HATERS GONNA HATE, FFX style

[Clo]

And I will hate.

I tried to play FFX recently (maybe I'm still playing it, I dunno) and it just seems to suck. The menu sucks and the voice acting sucks and the character design sucks (Lulu, whachoo doin' wearing that fur dress in Besaid? Girl.), the weapons suck.

Most importantly, the beginning sucks something fierce. It's so slow, and it's just a bunch of swimming around random ruins with the worst controls and camera control. Even the HUD seems way too proportionally large, making rooms look bigger than they really are by making every little fallen pillar visible on the HUD.

Let me rant about the camera some more: When you are in that little Besaid village, there are THREE smurfing screens before you enter the temple, which just seems so unnecessary and disorienting. First, there's the camera on the village itself. Then, as you approach the temple, the camera moves and the screen changes. Then, as you near the door, the camera and screen change again to zoom more in on the steps/hallway before you enter the temple. What the hell is the point of that?! When you walk quickly into the temple it's like FLASH FLASH FLASH. I probably explained that horribly, but maybe someone will know what I mean. And they do this everywhere!

This may be temporary hatred. Maybe I'll reach a point and I'll be like, "Oh, I remember this, I love this, this game isn't so bad!"

But right now it's a huge suckfest. Haters, hate with me.

[Jowy]

I bought a PS2 back in 2002 solely to play this. Everyone I knew was raving about how great it was. After three hours of not having an ounce of fun I just rode my bike to Hollywood Video and rented Devil May Cry instead. I've been picking it up on and off since then. Can't kill Sin, don't care, Tidus dies (thanks #eoff).

I also hate this game.

[Red Mage Coffman]

Hey, dude, me too! I started playing again recently as well! Let me share my hate with a small little story.

Crew Member: Holy trout, Sin's attacking our ship! What do we do?!
Wakka: Let me take a crack at him!
Crew Member: With what?
Wakka: My Blitzball!
Crew Member: ... We're so smurfing boned.

Just so many stupid things about this game now that I go back and play through it all again. How did I fall in love with... THIS? I'll never really know... Hopefully, like you said, I'll remember later on.

[Laddy]

Yes. YES. It's about time people realize just how insipidly stupid this game's plot is. It's filled with cliched, gimmicky, unlikable characters, an incredibly pretentious theme in a convoluted plot that ceases to make sense if you think about it after like 5 minutes of thinking about it, and some of the worst character designs ever. Tidus and Wakka in particular. Oh, and the Sphere Grid is the worst character advancement mechanic ever. At least with the Crystarium you had multiple roles to advance.

The voice acting, location design, and battle system are good though.

[Clo]

I was loving on the FFX hate until Laddy said the voice acting was good.

No. Tidus and Yuna make me want to just stop playing, hearing them speak alone. I will put down the damn controller and walk away.

[Jowy]

i just left the room and made lunch during the part in moonflow where they were making out or whatever. and that awkward laughing scene is cringe worthy. the cutscene before you have to fight Lady Yunalesca is pretty cool the first four times you see it though.

smurf yunalesca so much, man. that's the worst boss fight ever.

[maybee]

Final Fantasy X is amazing. It has terrible voice-acting but the battle system, Sphere Grid and storyline is bloody fantastic. So emotional and beautiful. I love Yuna's huge crush on Seymour at the beginning and her friendship towards Tidus and then when Yuna finds out that Seymour has killed his own dad she gets all emotional and Tidus tries not to get upset about the wedding idea, then Yuna stands up to Seymour when he plans to use her like a chess piece and Tidus kissing Yuna in the lake aaand then Tidus finding out that Yuna is on a serious suicidal mission and just all the cries.

And the ending. So many cries.

And it has Rikku in it. One of the best Final Fantasy females. She's cheerful, but not annoying cheerful. She's naive, but not annoying naive like Yuna. She's intelligent and wise and is a good friend to even Wakka who is incredibly racist towards her.

No. Tidus and Yuna make me want to just stop playing, hearing them speak alone. I will put down the damn controller and walk away.

Haha. I usually turn down the volume unless it's a good song coming up or playing and just rock out to Bruno Mars or something. The only one who has a good voice is Auron.

[Laddy]

I was loving on the FFX hate until Laddy said the voice acting was good.

OH GOD NO I COMPLETELY MESSED UP THERE. I meant the music. The music is some of the best in the series.

The voice acting, with the exception of Rikku, Auron, and Jecht, was either flat (Yuna, Seymour, Kimahri, Lulu) or obnoxious (Tidus, Wakka). So yeah, the voice acting was embarrassingly bad.

[Jiro]

I'm going to have to go and get Pete and we'll have to educate you all on why you're wrong.

I tried to play FFX recently (maybe I'm still playing it, I dunno) and it just seems to suck. The menu sucks and the voice acting sucks and the character design sucks (Lulu, whachoo doin' wearing that fur dress in Besaid? Girl.), the weapons suck.

Her dress is made out of belts. It's a Nomura thing, just run with it.

