I almost didn’t play Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. I was mostly just excited to move on to Final Fantasy XIII, and the week that I started playing Revenant Wings, Final Fantasy Resonance had just released. I really enjoyed the demo for Resonance and was very tempted to jump the queue and play it first so I could be a part of the cultural zeitgeist, but I find myself unwilling to pay full price for a game these days. Especially when I have so many other games on my list to play already.
Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings is one of the few games in the Final Fantasy Catalogue that I actually played back when it was first released, in late 2007. I didn’t remember much about it, other than that it’s a real-time strategy game on the Nintendo DS and that I had managed to get to the final boss, but never managed to make it over the finish line (much like my Final Fantasy X experience, actually). But being fresh off The Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age means that there will never be a better time than now to play through Revenant Wings, so I buckled down and dug out my old 3DSXL. And besides, I was hopeful that the characters introduced in Zodiac Age would be expanded upon and developed further. I realize now that was a bit of a naive hope.
Story
Revenant Wings begins with Vaan and Penelo in their own airship, following Balthier and Fran as they approach and pillage a ruin for treasure. In the treasure room there are two crystals, Vaan and Balthier each grab one, and then escape as the ruins crumble around them. Vaan and Penelo hitch a ride on the Sthral as Vaan’s airship is caught in a landslide and lost. Soon after, an airship of unknown make and origin falls from the sky and crashes outside Rabanastre. Vaan and Penelo, along with their orphan friends from the Lowtown, Filo, Tomaj, and Kytes, sneak aboard and commandeer the derelict airship.
The airship takes the party up to the mythical sky islands, where they meet Llyud, an Aegyl, a winged person who’s entirely devoid of emotion. Vaan learns that he can use the crystal from the ruins to summon Espers to aid them in battle. What follows is supposedly a story of friendship. The crew meets someone called the Judge of Wings, who is trying to destroy the Auralith, large crystals that supposedly keep the sky islands safe and afloat. The Judge quickly succeeds in destroying one, leaving two. At the same time, lots of sky pirates are ascending to the islands looking for treasure and bounty, bringing conflict to the Aegyl.
Being the happy-go-lucky personalities that they are, Vaan and Penelo try their best to prove that not all sky pirates are bad and that they’ll do right by their new friend Llyud. They follow the Judge of Wings toward the second Auralith, where they meet Balthier and Fran, and Balthier is in the process of destroying the second Auralith. Vaan tries to stop him. Balthier rebukes him, telling him to stay out of matters he doesn’t understand, and refuses to explain the situation to his supposed friend. Balthier succeeds in destroying the crystal, and shortly after it’s revealed that the Auralith are instrumental in stripping the Aegyl of their anima, the essence that gives people emotion and humanity. It turns out that destroying the Auralith is a good thing, because the villain, Feolthanos, has been absorbing everyone’s anima for who knows how long.
Balthier and Fran join the party while their airship is under repairs, and shortly afterward Ashe and Basch show up too, because trouble has befallen Ivalice: people are summoning espers down below and they are looking for help. The party flies around, engaging in combat after combat, until they eventually ascend into space, face down Feolthanos directly, and destroy him and the third Auralith. Everyone lives happily ever after, or something.
I apologize if my story synopsis went off the rails for a bit, but that’s honestly how the story felt. It tries to set up dramatic revelations, betrayals, and people who’ve ascended to godhood trying to bring back a fallen loved one, and none of it really hits properly. Part of the problem is that all the characters and dialogue are really childish. The writing portrays them as excited little children, and there’s no depth. They’re ignorant of anything that’s not happening right in front of their little noses.
There’s one point where Penelo attaches herself to someone they meet along their journey for a single night, and then that person is taken away by the Judge of Wings. Penelo falls into the depths of despair, saying she’s tired of everyone being torn away from her. It was a moment of dissonance for me, because we as players haven’t been shown Penelo’s losses at all. So many other characters in the Final Fantasy series earn that kind of statement far more. I’m thinking of Cyan in Final Fantasy VI, who watched his entire kingdom fall to Kefka’s evil plots, and saw his wife and child perish right in front of him. Or Cloud in Final Fantasy VII, who lost Zack and Aerith during the game. I know Penelo lost her parents during the war before the events of Final Fantasy XII, because the exposition told us, but so many other games in this series have done such a good job of showing us loss, that this was a moment where I didn’t feel Penelo had earned that statement.
There’s also some narrative dissonance in how the game treats its central risk. Early on you’re warned that using the crystal to summon Espers costs you part of your anima, and that if you use it too much you’ll be robbed of your humanity. But there’s never any consequence for summoning, or for just playing the game. The story tells you this is a risky endeavor, but the gameplay never feeds into it. Much like in Final Fantasy XII, the characters at the end of the game are largely the same as they were at the beginning. No one experiences great loss or growth. At the very least, there were a lot more little vignettes of the characters interacting with each other. The dialogue was never deep or impactful, but those interactions made them feel more like friends.
The Gameplay
Revenant Wings is an Real Time Strategy game. You control five leaders in real time, and each leader has a number of minions in their squad. The Minions come in three types: melee, ranged, and flying. There’s a rock-paper-scissors mechanic at play between these types, where melee units are strong against ranged units, ranged units take down flyers, and flyers are really good at defeating melee. There’s also a secondary cycle of elements (fire, water, thunder, earth), with units resistant and weak against each other.
Before every battle you get a preview of the leaders and minions your opponents have, and you set which five Espers types you want to bring. I kind of like this in theory, but in practice it’s more fiddly than it should be. It’s annoying that the game doesn’t show you the incoming enemies while you’re choosing which minions to take. You need to remember what types and weaknesses the enemies are bringing and build your loadout accordingly. I ended up needing to flip back and forth a lot just to remember who I needed to counter, It’s mildly tedious.
Every battle starts out roughly the same. Your five leaders, each bringing two minions, are set off on a sprawling map to overcome overwhelming odds. The enemies are spread all over the map, and the goal is to pick them off one by one, or in small groups, so you aren’t overwhelmed yourself. Most maps have a summoning gate that you can capture with your leaders to summon reinforcements, though there’s a limit to how many Espers you can summon, meaning you can’t just Zerg rush the enemy. Some maps also have soul crystals, which respawn leaders if they fall in battle.
Each of your leaders have unique abilities, and will acquire more as the game progresses. You can set one ability on each character to auto-fire through a “Gambit”, but calling it a Gambit feels disengenous. The Gambits in Final Fantasy XII was a clever series of If/Then statements that you could curate and manage to control how your companions behave in battle. Here, a ‘gambit’ is just ‘trigger this ability as soon as it’s ready’. There’s no logic or context for the gambit, just, spam this one ability.
Every other ability has to be triggered manually: tap the hero, tap ‘abilities’, choose the ability, tap the target. That ends up being a lot of taps per ability, especially when each character has 8 abilities and you have 5 characters to manage all at the same time. And choosing your target can be impossible when you have 15 of your little guys running all over the map and engaged in massive cluster of a battle with 10 enemies. It becomes frantic and unwieldy. I spent the vast majority of my playthrough just using Kytes and his AoE spells to blast enemies with their weaknesses. It was pretty rare that I needed to dig into the other characters’ abilities, with the exception of Penelo and her Raise.
Some characters have an ability that’s just so good it always has to be the Gambit. Penelo, the White Mage, was always casting Curaga, which heals a group of allies over a wide area. I always want that on, but she also has other good abilities, like buffing strength or magic, and using those means remembering to trigger them manually. That often meant taking my focus away from the battle and then trying to control Penelo manually. Because she can cast her healing at a range, if I wanted her buff to hit my melee and flying characters, I’d have to manually move her closer, then hit the buff button before turning my attention back to the characters doing the battling. And often, by the time I did all that, the battle would be over already.
Trying to utilize the abilities of all five characters and trigger them all at the right time turns the game into a furious screen-tapping mess. I understand that in RTS games the victor is often the player with the most actions per minute, but it just doesn’t work well here, especially thanks to the DS format. Triggering every ability takes four taps at the least, and by the time you’ve finished tapping through two abilities, the first one has cooled down and reset. If you forget what an ability does, by the time the tooltip scrolls up and tells you what it does, someone is dead, or the situation where that ability would have been useful has passed.
Pacing and Difficulty
Every battle in Revenant Wings is slow. It takes time for your troops to stomp across the map, time to summon reinforcements, time to capture a gate, and time to command your army to engage an enemy and watch that little red health bar tick down bit by bit. Because every battle takes so long, I was never inclined to grind. On every map I collected all the materials scattered about and every treasure, and I even did all of Tomaj’s side missions outside of the story missions, all the way up through chapter 9.
Chapter 9 is my biggest qualm. The difficulty spikes dramatically. Maybe I missed something, but all the enemies and my characters had been around level 38 to 40, and then all of a sudden the enemy level jumped to 50 and I was getting smoked. There were no more side missions to do and no more main missions to attempt other than the one I’d hit a stone wall against. My only option was to bash my head against that mission, accrue experience from losing, slowly level up, and eventually win.
Sometimes you can go into a battle with the exact same characters and the exact same build and have a wildly different outcome depending on which enemies attack whom, and when. More than once I had to scrap a mission because Penelo got blindsided and knocked out, and she was my only character with a revive unless I also brought Llyud. It feels insane to me to have only two characters with that ability. There’s no option for items such as Phoenix Downs, and really nobody else to pick up the slack if your healer (Penelo) gets ganked. Llyud is also a front-line character, so it’s not uncommon for him to die when a couple of ranged characters get behind a melee unit he’s fighting. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s frustrating that I have to always bring Llyud and Penelo, or else as soon as I Penelo gets hit, I have to scrap the whole battle and start again.
