Review: Final Fantasy 10

Weird how "Tactical Beach Ball" never made it to Monster Hunter or anything.

Righto, let's get this show on the road. Final Fantasy 10 time. This was my first ever video game, so it was pretty weird to revisit it for me. Some things that looked esoteric and daunting turned out to be very streamlined and simple, while other things that frustrate me now, I didn't even remember being a thing back then. What were your expectations going in?

This one seems weirdly controversial. Like a lot of people talk about it extremely fondly, while others quite disdainfully. Though i’m not sure how much of that is carried over from the even more controversial/generally disliked direct sequel. Mostly people just seem to hate Tidus though. 

Finish the job, Wakka.

...and where do you fall on the Tidus thing? Can't say he made a great first impression, nor did he ever really grow on me. I'm kinda so-so on the entire cast, but Tidus is firmly at the bottom of my list.

Oh good news, I immediately figured out why people don’t like Tidus. He’s completely self-absorbed, straight up says the dumbest rudest shit every single time, his voice acting SUUUCKKKKSSS and hes too dumb to even live. Like 2 cutscenes in and he almost died just choking on a mcrib seriously lmfao. This is so weird and awkward I think I might actually enjoy it. 

Tidus Hates His Dad: The Musical

So as I mentioned earlier, the big thing about this game is how much it's been streamlined. They really went back to the drawing board, and basically scrapped anything that they felt was superfluous. With so many Final Fantasy games under your belt by now, how much of it worked for you, and how much didn't?

The (overhauled, as always) battle system seems really solid actually. They’ve kept it quite linear (soft-set classes with a weird cool roadmap upgrades system) trimmed a lot of the bloat (eg, legacy spells) and kept it quite tactical. You need to keep an eye on things like armour piercing and using ranged attacks on flying enemies. So yeah, combat system good. Minigames awful. Art good. Cutscenes… so bad they’re hilarious. The game is also very linear, which… I can see some people maybe being disappointed by that but it actually kinda works for me? Maybe just because 10 games deep these things feel a bit disposable on some level.

....Do I have a choice?

Fair enough. The one thing I noticed when playing though, was how uneven and annoying the game could be in terms of balancing. The further along I got, the more frequently I'd hit a wall, and the more often the game prevented me from experimenting and having fun. As it turns out, a lot of that stuff seemed to be related to extra "challenge" nonsense they added for the PAL version.  It's one of those situations where I think the older, less polished version with fewer content might be a much smoother experience, since it doesn't make things harder for people that are already struggling.

Yeah I was surprised how broken some of the side-content feels, with the dark aeons blocking backtracking and some of the minigame ideas just being torturous sounding. I didn’t even bother with a lot of stuff and I have no regrets.

This guy is dressed like Sherlock Gnomes to his own wedding adgsgsggh

Man, can we talk about Seymour for a moment? This guy pegs. I know he’s so obviously the obligatory queer-coded villain, like Kefka and Kuja before him. But this naked ass monk elf has some serious power bottom energy. Why’s he so saucy? He seems to want Yuna as his child bride just to… annoy people? And then he dies repeatedly on purpose? And who thought that hair was a good idea?

Seymour's pretty out there, but at least he had presence. A lot of characters were lacking in flavour to me. You'd be lucky if their one trait was brought up more than once. The story justified this decision by reiterating that the story was not about them, and is instead about Tidus and Yuna, but eh. That's a fair decision, but it also means those two were expected to carry more than they could.

If you should die before you wake... aaah haah haah haah...

This game just has so many weird narrative choices. Like there’s this bit where they decide to sentence the party to death or something, and they divide the party into swimmers and non-swimmers. They put the non-swimmers in a labyrinth with an exit. And they put the swimmers in a swimming pool without a ladder??? Like in the sims???

Hey now, the pool of death did have a ladder. It was just on the other side of the map. The villains even at some point say that they should probably head over to the other side, since they might escape otherwise. Madness.

Is only blitzball why u have to be mad

So blitzball is the token “really big minigame that runs adjacent to the plot” that now seems to be a staple of the series since FF7. It’s basically turn-based fifa I guess. But it feels so weird and unbalanced, like you have to just fail a bunch at the start before you get to level up enough to understand how the game is supposed to play. You’re also expected to recruit people but there’s very little backtracking in the game.
I don’t get these shrines- sorry CLOISTERS OF TRIALS either. They're temples full of all these runes and weird stuff, but then the puzzles are deceptively simple. Sometimes cool design ideas but mostly just uuuuugh trial and error. Tedious. Tidius.

You touched on it earlier too, but trial and error and tedious is how I'd describe the minigames as well. I've never been a fan of Final Fantasy minigames, but they seem to be at their worst here. There's one where you have to collect all the butterflies on a timer, without touching the bad butterflies. Even putting the Blitzball aside, there's one where lightning strikes at random intervals and you have to dodge 200 bolts. Then there's the absolute worst of the bunch, where you're racing on a bird, and a seemingly infinite stream of seagulls try their best to crash face-first into your mount, while other people are throwing beach balls at the poor thing.

I have to commend the game on some of its bold choices tbh. While it's definitely a hot mess, it does commit to its narrative a lot of the time which I always admire. It brings some unpredictability. Even if the narrative is, um… like some sort of weird incomplete teen fiction. Oh, and the Al Bhed dictionary idea was neat!

Caught u laughing at "poon child" didn't I? Glad you stayed for this!

Final score?

I give it a RIDE ZE SHOOPUF/10. I don’t understand why they did so many of the things they did. It’s such an unbalanced game. There are moments of cringe and moments of charm. There’s something about it that reminds me a lot of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace? Like there’s all this Jar Jar shit and some kid you don’t care about, and they take up so much runtime with like random worldbuilding guff that never goes anywhere… but buried in there are some strong ideas and concepts that are inevitably gonna shape and inspire everything after it. And you certainly couldn’t accuse it of being too “safe”.