<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>Well, my friend finally got around beating the game, and here are my thoughts.
Tida (it's spelled Tidus, but pronounced Tida) is, IMO, the coolest hero in a FF game. Voice acting helps to round out his personality very well.
Yuna, who is supposed to be important to the story, somehow doesn't feel like that. I've found recent FF heroines to not play a very big role in the scope of the story. I mean yeah she's supposed to be the one saving the world or something, but it just doesn't feel that way. It seems like from about FF8 and on the Square heroines that are supposed to be important turned out to be helpless in the grand scheme of things.
Some of her summoning stances looks like something straight out of a Magical Girl Anime (the final dungeon comes to mind). On the flip side, some of her other summoning stances are really cool (Ifrit comes to mind). At least she's not just outright stupid like some of the recent FF heroines, or at least it doesn't seem that way.
I don't know much about the supporting cast, though they don't have that big of a role in the grand scheme of things anyway.
The battle system is pretty good, but it can still get abusive. Summoning is always free since the worse that can happen is that your summon got blown away before it got to attack, in which case it's as if you never summoned anything at all, but since Summons don't cost MP it's not a big deal. Unless you've some freak incidence like the boss blew away your Summon AND somehow got his turn before someone else and attacked again, you don't lose out anything by summoning. The summon's attack power is reasonably balanced with that of your team. In fact I'd say you get more damage out of sticking with a 3 party team as opposed to Summons. It seems like the summons are there to replace the extra life bars you get via healing (only a few people start with white magic, and it doesn't seem to heal a lot).
Tida's Quick Trick ability is even more broken. It's like having 99 speed in Final Fantasy Tactics. My friend got in a mess against the last guy and started using Quick Trick and for a while we thought Tida got infinite turns because he had about 8 turns in a row before anyone else's active time bar even moved.
The music, like I've posted below, isn't really that good. Thankfully, the battle themes, regular and boss, are all quite good. Suteki Da Ne gets way overused throughout the game, and to a lesser extent the Zanarkland theme (the piano piece at the game start screen). Zanarkland is a beautiful theme, and maybe one of the Suteki Da Ne variation is good (A Short Lived Dream is quite good). Unfortunately that's about it.
The bad: Heavy Metal and Final Fantasy DO NOT MIX! The OtherWorlds theme is an insult to the Final Fantasy series. It sounds like something a 14 year old would make banging on instruments would make. The FF Preclude is badly butchered, and the usual FF ending theme is missing at the end. I consider this heresy. I think Uematsu is losing it, and he should let someone else take over as the composer for the FF games.
Overall, I think the game is quite good, although the music is a travesty to the series. They sort of screwed up on the ending, but I guess you can't win them all.</div>
Tida (it's spelled Tidus, but pronounced Tida) is, IMO, the coolest hero in a FF game. Voice acting helps to round out his personality very well.
Yuna, who is supposed to be important to the story, somehow doesn't feel like that. I've found recent FF heroines to not play a very big role in the scope of the story. I mean yeah she's supposed to be the one saving the world or something, but it just doesn't feel that way. It seems like from about FF8 and on the Square heroines that are supposed to be important turned out to be helpless in the grand scheme of things.
Some of her summoning stances looks like something straight out of a Magical Girl Anime (the final dungeon comes to mind). On the flip side, some of her other summoning stances are really cool (Ifrit comes to mind). At least she's not just outright stupid like some of the recent FF heroines, or at least it doesn't seem that way.
I don't know much about the supporting cast, though they don't have that big of a role in the grand scheme of things anyway.
The battle system is pretty good, but it can still get abusive. Summoning is always free since the worse that can happen is that your summon got blown away before it got to attack, in which case it's as if you never summoned anything at all, but since Summons don't cost MP it's not a big deal. Unless you've some freak incidence like the boss blew away your Summon AND somehow got his turn before someone else and attacked again, you don't lose out anything by summoning. The summon's attack power is reasonably balanced with that of your team. In fact I'd say you get more damage out of sticking with a 3 party team as opposed to Summons. It seems like the summons are there to replace the extra life bars you get via healing (only a few people start with white magic, and it doesn't seem to heal a lot).
Tida's Quick Trick ability is even more broken. It's like having 99 speed in Final Fantasy Tactics. My friend got in a mess against the last guy and started using Quick Trick and for a while we thought Tida got infinite turns because he had about 8 turns in a row before anyone else's active time bar even moved.
The music, like I've posted below, isn't really that good. Thankfully, the battle themes, regular and boss, are all quite good. Suteki Da Ne gets way overused throughout the game, and to a lesser extent the Zanarkland theme (the piano piece at the game start screen). Zanarkland is a beautiful theme, and maybe one of the Suteki Da Ne variation is good (A Short Lived Dream is quite good). Unfortunately that's about it.
The bad: Heavy Metal and Final Fantasy DO NOT MIX! The OtherWorlds theme is an insult to the Final Fantasy series. It sounds like something a 14 year old would make banging on instruments would make. The FF Preclude is badly butchered, and the usual FF ending theme is missing at the end. I consider this heresy. I think Uematsu is losing it, and he should let someone else take over as the composer for the FF games.
Overall, I think the game is quite good, although the music is a travesty to the series. They sort of screwed up on the ending, but I guess you can't win them all.</div>
