SweetieGames

Game: Final Fantasy X HD Remaster

Developer: Square Enix, Virtuos

Publisher: Square Enix

Platform: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows

Year: 2013

Despite the fact that I’m a big fan of RPGs, I’ve always felt like I’m late to the party with games in the Final Fantasy series. I’ve been trying to rectify this by picking up games in the world-famous series when I feel the itch for a classic JRPG experience. On this blog, I previously talked about Final Fantasy’s MMORPG offering, Final Fantasy XIV, and my experience as a newbie in a hugely popular online game. In this article, I’ll be reviewing the remastered edition of the beloved Final Fantasy X, which originally released in 2001 on the PS2.

Final Fantasy X follows Tidus, a star in the fictional sport of blitzball. During an important blitzball match, the city is attacked by an enormous monster, destroying buildings and sucking up the remnants into the sky. Tidus is swallowed up after a short interaction with his mysterious family friend Auron, and ends up in the land of Spira. He meets new allies; the “Summoner” Yuna and her team of Guardians, who are undertaking a pilgrimage in order to save Spira from Sin, the monster that attacked Tidus at his blitzball game. The rest of the game follows his quest to stop the impeding calamity in Spira and find his way back home, despite the fact that in this world, his hometown was destroyed many years ago.

Final Fantasy X throws you right in at the deep end, introducing you to battles almost as soon as the game starts. There’s plenty of drama in the game, as Tidus himself and each of his new allies have some form of inner turmoil they’re trying to overcome with their adventure. Backstories and heavy amounts of lore are gradually revealed over the course of its 50ish hour runtime (if you’re not trying to 100% it!)

What I Liked:

As a lover of turn based games, FFX is immensely fun to play. Battles feel tense and agile as you’re able to switch out party members quickly mid-fight, allowing every character their time to shine in battle. You’re able to plan your moves effectively as the turn order is clearly displayed on the side of the screen, and hovering over different attacks or spells alters the turn order in different ways, sometimes allowing a character an extra move or pushing them further down the list afterwards. The bosses in this game also provide a real challenge!

Levelling up and gaining new skills is also switched up from the traditional JRPG format with the sphere grid, which took me some getting used to but I ended up loving once I got the hang of it. Each character starts at a different point on a huge grid of interconnecting nodes, and the player can spend spheres earned through experience in battles to move around, increase certain stats and learn new skills. This system allows any character to learn any skill, as long as you’re able to find the right spheres. I loved being able to teach strong end-game spells and moves to multiple characters, rather than it being limited to specific character classes, and being able to give as many characters as possible access to healing magic was super helpful.

The characters in Final Fantasy X are complex and you can’t help but root for them. Tidus is fighting his own inner demons from the start of the game, as his father was also a star blitzball player who disappeared when he was younger. You see how his dad wanted to push Tidus to succeed, but ended up giving him low self esteem and an inferiority complex instead, unsure if he can live up to his dad’s legacy. The summoner Yuna is in an almost similar position, where she wants to save Spira through her summoning like her father did many years prior. All the party members’ motivations, thought processes and actions make sense when you learn about each one, and there was no character in the party I disliked. Every character felt very real.

As mentioned earlier, the plot is very lore heavy and many new terms, traditions, rituals and even religions are thrown at you very quickly after the game starts. I don’t have a problem with learning new lore, and Final Fantasy X helps you along by having Tidus also be new to the world of Spira so you learn alongside him. This avoids heavy exposition dumps which feel unnatural, which I really appreciated. The game does a good job of solidifying the rules of the world into the player so that the twists towards the end of the game have great payoff.

What I Didn’t Like:

I will preface this part by saying I was one year old when the original Final Fantasy X hit shelves on the PS2, meaning the HD Remaster I played on my Switch was my first experience of it. I knew that even this remastering was pretty old by the time I got to it, as it was released in 2013 on consoles as old as the PS3 and Vita, so I was willing to give its looks some grace; it wasn’t going to look as good as a remaster coming out this year. But when I saw screenshots from the original PS2 version, I couldn’t help but feel robbed! Why does the original version look so much better?!

It turns out that the original version of FFX pushed the limits of face tracking and motion capture at the time, allowing for subtle expressions and realistic mouth movements to match the dialogue. Faces in the original version almost look real, while still maintaining that JRPG look we all know and love. When it came time to remaster the game, the files used for motion tracking were not compatible, meaning everything had to be remade from scratch. And it looks bad.

The faces are puffier and the expressions on every character are so stiff. They’re barely able to emote at all and the voice acting does all the heavy lifting. I understand wanting to try a different style rather than the realism that the original was going for, but at least make the new stylised characters look like they can move their faces in a natural way! Don’t even get me started on the NPCs who have JPEGs slapped onto 3D character models; making it look like they’re wearing someone else’s skin as a mask.

Even the environments have taken a beating in the HD remaster of the game, with the rich skies full of clouds being reduced to expanses of dark nothingness. Sure, everything looks smoother and, well, higher definition, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be uglier than its predecessor. When I discovered the difference in looks between the original and the remaster, I even considered dropping the Switch version and picking up a PS2 copy, but it turns out the remaster features content that used to be Japan exclusive, so I wouldn’t even get the full experience! Super frustrating.

Closing thoughts:

I had a blast playing Final Fantasy X as a lover of story driven JRPGs. The battles are fun, the characters are great and it provides a fantastic JRPG experience with different twists on the well-loved genre. If you’re not too fussed about what used to be Japan exclusive content, I’d recommend picking up a copy of the original on PS2 or an emulator.

Rating: 8.5/10

Have you played Final Fantasy X HD Remaster? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!