A Year in Final Fantasy: X

Final Fantasy X is awkward, inscrutable, sometimes shockingly ugly, filled with weird characterization, often terrible voice acting, and a runtime that's probably about fifteen hours too long. It's the first step into digital cinematics as opposed to actual gameplay; it's overly bombastic and it has very little subtlety. These are the sorts of things that a particularly stingy critic of the game could level against FFX, and indeed, most of these things are very much true. But shouldn't games with this much ambition be championed? Don't those weird, jutting idiosyncracies not only give a game like this a charm that its more technically perfect progeny could only dream of, and even further, don't those idiosyncracies define the video game industry? Final Fantasy X is far from the video game "ideal," but that gives it something so much harder to attain as organically as Sakaguchi et. al have here: real emotion. 

Now, that's maybe something that video games don't need to try to attain – one of my favourite reviewers, Derek from CGRUndertow, recently did a review of Dragon Age 2 from the perspective of the complete irrelevance of the video game storyline, even in games that do them about as well as they can be done, and to some degree, I actually agree with him. Video games, as a medium, are not designed as story delivery devices. There's always a disconnect between what you're doing and what what you're doing means. Nowhere is that more clear than in the role-playing genre, where what you're doing – exploring, fighting, and navigating menus, has absolutely nothing to do with what actually happens in the game.

However, outside of a game's potential ludonarrative (that is, the narrative that actions and player interaction creates), there's something that can happen when you have two dichotomous "wholes" that should exist in opposition to each other, and in Final Fantasy X, that opposition between "gameplay" and "story" is separated by as wide a gulf as anything in the Final Fantasy franchise. Games don't need to tell stories, but they end up telling you one anyways – you're hopefully involved with the characters and involved in what happens; you want to see them turn out OK. When a game is able to effectively append on a story to this story that always exists, even in games like Pong or Tetris, that can make your interaction that much more meaningful. So it's true: games don't need stories, but if they can do them the right way, why not?

On the one hand, you have a traditional, almost retro gameplay system – a more-or-less strictly turn-based battle system tied to random encounters on a field map that you have to navigate. Outside of some inconsequential minigames and some menu navigation, that's about all that Final Fantasy X requires of the player. And on the other hand, the story, now delivered fully-voiced, tied to cinematics both in-engine and pre-rendered that are leaps and bounds ahead of anything that had been seen up to that point. Simply put, this is something that should not work, especially once you consider the premise.

But that premise, which promises so much angst and embarrassing future-sports talk (the main character, Tidus, plays in a ridiculous underwater water polo-type game called blitzball), turns out to be utterly fantastic, and so too does the gameplay. Both are a little broken, but just like I posited in my Final Fantasy VII review, it's the broken bits that give the game charm, rather than destroying anything of value.

See, Final Fantasy has, for the last fifteen years or so, stood in as a shorthand for ever-escalating technical prowess and overly-emotive storytelling in video games. So doesn't it just make the series that much more lovable to discover that not everything fits together perfectly? It doesn't feel like the product of bad design or brazen capitalism (at least, not by this point in the series) – rather, it feels much more auteur-like, as if Sakaguchi, Yoshinori Kitase and others, are simply expressing exactly what they want to, conventional wisdom be damned. There's of course the ties to the series' history that enables less than perfect design to creep in, but the willingness to try new things, even if those things end up being pretty small in the scheme of "all of video game design principles," is heartening, at least to me.

What's interesting about Final Fantasy X is that it seems to make juxtaposition its primary feature. Yes, it's a story about a cocky, rambunctious blitzball player hurled 1,000 years into the future, but it's also an incredibly somber tale of lost faith. Yes, it's often as inscrutably weird as anything has ever been, with plenty of jargon and inexplicable occurances, but at it's heart, it's really an often-righteously angry polemic against the necessity of dogmatic religion (a theme that would be brought back, to far diminished results, in Final Fantasy XIII). Yes, the the character designs are outrageous, but they're also real, honest-to-God characters, with actual characterization, and it's actually really easy to care about them. And yes, it's a game that spirals out of control in the last ten hours, with far too much tedious battling, but it's also generous enough to be some of the most tactically satisfying JRPG battling that has ever existed.

Doing a brief plot summary would never work, so let's just say this: the game sends Tidus and a band of "guardians" out along with Yuna, a summoner, on a pilgrimage to defeat a monster named Sin, who is supposed to stand in as a physical manifestation of all of humanity's wrongdoing. That's the basic outline, but how the game gets there is often masterful, as characters lose their faith and restore their resolve in the one thing they can hold onto, which is humanity. This is something that, as a pretty staunch atheist, I can get behind (even as a game that is intended to restore faith – that is, Dragon Quest IX – can be one of my favourite games ever made), and little details that the time-travelling narrative allows us to see about this religion are unusually incisive for the Final Fantasy series. Without spoiling anything, let us say that most Spira's religion is based on throwaway details from the previous society of Zanarkand, which to me seems like as big of a repudiation of monotheistic religious teachings as anything I've come across. Now, the game gets a little too twisted around to maintain this righteous anger for the entirety of its runtime, and as a result it becomes a bit unfocused, but for those first twenty-five hours or so, this is as strong a takedown of religion in a visual medium as I've seen.

Really, though, what makes Final Fantasy X so great is how buttery-smooth it is. When a game is able to include so many elements of game design that I've come to detest, such as endless cutscenes, awkward interaction with environments and a focus on flashiness, the fact that I simply didn't care about any of these shortcomings means something must be very right. I'm five games into my Final Fantasy exploration and I still haven't figured it out, but I think it has to do with a supportive gameplay structure rather than an integrative one. When the two halves of the game equation – that is, story or gameplay – fail to support one another, the entire game crumbles. This is in stark opposition to a game like Ocarina of Time, where the story and the gameplay are so intricately interwoven that to lose one element would mean losing everything. The story could exist without the gameplay or vice-versa in a Final Fantasy game, but having both elements firing on all cylinders makes everything work. It's perhaps the opposite of what I usually look for in games, but having all of the elements work independently of one another – that is, graphics, gameplay, sound, characterization, etc. – at the highest level can be an effective strategy as well.

So does the whole game suffer because the storytelling methods (voice acting, cutscenes) don't always work? No, of course not, because there's so much more here to hold everything up. Do I wish that the game hadn't seen fit to throw in abstract puzzle-solving? Aye, that I do. And I wish that the voice actors were better, and that the last few hours weren't such a slog, and that every character was given the pathos of Yuna and Auron, and that Rikku didn't really exist. Yes, this is all true, but criticizing this game for those reasons feels wrong. It nails everything that's important, and more than that, it inspires a feeling that will not let go. Sure, this is maybe a game best played by lonely fifteen-year-olds, but while I was playing Final Fantasy X, it meant something to me. I could disparage it for the decisions it made; I could sing its simple, traditional battle system's praises to the high heavens (OK, I promised I wouldn't talk about the battle system too much this time, but FUCKING RIGHT ON, SQUARESOFT: you finally understood that a logical, functional system works far better than one that requires twenty hours of explanation) or I could praise the game's soundtrack till I was blue in the face. But Final Fantasy X is to be taken on its own merits, and I don't give a damn whether you identify with it or not: I did, and that has to mean something.