yet more video game musings...

We finished Final Fantasy X about a week ago, and I've been thinking about how it stacks up on some of the fronts I've talked about here before: plot coherence, game mechanics, and so on.

These games are associated with the let's collect every treasure chest before we save the world trope enough for The Kingdom of Loathing to reference it, but... nowhere in the game does it actually push 100% completion at you, unlike e.g. Kingdom Hearts II. To the contrary, the airship captain reminds you that everyone is counting on the party to defeat the Big Bad every time you ask him to take you somewhere. (He then cheerfully takes you wherever you're going, but.) We did collect a bunch of the optional treasures, because we are the sort of people who notice the clues and try for them, but it would be quite easy to play the entire game without e.g. noticing that there even are secret airship destinations you can unlock. As far as I know, there wasn't any in-game reward for perfect completion.

I was surprised when the endgame was a cakewalk, unlike (again) KHII. I think this is largely because the first time we tried it, we got our asses kicked not very far through the sequence (Sin's mouth, for those who've played). We then went off intending to level up a bunch. It happens that there is an optional dungeon that's really good for powerleveling; it didn't feel like a grind at all. In retrospect, when Yuna's aeons took out both of the bosses in that dungeon in one hit each, we should have realized we were set, but we kept going a bit after that because some of the other characters still seemed underpowered ... by the time we went back to Sin, Yuna's attack spells could consistently one-hit anything but a boss, and Auron's base attack could do the same at least half the time. And I was expecting that not to be enough.

( it goes on ... and includes massive spoilers ... )

When we were all done we wanted to know what happened next in the story, particularly to Tidus, but we weren't in a mood to play the sequel game (still aren't, really), so instead we had Pam's computer spend a week pulling a DVD of all the cut-scenes from the sequel off BitTorrent. Unfortunately, since the translation was spotty and whoever compiled it left out all the dialogue that occurs in the game proper rather than in cut-scenes, it made no sense whatsoever. We then did what we probably should have done in the first place, i.e. read the plot summary on Wikipedia and find the good ending cut-scenes on Youtube. (In what was either sloppiness or sadism, the DVD had only the bad ending.)