Graphics & Music
The graphics are honestly fine. Most of the character sprites were taken directly from Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced or Tactics Advanced A2, and a the sprites of the characters that came from Final Fantasy XII looked like their PS2 counterparts. The character portraits are pretty flat and featureless, which might be a style choice, but I found them much less interesting than they could have been.
Every now and then throughout the story there’s a FMV cutscene, much like in XII, and I was surprised to see the full-motion video on the DS. It does run at like, 15 frames per second, and some of the character models look like wax figures compared to how they looked in Final Fantasy XII. One thing I really didn’t like was Penelo’s new outfit, where she’s basically wearing nothing from her ribs down to her pelvis. Especially because she looks and acts like a child, it’s just uncomfortable.
The music is all straight from Final Fantasy XII, but using the DS’s dramatically reduced sound capabilities. They’re cheap, tinny facsimiles of the gorgeous music that the original game had.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I think Revenant Wings is a game that’s okay being lost to time. RTS is a challenging genre to implement well, and the DS isn’t the best form factor for it. It’s probably better than any other console would be, since you can tap the screen, but it’s still not ideal. The game doesn’t add anything substantial to Final Fantasy XII and doesn’t really build on the foundation of the main game. It feels like a cheap side-story spin-off, more fanfiction than cannon.
I don’t think Revenant Wings is worth anyone’s time today. If you like RTS games, this one is a hollow shell of what the genre offers. The story is childish, but the difficulty is such that I don’t think any kids are going to beat it. I know back in 2008, I sure didn’t. There are so many better games in the Final Fantasy franchise, and in the end this one just isn’t interesting or intriguing enough to justify suffering through all the frustration points.
But I am glad to have finally ticked an unfinished game from my childhood off the list, and it’s another step completed on my Final Fantasy pilgrimage.
It’s been just over a month since I started Final Fantasy XII. This time the gap between starting and finishing wasn’t because I lost interest, like it was with Final Fantasy VIII. It’s because I got a new job, and now I only have about an hour a day to play games. Final Fantasy XII took me roughly 36 hours, and that doesn’t count the time the in-game clock lost when I got a game over and had to reload an old save, nor the fact that I had it on X2 speed almost the entire time.
My history with this game is a little textured. I played it when it first came out, and I tried it again five years ago, but both times I never got much farther than the Tomb of Raithwall. It wasn’t that anything was wrong with the game. I was just bored, and a big part of that is that I’m such a character-driven person. The lack of a character driven story in XII always drove me to apathy. I’m quite happy that I finally played it all the way through, but I’m getting ahead of myself, so let’s set the scene.
Story
Final Fantasy XII begins with a royal wedding. Princess Ashe is marrying, promising an age of peace and prosperity for the kingdom of Dalmasca. Unfortunately, the Archadians attack, invading with their terrifying airships and bringing the war to the doorstep of Rabanastre, Dalmasca’s capital. The prince fights valiantly, but Dalmasca’s forces are pushed back to the throne room. Basch and Reks rush through the castle to guard their king, but they’re separated. By the time Reks arrives at the throne room, Basch has slain the king of Dalmasca, ending the war and pushing Dalmasca into servitude to Archadia.
The game flashes forward a couple of years and focuses on Vaan, Reks’s little brother. Reks died after that encounter, but he lived long enough to tell the world what he saw: Basch murdering their king. Vaan is a street rat, an orphan who dreams of becoming a sky pirate. He spends his time screwing around in the city’s underbelly, hunting rats and doing favours for an old man. His childhood friend Penelo is generally by his side, trying to keep him out of trouble.
Archadia’s crown prince, Vayne Solidor, arrives in Rabanastre and assumes government, promising to be a good steward of a country that is now under Archadian rule. There’s a celebration, a gala, and Vaan thinks this is the perfect time to sneak into the castle to steal some treasure. He manages to snag a small gem called the Dawn Shard, and while he’s at it he runs into Balthier and Fran, two sky pirates also seeking treasure. During this heist, a resistance force launches an attack on the castle and throws everything into chaos. Vaan, Balthier, and Fran escape together, fighting over the Dawn Shard and agreeing, reluctantly, to work together to get out of this particular pickle.
The group ends up in chains in the dungeon, and there they meet Basch, the knight who slew the king. He swears he didn’t do it. He swears he was framed, and that his twin brother was the true kingkiller. The group frees him from his chains, they all escape together, and Basch leads them to the resistance, where they meet Princess Ashe, who was presumed dead. Around this time Penelo is kidnapped and held for ransom. The group rescues her and starts to learn about the secrets of the Dawn Shard, the manufacturing site, the terrible power it has, and how Archadia is using it to turn the tides of war.
The rest of the game follows Ashe seeking power to bring freedom to her country. They hunt for more nethicite, find the Tomb of the Dynast-King and the great swords that can destroy nethicite, and eventually find the Sun-Cryst, the source of all the nethicite itself. Working together, they break the Sun-Cryst, hoping to bring an end to the age of war.
While Ashe’s party runs around the desert gathering relics and nethicite, Vayne Solidor kills his own father to take control of the empire. So much of this game is the machinations of imperialism, people who want power for the sake of power. The story comes to a head when Vayne, in the sky fortress Bahamut, declares war on a neighboring kingdom, with Rabanastre caught right in the middle. In fact, the battleground is Rabbinate itself. The party manages to board Bahamut, ascend the sky fortress, and slay Vayne, leaving his little brother Larsa, a friend of peace, to rule and bring an end to the war.
My biggest critique
Much of the story has far less to do with the characters and their individual growth than with the tides of fate and global geopolitics. There are plenty of scenes of people gnashing their teeth and saying the council will never agree to whatever plan they have, and then someone barking back that they are the council, and if the king won’t agree, they’ll just have to kill the king and take his place. Unlike the previous Final Fantasy games, which focused on the characters and the relationships between them, this one is about larger events, and the individual players don’t necessarily matter so much.
That is my biggest critique of Final Fantasy XII: it is not a character-driven game. No one grows or develops. All the characters are largely the same at the end of the game as they were at the beginning. No one faces great trials of conscience, and no one has to give up their old ways to become something different or better. Compare that to Cecil in Final Fantasy IV, who grows from a dark knight into a paladin through a story of atonement and redemption. Or look at Final Fantasy X, with Yuna and her pilgrimage to save Spira, bound by her duty while struggling with her feelings for Tidus. For a series that has done such a great job creating memorable characters over decades, Final Fantasy XII left me a bit puzzled by its focus on grand history instead of the character-driven plots the series is known for.
If we’re being honest, the party has no real motivation to stay together, nor do they spend any time deeping their bonds to one another. Penelo is only there because Vaan is there. Vaan is there because he wants to be a sky pirate and sticking close to Balthier is a foot in the door. Fran only sticks around because Balthier is here and Balthier is sticking around because he smells treasure. The only character who has real stakes in the adventure is Ashe, and the adventure is just her seeking our relics to build power so she can take back her kingdom. At the end of the game, Vaan mentions that they’re such good friends, but I really didn’t feel it. There’s no side stories or dialogue outside of the main plot that makes you think the characters have developed a bond of friendship. Having snippits of their personalities along the adventure would have gone a long way to helping this, like the Skits in the Tales of series, or the way the characters quip in Dragon Age or Mass Effect.
The villains are all similarly underdeveloped. Vayne has ambitions to bring Dalmasca under his control and commits regicide/patricide to assume power, but he’s never more than a distant threat that shows up in cutscenes. In Final Fantasy IX or VI, Kuja and Kefka were constantly in your face, showing you their power and making you hate them, giving you a reason to want to fight them. Vayne is just, a figurehead to fight in the very end. The judge, Galbranth is a bit more interesting, a former Dalmasican, now a dog of the empire and brother of Basch, there’s more to explore but it doesn’t really get brought up. likewise, the mad scientist Cid is Balthier’s father, they have a couple quips of Balthier running away to be a sky pirate, but no one sheds tears over each other when we slay their kin. The story just moves on because it’s so much less interested in the characters than the grand politics at play.
The World
Every game in the series seems to have, in my opinion, some direct response to the criticisms of the previous game. I felt that Final Fantasy X was too linear, that every dungeon and every map was little more than a straight line from beginning to end. Final Fantasy XII took that criticism to heart. Every town, dungeon, and environment is huge and sprawling. Thank goodness the Zodiac Age has a map overlay that lets you see the entire dungeon in one view, because otherwise you’d spend so much time running around trying to get your bearings.
This isn’t a criticism, by the way. I actually quite enjoyed how it made every area feel like a real place. The world of XII feels real, full, and lived in. Cities are littered with people to talk to and alleyways to explore. Sure, there often isn’t much reason to explore them, but they’re there, and it makes the world feel more textured and fleshed out. That goes for the various races of Ivalice too: the lizardesque Bangaa (never call a Bangaa a lizard, kupo!), the Viera, the Nu Mou, and the large, piglike Seeq. It feels like a fantasy world, and a very well-developed one.
The Gambit System
The gameplay is also quite different from its predecessors. Unlike Final Fantasy X, or anything before it with an active-time battle system, Final Fantasy XII happens entirely in real time. Battles happen right on the main map, with no transition into a separate battle screen. Each character selects an action, and then a ATB meter starts to fill. You can directly control each character, but there’s a robust gambit system that allows you to program each character with a bunch of commands that will automate their decisions in battle, removing the need for constant commands.
