Final Fantasy X-2 - Review (20 Years Later)
Going where the franchise has never gone before... But also, where it did in the last game.
The Final Fantasy series as a whole has always been one about reinvention. Each mainline iteration of the series has been in an entirely new universe, with it’s own set of rules, lore and idiosyncrasies. Final Fantasy X-2 is a whole new territory for Square, in that is is the first direct sequel ever to be released to a mainline entry into the franchise.
Final Fantasy X-2 would also be a milestone release for Square, following the successes of both Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts, Square entered into talks with fellow Japanese publishing powerhouse, Enix, to merge and Final Fantasy X-2 became the last game to be published in Japan solely by Square, and became the first game published internationally by Square Enix.
So, how does a title that has so many milestones attached to it hold up? Well… It’s a bit of a mixed bag really.
An Idol Trio & A Big Ass Robot
As Final Fantasy X-2 is a direct sequel to Final Fantasy X, we follow it’s female protagonist, Yuna, through a brand new story throughout Spira. She is joined by original party member Rikku, who has grown her hair and lost some of her clothes, and newcomer, Paine, who appears to fill the goth girl void left by Lulu from the first game.
Yuna’s role within the first game was that of a pilgrimage throughout the world of Spira in order to gain enough power to defeat the monstrocity of Sin and provide peace to the people that had been terrorised for over a millennia. The purpose of this game is to ask: What happens after we save the world?
Well, in Yuna’s case, after she saved the world, she became the lead in a J-Pop Idol trio, called YRP.
While that is true, it’s not actually Yuna’s main impetus within Final Fantasy X-2. It is revealed to us part way through the story that after Sin is defeated, Yuna finds a sphere, which shows a recording of a person, who very much looks like Tidus, behind bars and yelling to someone behind a camera. Yuna, who very much fell in love with Tidus before he faded away at the end of the previous game, is very much invested in trying to find Tidus again, and becomes a Sphere Hunter to find out more information.
Since the fall of Sin, Spira as a continent hasn’t changed much, but how the people live has changed drastically. No longer is machina vilified, sacred temples, such as the one in Zanarkand, are now tourist attractions, and people across the world search out Spheres in order to sell them for great amounts of money. Yuna, Rikku and Paine are such sphere hunters, and form a team named the Gullwings. They travel on a ship with Rikku’s brother, Brother, as the pilot. He doesn’t play a huge part of the plot, but his amazing infatuation with Yuna is adorable. Their tech support is a 12 year old kid named Shinra, a funny little callback to FFVII, who is a tech genius and managed to create a device that allows spheres to grant certain abilities to our party members.
Typical Final Fantasy games will have your party go on a journey across the world to accomplish your missions, but in Final Fantasy X-2, you’ve already been across the whole world in the previous game. We’d already unlocked the airship, been to pretty much every environment, is there any need to go on that same journey on foot again? Apparently not. After the initial mission where we are tutorialised on the new combat, the whole world is unlocked for us to travel to, through a menu. We don’t need to fly the ship manually, just select the area we want to go to.
There are five chapters of story in Final Fantasy X-2, and the idea is that the Gullwings will travel to each of the 15+ locations within the game, proceed through 20 minutes to an hour of side missions in each location in the hopes of finding a new dressphere, which unlocks a new job for our characters. The idea is that most location will have a small overarching story through each of the five chapters. For instance, Macalania Woods has a story about musicians and the Moonflow has a story about a side character trying to put on a show and needs assistance.
After the fall of Sin, as I mentioned previously, Spira is in a very different place. No longer are the Al Bhed wholly villainised for using machina, a new faction has been formed called the Machine Faction, led by Gippal. The youths who were disenfranchised by the failings of the Yevon religion have formed the Youth League, led by Nooj, and a reformist party looking to bring the Yevon teachings to a more modern age, in the form of New Yevon, led by Baralai.
These three factions and their leader used to be part of an elite warrior team, named the Crimson Warriors, alongside Paine, until an accident happened and they all went their separate ways. Part way through the story, it’s revealed that the sphere Yuna found that saw Tidus behind bars, was actually a thousand years old and depicted a fallen soldier of the Machina War named Shuyin. Shuyin had wanted to wake an ancient and all powerful machina that could destroy all of Spira, named Vegnagun. Due to the whole spirit things of this universe, Shuyin, despite being killed a thousand years ago, his spirit is still running wild and has been able to some nefarious things.
I don’t particularly understand what Shuyin actually does, but it involves resurrecting the Dark Aeons that Yuna had collected and opening up holes at the temples across Spira and kidnapping the three leaders of the various factions to do his bidding. Ultimately this just allows the Gullwings to enter the holes, find and destroy Vegnagun and then Shuyin, rendering the threat pretty much moot and providing a piss poor resolution to the game.
I liked the individual stories found in the side missions throughout Spira and finding out how people had progressed past the threat of Sin, but the overarching plot felt a bit phoned in. I’m not entirely sure why, if Vegnagun was so all-powerful, that it couldn’t have been used to fight Sin in the first place. Oh well. Hindsight and all that.
Combat
Back in Final Fantasy X, I raved about the battle system implemented there, the Conditional Time Battle system. The CTB system allowed party members to be swapped in and out at will, and actions would make changes to the turn order depending on the action selected. It gave a great amount of player agency and manipulation on how battles could go… So in Final Fantasy tradition, with a new game, it’s time to throw that out of the window.