Most importantly, the beginning sucks something fierce. It's so slow, and it's just a bunch of swimming around random ruins

Final Fantasy VII's beginning sucks. It's just a bunch of running around Mako Reactors. Final Fantasy VIII's beginning sucks. It's just a bunch of running around Balamb Garden. Final Fantasy IX's beginning sucks. It's just a bunch of running around the Prima Vista and then Alexandria. Please note that all the while there are tutorial battles and character introductions.

Say you were transported to a foreign world after coming into contact with a demonic whale. Would you wake up and immediately start fighting something? Or would you bust out your phone and have a rock concert right there on your own? It's slow because that's how pacing works. Final Fantasy X is not simply a game, it is a story telling experience.

with the worst controls and camera control. Even the HUD seems way too proportionally large, making rooms look bigger than they really are by making every little fallen pillar visible on the HUD.

The HUD is pretty bollocks and sometimes the controls aren't quite what I'd expect. Oh well. There's a million other games that do it worse. Kingdom Hearts has atrocious camera control.

Let me rant about the camera some more: When you are in that little Besaid village, there are THREE smurfing screens before you enter the temple, which just seems so unnecessary and disorienting. First, there's the camera on the village itself. Then, as you approach the temple, the camera moves and the screen changes. Then, as you near the door, the camera and screen change again to zoom more in on the steps/hallway before you enter the temple. What the hell is the point of that?! When you walk quickly into the temple it's like FLASH FLASH FLASH. I probably explained that horribly, but maybe someone will know what I mean. And they do this everywhere!

I know what you mean. Hey, next time you watch a movie, tell me if they use one camera angle. Final Fantasy X wanted to create absolutely breathtaking environments, and it did. Could you imagine if it was just 2D and you didn't get to see the intricacies of the environment? While, yes, three screens is Besaid seems a bit excessive, you have to remember that previously these three areas might have had actual loading transitions. When you walk through Narshe, the screen pans up. When you walk through Corneria, the camera pans too. Other locations like, say, parts of Midgar, have entirely separate screens for different parts of the same Slum area.

Once again I reiterate that FFX is not simply trying to be a game. It was trying to infuse a rich storyline with detailed environments to create an experience. I mean at least you're only fresh to the game. You can't possibly be wrong forever, unlike the rest of these haters.

Hey, dude, me too! I started playing again recently as well! Let me share my hate with a small little story.

Crew Member: Holy trout, Sin's attacking our ship! What do we do?!
Wakka: Let me take a crack at him!
Crew Member: With what?
Wakka: My Blitzball!
Crew Member: ... We're so smurfing boned.

Just so many stupid things about this game now that I go back and play through it all again. How did I fall in love with... THIS? I'll never really know... Hopefully, like you said, I'll remember later on.

So the mechanic of Wakka's physical attack is a bit iffy. Have you ever been smashed in the face by a basketball before? Because I imagine it to be similar to that. But, let's take a look at some of the other strange weapon types before we start calling this one out.

Final Fantasy IX's rackets. What do they even do? Flings light balls at people. Sure. Next time I'm playing tennis I'll be sure to give that a go. Eiko also uses flutes. Yeah, way to beat something with an instrument, I'm sure that's going to help. Let's not forget that Quina uses forks as a weapon either.

Several games make use of books as a weapon. I know Jason Bourne can kill a man with a magazine and a hardcover but I think you'll find the true lethality is in the fact that it is magic. What happened last time you tried to play Blitzball? It's pretty hard to get it to work considering the game relies on physics and technology not present in our world. Who's to say that Blitzballs themselves don't have strange qualities.

I'm not even done with examples yet. Gunblades. Rinoa's Blaster Edges. The smurfing recurring boomerang which, despite the actual function, still manages to return after every throw. Barret's Gunarm which is fired...how? Where does the ammunition enter it? Nanaki's hair clips? What the smurf? Megaphones? There are numerous more examples of stupid weapons. You seem to have more complaints though, so lay 'em on me and I can tell you why you're wrong

Yes. YES. It's about time people realize just how insipidly stupid this game's plot is. It's filled with cliched, gimmicky, unlikable characters, an incredibly pretentious theme in a convoluted plot that ceases to make sense if you think about it after like 5 minutes of thinking about it, and some of the worst character designs ever.

Let's deal with the characters first. Clichéd? Perhaps. They do fit into some archetypes. But then, they're meant to. The point is to have a group of people working together who complement and clash with each other. But they're not 2D carbon copies of archetypes either. Tidus is a whiny douchebag? Okay, but he's also got severe childhood issues with his father and mother. Plus, he stands up to everything when he decides that the woman he loves isn't going to die. What about Tidus being the egomaniac sports star? Again, he's got a bunch of insecurities because he's always living in his father's shadow. Then he gets transported to a completely different world and is still living in his father's shadow, only this time his father is a giant smurfing whale monster who is hell bent on destroying everything. Then he has to come to terms with his own mortality, a complete existential crisis because he's not even real and does it all while still maintaining his flaws; that is, he's still a fish out of water and completely clueless on how to act in Spira.

Should I write essays on all of the characters or will that suffice for now?

Tidus and Wakka in particular.

Ugh Tidus and Wakka are two of the better characters.

