, just as VII did when it made the jump from SNES to the PS1. Final Fantasy X should be a killer title. So then, let’s see what Square have lined-up for us this time….

So what’s the story then? Well, I will give you an outline, but I refuse to go into depth, as that would ruin it for you. So, here we go. Ahem. We start by watching our hero, Tidus, playing at a Blitzball (think of underwater volleyball with punching) match in his home city of Zanarkland, when suddenly a huge whale/evil force/thing, called Sin, attacks the city. Tidus survives and with the help of a mysterious fellow called Auron, takes on Sin. He fails and gets sucked into a warp. The city gets destroyed and Tidus is thrown 1000 years into the future. He awakens to find that the future is in peril too…. And what follows is the normal Square-style quality plot; hero with mysterious past, world in danger, huge monsters, silly trousers. You get the idea. But onto more important matters…

The first thing that will strike you about this game are the graphics. They are quite simply incredible, beautiful even. From the very first glorious cut-scene (more on those later) to the actual in-game graphics themselves, nothing is wrong. We are talking poetry in motion here my friends, console RPG’s have never looked this good. As you can see by the sumptuous screenshots, everything is high-res and smoothed over, these are looks to die for, proving once and for all that the PS2 is not short on graphics processing power. It is also the first time that the backgrounds are not pre rendered as well. Yes, they are polygons! As for the character and monster design (in a graphical sense) everything is wonderful, the characters have great facial expressions and fluid movements, whilst the baddies all look as disgusting as a flying bird-lizard-thing should. Fantastic stuff.

So then, what of the characters? After all, you will be assuming their role for the foreseeable future; you should really know something about them. They seem like a well-balanced bunch, giving you a nice mix of hard hitters and magicians. The hard-hitting physical characters are Tidus; the blitzball pro who is the main character, Wakka; a blitzball player, who uses his gaming equipment instead of weapons, Auron; a mysterious swordsman who is always stern and serious and Kimahri; a Ronso (a blue lion-man) with the ability to learn any enemy attack. Of course, it is Final Fantasy, so there are mages. This time we have Yuna; a spirit summoner who is expected to defeat Sin. We also have Lulu, Yuna’s guardian, who is skilled at black magic and has a very strange idea of battle dress. Finally we have Rikku, who is in the middle, she is skilled at using machines and is vital later in the game when you make your own weaponry. As I said, a nicely balanced bunch.

Much of the game, plays like a standard RPG. Wander around, chat to the locals, solve a few puzzles, kill a baddie etc. It’s all fairly meat and potatoes stuff. Nothing really groundbreaking, but I wasn’t really expecting it to be. That I will leave to Final Fantasy XI. But the game was never really designed to focus on the walking around; it’s the battles and plot that really pulls in the punters…