Introduction

I initially didn’t plan on playing Final Fantasy X-2. But one of my friends decided to join me on my Final Fantasy X playthrough. And by join me, we played our games separately and texted each other our exciting and frustrating moments. When we both finished, I mentioned I was going to play Final Fantasy XII next. He suggested I wait a bit so he could have a bit of a JRPG detox, then he’d join me on that one as well. So with all the wonderfully deep and melancholic feelings in my heart from the end of Final Fantasy X, I decided to spin up Final Fantasy X-2. I wasn’t really ready to leave Spira, I really liked the world and the characters and the story. I was interested in what the first direct sequel in the Final Fantasy franchise would hold.

Now, I had tried playing Final Fantasy X-2 back in 2014 when I bought the Final Fantasy X/X-2 remaster for the PS3. And the only thing I really remembered was launching Final Fantasy X-2, seeing Yuna singing and dancing in a Brittany Spears-esque JPOP dance sequence, then promptly turning the game off. Yeah, I really never game it a chance. Well, that changes now!

Story

Yes, the opening cutscene does have Yuna singing and dancing in a Pop concert. She’s the centre of attention and fans are cheering her on, but cut in-between shots of Yuna’s performance we see Rikku and Paine knocking out guards and sneaking backstage.

A little later on we discover that the Yuna who was dancing in the concert was actually LeBlanc, a sphere hunter and leader of Leblanc Syndicate. Leblanc stole Yuna’s dressphere and was trying to cash in on her fame. Yuna, has joined forces with Rikku and Paine to form the Gullwings, whose mission is to hunt spheres, because… they’re valueable?

It turns out there’s a 15 minute cutscene called Final Fantasy X: Eternal Calm that set the stage for Final Fantasy X-2 that I completly missed until I was a couple hours into the story. It’s in Eternal Calm that you learn that Kimhari found a sphere recording on Mt. Gagazet, and in that recording there’s someone who looks suspiciously like Tidus being held captive. Yuna joins the Gullwings to find more spheres so she can find whoever this person is.

Final Fantasy X-2 is an asset-flip sequel. All the locations are the same from Final Fantasy X, and outside of the 3 main characters, all the old characters that you meet use their old character models. Which is fine, except for when Rikku tries to call Wakka “tubby”, but the character model from Final Fantasy X is jacked. Even worse than that, Lulu is pregnant and gives birth during the story of Final Fantasy X-2, but her character model doesn’t change at all. I appreciate trying to tell a story, but man, those moments made me scratch my head.

Pictured here: 9 month pregnant Lulu

The way Final Fantasy X-2 is structured, is that the airship Celcius is your base of operations. Piloted by Buddy and Brother, you are able to go to any of the locations from Final Fantasy X right from the get go. You want to start your new adventure in Zanarkand? Sure! Why not Djose temple? The game will highlight which locations are required for story progression, but almost every other location holds characters to meet and a side quest for you to explore. Not only does each location have a side quest, but Final Fantasy X-2 is broken into 5 chapters, and most locations have a side quest in each chapter.

On one hand, it’s kind of touching to revisit the old locations. Running across the calm lands, riding scoopufs, visiting the idyllic island of Besaid all evoke strong feelings of nostalgia. I couldn’t help but reflect on my time with the characters in X while playing Final Fantasy X-2. It was kind of fascinating returning to Zanarkand for the first time, and seeing it overrun with tourists. In X it was such a sombre, reverent place and now there’s gobs of people trampling over the places where Yuna laid her life on the line to grant these people their Eternal Calm. But after a couple chapters, I was fatigued. I didn’t want to go back to besaid island for the fourth time, I didn’t care about another trek through the lightning plains.

And I largely didn’t. The save file for Final Fantasy X-2 has a percent completion tracker on it, and I finished the game with about 60% completed. Now, some of those side quests can be kind of funny or sweet, or sometimes will shed a bit more light on certain characters, but at the end of the day it felt like a relentless grind. Running all the way up and down the Mi’ihen Highroad is fine once. Not over and over again.

