yet more video game musings...
Oct. 23rd, 2008 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zwolWe 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
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.
('ware spoilers)
Part of the problem there, I think, was that we didn't unlock the ultimate weapons for four of the seven characters, so the party as a whole felt underpowered, even though both Yuna and Auron were at the point where they could probably have cleared the entire endgame singlehandedly. This aspect of the game really left a bad taste in my mouth. Tidus, Wakka, Lulu, and Kimahri were all consistently hitting the damage cap by the time we got out of the optional dungeon. And the ultimate weapons don't just remove the damage cap, they make you level faster and give a bunch of other bonuses. It felt like not unlocking them was doing the characters a disservice. But for those four, you have to beat annoying minigames to get their weapons completely unlocked. Chase butterflies? We tried really hard and it wasn't good enough. Get a perfect score in the chocobo races? Too annoying to try all that hard. Play up to two hundred and fifty games of blitzball? Bleah. Dodge lightning two hundred times without a single error? Hell no.
This would've been much less irritating if the ultimate weapons weren't worse than useless if not fully unlocked. We had them all in inventory, and it would have been totally plausible for them to have some subset of their full powers when first found (ideally including Break Damage Limit from the get-go); then the additional side quests to power them up all the way would not have felt both irritating and required. But no. Before they're fully unlocked they have negative effects. WTF?
Another part of the problem was that the basic mechanics were a bit too complicated and opaque. I was never sure what the core character statistics actually meant, so it was hard to tell which upgrades were effective for which characters. Rikku would have been a much more effective character if I had had a better idea of her items' capabilities, and by that I mean if I had had any idea at all really. There was an explicit upgrade mechanism for the aeons, which was too expensive to use much, but close to the end we noticed that they were all much more powerful than they had been the last time we'd paid attention to their stats; we have no idea how that happened.
Of course, the final boss fight sequence makes you fight all of your own aeons, which is a cute way of scaling the endgame to the party at least a bit. (I remember thinking, oh no, we're going to have to fight Anima, aren't we.) It seemed less than justified in-story, though; Yu Yevon was right there, why couldn't we just beat on it? Also it was a really cruel thing to do to Yuna. I think it was the same animation each time, but she sure looked more and more miserable as we went down the list.
That's the only place where I felt the narrative justification really failed, though, and to be fair, there was a cut-scene where Yuna and Tidus come up with the tactic that meant they had to fight all the aeons. Overall the plot flowed really smoothly, to the point where it felt more like a movie than most of the games we've been playing. There's even an in-story reason why you have time to prepare for the endgame; it might've been a nice fillip if Sin starts attacking things again if you take too long, but it didn't feel like a plot hole.
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
These games are associated with the
let's collect every treasure chest before we save the worldtrope 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.
('ware spoilers)
Part of the problem there, I think, was that we didn't unlock the ultimate weapons for four of the seven characters, so the party as a whole felt underpowered, even though both Yuna and Auron were at the point where they could probably have cleared the entire endgame singlehandedly. This aspect of the game really left a bad taste in my mouth. Tidus, Wakka, Lulu, and Kimahri were all consistently hitting the damage cap by the time we got out of the optional dungeon. And the ultimate weapons don't just remove the damage cap, they make you level faster and give a bunch of other bonuses. It felt like not unlocking them was doing the characters a disservice. But for those four, you have to beat annoying minigames to get their weapons completely unlocked. Chase butterflies? We tried really hard and it wasn't good enough. Get a perfect score in the chocobo races? Too annoying to try all that hard. Play up to two hundred and fifty games of blitzball? Bleah. Dodge lightning two hundred times without a single error? Hell no.
This would've been much less irritating if the ultimate weapons weren't worse than useless if not fully unlocked. We had them all in inventory, and it would have been totally plausible for them to have some subset of their full powers when first found (ideally including Break Damage Limit from the get-go); then the additional side quests to power them up all the way would not have felt both irritating and required. But no. Before they're fully unlocked they have negative effects. WTF?
Another part of the problem was that the basic mechanics were a bit too complicated and opaque. I was never sure what the core character statistics actually meant, so it was hard to tell which upgrades were effective for which characters. Rikku would have been a much more effective character if I had had a better idea of her items' capabilities, and by that I mean if I had had any idea at all really. There was an explicit upgrade mechanism for the aeons, which was too expensive to use much, but close to the end we noticed that they were all much more powerful than they had been the last time we'd paid attention to their stats; we have no idea how that happened.
Of course, the final boss fight sequence makes you fight all of your own aeons, which is a cute way of scaling the endgame to the party at least a bit. (I remember thinking, oh no, we're going to have to fight Anima, aren't we.) It seemed less than justified in-story, though; Yu Yevon was right there, why couldn't we just beat on it? Also it was a really cruel thing to do to Yuna. I think it was the same animation each time, but she sure looked more and more miserable as we went down the list.
That's the only place where I felt the narrative justification really failed, though, and to be fair, there was a cut-scene where Yuna and Tidus come up with the tactic that meant they had to fight all the aeons. Overall the plot flowed really smoothly, to the point where it felt more like a movie than most of the games we've been playing. There's even an in-story reason why you have time to prepare for the endgame; it might've been a nice fillip if Sin starts attacking things again if you take too long, but it didn't feel like a plot hole.
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 endingcut-scenes on Youtube. (In what was either sloppiness or sadism, the DVD had only the bad ending.)
