FFX thoughts
PostPosted:Sun Jan 20, 2002 8:45 am
<div style='font: 12pt ; text-align: left; '>In no particular orders...
Minigames - I think the minigames suck, especially since everyone's ultimate weapon except Yuna's is tied to some minigame. There should be an option to trade for your ultimate weapon by giving 99 of some curtain/gem/whatever that is just growing dust in my inventory.
Useless abilities - I'd argue that the only abilities that matter on armor is Break HP Limit and Stone/Confuse/Death/Berserk protection and that's it. The reason why those are the only ones that matter is because if you don't have those protection you're dead the moment you run into something with those types of status attack so it doesn't matter what other protection you have.
You will not have proof anything by the time you really need it anyway since the components are hard to get. Confuse/Berserk components are especially hard since they're only stealable (not counting bribe, too much of a money sink to experiment). Elemental damage is really not a problem since the Nul spells are dirt cheap and the heavy stuff is nonelemental anyway.
For weapon the only thing that matters for me is Exceed Max Damage, Triple AP, Drive to AP, and Triple Overdrive. The Counter abilities on Tidus's UW isn't too bad but it's insignificant compare to the power of the Quick Hit. One MP is kind of cute but you never really run out of MP as long as you've some Two/Three Stars somewhere. The status damage stuff is pretty useless because it is so easy to hit 9999 in this game. The stuff you can't kill in one hit of 9999 tends to be immune to Stone/Death, not to mention it's rare to get a Strike ability early on the game. I know not everything is immune to all status in the end, but honestly who's keeping track? When you scan something and it says it's immune to 15 different things, do you even remember which ones they didn't mention?
I think FF8 still has the best status effect system. On one hand having an item like a Ribbon is too powerful, but having no realistic chance to resist against status effects unless you already know what you'll get nailed with isn't fun, either. The Ward class abilties does next to nothing against the 100% status effect stuff that almost everything uses toward the end. In FF8 you can either have immunity to a few things, or resistance to a bunch of things. Gives a lot of room to mix & match and stuff and doesn't force you to always walk around with only Stone/Death/Confuse/Berserk immunity and Esuna/Remedy everything else. I'd like to have a chance to resist Darkness or Poison or whatever even though it's easy to get rid of it with a Remedy.
Useless items - Too much stuff just keep on pile dust in my inventory. I guess the problem is that you need them to learn some useless ability like SOS NulBlaze or something which will save you 0 times out of 100.
Useless weapons/armors - Enemies drop too much useless stuff. I've to regularly make a trip to just filter out all the junk I got so I can pick up more stuff. I guess the idea is that you may happen to get a cool sword earlier, but if they want to do that they can just make enemies sometimes drop a large quantity of items so you can make stuff a lot earlier than you could. I picked up a TKO (Stonetouch) which is quite nice until about Zanarkand when things start being immune to stoning, but other than that I don't recall ever using any weapon/armor I got from enemies (Brotherhood is better than 99% of the weapons you'll get until the end anyway).
Music - Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I think this may be the fact that you spent 95% of the game in the battle screen so you never realized what the background music is anyway. They should definitely do more places like Zanarkand Ruins where the BGM is also the battle music.
Battles - Although battles in FFX are ridiculously cheesy sometimes (Seymour comes to mind), I guess they do offer a good challenge. But there's still nothing new... Haste everyone, heal everyone, and if there is a trigger command or some helper text showing up you should follow it (except on Jecht). My favorite battle is against Evrae even though he's a complete wuss. The Photon Wing attack looks quite cool despite being rather short in animation and didn't blow up three planets in the process. The frequency of encounter is annoying and getting No Encounters is tough, which means you either waste a lot of time fighting stuff or you don't explore very much.
Some regular battles are way too hard. I went back to Inside Sin to capture some monsters, ran into a Bahemoth King and the Meteor death attack took 5000 HP off Wakku's 9K HP and he's got at least 3 character's worth of stats on him. Now tell me how you're supposed to survive this if you got in here on your first character path? My Japanese friend got Anima when going inside and even Anima gets beat up pretty badly by random encounters (a Varuna took like 3/4th of Anima's health off before dying).
Sphere Grid - It works okay until you hit the end of your character's path. Then it's just hardcore leveling up that's basically asking for exploit. It simply takes way too long to fill the grid in a legitmate way. Although no one says you've to fill the grid, if you're a completist you'd want to, and you need to have a good portion of it filled to even attempt the Arena. I end up using Triple AP + Drive -> AP, set Overdrive move to Stoic on Tidus and Comrade for everyone else, and beat up Don Tonberry and get countered for 99999. 3 hits and you're looking at 200-600K AP depending on what your multiplier is. Getting 50 levels per fight is cool, though I don't think that's the original intention either. I think 7's leveling rate was about right... takes a while, but if you have a good supply of Elixirs you can do it pretty fast on Magic Pots. FF8 is a bit too fast (Heaven/Hell Island = 1 level per fight).