The plot of Final Fantasy X-2 generally revolves around the actions of two competing factions. New Yevon and The Youth League. New Yevon seeks to maintain the power structure Yevon held in Final Fantasy X, despite the actions of Yuna revealing the corruption within the orginzation. The Youth League, on the other hand seek to uncover the secrets of Spira, including everything Yevon was hiding from the populace. As membership in The Youth League expanded rapidly, they became more hot-headded in their approaches, being openly hostile to anyone defending or even being tangentially related to Yevon, new or old. There was one moment where an NPC basically spat at Yuna and said “the time of the summoners is over. Aeons are gone, Summoners are useless now”, which is a wild thing to say after everything Yuna did for the populace in Final Fantasy X. But then again, I kind of get it. Yevon was a fraud, and the world has fundamentally changed. Still, I was shocked at the lack of reverence for Yuna after she delivered the eternal calm, considering the god-hero status Auron, Jecht, and Braska received after defeating Sin on their pilgrimage.

Because the structure of Final Fantasy X-2 lets you pick and choose which location you want to go to in the order you see fit, the story isn’t as cohesive or punchy as Final Fantasy X. And there’s a lot less of it, too. Each chapter has a handful of cutscenes to move the main plot forward, and you can count the CG cutscenes in the game on one hand. There isn’t an emotional build up throughout the game, instead any emotional moments are kind of built and resolved within their own side-quest encounters. It’s not terrible, but it doesn’t hit the same was that Final Fantasy X did.

Basically under Besaid there was a giant machina weapon named Vagnagun, and 1000 years ago some plucky kid from Zanarkand wanted to use to to stop the war between Besaid and Zanarkand so he could save his summoner girlfriend. But they died, executed by firing squad. But their souls remained, and that plucky kid looks kind of like Tidus, which is who Yuna saw in that Sphere that Kimhari gave her to start the game. The leaders from New Yevon and The Youth League try to figure out what to do about Vegnagun, but while they’re standing in the Farplane, Shuyin (the Tidus look-alike) posesses one of the leaders, and takes him and Vegnagun deep into the Farplane, with the other faction leaders following to try and stop it. Without the leaders, the factions begin to fight each other more earnestly.

The Gullwings decide that the only thing that could possible stop the violence is song. So they put on another concert and Yuna unites the factions with a song and dance.

With the factions united, Yuna and group dive deep into the Farplane and meet with the leaders who are at a total loss as to what to do with Vegnagun. Their plan is to force Shuyin out of his current body into Nooj’s body, which they’ve rigged to sacrifice himself to stop Shuyin once and for all.

Yuna says “I don’t like your plan. It sucks.”

Which, to be fair, she would be sensitive to the idea of someone sacrificing themselves. But she suggests “if it’s a machine, we can just take it apart”, and so the Gullwings beat the shit out of this ancient weapon and save the day.

Right from the get-go, Final Fantasy X-2 has a dramatic shift in tone from Final Fantasy X, and that’s communicated immediately with the jpop concert opening. If you come into this game expecting another beautiful, meloncholic story, well, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Final Fantasy X-2 reminds me of all the mediocre fan-fictions I read as a teenager. Taking the characters we fell in love with, sliding in a self-insert, and then going on wacky adventures with little consequence or thought as to the wider world and narrative the original media set. I don’t necessarily hate Final Fantasy X-2’s story, but I certainly don’t respect it the way I respect Final Fantasy X.

Gameplay

Right off the bat Final Fantasy X-2 hits you with the changes to its battle system. The ATB is back, meaning the combat happens in real time. Also, it’s pretty fast paced and chaotic. More than once I’ve lost a character to just some bad timing and me spending just a bit too long drilling into menus trying to find the item that I was looking for.

The real big gameplay element that most of the story focuses on is the Dresspheres, which allow your three characters to change jobs mid-battle. By pressing L1 you pull up a menu and you can swap your job, triggering a magical girl style costume change. After the sparkles settle, the character can then use the skills associated with their new job.

Each character earns skills for each of their jobs individually. Just because Yuna learned all the White Mage Skills doesn’t mean that Rikku and Paine will be any help healing the party. On one hand, I get it, but on the other hand, it’s a tedious ass grind to acquire all the skills for each job for each character. This just naturally pushes each of your characters into archetypes, leaving little reason to have overlap.

The other element to the dress spheres, is the Garment Grids. These Grids are usually fairly circular and have various slots for you to place dress spheres in. The dresspheres you attach to the garment grid is what dictates which classes each character can access during each battle. Thankfully you can put the same dressphere on multiple grids.

Furthermore, most Garment Grids will offer a passive benefit as well, like letting the character cast certain spells no matter which dressphere they’re currently using. This enables a character to pull a little double duty, weilding a damage dealing class, but retaining access to some specific magics. Many Garment Grids have multi-coloured gates that will give a character a bonus if they manage to pass through all the gates. The bonus can be casting a spell for free, or bolstering a specific stat.