The Active Time Battle system has returned and had a glowup to go with it, taking some cues from the CTB system. The main thing borrowed from the CTB system is that while there is an ATB bar does have to scroll in order for an action to be selected, the time needed is variable. Yuna’s basic attack would cause a 3 second ATB to follow before her next attack, however, if Yuna used a special attack named Trigger Happy, that would be followed by a 5 second ATB timer before she could attack again. This would put an extra layer of strategy upon the player as they would need to make sure that you weren’t left unawares by an incoming attack.
I have to admit, I’m not the biggest fan of the ATB system. I like being able to strategise and think through my attacks and with ATB, I panic a little and end up just spamming through the basic attack command. With Final Fantasy X-2, the ATB is so fucking fast! I don’t like to swear in these posts, but holy shit. They’re ridiculously fast, even by changing the ATB speed in the settings menu to slow, I still felt it was too fast that I ended up spamming attack as I had ATB-based anxiety.
The main gimmick of FFX-2 is the Dressphere system, a spin on the job system of FF3 and FF5, wherein our party can change jobs mid combat. While this would ultimately require an ATB to change jobs, it gives so much flexibility to the combat that it doesn’t even matter. Get hit by a hard hitting attack, immediately change someone over to a White Mage and start healing up. Encounter a boss? Change over to a Songstress and start debuffing the crap out of the enemy in front of you. Needing to grind a bit? Change to Berserkers and just hit everything as hard as possible.
Dresspheres would mainly be gotten throughout the side stories, giving the player the impetus to actually play the side stories… Except I kinda didn’t realise this. Initially the game highlights where the main story focus missions would be and for the first 3 chapters that’s just where I went. I don’t know how many dresspheres I missed, but from what I can gather, it was quite a few.
Dresspheres would need to be levelled up in order to gain more abilities, just like the magicite system from Final Fantasy VI, again this gives a lot of player agency as the player can choose which abilities to learn with the dressphere. My issue with this system is that some sort of JP or AP is required to learn these moves, this is gained through battle but it’s never actually clear how or why it’s earned. It’s just a generic number within the dressphere menu and never explained further. As a fan of Dark Souls, I always appreciate not having my hand held within games, but I do appreciate it when systems are explained properly.
Further giving depth to the Dressphere system is the Garment Grid system. As the Sphere Grid from Final Fantasy X has gone away, the Garment Grid is the replacement and determines which Dresspheres can be chosen within battle. It’s not the most complex of systems, but does add an additional layer of consideration. There are many different grids to find within Spira and some give additional abilities and stats depending on how many different Dresspheres are used within battle. I always love having player agency and having the Garment Grid was always a welcome addition, even if I did just mostly switch between three different jobs per character for the whole game.
Presentation
Final Fantasy X was an incredibly popular game in an already incredibly popular franchise, so it stands to reason that Square wanted to capitalise on that popularity by releasing the first direct sequel in the series. My issue with this is… We’ve seen everything there is to Spira. I think throughout the whole game there were 4 environments in total that were created for Final Fantasy X-2, the rest was reused assets. I’m not one to complain about reusing already built assets to help ease production, but there was no excitement in getting to a new area, areas were 100% the exact same as they were when we were journeying to fight Sin. It disappointed me greatly that not only were we going through the same locations as the first game all over again, but the intention is that we go through those same locations at least five times. Now I understand where the second half of Bravely Default came from…
With the amount of asset reuse in Final Fantasy X-2, one of my gripes with FFX still persisted, and that’s that the movement is based on the eight cardinal directions, as the camera moves, so does the movement of the character. It became so frustrating to move Yuna forward and then the camera would move and she’d veer into the wall.
Adding to the fact that this is a game that heavily reused assets in order to save a lot on development costs, all the NPCs are so low poly that’s not even funny. Due to the fact that the main characters of Yuna, Rikku and Paine are very detailed, alongside some of the other story focused characters, it’s just so jarring that the NPCs are so low res and low poly. It took away my focus from cutscenes whenever they were displayed. I understand that it wouldn’t be feasible to have everyone in the game as high detailed as Yuna, but it felt so weird and out of place. Maybe it wasn’t as noticeable in the original version of the game and the HD Remaster just highlights it, I’m not entirely sure.
One thing that I didn’t mention in my Final Fantasy X review was that the audio mixing of the character dialogue was so off, and that really continues here. Final Fantasy X was the first game in the series with voiced dialogue, and from what I’ve seen online since, there was very little audio direction given from Square, so the intended tone of lines would not match what the voice actor had provided. There would be lines of audio that were sped up to match the amount of time given for the Japanese audio and it would sound super weird. Well, that continues exactly the same here. With the addition that Yuna is supposed to be a decisive leader, but the voice actress is very softly spoken, it just doesn’t give the impression that she is a leader, to me at least.
In Conclusion…
Final Fantasy X-2 was a game that represented multiple milestones. The last game in Japan published solely by Square, the first game internationally to be published by the newly created Square Enix, the first game in the franchise to be a direct sequel continuing the story of a previous title, and finally, the first game ever to have an all female party.
It’s a shame that the writing, the reused locations, the heavy backtracking to areas and lack of money put into the project holds back something that could have been incredibly great. The idea of Yuna, Rikku and newcomer Paine, trekking across the world hunting for spheres could have been incredible, but the lack of anything new outside of combat just hurts so bad.
Granted, I didn’t play a completionist game and didn’t realise that I was supposed to go to every single area in every single chapter, so I’ve missed out on getting a fully well rounded story, this could be the reason why I feel let down by the game. My only hope is that if the rumours / hopes of a Final Fantasy X Remake is realised, that a X-2 Remake could also be on the card. Also maybe X-3? Please?
For these reasons, I can only give Final Fantasy X-2 a 2 thumbs up.
