Final Fantasy X

[Albert]

Yeah yeah, I know Lord of the Rings is opening tomorrow, but who's planning on picking up Final Fantasy X? I didn't have enough patience to finish FF7 and FF8, but I loved FF9 and I'm really looking forward to 10. I had the opportunity to play it at E3 and it looks fantastic. If I'm lucky enough to get my hands on a copy of it tomorrow, then you won't see me posting any messages for a few days.

 

Here's a cool video review on Gamespot (it's the huge, 133MB file at the top):

 

Gamespot Final Fantasy X Video Review

 

..Al

[liquid_sky]

quote

didn't have enough patience to finish FF7 and FF8, but I loved FF9  

 

Well you have a better record than me, I lost patience for the series after ff6 jap ff3 USA.

[liveinabin]

Everyone should play one Final Fantasy game, but one only.

[Wntermute]

I got FFX .. it is quite amazing. Many of the battle sequences take place right where you get attacked rather than some quasi-dimensional battleground. (There still are a few of those style encounters scattered around)

 

All of the main characters have full voiceovers. There are just a couple mini-games (Blitzball and Chocobo raising)

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Wntermute:

I got FFX .. it is quite amazing. Many of the battle sequences take place right where you get attacked rather than some quasi-dimensional battleground. (There still are a few of those style encounters scattered around)

 

All of the main characters have full voiceovers. There are just a couple mini-games (Blitzball and Chocobo raising)

---

 

I noticed that for the battles it looks like each "area" has one or more spots the battles always take place in. They usually don't take place exactly where you encounter fiends, but at least it's the same geometry instead of something completely different that's loaded. Looks like they pick areas where there's enough space for battles to take place, taking into account all the camera movement usually associated with them. This is handled much better than in previous games, not to mention battles begin much faster.

 

As for the voice acting, I think it's a mixed blessing. Most of it is okay, but some of it is pretty poor. I certainly can appreciate the amount of work that this takes, though, having developed conversation system for Deus Ex (which had over 10,000 lines of spoken dialog). One thing that I'm disappointed with is that it appears the lip-syncing was never updated with the English audio. Also, it would have been nice if they provided an option to listen to the Japanese speech with English subtitles.

 

As for Blitzball, I'm not really crazy about it. FFX is going to take me long enough to finish without having to worry about competing in Blitzball tournaments. I bet you could double the amount of time you spend playing the game if you played Blitzball. As it is, I was up to 7am this morning playing FFX.

 

Overall I'm enjoying it quite a bit, although the game appears to be *extremely* linear in that you have absolutely *no* say in where you progress through the land. You just plod along on a narrow path from point A to point B, stopping at various cities along the way. I like the the Sphere grid method of upgrading your characters, although it's pretty evil in that it really makes you think about how you want to develop everyone. You spend a lot of time in this screen as you obtain sphere levels and spheres to populate the grid with. The summoning is much improved in that only one character can summon and the Aeons (as they're called) stay for the remainder of the battle (until their hit points drop to 0 or you dismiss them). And you can turn off the long animations every time they're invoked.

 

The story is interesting thus far, I'm really curious how it turns out. This game wasted no time in developing a love interest for the main character. And as always for Squaresoft, the CGI cutscenes look amazing.

 

..Al

[Jun Kazama]

yeah i cant wait to FFX i guess it'll be hard to find its not my problem im going to let my brothers buy it then i'll just play it haha you can tell thats what i usually do considering im playing FFVII at the moment hehe im such a loser

[Wntermute]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Albert:

As for the voice acting, I think it's a mixed blessing. Most of it is okay, but some of it is pretty poor. I certainly can appreciate the amount of work that this takes, though, having developed conversation system for Deus Ex (which had over 10,000 lines of spoken dialog). One thing that I'm disappointed with is that it appears the lip-syncing was never updated with the English audio. Also, it would have been nice if they provided an option to listen to the Japanese speech with English subtitles.

 

As for Blitzball, I'm not really crazy about it. FFX is going to take me long enough to finish without having to worry about competing in Blitzball tournaments. I bet you could double the amount of time you spend playing the game if you played Blitzball. As it is, I was up to 7am this morning playing FFX.

 

Overall I'm enjoying it quite a bit, although the game appears to be *extremely* linear in that you have absolutely *no* say in where you progress through the land. You just plod along on a narrow path from point A to point B, stopping at various cities along the way. I like the the Sphere grid method of upgrading your characters, although it's pretty evil in that it really makes you think about how you want to develop everyone. You spend a lot of time in this screen as you obtain sphere levels and spheres to populate the grid with.