Oh, and the Sphere Grid is the worst character advancement mechanic ever. At least with the Crystarium you had multiple roles to advance.

At least with the Crystarium you had no options. Oh wait, that's not a positive. You can do whatever the smurf you want with the Sphere Grid. You can nerf yourself for crying out loud. The Crystarium is just like FFXIII itself in that it pretends to give you options but it is really a lengthy corridor.

The voice acting, location design, and battle system are good though.

Well we're in agreement on this then.

I'll be back to respond to the inevitable wrongness that this thread breeds soon

EDIT:

I was loving on the FFX hate until Laddy said the voice acting was good.

OH GOD NO I COMPLETELY MESSED UP THERE. I meant the music. The music is some of the best in the series.

The voice acting, with the exception of Rikku, Auron, and Jecht, was either flat (Yuna, Seymour, Kimahri, Lulu) or obnoxious (Tidus, Wakka). So yeah, the voice acting was embarrassingly bad.

The music is good. The voice acting is not amazing, I'll give you that. Keep in mind that it was the first outing for SE on voice acting. Yuna is probably my least favourite voice because she just makes me tired but I would say the rest are still passable. Well I mean Kimahri doesn't really even count as being voiced.

[Yar]

The only thing I really truly enjoyed about X was the CTB battle system. It was new, fresh, and it was to play around with.

That said...
The Sphere Grid system is my biggest gripe and makes me cringe. It gives you the false impression that you have the ability to develop your characters with a hands-on approach. It does not do that. You are basically railroaded in to one line of growth for each character with only minor pit-stops along the way. You can't open the sphere grid to really do anything you want until you're almost done with the game. And then what's the point? Everyone is pretty much already set in their ways and it's no use to change it.

The characters were meh. Archetypes that aren't even new for the series. I had trouble caring about any of them.

Much like XIII, this game is extremely linear and does not leave much for a second playthrough.

[Laddy]

Let's deal with the characters first. Clichéd? Perhaps. They do fit into some archetypes. But then, they're meant to. The point is to have a group of people working together who complement and clash with each other. But they're not 2D carbon copies of archetypes either. Tidus is a whiny douchebag? Okay, but he's also got severe childhood issues with his father and mother. Plus, he stands up to everything when he decides that the woman he loves isn't going to die. What about Tidus being the egomaniac sports star? Again, he's got a bunch of insecurities because he's always living in his father's shadow. Then he gets transported to a completely different world and is still living in his father's shadow, only this time his father is a giant smurfing whale monster who is hell bent on destroying everything. Then he has to come to terms with his own mortality, a complete existential crisis because he's not even real and does it all while still maintaining his flaws; that is, he's still a fish out of water and completely clueless on how to act in Spira.

I don't doubt that a lot of Final Fantasy X's ideas are intentional. But intentional does not equal well-executed.

I never doubted Tidus' situation with his father and his home being genuine, I never doubted that his reaction was deserved. My issue is that it was handled with all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb. Tidus dislikes his father, yes, but this is rarely explained in ways other than him talking about constantly.

I understand it's an important aspect of the plot, but they really should have used a "show, don't tell" storytelling mechanic. Tidus really only has one method of displaying his dislike for the guy: talking about it. And while I can understand the need for such dialogue, going through 40 hours of less-than-stellar voicing about his poor relationship with his father eventually gets a bit tiring.

And again, I realize Tidus' situation in being an unfamiliar world is significant as well. But again, this is handled with little subtlety. He blatantly disrespects people's beliefs and customs from the get-go (and even as wrong as they are, he had no reason to believe this at that point). I realize he wants to go home and doesn't fit in, but after 40 hours of him speaking about this it eventually loses its sympathy.

In short: Tidus as a character isn't a problem, it's the lack of subtlety in the writing that causes him to be unappealing as his desires and insecurities either become a topic of long conversation or handled in a way in which his motives are not well-defined. I think the character's struggles should have been weaved in to the story more through his unspoken reactions and hints rather than multiple speeches.

[Flying Arrow]

Clo,

If you're having trouble wanting to continue already, just wait until you get to Luca. It's one of the biggest trolls designed by a big-name company.

I think FFX is overall a pretty ill-conceived game (not necessarily a bad one). I like it in a way, despite the game itself really not wanting me to.

[Jinx]

Whoever said Yuna starts the game off having a crush on Seymour is just WRONG.

[black orb]

>>> lol, all your complains about this game are exactly what I love the most on it..

[Formalhaut]

The only thing I really truly enjoyed about X was the CTB battle system. It was new, fresh, and it was to play around with.

That said...
The Sphere Grid system is my biggest gripe and makes me cringe. It gives you the false impression that you have the ability to develop your characters with a hands-on approach. It does not do that. You are basically railroaded in to one line of growth for each character with only minor pit-stops along the way. You can't open the sphere grid to really do anything you want until you're almost done with the game. And then what's the point? Everyone is pretty much already set in their ways and it's no use to change it.

I'm going to assume you have never used the expert sphere grid. In that, all the characters are in the centre and you can choose them wherever they wish. The whole point of the standard grid was to people who didn't really wanted to be bothered with planning their route.