Old School Gamers: Your opinion of FFX?

I could definitely be considered an old school gamer, and I must say, FFX is my least favorite Final Fantasy game that I have played. I haven't played X-2 though, but that was because I hated FFX so much.

The sphere grid acts like it's wide open to customization, but is just generic leveling up, only you have to do it yourself, and it is linear. It's not until you are already powerful enough for most of the stuff in the game that you can do what you want with characters.

I don't like voice acting in games because I read faster than I listen. I don't want to sit there for 20 minutes to hear more story, I want to play the game. Luckily, I could skip most dialogue. But still, a highly disproportionate amount of the game revolved around not actually doing things. The beginning was ridiculous with this, but it didn't let up much as it went on. Sure, it gave a lot of that backstory to making Spira a real world that PiccoloNamek loves so much, but stuff like that should be optional if it takes so much time and takes away from gameplay as much as it did. Also, the main story was not incredibly focused, because it was told in a way that was complicated to understand at first glance. If the person casually playing through the game doesn't know what's going on, you're not telling the story right.

Blitzball was the shining point in FFX. It was a bit of old school fun in the game. It got easy really fast, though, with players leveling up. Only Triple Triad interested me more as far as FF mini-games go.

The battles tried adding that strategic bit, attempting to make a bit of a rock-paper-scissors setup, but it instead turned out to be just matching the character with the enemy, just a connect the dots game. It did have the same timing system FFT did, but without having to plan out any positioning or traveling distance, it made things very easy. If a move happened now or later, it had the same effect, so you were allowed to plan out a whole battle. Also, switching out characters and having everyone at your disposal rather than a small party made things a bit too easy also. And note that I'm not talking about optional bosses with any of this, I didn't enjoy the game enough to care and find how to fight those things.

Originally Posted by PiccoloNamek

Sure, the random battles were easy, (well, most of them) but I don't really care about that. They are a tool to level up with, not something to enjoy or add to the game's value or difficulty.

This I just hate. What's the point of having the battles in the game if they present no fun or difficulty at all? They should just let you automatically gain levels if they intended it to be that easy. Battles became boring and tedious as I went on because they were all the same and all easy. Putting something in a game just to increase the game time is laziness and shouldn't happen.

I also didn't really enjoy or connect with or care about any of the characters in the game at all, which probably detracted from my enjoyment even more. I got really hyped up about the game and bought it right away too, it's a shame it turned out to disappoint me so much.

How ya doing, buddy?