Monday, December 22, 2003

If she says "poopie" one more time...

Now renting: Final Fantasy X-2.

Ok, first of all, it's a good game. Really fucking difficult, actually. I don't know where people get off saying that it's too easy. Probably the most difficult Final Fantasy game ever. Combat is super-fast, resources (i.e., money) are limited, and the enemies are tough sons-of-bitches with a wider variety of strengths and weaknesses than I ever thought possible. The "dressphere" system is rather ... interesting. It's basically the job system from FF5/FF:T, and I've never liked the job system. You see, I'm a "completeness" freak. I have to do every goddam thing there is to do in a game, or I feel like less of a person. This is not a good way to be when playing a game with the job system -- too much shit to learn, not enough time. In fact, the whole FFX-2 experience makes me anxious. I always feel like there's a million things I'm missing. In fact, I went to gamefaqs recently and discovered that I am missing a bunch of things. The whole mission system really makes it easy to skip over stuff -- when you're not walking from one place to another, it's easy to just fly over a whole side-quest. The good news is, I did manage to find the aforementioned "monkey-full future" minigame. It was silly. Involved getting monkeys to fall in love with each other. That's the kind of game this is.

Of course, the big downside is the cuteness. The game begins with basically a music video of Yuna singing and dancing around (although we find out 5 minutes into the game that it wasn't actually Yuna), followed by a Charlie's Angels-esque introduction to each of the three main characters. It's pretty lame. But you don't really have time to reflect on the lameness, as you're flung into a series of battles while simultaneously trying to figure out how the whole battle system works. The cuteness returns with a vengeance, though. Rikku never shuts the fuck up. She says things like "disasterrific!" and "poopie!". I shit you not. It's enough to make me want to hang myself. Then there's the beginning of chapter two, which basically goes like this:

Random NPC: I'm bored. What should we do?

Rikku: I know... Yuna should dance!

Yuna: What? Um...ok.

And dance she does. And sings, too. Fortunately, the uber-lameness of this is offset by the dark and disturbing FMV dream sequence Yuna has that night. It's pretty badass.

In summary: Super-cutesy and J-poppy, but also so difficult and time-consuming that no 12-year-old girl would ever be able to get through it, despite what you think the target demographic may be. However, I'm still embarassed to have my roommate catch me playing it.

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