A Year in Final Fantasy: X-2

No one can accurately prepare you for how shitty Final Fantasy X-2 is.

The problems are myriad, a thousand-fold really. This is a sequel to a game that really resonated with me, but born in the pits of sludgy capitalism, given a good sprinkle of gross fanservice and gutted of anything resembling either good gameplay on a fundamental level, or even anything resembling my favourite elements of past Final Fantasy games. This is the beginning of the end.

Maybe I'm putting too much blame at the feet of the newly-minted Square Enix, but FFX-2 really feels like a company hedging their bets after a particularly bloody merger – this is a game that is really unlike anything I've ever played before, but feels completely devoid of good design or interesting gameplay. Indeed, Final Fantasy X-2 really feels like a dilution, an attempt to water down everything to make it more palatable to an even bigger audience – which is baffling to me. Final Fantasy, at this point especially, was synonymous with quality gaming, with lavish production values and emotional (for better or worse) storytelling, but it seems like Square Enix got greedy right off the bat, and demanded more. You can tell what kind of artistic sense Square Enix (as opposed to its far more idiosyncratic forebears, Squaresoft and Enix) had when they thought that they could bring in "the masses" with a sequel to a game beloved for all the reasons this one isn't.

Essentially, FFX-2 asks the question, "what happens after you save the world?" It's an interesting enough concept, one that really hadn't been explored before in the Final Fantasy lineage, but it's completely and utterly squandered in the first minute you start the game. Because if there's one thing that Final Fantasy X was missing, it was… J-Pop.

OK, maybe that's unfair – the whole game isn't susceptible to that J-Pop nightmare that is the game's opening cinematic, but the general spirit is still there: this was to be the "pop" Final Fantasy game, a game that would be accessible enough for anyone to play and would shake up the general Final Fantasy formula. Unfortunately, the way that Square Enix went about this was to assume that everyone who would play Final Fantasy X-2 would have the intelligence of your average four-year-old.

I'm not the type to defend a game based on its reams of unintelligible back-end tinkering, or the statistics or obscure tactics necessary for survival, but Final Fantasy X-2 dials back the complexity of your average Final Fantasy game far too much. Equipping your characters with new equipment is a thing of the past; you only have three characters to do battle with; and the battle system is your standard Final Fantasy active-time battle system, but given far less tactical considerations than any game before it (especially the masterwork that is its predecessor's conditional battle system). The only new idea brought in is the ability to change jobs on the fly (an idea repeated almost verbatim in Final Fantasy XIII), replete with a lavish animation detailing… dressspheres.

Jesus. Christ.

OK, dressspheres basically allow your character to change jobs on the fly, but what a dresssphere is is literally your character changing clothes into the garments of the new job (i.e., black mage, gunner, warrior, white mage, etc.). Switching jobs on the fly isn't a terrible idea, but the pervy way the game fetishizes these clothing changes is. It's fanservice of the grossest kind, allowing bottom-feeding male gamers to get their leer on while making female gamers incredibly uncomfortable.

Fanservice on its own isn't a terrible thing necessarily (look to Smash Bros. or Marvel vs. Capcom, for instance), but it has to be handled right and in the right context, and a sequel to the grim, fatalistic Final Fantasy X was never going to be that context. The game doesn't treat its plot with any respect, but more than that, it doesn't treat its characters and the player with any respect. With the exception of Paine, we met all these characters in the last game, but here, they might as well be different people. Rikku is especially egregious, going from a chirpy girl to a straight-up bimbo in this game. It's galling.

So the game drops these characters into the same gorgeous environments from the first game, presumably to face some sort of new threat or to examine this world in greater detail, but instead, the game becomes an aimless slog through horrible gameplay segments, all justified under the catch-all phrase, "the world has changed." The world changing isn't justification enough for the horrible character design (Tetsuya Nomura's absolute worst tendencies are on display here, in full force, all the time), the brain-dead writing, and most atrociously of all, the gameplay.

OK, yes, a lot of the gameplay is comprised of running around a field map, getting into random encounters, fighting boss battles, opening treasure boxes – you know, the Final Fantasy standard. That stuff is fine – not mind-blowing, but not broken either. But that only makes up maybe half of the game. The other half? It's like Final Fantasy VII's Golden Saucer blew a load all over the game. It's wall-to-wall minigames, and most of them are terribly facile. With the exception of one, weirdly out of place third-person shooting segment, none of them could qualify as being "fun," and worse, they don't fit into any sort of narrative. Like, at all.

In fact, one could reasonably assert that Final Fantasy X-2's plot simply is the plot of these minigames, so fully do they derail what miniscule amount of narrative thrust exists in the game. Ostensibly, as Yuna (the solemn high summoner of the last game), you're leading your Charlie's Angels-esque crew called YRP (and also called the Gullwings, interchangeably) all over Spira in an attempt to hunt down spheres, which are basically like video tapes of past events. Rikku and Paine initially believe this to be because Yuna wants to get away from everyone and just have some fun, but Yuna is actually searching for Tidus, who disappeared at the end of the last game. Besides a political conflict rising between two factions, the Youth League and New Yevon, the latter of which is seeking to resurrect the Yevon religion after Yuna destroys it in Final Fantasy X, this is the entire plot, and it never takes any twists or has anything very intelligent to say. Add in the way that the endless minigames dilute this already watery plot, and you're left with a veritable ocean of bad game design.

When FFX-2 was first released, critics were starting to feel, I think, some Final Fantasy burnout (a problem that the increasingly risk-averse Square Enix management would only exacerbate), and Final Fantasy X-2's free-form approach allowed for some freedom. Freedom's not a terrible thing when it's executed properly, but the Final Fantasy team (especially considering the departure of series founder Hironobu Sakaguchi) had no idea how to do it. The linearity of the Final Fantasy games has always struck me as being perfect, a way for the player to explore a linear narrative like you're the character in a book. Freedom isn't an excuse for poor game design.

But critics were also pretty lenient with this game, while simultaneously recognizing the way it fell short of its predecessors. The idea here is that everything still works – mechanically, this is a very solid game, making it not an unbearable chore to play, but one where the mechanics simply get out of the way enough for you to recognize how bad everything is. Luckily for gamers, mechanics that work aren't the be all and the end all of games – they're made up of more elements than that.

And every element that isn't the core nugget of Final Fantasy gameplay legacy (something that seems to be under threat at all times during this game) or the often wondrously gorgeous graphics, is objectively worse than every game before or since, even worse than Final Fantasy XIII. It simply never achieves anything it sets out to, and while I don't require every Final Fantasy game to be soul-crushingly depressing or melodramatic, just any sign of life from this game would have been nice. Unfortunately, everything, even the bland, personality free music (Uematsu's legacy looms large here indeed, and the awful elevator music in his stead is just grating), is just wrong. One could play Final Fantasy X-2 and be reasonably entertained in parts, but even the dumbest cretins deserve something more than that.