The Gambits start off pretty simple. You set a character to target the nearest enemy with an attack, and they’ll keep doing that. When you get some spells, you can set the character you want as your healer to cast Cure when someone’s health falls below 50%. Put that Gambit above the attack Gambit, and now they’ll continue to attack until someone’s health is below 50%, then switch over to curing. It’s all automated and smooth, and it makes running around the map and grinding through battles really easy, especially in The Zodiac Age version, which has a speed-up option.
The problem with this system is that you can set up your gambits to handle a combat, but every combat is different. Even with a good set of all-purpose Gambits, there is a lot of going into your menu and tweaking your actions and triggers to suit each scenario. I didn’t mind it, but I’ve read that some people get exhausted of micro-managing these supposedly automated party members. Personally, I appreciate having so much control over these AIs, as I cannot tell you how many times I’ve cursed a game because my supposedly intelligent automated party members did something completely idiotic.
The License Board
Slain enemies drop two kinds of points: experience points to level up your characters, and License Points to unlock new abilities. Each character has a License Board, and in this version of the game there are 12 job-specific boards to choose from. Every character can use up to two. You can give someone a Monk and Red Mage combination so they can beat down enemies with their fists but pivot to magic when necessary. Or a Time Mage/Archer, someone casting Haste on everyone before flipping over to the bow to slay flying enemies. All of the gear each job can equip must be unlocked by a License, the same goes with all the jobs corresponding abilities.
I remember playing the original North American edition, where there was only every character had their own massive license board that contained everything. Every character had access to every single ability and every piece of gear, should you have the LP to purchase it. You could push each character in different directions to diversify them, but kind of like in Final Fantasy X and it’s Sphere grid, by the end game everyone was starting to overlap. Truly dedicated players could unlock every License for every character. I’m guessing the Zodiac Age’s restrictions are meant to counter that Jack-of-all-trades mentality.
I made the conscious decision to diversify my cast, so I had all 12 jobs covered, even if I felt some jobs were really unnecessary. My Red Mage was basically just a worse White Mage who rarely used any Black Magic. My Machinist ended up as a White Mage by the end of the game, using entirely White Mage focused gear and abilities. But I still enjoyed having each character fill their own role, especially because you do need to swap them in and out of your party. Characters not in your party don’t gain experience or License Points, so it’s pretty easy for the one character who’s always in your party to get really far ahead of the rest. These jobs are the only real thing differentiating each character from one another, so it was worth it for me.
It can be frustrating that when you unlock the license for a technique, ability, or gear, you then need to find the associated skill or equipment out in the world. The reverse is true, when you find a new weapon, you’ll need to go into your inventory, go to the bottom of your weapons list to see what license it needs, then go into the specific characters license board and buy the license before you can equip it. It’s fairly tedious, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the feeling of unlocking nodes on the license board. Sometime in the latter half of the game however, I managed to hit everyones stat bonuses on their license boards, and then I really stopped caring about preemptively buying licenses until after I found the equipment or skill. I’d be sitting on hundreds of LP for each character, just waiting for the next piece of gear that needed unlocking.
Loot, Chests, and the Bazaar
You find some gear lying around the world, but you have to be aware that a lot of the treasures comes down to some pretty nasty randomness. When you enter an area, most chests have only a certain percent chance of spawning, and many of those chests only have a certain percent chance of containing good gear. This is particularly atrocious in one part of the game near the end, which has nearly one hundred chest scattered around about five sections of the map. Each chest only has a 15 to 20% chance of spawning, and each one only has a 5% chance of holding the item you’re looking for, while the other 95% change will have a range of Gil. That mentality is prevalent throughout the entire game. Sometimes you’ll be running through a forest, spot a treasure chest, open it, and find a mere 5 Gil. Really not worth the time.
So if the chests are random, where does the good gear come from? As per Final Fantasy tradition, a number of great gear can only be acquired by stealing it, which is never my favourite thing to do. But Final Fantasy XII introduces the Bazaar. At every shop in the game, you can sell the various loot the monsters drop, and if you sell the right combination of loot, the bazaar will have an item up for sale. Some of the best weapons in the game are acquired only through the bazaar, but they require some serious hunting for specific loot. I never found any in-game resource for the bazaar recipes, it’s almost like Square Enix expected you to have a guide or go online to find exactly what types of goods to sell to get the items you’re looking for.
Hunts and Difficulty
The main storyline of Final Fantasy XII was fairly easy. None of the bosses on the main quest gave me any trouble. But there’s a Hunt system, where the game gives you specific marks to seek out. These Marks often representing some pretty serious challenges, especially if you take them on as soon as they become available. While the Gambit system automates so much of the combat, what I really liked was thinking, before going into a battle, about what kind of Gambits I’d need. You can use the context clues the hunt-giver provides to guide your strategy.
The annoying part of the hunts is that every hunt requires 4 steps. First, you need to accept the hunt from the board in the various pubs in the towns you’ll visit across Ivalice (or accept them from Montblanc). Then, you’ll need to find the hunt requester, somewhere in the world. Once you trek over to the requester, you then need to go find the monster somewhere else in the world. And finally, once you’ve slain the beast, you need to return to the hunt requester to claim your reward.
All I can say is there’s a ton of back tracking in the Hunt System. You’ll think yourself done with an area, but these hunts will have you running right back of the path you just completed to find the requester or mark. There is a teleportation system, but it uses a consumable resource, so I never really liked using it. Likewise, each of the cities in the game contains an aerodrome, allowing you to pay a small sum to fly between towns, but there’s a ton of world inbetween locations. Once again, thank goodness for the X2 speed up.
Final Thoughts
I’m happy I finally played and finished Final Fantasy XII. It’s ultimately a great game. The visuals are stunning when compared to even Final Fantasy X and X-2, the music is brilliant, the world feels real and fully realized, and the gameplay is interesting. I never really felt frustrated. The dungeons were large, sprawling, and interesting to explore, and I like exploring the world of Final Fantasy XII, especially when my pacing isn’t thrown off every three seconds by a random battle transition and me mashing the A button to get through the random mobs.
That said, I have a hard time believing this will be anyone’s favourite Final Fantasy, especially if they’ve explored the games that came before it. I could see it being the favourite of someone if it’s the only Final Fantasy game they’ve ever played, because it is a very solid game. The systems are deep and invite you to explore and plumb their depths, and there are plenty of side dungeons and bonus content to engage with.
But for me, the lack of character development and character-driven story means Final Fantasy XII doesn’t rank very highly on my list. It’s below X for sure, below all the SNES games, probably below at least VII, and maybe below VIII and IX, too. Like I said, I never felt frustrated with it, and I don’t have any real reason to pan it critically. But I also don’t see myself coming back to this one. I’m happy I played it, I’m happy I’m done, and I’m ready to move on to Final Fantasy XIII.
Or Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. That’s another game that I had when I was a teenager, and the only thing I remember is that I managed to get myself right up to the final boss, but never managed to summit that challenge. Perhaps this is the time to give it another shot, while the story is still fresh in my head.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was another one of those games that I had some fond childhood memories of. I’ve played a smattering of the game here and there throughout my teenage years, and one time I even got to play it multiplayer, which I’ll go into depth on that later. I’ve always remembered really enjoying Crystal Chronicles, but I’ve never owned it, so I’ve never beaten it before. That changes today, let’s dive into one of the first multiplayer, non-turn based Final Fantasy games, originally published for the Nintendo Gamecube in 2003.
Story
The world is covered by a toxic substance called Miasma. Settlements are able to survive only in the shadow of a crystal, which provides a purifying presence. But these crystals lose their purifying power over time, so each village sends a caravan out into the world. The caravanners are able to travel around the world thanks to a crystal chalice, that has a small shard of crystal embedded in the top. The crystal shard provides a small sphere of safety from the Miasma. The caravan’s goal is to find myrrh trees to collect myrrh drops that can be used to recharge the town’s crystal. The world is gated by these intense Miasma streams, which require your crystal chalice to possess a specific element to pass, which can usually be acquired in a nearby dungeon.
As you adventure out into the world, you’re fed little vignettes as you encounter other caravanners and characters. Every encounter is then recorded in your journal. Similarly, when you enter a dungeon, you’re given a small narration that sounds like the entry from someone else’s journal. And once you beat the boss of the level and collect a Myrrh drop, you record your adventure in your own journal.
It only takes 3 drops of myrrh to recharge the crystal, after which you are forced to return home and your hometown of Tipa throws the yearly celebration to celebrate your return and the charging of the crystal. Then, after the town mayor tells you a little tale of a past caravan’s actions, you set out again to collect more myrrh drops.
Throughout your adventures you’ll hear of, and eventually run into a character called The Black Knight, who screams about a light stealing his memories and he can’t remember who he is anymore. You’ll also run into a group of inept thieves, a clan of armoured Lilties, and various other minor characters, each encounter making the world feel more fleshed out and lived in.
Eventually, you’ll make your way to the Lynari Desert, where if you’ve been paying attention to the poems shared by the charlatan Gurdy, you can solve a puzzle to unlock a 5th element for your chalice. This 5th element allows you to pass through all the Miasma streams, including the one gating off Mag Mell, a village of Carbuncles at the foot of Mount Vellenge. At the end of Mount Vellenge, you encounter the Meteor Parasite, which is a 3 phase boss battle. As you prepare to deliver the final blow, you’re interrupted by a disembodied voice, and you suddenly find yourself on an ethereal plain with a figure made entirely of light.