Story - I think it's quite good, though it seems rush toward the end. Shiva and Yojimbo basically said Tidus was going to disappear (since they assured that he will NOT disappear) yet no one figured it out nonetheless. Some loose ends doesn't seem to go anywhere, like the fact Tidus looks like Chappu. Somewhere in the story the minor characters fades away like any other recent FF game. I think the game would've been better without Auron (who has no personality and whose only job is to look cool), Kimahri (who has no story until Mt. Gagazet), and Lulu. Speaking of Lulu, I somehow ended up with Lulu being the highest affinity with Tidus even though I never used her. Does that mean I got all the other girls really angry at me? :(
The ending - If Tidus was not supposed to die, what's with all the melodrama? I think it's pretty poorly executed... it's touching, until you realized that Tidus wasn't going to die anyway, and then it becomes pointless.
VAs - Wakka and Rikku are superb, IMO. Auron is pretty good too. Tidus/Yuna are kind of averageish. Kimarhi has only like 5 lines in this game, and I can't quite get a handle on Lulu's VA. Seymour was pretty good, much better than the "HAHAHA I'm a Villian" voice he had in the Japanese version. At first I hated it because it sounded like someone who was insane, but then I realized he was insane... or pretty darn close to it. His voice reminds me of Kefka... evil and insane.
Bahamut - Another game the King... or is that Queen... of the Dragons get shafted. Aside from looking important and showing up in random moments to say seemingly profound things, Bahamut basically has no role in this game. In fact I think Bahamut's presence is harmful to the story development. The story is quite good, and then Bahamut just randomly pops in and says something, but doesn't answer anything and leaves. If he has something important to say, tell it to everyone, not just Tidus while he's away in lala land.
Final Battle - Yu Yevon is perhaps the least impressive final boss I've seen. I guess it make sense story-wise, but he still looks weak. Having a battle that you cannot lose also cheapens the thrill of the battle. You'd think the greatest summoner ever can get summons with more HP than Yuna's versions. I know Yu Yevon needs time to strength the summons with the dead souls, but even then, they shouldn't have been this weak.</div>
Minigames - I think the minigames suck, especially since everyone's ultimate weapon except Yuna's is tied to some minigame. There should be an option to trade for your ultimate weapon by giving 99 of some curtain/gem/whatever that is just growing dust in my inventory.
Useless abilities - I'd argue that the only abilities that matter on armor is Break HP Limit and Stone/Confuse/Death/Berserk protection and that's it. The reason why those are the only ones that matter is because if you don't have those protection you're dead the moment you run into something with those types of status attack so it doesn't matter what other protection you have.
You will not have proof anything by the time you really need it anyway since the components are hard to get. Confuse/Berserk components are especially hard since they're only stealable (not counting bribe, too much of a money sink to experiment). Elemental damage is really not a problem since the Nul spells are dirt cheap and the heavy stuff is nonelemental anyway.
For weapon the only thing that matters for me is Exceed Max Damage, Triple AP, Drive to AP, and Triple Overdrive. The Counter abilities on Tidus's UW isn't too bad but it's insignificant compare to the power of the Quick Hit. One MP is kind of cute but you never really run out of MP as long as you've some Two/Three Stars somewhere. The status damage stuff is pretty useless because it is so easy to hit 9999 in this game. The stuff you can't kill in one hit of 9999 tends to be immune to Stone/Death, not to mention it's rare to get a Strike ability early on the game. I know not everything is immune to all status in the end, but honestly who's keeping track? When you scan something and it says it's immune to 15 different things, do you even remember which ones they didn't mention?
I think FF8 still has the best status effect system. On one hand having an item like a Ribbon is too powerful, but having no realistic chance to resist against status effects unless you already know what you'll get nailed with isn't fun, either. The Ward class abilties does next to nothing against the 100% status effect stuff that almost everything uses toward the end. In FF8 you can either have immunity to a few things, or resistance to a bunch of things. Gives a lot of room to mix & match and stuff and doesn't force you to always walk around with only Stone/Death/Confuse/Berserk immunity and Esuna/Remedy everything else. I'd like to have a chance to resist Darkness or Poison or whatever even though it's easy to get rid of it with a Remedy.
Useless items - Too much stuff just keep on pile dust in my inventory. I guess the problem is that you need them to learn some useless ability like SOS NulBlaze or something which will save you 0 times out of 100.
