Old School Gamers: Your opinion of FFX?

I would consider myself old school in the sense that I play RPGs more for the exploration of the world than for the development of the core story. I prefer to immerse myself in a world through subtlety and imagination rather than through cutscenes and contrived events. I prefer to go explore that mysterious dungeon myself rather than to be noticeably (the key word, I guess; all RPGs have a beginning, end, and everything in-between) forced into doing it by the story. In that sense games like Nocturne and Metal Saga could be considered old school despite the fact that they're 3D.

That being said, I found FFX to be an okay game. I consider it a step down from IV, V, VI, and VII (my favorites in the series), but it has a lot of polish and the pacing is pretty steady and the story involving. My main problem with X was that the whole experience seemed a bit hollow by the time I got to the end. The game just wasn't very memorable to me. Other than that I didn't care much for the cast, the temple-hopping linearity, the tacked on "side quests", and the deceptively inflexible Sphere Grid. I'd only recommend it if you have nothing better to play.

If you want to play a game that has FFX's strengths but fewer of its weaknesses, I'd suggest Shadow Hearts Covenant. The whole vibe I got from that game was, "this is FFX done right".

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