The figure of light reveals herself to be Dio, Dio, together with Ream, eat memories. While Ream prefers to gorge himself of the negative memories, Dio just nibbles on little memories from time to time, which explains the Black Knight’s madness. Ream won’t allow you to destroy the Meteor Parasite, as it’s the source of the Miasma, and the Miasma causes so many negative memories that he just loves to devour.
Once you defeat Ream, he absorbs Dio into himself, and again attacks, refusing to allow himself to fade away. Once you defeat Ream a second time, you find yourself back at the Meteor Parasite, which appears to be withered and dying. You strike it once more, it dies, and the land is free from the scourge of Miasma.
The story of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is fairly non-linear and is light on exposition. Dio and Ream being the unseen final bosses of the game were a complete surprise to me. But I suppose at this point it’s almost more expected for a random and sudden deity to appear as the final final boss in this series.
Gameplay
Unlike past Final Fantasy games, Crystal Chronicles is a 3D real time action RPG. As you crawl through the dungeons you’ll acquire items and magicite, which you can add to your command list. Attack and Defend are always available in your command list, and you cycle through your commands with the shoulder buttons before pressing A to activate the command.
You can chain up to 3 attacks together with some careful timing, and most of the game is just you, wailing on the enemies with your sword until they fall. In fact, most of the combat in Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is just you rushing in, hitting the monster 3 times, then moving slightly to dodge its attacks, before delivering 3 more hits. Rinse and repeat until everything is dead. Another aspect of the combat is the Focus attacks. All magic requires a few seconds of focus (holding the command button) before they’re ready to cast. Then a spell reticle appears on the ground, allowing you to target areas far away from your avatar.
You retain items like food and crafting materials from level to level, but you need to recollect your magicite every level. The most important one being Cure. There is no MP or mana system here, so once you get a Cure spell, you’re able to easily keep your health at full. Sometimes it requires some careful timing so you don’t get smacked in the face as you charge your spell, but in general, once I found a Cure, I felt pretty safe for the rest of the dungeon. You can also fuse magicite together to create stronger spells. 2 Fire spells will give you a Fira, while two different elemental magicite will let you cast Gravity. Sometimes you can get Mog to help you out a bit, too.
Oh yeah, Mog. Remember in the story section where I said caravans have a crystal chalice to keep the Miasma at bay while they adventure throughout the land? Yeah, Mog is a Moogle that carries your chalice. You can have him drop it, and he’ll sometimes provide a bit of support if you charge a spell. He’ll charge a spell of the same type, and move his spell reticle on top of yours, combining your spells, as if you had multiple magicite fused together. The problem with this system is 2 fold. 1, Mog is entirely unreliable to actually cast a spell. And 2, if he’s not holding the chalice, you can’t move around freely without dipping into the Miasma, which saps your health.
Throughout each level, you can find 4 artifacts that will boost your stats, provide extra command slots, or extra hearts. At the end of each level, you’re given a chance to keep one artifact permanently. The level always provides 4, no matter how many you find, so finding them all just gives you a choice of 8 in the end.
As I touched on above, every dungeon holds a Myrrh tree for you to harvest a drop from. Each tree only produces one drop of myrrh every 3 years, meaning you’ll need to travel further and further to find myrrh drops until 3 years have passed. When you do revisit an area, you’ll often find that it’s changed. The monsters are stronger, maybe a drought cleared a river path that didn’t exist before, and the level boss will have acquired new abilities for an added challenge, too.
Thoughts
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is a game that is short on plot but strong on vibes. There’s a real sense of loneliness and melancholy as you adventure through this tortured world. Everyone is struggling to survive, the Miasma is ever-present on your doorstep, but no one seems to mind. They go through their days, seemingly fairly carefree, secure in the thought that the caravan will return by the end of the year to recharge their crystal. There is one dungeon, Tida Village, that is an abandoned town where the caravan never returned. The narration introducing the location is haunting:
The sun once smiled on this village more than any other. But one day, their crystal’s blessing faded. The villagers eagerly awaited their caravan’s return; but for them, the crystal would never shine again. It is said that not a single one of them tried to escape. All stood fast waiting for the caravan, hoping to the very end. After hearing that tale, I felt the weight of my burden like never before.
There is a sense of sadness that is pervasive throughout the game, but you won’t know it by the music. Beautiful woodwinds and simple, jaunty tunes make this soundtrack absolutely wonderful. I can’t help but bob my head to the gorgeous, provincial tunes. All the music is made using classic or ‘ancient’ instruments. No heavy metal guitar riffs like the final boss music of Final Fantasy X over here. Composer Kumi Takano knocked it out of the park with beautiful, simple music that imbues the game with an incredible amount of charm. Easily one of the best OSTs in the series.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is a surprisingly short game. My in-game timer reads only 12 hours after beating the final boss, but I suspect that timer is somewhat truncated, considering how often I died and had to reset in a level. If you do fall, you have the option to continue the dungeon you’re currently working on, or reload your last save. If you choose to continue the dungeon, you’ll be dropped at the start of the room you’re in, all the items and magicite you’ve collected will remain in your inventory, the monsters you defeated stay gone, but any items you consumed are also gone. This was mostly a problem during boss fights where I used one or two phoenix downs, only to die anyway, and have to retry the boss from the start, but with less phoenix downs.
The final dungeon represents a significant difficulty spike that is worth mentioning. The Final boss in particular was a horrid 5 stage affair. I quickly burned through my phoenix downs and had to take down the last two forms one at a time. If only I had a friend around to revive me when I fall.
The Multiplayer Elephant in the Room
Back in 2003 when Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was released, it had a novel mechanism to allow for multiplayer play. Because a player has to go into their menus a fair number of times, having all players play from the same screen just wouldn’t make sense, it would destroy the flow. So instead, each player needs to have their own Gameboy Advance and a GameCube link cable. This gives every player their own screen to manage their inventory from and access their won information without disrupting the flow of the game. The downside for me, however, was that I grew up in a small town and never had access to the GameCube link cables. I was never willing to spend my few coins back then on a peripheral over a new game. But I did get to try multiplayer once when I was traveling to a cousins house, so I’m not totally ignorant of the multiplayer experience.
There are a couple of downsides to this approach, however. Because all players need to remain within the range of the crystal chalice, when one player dives into their menu, the whole party has to wait for them anyway. Secondly, the moment you have at least 2 players, Mog is no longer a part of the team. Someone always has to carry the chalice, which cuts their movement speed by at least half. It’s not exactly fun being the chalice holder while your teammates run up and kill the monsters before you even have a chance to drop the chalice and pull your weapon.
Now, the loss of Mog is regrettable, but it is still fun to play this game with your friends. The bosses are an interesting challenge, and syncing up and casting your spells on the same spot offer a really exciting moment of collaboration. The character you played was saved in the village, letting you power them up as you and your friends moved through the dungeons together.
Without other players though, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles feels like a lonely affair. Your avatar walks alone into battle, sits alone at camp sites, meets up with other caravans on the road, totally alone. The loneliness does play into the overall sense of melancholy that Crystal Chronicles presents, and I would largely be fine with it. There were some particularity frustrating moments where the puzzles of a dungeon obviously wanted 2 or more players to do something at the same time. Or one player is supposed to stand on a pad and another player is supposed to grab a key that reveals itself. Never mind the existence of the Life spell to resurrect your fallen comrades, which is largely wasted in the solo experience.
My in-game timer tells me that it took a mere 12 hours to beat Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, but it feels much longer than that. Perhaps it’s because the pace of the game is slower, or the timer for a level restarts after you die. Either way, I came away from my Crystal Chronicles play though less keen on the game than my nostalgic memories had me feeling before. I still enjoyed the experience, especially the music. But I won’t lie and say that I’m likely to replay this game sometime in the future. The story is drip-fed to players, the villain comes out of nowhere, and there’s never a sense of over arcing progression or building tension. You just keep adventuring until you happen to take down the cause of all the Miasma. The combat is repetitive and without multiplayer, the slow pace made it harder for me to want to come back to this game at the end of each day. I don’t think it’s a bad game by any means, it’s certainly charming and nostalgic. But it sure does show its age and technical limitations in 2026.
Before I started this whole Final Fantasy endeavour, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was my most-played Final Fantasy game by a long shot. I played it on my platinum Game Boy Advance SP, and I played the daylights out of this game. It’s one of the first times I remember going onto good old GameFAQs to figure out which abilities I needed to unlock the various classes, which, on dial up internet was quite the chore. But I don’t want to launch straight into my nostalgia. Let’s talk about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance itself, what I love about it, and what changed during this most recent playthrough.
The Story Begins
Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens with a school-sanctioned snowball fight. You play as Marche, the new kid at school. On your team are the weakling Mewt and the strong, confident redheaded Ritz. The teacher gives everyone a little bit of instruction before setting the kids loose to pelt each other with snowballs.
I actually love this as a tutorial. It teaches the player movement, positioning, and attack range, all wrapped up in a scenario that feels surprisingly natural instead of throwing you into a random battle against goblins for no particular reason. Unfortunately, the other team is full of bullies, and they all decide to pick on Mewt. After a couple of rounds of combat, the cutscene takes over, and one of the bullies beans Mewt with a rock hidden inside a snowball. Little jerks. The teacher watching the scene puts an end to the snowball fight and the kids go their separate ways.