---

 

I noticed the lip-synching myself.. but it only seems to get out of sync in the "engine-mode" scenes and not out of sync in the "cinematic-mode" scenes.

 

Blitzball hasn't been high on my list either. Luckily, I got the Jecht Shot right the first time, but didn't get to use it in the game (I won 1-0 from a goal in the first half, before I was able to switch in the Jecht Shot.. and then Tidus left before he ever got the ball in the second half). I *HAVE* been trying to find people to recruit (I'm just past the Chocobo Eater part), but NOBODY I've met responds to the Square button!

 

From what I've read, there IS a part later on where you get an Airship.. but then instead of letting you go wherever you want, it'll give you a list of possible places. I think there might be some way of telling it where to go other than that because a mag I have tells you to go to certain coordinates for extras.

 

The Sphere Grid is quite interesting.. I know there are a couple maps to it available online.

[Albert]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Wntermute:

I noticed the lip-synching myself.. but it only seems to get out of sync in the "engine-mode" scenes and not out of sync in the "cinematic-mode" scenes.

 

Blitzball hasn't been high on my list either. Luckily, I got the Jecht Shot right the first time, but didn't get to use it in the game (I won 1-0 from a goal in the first half, before I was able to switch in the Jecht Shot.. and then Tidus left before he ever got the ball in the second half). I *HAVE* been trying to find people to recruit (I'm just past the Chocobo Eater part), but NOBODY I've met responds to the Square button!

 

From what I've read, there IS a part later on where you get an Airship.. but then instead of letting you go wherever you want, it'll give you a list of possible places. I think there might be some way of telling it where to go other than that because a mag I have tells you to go to certain coordinates for extras.

 

The Sphere Grid is quite interesting.. I know there are a couple maps to it available online.

---

 

It looks like they went through the effort to update the lipsyncing in the pre-rendered cutscenes, but for whatever reason decided not to do the same for all the in-game speech. Having been in this same boat before, I'm guessing that they may not have had some automated process to generate the lip-syncing data from the speech audio. I'd hate to think they hand-animated *all* the lip-syncing based on the Japanese audio, but it certainly is possible. *Shudder*

 

So, when you won the Blitzball tournament, what happened? I played it three times and lost each time and decided to just continue rather than play a rather aggravating game against a much better team. After the match, I was attacked by all sorts of baddies, which was eventually ended by one of the Maester's (the guy with the blue hair whose name I can't remmeber now) summoning his nice Anima aeon that kicked some major ass. I'd really like to know what you get by winning the match. I'm well past that point now so I'm not going back, but I'll be disappointed if something really cool was awarded.

 

As for the Sphere Grid, I've progressed to the point with most of my characters where I've had to make some decisions as how to develop them. I have a few Level 2 Sphere Keys now, but nothing beyond that yet. Any time I zoom all the way out in the Sphere Grid I become a bit overwhelmed. "I want it all!!"

 

I'm probably about 20 hours into the game thus far, no Airship yet.

 

..Al

[Wntermute]

There aren't too many differences.. all hell breaks loose in the stadium (and gets saved by Maester Seymore) whether the Aurochs win or lose. There are a couple astonished fans in the town after the game whose text would be different depending on who won. I think the distribution of Blitzball XP is different as well depending on the outcome (a couple of my players progressed to Level 2 after the match).

 

Pretty much all of the FAQs and walkthroughs I've seen go "don't sweat the mandatory Blitzball matches, they make no difference on gameplay if you win or lose".

 

hehe there's a Queen song that reflects your view of the Sphere Grid.. "I want it all .. and I want it now"

[Albert]

quote

Pretty much all of the FAQs and walkthroughs I've seen go "don't sweat the mandatory Blitzball matches, they make no difference on gameplay if you win or lose".

 

Ugh, this implies that there's more than one mandatory Blitzball match? I've only encountered one so far. Oh well, at least I know I don't need to worry about winning any future matches I need to suffer through.

 

quote

hehe there's a Queen song that reflects your view of the Sphere Grid.. "I want it all .. and I want it now"

 

Ha ha! No kidding! You can spend a *lot* of time fighting fiends just to move your characters around that damn grid. Up until now, I've had pretty powerful characters that easily defeated every major boss. However, I finally saw the "Game Over" screen while being brutally slain by one of the Bosses you apparently encounter repeatedly through the game (this is my third such battle with this individual, so depending on how far in the game you've progressed you may know who I'm talking about). Let me just say I hate spells that instantly kill party members and Aeons. I need to do some preparation before I try taking this guy on again.

 

..Al