Final Fantasy X has by far taken many gamers’ breath away. The stunning graphics, excellent music, and good character development are just few of the good qualities you’ll find in this game. Let’s look at some of them.

Music: BEAUTIFUL! Once again Nobuo Uematsu has set the stage for yet another game. I have been particularly fond of his music since I played FFVIII, and from then it has played a large role in my choice of games. Aside from the usual classical sound, the creators have incorporated another style of music for this FF: rock. As soon as the game starts you are introduced to the song “Otherworld” (its hard rock—you can’t make out what the singer sings sometimes but overall its good) and later in the game you hear another song called Suteki Da Ne (“Isn’t It Beautiful?” in English) performed by Rikki. Both of these songs are brought into the game by gorgeous cinematic FMV’s. Speaking of which, let’s move onto that.

Graphics: As I had said earlier, these graphics are gorgeous. I always wanted to go back and see the FMV’s in the other Final Fantasy’s but never could unless I played them over again, but no need to do that in FFX. Every movement of the hair, skin, clothing, surroundings, and more are captured in these little cinematic moments. The only bad thing for some people is that there just may be too many of these moments. Sure you’ll enjoy them, but to those who want to hurry and get the game over with then this is a downside. I don’t believe you can skip through these either (I’ve never wanted to try) so just sit back, relax, and enjoy. As far as the non-FMV graphics go, they’re really good too. I can’t wait to see what their upcoming games will look like.

Gameplay: This portion was pretty good. It took me a while to get used to the new battle system but I have to admit it’s a lot better than ATB (active time battle). I really did not like ATB at all, anytime you had to leave and forgot to pause was a disaster. You’d come back and find out that your entire party is dead within five minutes. But along with this new battle system comes more thinking time. You have plenty of time on the clock to choose what move you’re going to use next which makes it somewhat easier to play than the other FF’s. Also there is a small map in the left hand corner of the screen which leads you places, you are a red arrow and it points to where you need to go. Many people complain about this saying, “I feel like I’m being led somewhere…” well DUH! If you don’t want the map on, then turn it off in the menu screen, it’s as easy as that. There is also a new way of leveling up called the Sphere Grid. Boy…this really took some time to get used to, but after a while you get the hang of it. Your leveling up depends on how many kinds of different spheres you have. An example is if you want to learn a new ability, you have to have enough ability spheres to activate its corresponding node. BUT you can only use this sphere if you are on the node that uses it. Get it? Haha, I hope so, that’s the best way I could explain it. Now, let’s move onto the minigames.

Minigames: There really was no upside for me in the minigames area. They were tedious, time consuming and annoying. One in particular was the Chocobo Race. I still have to beat the trainer with –0:00 time. How do you get that? Well you can check out some tips in the “Minigames” section of this site to find out. And if those don’t work then you have to keep trying. The closest I got was four seconds. After a while you want Tidus to pull out a baseball bat and start hitting the birds as they fly towards you…but he never does *sigh*. Another game is the lighting game. I’d have to say this was the worst out of all the minigames in FFX. You have to doge 200 lighting bolts, yes, that’s right 200! You can doge them by pressing a certain button at the right time, but if you get struck then you start over with a count of 0. I think I got to 15 then gave up; I don’t have the patience for that. You get a special item if you dodge all 200 but I made it through the game without it. Another game is the butterfly game; this isn’t as bad, but still frustrates you. You have to touch only a certain color butterfly, and if you touch another color then you have to fight some monsters. You are timed on this too, so those battles really slow you down. I don’t think I ever got the item for this game either. One last game is Blitzball. This is the best of all the minigames. I was strangely addicted to it when I first started to p lay, but after a while I withdrew from it altogether. Its like a mixture of football, and soccer underwater and it took me a while to understand this. I didn’t really take the time to learn anything about it so I didn’t do too well with it later on.

Difficulty: Easy, flat out easy. This is a good game for first time FF players, but for those of you who have played FFIV or FFV then this is a piece of cake. The last battle is ridiculously easy and some of the battle arena monsters are harder than the bosses you face throughout the entire game. You can also level up extremely high which eventually allows you to hit up to 99,000 damage. It may sound great now, but after a while you’re tired of killing monsters with one hit. It just doesn’t seem much of a challenge anymore. The puzzles are a good challenge later on, but other than that, its not difficult at all.

Characters: The characters in this game were some of my favorites. One in particular was Auron, he had a good story behind him and his character overall had a mysterious aura. Leave it to the Final Fantasy creators to have at least one mysterious guy in your party ^_~. Some others include Rikku, Lulu, Kimhari, and Wakka, and main characters are Tidus and Yuna. All together they make a good cast for this game.

Conclusion: This game was great, I enjoyed almost every bit of it to the last drop. I highly recommend this game for new Final Fantasy gamers, or for any Final Fantasy gamer at that. Personally I think it was most definitely worth the money I paid, and I hope that you agree.