After school Mewt says he’s picking up an old book from the bookstore and asks if everyone wants to come over to Marche’s house to read it together. During this conversation you also see Cid across the street getting reprimanded by some adults while looking pathetic and defeated. It’s here you learn that Cid is actually Mewt’s father and that Mewt’s mother has passed away, leaving Cid trying to deal with his own grief while raising his son. It’s not exactly an easy situation, and it’s one of the first hints that beneath this bright, colourful fantasy game there’s something much sadder going on.
The group heads over to Marche’s house, where we meet Marche’s brother Doned, who uses a wheelchair and has been in poor health for quite some time. Then comes a conversation that probably every adolescent nerd who’s ever played video games or read fantasy books has had with their friends. “Wouldn’t it be cool if this fantasy world was real?” and “I’d love to live in a video game.” It’s that childhood dream of escaping into a world where you have power and agency instead of feeling helpless. After this escapist fantasy, Ritz and Mewt depart, and the kids go to bed.
That night, the world changes. The school transforms into a rocky plains crawling with monsters. Your school transforms into a bustling city crawling with various colourful races. Marche is lifted into the air, his pyjamas transform into battle leathers, and suddenly he’s standing in the middle of a fantasy world.
Marche immediately bumps into a Bangaa, a humanoid lizard race, and casually calls him a lizard—which, it turns out, is a terrible slur. Montblanc, the ever-cheerful Moogle, rushes in to save you before the offended Bangaa challenges you to an engagement.
Enagements & The Laws That Govern Them
In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, every battle is called an engagement, and every engagement is overseen by judges. These judges enforce a different set of laws that everyone in the engagement is expected to obey. One battle might forbid fire magic while rewarding ice attacks. Another battle might prohibit swords entirely. Sometimes the laws will barely affect your party, while others completely cripple a specific character, or essentially render a battle unwinnable. If swords are forbidden, suddenly your soldier class characters are having a very bad day. On the other hand, whenever the law prohibits Control actions, I always cackle because I’ve basically never used Beastmaster’s Control ability, so it’s practically a law-free battle for me.
Usually, breaking a law earns you a yellow card, earning you a fine of some gil or an item that you’ll lose after the engagement. Sometimes characters will get punished by having a certain stat reduced, which feels like a much worse punishment. Break enough laws, though, and you receive a red card, and that unit gets ejected from the engagement entirely, and you’ll need to bail them out of jail for a much larger sum.
From what I remember, this law system is at the centre of a lot of people’s complaints about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. There are situations where you’ll be fighting five monsters and one of the laws is “Don’t damage monsters.” So… what exactly are you supposed to do? The answer shows up partway through the story when Ezel opens a card shop, allowing you to add or remove laws before battles. At first you might wonder why you’d ever add another law, but it’s important to remember that every law that forbids something will also reward something else. If swords are forbidden, bows earn Judge Points instead. Judge Points, or JP, are awarded for following the rewarded law or for delivering the finishing blow to an enemy. Later in the story those Judge Points can be spent to summon powerful Totemas, dealing large MP or HP damage, depending on the race of the character who summoned it.
I feel that the law system is much more interesting than people often give it credit for. Yes, there are moments where the laws feel arbitrary or downright unfair, but more often than not they push me to think about battles differently or use classes and equipment I might otherwise ignore. It pushes me to diversify my party instead of railroading everyone into one specific path.
Clans, Your Found Family
Montblanc invites Marche to join his newly formed clan, and from there Final Fantasy Tactics Advance opens up. You take on missions, recruit new members to your clan, and explore Ivalice, plonking down new locations on a barren map. Along the way you reunite with Ritz, meet Ezel, who as I said above has figured out how to manipulate the laws, and eventually encounter Prince Mewt. In this fantasy world, Mewt’s mother is alive again, and his disgraced father is now the respected Judge Master. Everything he’s ever wanted exists in this world. Marche, however, is determined to get home because he asserts that this world simply isn’t real. Ritz doesn’t necessarily disagree with him, but she enjoys the freedom and confidence she’s found here and has little interest in helping Marche return to the old world. Prince Mewt actively opposes Marche’s quest, strengthening the laws, sending judges after him, and even placing a bounty on his head. Honestly, it makes perfect sense. Here Mewt has power, privilege, and status. Back home he has almost nothing.
I was telling my wife recently that when I originally played this game, I didn’t agree with Marche. I was firmly on Team Mewt. Why would I ever want to leave this fantasy world and go back to reality? It wasn’t until I stood there and actually spoke those words out loud as an adult that I realized how sad that proposition really is. Only someone who’s deeply unhappy with their real life wants to abandon it entirely for a fantasy. As a kid, I understood Mewt completely. As an adult, I understand Marche and why escaping to a fantasy isn’t healthy. Throughout the story, Marche wavers. While he tracks down the crystals guarded by the Totemas and destroys them one by one, believing that breaking the fifth crystal will unravel this world and send everyone home, he’s riddled with doubt. Is it fair of him to rip Mewt away from his fantasy? Does he even want to go back to being the new kid at a new school, living with a single mother whose attention is spent mostly on his sickly little brother? It’s actually a surprisingly melancholy story when you stop and think about it. Three friends fundamentally disagree about what’s best, and eventually those disagreements are settled through violence because there simply isn’t another option.
Unfortunately for Marche, even after destroying the fifth crystal the world doesn’t simply disappear. It continues to exist because there are still people who genuinely want it to. His brother, Doned is one of them. In the real world he’s sickly and confined to a wheelchair. Here he can run, fight, explore, and live a full life. Of course he doesn’t want to leave. He spends the later half of the game actively sabotaging Marche’s plans because, from his perspective, Marche is trying to destroy the only world where he’s able and happy. It’s an interesting premise because Marche spends the entire game trying to save everyone by dragging them back to reality, while almost everyone he cares about is desperately trying to stop him because they’ve escaped the difficult circumstances back home. As a kid I understood the desire to escape. As an adult I understand why living permanently inside an escapist fantasy isn’t really living at all.
I will say that I find Ritz’s motivation for staying in this world relatively weak. In the real world, her hair is naturally white and she dyes it red every day. In this world, her hair stays red. And that’s about it! At least with Marche, Donad, and Mewt they have much stronger reasons for their conflict. Although I will say Donad coming around to agreeing with Marche to leave this world felt a little too easy. I can’t imagine someone agreeing to give up their ability to walk so easy, but hey, this game is intended for a younger audience. For the most part, the game does a really good job of giving each character their own motivations and showing how they are challenged and grow. Which is more than I can say for the sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, but that’s a tale for another day.
Jobs & Character Customization
What really made me fall in love with Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, though, was the gameplay, and more specifically how the game lets you build your characters. Each character belong to one of five races, and every race has its own collection of jobs, with some overlap.
The Humes are your traditional human characters, beginning as Soldiers and Archers before branching into Defenders, Paladins, Ninjas, White Mages, Black Mages, and Thieves. Every job allows the character to equip different weapons, and most weapons will teach a different ability to the character holding it. Equip a sword with Mindbreak, and your Soldier can immediately use that skill. At the end of each battle, the entire party receives some Ability Points, or AP. Keep that weapon equipped for long enough and eventually you’ll master it, allowing you to continue using the skill even after swapping out the weapon that provides it.
New classes unlock by mastering abilities from previous jobs, so you’re constantly planning several steps ahead. If you want to get your Hume to the Ninja Job, you’ll need to master 2 thief action abilities. If you want access to the powerful Illusionist class that can damage all enemies at once, you’ll need 5 black mage abilities and 3 white mage abilities.
The Moogles lean toward magical and technical roles with the Gadgeteer, Gunner, and Mog Knight classes. The Bangaa focus on brute force with the Templar, Dragoon, and Gladiator classes. The Viera become elegant Archers, Snipers, Assassins, and Red Mages. Then there are the Nu Mou, who are probably my favourite race in the game. They’re these wonderfully melancholy, Eeyore-looking creatures who specialize almost entirely in magic. I’ve honestly never really explored their Beastmaster line because their spellcasting is just so absurdly good. Once you unlock Turbo MP, these little magical Eeyores transform into walking tactical nukes, dropping Firaga’s left and right, and I absolutely love them.
Most of the battles will let you bring 6 characters into battle, with Marche always being included. This means 6 sets of equipment and skills to balance and swap around between each battle. It takes 2 or 3 battles to master some of the cheaper abilities, but with 6 characters all earning AP, it’s pretty likely that at least one character will master an ability every battle. This means between every battle you’ll need to go into the party screen to swap gear to continue unlocking new abilities for your characters.
Doublecast + Summon knocked out all 5 of these enemies in one turn.
I know this level of party management probably sounds tedious to some people, but I absolutely love it. Between almost every battle I’m opening menus, swapping equipment, changing jobs, assigning abilities, and figuring out what everyone should learn next. Sometimes that means intentionally giving someone a weaker weapon because it teaches an ability they haven’t mastered yet. Because I’ve played this game so many times, I inevitably railroad Marche toward Ninja so he can learn Double Sword as soon as possible to wield two blades at once. Likewise, I almost always push a Viera into Sniper and then Assassin so they can combine Concentrate with Last Breath, Ko’ing enemies with an 80% hit rate. That, combined with their absurd speed means I start every battle immedately deleting one opponent from the battlefield before they even get a chance to move.
I do like this system and how it creates an arc for your characters, but there are certainly some downsides. First, it does take a long time to train up a unit to a point where they’re use able. It can be frustrating when you send your main units off on Dispatch missions, using a non-default unit just feels anemic. Also, sometimes grinding abilities just to satisfy prerequisites can feel like wasted time, like needing to learn thief skills to unlock the Ninja. As soon as I unlock the ninja, I never touch those thief skills again. This system sounds like it would reward exploring, but really, once you get every character dialed in on the two classes they’re going to utilize in the end game, then you’re pretty well done building those characters.