Useless weapons/armors - Enemies drop too much useless stuff. I've to regularly make a trip to just filter out all the junk I got so I can pick up more stuff. I guess the idea is that you may happen to get a cool sword earlier, but if they want to do that they can just make enemies sometimes drop a large quantity of items so you can make stuff a lot earlier than you could. I picked up a TKO (Stonetouch) which is quite nice until about Zanarkand when things start being immune to stoning, but other than that I don't recall ever using any weapon/armor I got from enemies (Brotherhood is better than 99% of the weapons you'll get until the end anyway).
Music - Wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I think this may be the fact that you spent 95% of the game in the battle screen so you never realized what the background music is anyway. They should definitely do more places like Zanarkand Ruins where the BGM is also the battle music.
Battles - Although battles in FFX are ridiculously cheesy sometimes (Seymour comes to mind), I guess they do offer a good challenge. But there's still nothing new... Haste everyone, heal everyone, and if there is a trigger command or some helper text showing up you should follow it (except on Jecht). My favorite battle is against Evrae even though he's a complete wuss. The Photon Wing attack looks quite cool despite being rather short in animation and didn't blow up three planets in the process. The frequency of encounter is annoying and getting No Encounters is tough, which means you either waste a lot of time fighting stuff or you don't explore very much.
Some regular battles are way too hard. I went back to Inside Sin to capture some monsters, ran into a Bahemoth King and the Meteor death attack took 5000 HP off Wakku's 9K HP and he's got at least 3 character's worth of stats on him. Now tell me how you're supposed to survive this if you got in here on your first character path? My Japanese friend got Anima when going inside and even Anima gets beat up pretty badly by random encounters (a Varuna took like 3/4th of Anima's health off before dying).
Sphere Grid - It works okay until you hit the end of your character's path. Then it's just hardcore leveling up that's basically asking for exploit. It simply takes way too long to fill the grid in a legitmate way. Although no one says you've to fill the grid, if you're a completist you'd want to, and you need to have a good portion of it filled to even attempt the Arena. I end up using Triple AP + Drive -> AP, set Overdrive move to Stoic on Tidus and Comrade for everyone else, and beat up Don Tonberry and get countered for 99999. 3 hits and you're looking at 200-600K AP depending on what your multiplier is. Getting 50 levels per fight is cool, though I don't think that's the original intention either. I think 7's leveling rate was about right... takes a while, but if you have a good supply of Elixirs you can do it pretty fast on Magic Pots. FF8 is a bit too fast (Heaven/Hell Island = 1 level per fight).
Story - I think it's quite good, though it seems rush toward the end. Shiva and Yojimbo basically said Tidus was going to disappear (since they assured that he will NOT disappear) yet no one figured it out nonetheless. Some loose ends doesn't seem to go anywhere, like the fact Tidus looks like Chappu. Somewhere in the story the minor characters fades away like any other recent FF game. I think the game would've been better without Auron (who has no personality and whose only job is to look cool), Kimahri (who has no story until Mt. Gagazet), and Lulu. Speaking of Lulu, I somehow ended up with Lulu being the highest affinity with Tidus even though I never used her. Does that mean I got all the other girls really angry at me? :(
The ending - If Tidus was not supposed to die, what's with all the melodrama? I think it's pretty poorly executed... it's touching, until you realized that Tidus wasn't going to die anyway, and then it becomes pointless.
VAs - Wakka and Rikku are superb, IMO. Auron is pretty good too. Tidus/Yuna are kind of averageish. Kimarhi has only like 5 lines in this game, and I can't quite get a handle on Lulu's VA. Seymour was pretty good, much better than the "HAHAHA I'm a Villian" voice he had in the Japanese version. At first I hated it because it sounded like someone who was insane, but then I realized he was insane... or pretty darn close to it. His voice reminds me of Kefka... evil and insane.
Bahamut - Another game the King... or is that Queen... of the Dragons get shafted. Aside from looking important and showing up in random moments to say seemingly profound things, Bahamut basically has no role in this game. In fact I think Bahamut's presence is harmful to the story development. The story is quite good, and then Bahamut just randomly pops in and says something, but doesn't answer anything and leaves. If he has something important to say, tell it to everyone, not just Tidus while he's away in lala land.
Final Battle - Yu Yevon is perhaps the least impressive final boss I've seen. I guess it make sense story-wise, but he still looks weak. Having a battle that you cannot lose also cheapens the thrill of the battle. You'd think the greatest summoner ever can get summons with more HP than Yuna's versions. I know Yu Yevon needs time to strength the summons with the dead souls, but even then, they shouldn't have been this weak.</div>