The Dressphere and Garment Grid system is pretty cool and unique, and surprisingly deep, but I didn’t actually end up utalitizing it all that much. In general I kept my characters locked to a specific class so I could unlock the high level skills, such as the -aga spells for Yuna as a black mage. But that left all her other classes feeling anemic by comparison, so I never switched her out. That is until I got a garment grid that let me use black manage skills, where I swapped her to a White Mage. Paine, I kept as the basic warrior class until I unlocked the Berserker class, which I switched to, so she could keep her impressive damage up.

Late in the game you can find Lore items, which, when equipped will let you access the skills from other classes. It’s something I wished was available right from the start, and would have encouraged me to shift my classes more frequently, if I could continue to access the skills I’d already earned rather than leaving them behind entirely.

Aesthetically, whenever you switch dresspheres, that character changes their costume too, but only in the battle. In the overworld, the three characters retain their default class costumes. I liked discovering each of the characters costumes, but oh my goodness the fan service was so gratuitous. It felt like every costume has the entire midriff section just clawed away, and the characters loved their booty-shorts and short skirts. Seriously, I felt shame and embarrassment while playing Final Fantasy X-2, to the point where I wouldn’t play it if my wife or daughter were home, lest they ask me why the characters in the game weren’t wearing any clothes

The Thief dressphere is probably the worst offender for skimpy-ness. Unfortunately that’s Rikku’s default costume for the entire game.

Overall, Final Fantasy X-2 is a fairly easy game. Once you lock in your classes and start unlocking their skills, you can cruise through most of the battles. That said, every now and then a ‘normal’ random encounter would KO my entire party. Sometimes, things happen, but overall the random battles were pretty easy.

I did run into some big troubles right at the end of the game when I messed up a final puzzle and didn’t realize you could reset it, so I spent a couple hours grinding levels and skills so I could beat this insanely difficult boss. The challenge with the boss was that he would hit for obscene damage, and healing himself for the same amount of damage, so I had two characters dedicated to healing or maintaining buffs, leaving the third character to be the damage dealer. The downside being that character was only doing 100 to 300 more damage than the boss was healing with every attack, so it was a very slow, attritional battle for me. Oh, and the boss had 144,000 HP. Yes, this battle took me FOREVER.

The upside to grinding up to a point where I could beat this super boss, was that it made the games final boss a cake-walk. It turns out you’re not supposed to beat that super boss, you’re supposed to solve the puzzle, which lets you skip that boss. And I’ll be honest, I ended up grinding my berserker to getting the Eject skill, and then just yeeted that boss right out of the arena. Cheesy, I know, but I hate grinding.

Final Thoughts

Final Fantasy X-2 is one of the rare games in the Final Fantasy franchise that has multiple endings. I got the normal ending with a 56% completion score. I think it would be fun to play through the game again, retaining all the skills and items I earned on my first playthrough, having multiples of each of the dresspheres, and discovering some of the sidequests that I left unfinished. I think that feature makes Final Fantasy X-2 one of the most replayable Final Fantasy games in the franchise.

Unfortunately for me, the plot is disappointing and utterly cheesy, with the power of song and love being the major problem solvers in this story. Further to that, the gratuitous costumes and the grindy nature of the game makes me not want to revisit it again, despite the New Game Plus feature showing up for the first time in franchise history. I was okay with the Normal ending, and I’m at peace looking up the other endings on YouTube.

One of the things I praised Final Fantasy X for, was that it was very easy to play without a guide. I cannot give that same praise to Final Fantasy X-2. So many side quests require perfect knowledge, to hit that 100% completion rating to see the perfect ending is such an exercise in tedium that I cannot be bothered. Not when there are so many other great games out there to explore.

Final Fantasy X-2 is the embodiment of a direct-to-video sequel. It reminds me so much of the Fan-Fictions I used to read and write back in the day. It’s a side-quest filled, asset-flip romp in Spira, with little regard for the themes and gravitas that made the source media so great. It’s the Mulan II of the Final Fantasy Franchise.

Next for me is Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, a game I’ve played half a dozen times and know that I love. I was going to proceed to Final Fantasy XII, but my friend who is willing to play it alongside me just got Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, so I’ll hold off on my mainline adventures a little while longer.