Even with my favourite classes dialed in, every time I replay Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, I try to explore at least one or two jobs I usually ignore. This time I invested heavily into turning a Moogle into a Mog Knight, and after getting a decent amount of strength through their level ups, I swapped them over to a gunner, dealing really decent damage from clear across the map. Those were both classes I’d barely touched before.
Unfortunately this playthrough also brought along something I’d never experienced before. I lost Montblanc forever during a battle in the Jagd regions, where the judges don’t exist, the laws don’t apply, and death is permanent. Thinking back, I don’t think I’d ever actually lost a character before.
My Criticisms
Which brings me to one of my biggest criticisms of the game: saving. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance does a remarkably poor job of reminding you to save. In between battles on the map screen, you have to press Start, enter the System menu, and choose to manually save. It’s incredibly easy to forget for literally hours at a time, especially if the device you’re playing on has a decent sleep option, like the Steam Deck has. Back when I played this on my Game Boy Advance SP, I’d just snap the lid shut whenever I was done and rely on sleep mode to pick up where I left off. To really drive this pain point home, if you happen to lose a battle, or if Marche breaks the law and gets a red card, you get a Game Over screen, which kicks you back out to the title screen to load a saved game.
There were definitely times where I lost a battle and ended up losing eight or nine hours of progress because I simply had forgotten to save. Recently I made another equally stupid mistake. I sent almost my entire main party away on dispatch missions, figured I’d just walk around the map until they came back, and accidentally wandered into a new location, which threw me into a hidden engagement. Suddenly Marche was fighting 5 enemies alone. To make matters worse, the battle forbade damaging monsters, and I didn’t have an appropriate Anti-Law card. I had effectively walked straight into an unwinnable situation. Thankfully I’d saved a few missions earlier, so I only lost a little bit of progress instead of an entire evening.
One thing I noticed during this playthrough that I’d never really appreciated before is just how slow this game can be. The only reason I noticed it was because I played almost the entire game with a 2x speed hack enabled. Whenever I turned it off, everything suddenly felt glacial. Animations take much longer than I remember. There’s a noticeable slowness to the actions. Half of the battles are just watching the enemy units take their turns. This is a pretty common problem in every Tactics game though, and after sitting through the absurdly long summon animations of the PS1 era games, I really can’t complain about the “wasted time” here.
I don’t even feel guilty using an emulators speed-up feature anymore. Modern Final Fantasy remasters regularly include fast-forward buttons, encounter toggles, or experience multipliers. At this point it almost feels like an expected quality-of-life feature.
Living in the Shadow of a Giant
While I realize that nostalgia might be playing a role here, I enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics Advance more than War of the Lions. That statement might be sacrilegious to some people as War of the Lions is routinely touted as one of the best games ever made. Yes, War of the Lions tells a much stronger story. Its political intrigue and complex factions are objectively more sophisticated. But Tactics Advance is simply more approachable. It’s brighter, more colourful, and more fantastical, and the race and job system feels much deeper. And the isekai plot is exactly what thirteen-year-old Alex wanted. Back then I couldn’t appreciate the political maneuvering and power struggles of War of the Lions. While I appreciate that story now, Tactics Advance has a story that spoke to me on a personal level. I also had more gripes for War of the Lions, like not seeing the map while staging your units at the start of a battle, or not being able to take back your movement, or just how absurd the zodiac system was and how consequential your characters star sign would be to how much damage they’d deal to enemies. Now, I know some of those complaints have been fixed in the 2025 remaster, but I didn’t play that version.
I still love Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It’s bright, colourful, cheerful, and endlessly fun to revisit. The job system on display here remains my favourite iteration of job systems in the entire Final Fantasy series. Unlocking new jobs, mastering abilities, experimenting with different combinations, and not spending 20 minutes throwing rocks at chocobos puts Tactics Advance above War of the Lion for me. Slowly building your perfect squad never stops being satisfying. Yes, the law system can occasionally be frustrating, and yes, forgetting to save can lead to some absolutely brutal losses, but every time I return to this Ivalice I find myself smiling. At the end of the day, I just feel joy while I play Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which is more than I can say about War of the Lions.
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.
Those are the first voice-acted words spoken in the Final Fantasy franchise. They’re spoken by Tidus as Final Fantasy X begins in medias res. A group of people sit around a campfire looking forlorn and melancholy. There’s no context for who these people are or where they are, or what’s causing them to be so depressed. All we have is this beautiful piano piece playing over the scene as a blonde boy touches a girl’s shoulder and then walks up a hill to look at a ruined city in the distance. He asks us to listen to his story.
Before I dive any further in, I want to mention up front that Final Fantasy X is one of the few Final Fantasy games I had actually played a lot of before starting this blog series. I played the original PS2 release back in 2005 when I was about 14 or 15 years old. I vaguely remembered something, like running into a stone wall of a fight when Kimahri has his solo battle, and some another boss or two being incredible difficulty spikes. I remembered the major plot twists, and getting up to what I thought was the final boss. That said, something I’ve learned over the course of this series is that if you don’t play a game for twenty years, you really don’t remember very much of it when you come back.
Story
Final Fantasy X begins in earnest with Tidus about to head to a Blitzball game, a type of underwater soccer. He’s a star player of the Zanarkand Abes and treated exactly like you’d expect a professional sports celebrity to be treated. He’s cocky, full of himself, loud, kind of obnoxious. Just a downright jock in every sense of the word. But as the Blitzball game gets underway, an unknown monstrosity attacks the city of Zanarkand. Buildings crumble around him and, in the chaos, Auron appears. Auron was a friend of Tidus’s father, Jecht. Jecht disappeared at sea ten years ago and Auron has seemingly been watching out for Tidus ever since. He tosses Tidus a sword and asks if he knows how to use it. Before long, though, both Auron and Tidus are sucked up into the sky by this gigantic gaping maw.
Tidus then awakens in an unknown ruined location where he’s picked up by a ship with some Al Bhed peoples, who speak a language he doesn’t understand. Thankfully, one of the Al Bhed, Rikku, does speak his language and she recruits him to help recover some underwater treasure. Things go slightly awry, as that giant monstrosity appears again. The Al Bhed call it Cin, and the next thing you know, Tidus is once again waking up in the water. This time, however, he washes ashore on the island of Besaid, an idyllic tropical beach that feels almost aggressively peaceful after the destruction of Zanarkand.
In Besaid, he meets Wakka, captain of the local Blitzball team. Tidus can’t help but show off his Blitzball skills, Wakka. He asks who Tidus plays for, and Tidus proudly proclaims that he’s the star player of the Zanarkand Abes. The whole group is in a quiet shock. Wakka says Zanarkand was destroyed 1,000 years ago and its ruins are considered sacred ground. They chalk Tidus failed memory and general cluelessness to the customs of the world to Sin’s toxin messing with his head.
Wakka brings him back to the village where Tidus meets Yuna, who is about to embark on her pilgrimage. Yuna is a summoner, and the role of a summoner is twofold. Their first duty is to go on a pilgrimage across the world, praying at temples along the way until they reach Zanarkand where they obtain the Final Aeon and use it to destroy Sin, bringing about a temporary Calm to the world. But Sin always returns. The cycle continues endlessly until humanity has supposedly atoned for its past sins.
The monster Sin that destroyed Tidus’s Zarnakand in the introductory sequence is this cataclysmic force that appears seemingly at random to destroy towns whenever humanity becomes too technologically advanced. The local religion, Yevon, teaches that Sin appeared because Zanarkand relied too heavily on machina and that Sin is humanity’s punishment for becoming lazy and dependent on technology.
The second duty of a summoner is to perform sendings, guiding the souls of the recently departed to the Farplane, so they can rest peacefully. Otherwise those souls linger, consumed by resentment, eventually becoming the fiends you fight throughout the game. I actually really appreciated this because it’s a great bit of ludo-narrative cohesion. The monsters aren’t just there because it’s a JRPG and JRPGs need monsters. The game gives them an actual place in the world and mythology. These souls are often represented by pyreflies, floating streaks of light drifting through the air, and you see them constantly throughout Spira.
Yuna convinces her party to let Tidus join them as one of her guardians. Wakka is already traveling with her, and you’re introduced to Lulu, the black mage, and Kimahri Ronso, this giant muscular blue lion-man with a broken horn who sort of exists somewhere between a dragoon and a blue mage. The party sets off from Besaid, and thus begins Final Fantasy X.
What immediately sets Final Fantasy X apart from every previous Final Fantasy is that there’s no over world to explore. Instead, you are on a pilgrimage, traveling from one location to another down a series of narrow hallways. Seriously, Final Fantasy X is basically a straight line that you move along as the story progresses. Sure, there are often small diversions or forks in the road. But at the end of those diversions is generally a single treasure chest, then you just need to head back to your main road and keep following the carefully designed path.
On one hand, I genuinely appreciated this change. No longer are you aimlessly hoofing it across barren over world landscapes trying to find the next destination while random encounters chew through your patience. In past games these over worlds gave you a sense of freedom, of having an open world. But you aren’t really free in those games, there’s a specific place you need to be to progress the story. Having the open world gives you the illusion of freedom. And in many of the past games if you accidentally venture in the wrong direction, you’ll encounter enemies 30 levels higher than you are and get instantly KO’ed. I know Final Fantasy XIII was heavily criticized for being a series of hallways, but part of me has to wonder why XIII got all those criticisms and yet X seems to have dodged the hallway simulator moniker. Maybe it’ll make sense when I get to XIII.
