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| My annual year+-too-late FF short review: FF X2 by Senor Barborito 01/11/2005, 3:54pm PST | ||||
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| Pros:
1. The new card minigame is decent. First modulo addition minigame I've ever seen, anyway. Also I'm horribly entertained by the dog racing minigame in the Calm Lands, even though it's a testament to my homosexuality to enjoy a dressed-up random number generator. In sum: minigames good. 2. The dress system is good. There, I said it. I like the dress system much better than the sphere system from FFX. Although it's still not as flexible as the junction system from FF8 (ps: that's the best one), it is the most flexible since FF8, and at least Square has finally come to grips with rationing levels between characters by giving you all the characters you're going to play right at the beginning. Double plus good: being allowed to switch dresses without sitting through a fucking cutscene every time. 3. I don't know what people were talking about with "arcade" and "too fast" and "battles too hard." It's a sleepwalking exercise. While it's a marginal pain in the ass at the very beginning of the game, by the time you acquire your first couple of outfits the whole thing is so old and done you might as well be playing on old-style Wait Mode. It keeps the battle scenes fast enough to keep you from falling asleep at the wheel, which can be a problem for power levellers, so I'm going to say it was a generally good change. Cons: 1. They took out every single last interesting character from X (Auron, Lulu, Seymour, Wakka) and kept all the ones that were boring and retarded the first time around. The addition of Hot Bondage Nurse Paine is a sop thrown to everyone in the audience over the age of 13, and I felt pandered to, although Paine's voice actress is the least annoying of the three main characters. 2. The voice acting: with the interesting characters went the most bearable voices. Now it's all giggling, high-pitched, sassy girls! With real Charlie's Angels style in situ preparations! Fuck you clowns. If I wanted "attitude" I'd buy a Bratz doll and then kill myself. 3. Everything not related to OCD power levelling and minigame dominance. Gone are the elaborate funeral culture and morbid life-under-the-stormcloud philosophy of the first game, gone are the responsibilities, biases, and conspiracies that lent all the depth and maturity that could be lent to a game series in which the protagonists are painfully younger with each edition. The main conflicts here are how often to do your hair, when the optimal hair-doing times are, and desultory faction-hopping, up until the Big Thrown Together Evil. The "non-linear" gameplay is just the freedom to level wherever you want between tagging plot flags. 4. Even easier than FFX, which itself was the easiest RPG I'd ever played. Here's how to play FFX: get Anima towards end of game, win everything. Here's how to play X2: get white mage dressphere in first fifteen minutes of game, win everything. As soon as you can heal your dudes, you become an unstoppable juggernaut. It's depressing. It drives me to go play the dogs for hours, drinking heavily and scrawling poems about Squall in my tear-stained black-crushed-velvet-covered journal. Phyrric Pro: 1. Every new Final Fantasy since 8 has caused me to look back on its predecessor with nostalgic affection. I now think FFX was a pretty good game, all things considered. |
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My annual year+-too-late FF short review: FF X2 by 01/11/2005, 3:54pm PST  Re: My annual year+-too-late FF short review: FF X2 by 01/11/2005, 6:53pm PST |