Most of the world is rendered fully in 3D unlike the previous games which used 3D character models on pre-rendered backgrounds. Because the locations in Final Fantasy X are mostly narrow hallways with fixed camera angles, the camera can pan and zoom and frame scenes in ways earlier games really couldn’t. In Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy IX, the camera mostly just slid around on the X and Y axis. Here, the camera moves dynamically through forests, villages, and temples, creating this sense that the world is dense and alive beyond the path you’re walking. I wonder if the reason Final Fantasy X avoided the “hallway” criticism I mentioned, is because hallways evoke the feeling of being overly simplistic. These hallways are acceptable to me because the world feels textured and full in a way the older overworlds often didn’t.
The use of linear pathways does something that I really appreciate. It controls the pacing of the story. You don’t miss important details because you didn’t visit an optional location, you don’t spend days wandering between plot points. The story is delivered smoothly and cohesively.
Using Tidus as the protagonist in this story also works incredibly well because he’s effectively a stranger in a strange land. Since he doesn’t understand Spira, the game has a perfectly natural excuse to dump exposition to him, and by extension, to the player. Tidus doesn’t understand Yevon’s teachings because we don’t understand them either. Meanwhile, for the people of Spira, these rituals are just part of life. They’ve never known anything different.
So as Yuna’s pilgrimage begins, Tidus is this happy-go-lucky idiot. He makes all these promises that he and Yuna will come back to these locations later. He completely misses the awkward and sad looks people give when he says these things. Then, partway through the journey, Tidus learns the truth: summoning the Final Aeon to defeat Sin kills the summoner. Yuna’s pilgrimage is her offering herself as a sacrifice, so the people of Spira can experience a brief period of peace, called the Calm.
Everyone else already knew this. They understood from the very start that this journey ends with Yuna’s death one way or another. Tidus, meanwhile, absolutely refuses to accept it. He vows to think of something, like the irrational child he kind of is. Which to be fair, defeating Sin doesn’t mean Sin is gone forever. Quite the opposite, the Calm generally lasts for about 10 years, then Sin always returns. The teachings of Yevon say that when the people have atoned enough, then the cycle will break. So they just keep throwing Summoners at the problem, hoping that each new Calm will be the eternal one.
Tidus also finds himself directly at the center of this conflict when Auron reveals that Sin is actually Jecht. Auron brought Tidus here at Jecht’s request in the hope that Tidus might finally break this endless cycle. Tidus hates Jecht. Jecht was the Wayne Gretzky of Blitzball players, so even though Tidus is a star athlete in his own right, professionally he’s still living in his fathers shadow. When Jecht was at home, his mother ignored him, fawning over Jecht. When Jecht tried to be a parent, he would berate Tidus, calling him a crybaby and that the only thing he was good at was crying. Anytime Jecht’s name comes up, Tidus is quick to point out his resentment towards Jecht.
I actually really love the father-son relationship here. I grew up with a single mother and never knew my father, and one thing that always frustrated me throughout the 90s and 2000s was how media constantly depicted fatherless sons as being overwhelmed with joy the moment their deadbeat father returned. It’s never something I connected with because I don’t have those feelings. If my father appeared in my life tomorrow, I wouldn’t suddenly want a relationship with him. To me, family is so much more than blood, it’s the relationships between people.
So I appreciate that Tidus is angry. Jecht was a jerk to him as a child and then disappeared. Tidus doesn’t spend the game longing for reconciliation. He has this massive chip on his shoulder because he spent his entire life living in the shadow of his famous father. And then in a twist of cruel irony, throughout Spira, he learns that Jecht traveled alongside Yuna’s father, High Summoner Braska, and because Braska brought the last Calm, he, Jecht, and Auron are viewed as legendary heroes. It’s genuinely compelling watching Tidus try to reconcile these conflicting feelings about a man he hates and hearing from everyone how much of a hero he was.
Graphically, Final Fantasy X looks significantly better than Final Fantasy IX. Almost like there was a generational leap or something. Like the previous games, it uses both low-resolution and high-resolution character models depending on the scene. Most gameplay uses lower-detail models, while emotional cutscenes swap in the more detailed versions. Sometimes it’s kind of jarring. You’ll have Wakka’s high-detail face standing beside some poor NPC who looks like they were carved out of damp cardboard.
The character movement can also be hilariously stiff at times. There are scenes where characters pivot like forklifts before walking off in a different direction. While very often the aesthetic, music, and well realized world can look great, there are absolutely moments where you’re suddenly reminded that Final Fantasy X is over twenty years old.
But then the FMV cutscenes kick in and good lord. These cutscenes are what I remembered the game looking like back in 2005. The flowing water, the hair physics, the lighting, it’s all incredibly good looking. Squaresoft absolutely flexed everything they learned from the previous Final Fantasy games and from their failed movie venture Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. One thing I especially appreciated was how seamlessly the game transitions between in-engine scenes and FMV scenes. Sometimes the transition between FMV and in-engine is clunky, sometimes it’s smooth, but it always looks good.
As the story progresses, the party begins to reject the idea of feeding summoners into this endless cycle of death. They repeatedly clash with Seymour Guado, a high priest of Yevon who believes the only release from suffering, is death itself. Seymour wants to actually become Sin because he genuinely thinks annihilating humanity is its ultimate salvation.
The party, unsurprisingly, rejects his philosophy.
Another aspect to the world is you discover that some people can remain in Spira after death as “unsent,” essentially refusing to pass on. Eventually, near the end of Yuna’s pilgrimage, the party meets Yunalesca, the original summoner who defeated Sin a thousand years ago. They learn the full horrifying truth: not only does summoning the Final Aeon kill the summoner, but the Final Aeon itself must be created from one of the summoner’s guardians. Braska chose Jecht. The Final Aeon destroys Sin… and then becomes the next Sin.
The party refuses to continue the cycle and defeats Yunalesca, effectively destroying humanity’s only known method of combating Sin. I actually chuckled at the scene afterward where the group casually informs Maester Mika that they killed Yunalesca, and the poor man just completely breaks down, refusing to believe that there is any alternative to the current cycle. Instead of listening to the party or trying to help, he just gives up and sends himself to the Farplane, dissolving into pyreflies.
During all this, Tidus also learns the truth about his own existence. A thousand years ago, Zanarkand and Bevelle were at war. Zanarkand’s summoners knew they were doomed against Bevelle’s machina, so the leader of Zanarkand, Yu Yevon used the fayth, people locked in an eternal slumber, with their dreams getting physical manifestations. That’s what Yuna’s aeons are, dreams from the Fayth at each temple. Yu Yevon uses the Fayth to summon Dream Zanarkand, and hides it elsewhere in the world before Yu Yevon created Sin. Tidus is from Dream Zanarkand, and is therefore a dream of the fayth himself. All this means that when Sin and Yu Yevon die, the fayth will stop dreaming, and Tidus will disappear.
This is the most confusing part of the plot, and I’ll be honest in saying that I looked it up after the fact. But I do want to mention here that Final Fantasy X has the most approachable story of the series by far. There’s no alien cells being injected into people, no memory loss mixed with time travel, nothing that convoluted. The world has all kinds of texture and depth, the religion feels real and well thought out, but the overall story, Yuna’s pilgimage, is really straightforward. This is one of the first times I’ve been able to follow the entirety of the story without much confusion or needing to look up alternative resources to figure out exactly what’s going on.
The party eventually teams up with Cid and his airship, tears a hole into Sin. They journey inside Sin’s body Pinocchio-style to confront Jecht and Yu Yevon himself. Tidus’s reunion with Jecht is exactly the kind of messy emotional confrontation I wanted from the game. Tidus says he hates him. Jecht basically responds with “Yeah, I know.” There’s no magical reconciliation. No perfect healing. Just two deeply flawed people understanding each other a little too late.
And then Tidus says, “This is the only time I’m glad that you’re my dad,” right before they have to kill him. Perfect.
After defeating Jecht, the party confronts Yu Yevon in a final battle that’s kind of fascinating mechanically. Every time you hit him, he heals for 9,999 damage, so unless you’re breaking the damage cap, the fight becomes this long grind. At the same time, all your party members have Auto-Life, so no matter what Yu Yevon does, you just keep getting back up. I suppose there’s something thematically fitting about that. The battle feels less like overcoming a challenge and more like stubbornly outlasting the embodiment of an endless cycle. Apparently Yu Yevon will use Grativja and hit the whole party and itself at the same time, constantly knocking it’s health down, but I managed to overcome it by breaking it’s magic, and then casting reflect on it so it’s healing just reflected to my party instead.
Anyway, once Yu Yevon is defeated and Sin explodes into a mountain of pyreflies, Tidus begins to fade away. There’s this genuinely emotional farewell where Yuna runs to hug him and falls straight through his disappearing body. He stands behind her, wraps her arms around her for a tender moment, then leaps off the ship with a hasty ‘goodbye’.
Because the church of Yevon sits at the center of the story, the gradual dismantling of that institution gives Final Fantasy X an incredible sense of scale. Whether it’s the party being branded heretics or watching Wakka, who starts the game as a blind follower of Yevon, to the point of racism and bigotry, slowly confront and unpack the hypocrisy around him, it feels huge. When the game reaches its climax and you finally tear down the foundations of this entire religion, it genuinely feels like you’re killing God. Final Fantasy has always loved the “fight God at the end” thing, but I think Final Fantasy X executes that idea better than any game in the series so far by having the entire conflict and story and culture of the world being centered around the church of Yevon.
The Level System
For this playthrough, I played the original US PS2 release, meaning I didn’t get access to the Expert Sphere Grid, but I’ll touch on that in second. The Sphere Grid itself is this massive interconnected web of nodes where every character starts in a different location. Instead of traditional leveling, gaining experience and passively improving their stats with each level up, characters gain Sphere Levels which let them move within the grid following the lines and activating nodes to increase stats or learn abilities.
I actually really enjoyed this system. It feels highly customizable even if, in practice, the customization is a little illusory because most characters are clearly funneled along intended paths. Tidus moves toward agility and time magic like Haste and Slow. Lulu focuses on elemental black magic. Auron becomes a physical powerhouse. But because everyone exists on the same grid, you can absolutely do ridiculous things if you want. You can focus your time and efforts to turn everyone into black mages if that’s your dream.
Often characters will come across a branching path on the sphere grid. Perhaps it’s a dead end, but has access to a couple extra nodes for a stat boost, or a path will be blocked off by a lock. Often removing these locks are what give characters the ability to trespass on other characters routes, letting you double up on skills amongst your party members. That being said, most of the time I just followed characters along their intended routes. The one exception was Kimahri, who I pushed toward Lulu’s section of the board to turn him into a backup black mage so I could exploit elemental weaknesses more aggressively.
By the end of the game, each character was around the end of their sphere grid, or was just starting to overlap with others. Wakka got Auron’s Break skills, Auron was moving into Tidus’s path to get more speed, that kind of thing. I’ve read that some people put the time in to earn ludicrous amounts of sphere levels to then max out each character on the sphere grid, but that’s an insane task that’s wholly unnecessary to beat the game. I’ve also read that doing that largely robs each character of what makes them unique.
The Battle System
The Sphere Grid gives you stats and abilities, so it ties directly into the battle system, and I think Final Fantasy X has one of the better combat systems in the series so far. Gone is the ATB system that’s been present since Final Fantasy IV Now, battles are fully turn-based with visible turn order. Big attacks will cost more ‘time’, while quick attacks or using items might let you do 2 actions before the next enemy gets to make their move. Adding to this, you can (and are encouraged to) swap party members in and out mid-battle without forfeiting that characters turn. I can’t stress how much I like this flexibility. Now I’m no longer trying to think if I should have my black mage in the party, or leave them behind for a summoner like I was in Final Fantasy IX or VI. Everyone is available at all times, but only 3 characters are in a battle at any one moment. Sometimes it was a juggle trying to get the right 2 characters out at the same time so one could buff the other, but it was a tactical consideration I really enjoyed.
An important aspect of this battle system is that any character who participates in the battle gets the full SP rewards. The SP earned from a fight is not divided between all characters, everyone gets the full amount from the fight. What this means in practice is that you really want every character to take at least one action in every fight. Once you get into the rhythm of it, it becomes second nature. Using your first two turns to kill all but one monster, then swap in every other party member to do a non-damage skill before finishing off the last one. I’m also pretty sure this mechanic is why teenage me struggled so much with the game back in 2005. Especially because some story sections lock your party composition, and if you’ve neglected certain characters, suddenly you’re in trouble. I neglected Kimahri hard, so when he had a solo battle he had to tackle, it was essentially a brick wall for me. Thankfully older me is more wise and now that I understood the system from the beginning, I was much more prepared to deal with that twist.
A lot of the regular mobs have have specific weaknesses that you’ll want to exploit. Tidus hits fast enemies, Wakka takes down the flyers, Auron with piercing is best for enemies with high defence, and so on. It made most of the random encounters pretty trivial, as you generally just needed to use the right tool for each job, but the flexibility of swapping in chracters mid-battle created some very satisfying tactical considerations, especially in some of the bigger boss moments.
One thing I especially appreciated was how quickly the game gives you most of the party. Compared to Final Fantasy IX, where you don’t even get the final character until absurdly late, Final Fantasy X gets your core cast assembled relatively early. Sure, Rikku doesn’t join until about 10 hours in, but the other 6 characters are in your party nearly from the get-go.
The Equipment/Aeon Customization system
The equipment system, however, is a bit weird. Weapons and armor don’t really have traditional stats. Instead, they have slots containing abilities. One sword might give Auron +5% Strength while another gives elemental damage or counterattacks. Later, Rikku unlocks the ability to customize equipment by consuming massive piles of items to fill empty slots with abilities.
I barely touched this system.
The customization costs felt absurdly high for relatively minor benefits, and there’s NO way to undo modifications. I couldn’t justify spending 20 mega-Phoenix to embue one piece of amour with Auto-Phoenix on an armour I might need to replace eventually. I mostly just made do with whatever gear I found naturally. The same applies to Yuna’s Aeons, which are this games Summons. They can also be customized using enormous quantities of items. Sometimes it was tempting to give one of them a new spell, but raising one aeon’s single stat by a single point would cost ~30 spheres. It was something I was never willing to commit to doing.
Also, I didn’t engage with this system because the main story really didn’t need it. Sure, there were difficult bosses. Seymour on Mt. Gagazet took me several attempts. The optional Baaj Temple boss underwater where you can only use Tidus, Wakka, and Rikku while dealing with petrification and party members being swallowed for a turn was rough. But overall, I didn’t find the main game especially punishing. I’ve read that in the HD Remake, the Dark Aeons are brutally difficult, but that’s not a feature in my game so I can’t really comment on it.
End-game grind
One of the things I appreciated most about Final Fantasy X. was the fact that I could just play it. In most of the games I’ve played in this series so far, I’ve had a guide handy at almost all times. But Final Fantasy X was different. Perhaps it’s a by-product of the linear nature of the game, but I didn’t look at a guide until I was nearly finished and I wanted to dabble in getting some of the celestial weapons. And I was so happy that I was able to beat the final boss without grinding at all through the entire game.
Unfortunately, getting those celestial weapons was locked behind some tedious grinding that I just wasn’t willing to engage with. I only managed to get Tidus’s celestial weapon, and I think that’s enough, because having a whole party kitted out with the best gear in the game would make the final battles utterly trivial. And those celestial weapons are wildly over-powered. From breaking the damage cap, to tippling the Overdrive meter, to reducing the spell cost down to 1MP for Lulu and Yuna, these weapons are wild, but they’re really tedious to earn.
Near the end of the game you unlock a monster arena, where the proprietor asks you to go out and capture 10 of every enemy. Doing so gives you gobs of items and unlocks some tougher battles for better prizes, but the idea of just running back across the whole world capturing enemies is a lot more tedium than I’m willing to embark on. I’m already most of the way through a Living Dex in Pokemon, I don’t feel like doing it here too. Yuna and Auron’s weapons are gated behind this monster arena, while Lulu, Kimahri, and Tidus’s weapons are hidden behind some mini-games.
I’ve read horror stories about Tidus’s weapon, needing to win a Chocobo race with randomly placed balloons and birds. Some people report spending hours trying to win and failing. I somehow managed to win it on my 4th try. Lulu’s weapon requires you to dodge a randomly occurring lightning strike 200 times in a row. Kimahri has you hunting butterflies while dodging random encounters.
I haven’t even talked about Blitzball yet. It’s a sport that you can play, and there’s one mandatory match in the whole game. It’s kind of a shame the way they framed that one match, as you and your players are hopelessly out-matched. Your first game of Blitzball is a frustrating experience which made me never want to touch it again. By working your way through the tournaments you unlock overdrives and the celestial weapon for Wakka, but I found Blitzball to be a frustrating mess of a game. Each character has half a dozen stats and when you try to do an action based on those stats, it’s not deterministic. There’s a random variable element that means sometimes you’ll just be unlucky in your shot. I get that’s a better way to emulate sport, but I wasn’t willing to pour several hours into a mini-game that I didn’t enjoy.
All of this doesn’t really matter to me though. It’s unnecessary to get those celestial weapons, as cool as it is to be overpowered. They exist for the players who want to bring the battle system to it’s logical conclusion. For me, I’m happy enough just finishing the main story.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I had a fantastic time with Final Fantasy X. Sure, there are scenes where the age of the game shows itself. There are awkward animations and weird PS2-era stiffness. But the story is genuinely excellent, the characters are memorable, the combat remains satisfying moment to moment, and Spira feels like a real world with history, culture, religion, and consequences.
At this point, I would comfortably place Final Fantasy X among the best Final Fantasy games I’ve played so far. Certainly head and shoulders above the PS1 trilogy of games, but I’m not quite so sure if it supplants IV, V, and VI in my heart yet. It might, but I’m not ready to commit to a firm ranking yet.
But I will say that I do not want to be done with Spira yet. So I’m going to play Final Fantasy X-2 next, which I hadn’t originally planned on doing. I have vague memories of trying it about fifteen years ago and bouncing off almost immediately. I remember the opening J-pop concert scene, and the game play being focused around costume changes and then turning the game off after maybe half an hour. But now that I’m so much more familiar with the characters and the lore, I hope I’ll find a lot more joy this time around.
Final Fantasy X represents a pretty major shift for the franchise. Core series staples like the ATB that have been a staple were tossed out, voice acting was introduced, and the FMV cut scenes are just getting better and better. It’s another generational leap forward, and even 25 years later, the story still holds up to this day. I know some people hold Final Fantasy X as “the last good Final Fantasy”, which I doubt is fair. Nevertheless, I will continue to move forward in this series. Hope to see you again, soon.
