The Insane Asylum

quote Vergil Ties

One game that the PS2 needed to carry Sony’s legacy of excellent RPGs over to a new console was Final Fantasy X. It had everything: Cutting edge graphics, seemingly epic storyline, excellent soundtrack and some high quality cutscenes amongst a different sort of leveling system and old school turn based gameplay. It could’ve utilized what it had to make a game that will excel Final Fantasy IX (which is one of my favorite RPGs), but instead decided to take the Final Fantasy VIII route and put way too much emphasis on cinematics and justifying and (often) overcomplicating nothing that anybody actually cares about. That’s not to say that Final Fantasy X is a BAD game, but rather, just a boring one.

Rather than start at the root of what’s wrong with Final Fantasy X, let’s start on a high note. The highest note I can think of has to be the graphics. Holy shit, are they good or what? The textures are realistic looking, giving the illusion that it’s like wandering through a real forest or wasteland. Speaking of forests and wastelands, the variety of environments are fairly good. From the traditional wasteland level, to ruins and even to big, sprawling cities, Square spared no expense in giving us different environments to look at, and the colors that they’re all represented with are perfect. Amongst that, character models look pretty damn nice. There’s a lot of attention paid to detail in terms of clothing and hair (sure, the main character is pretty much Cloud with his hair gelled downwards, but that’s not a bad thing, right?).

The one thing that forces me to drop my jaw is the immense amount of detail put into the FMV scenes. These scenes are a testament to how much the PS2 can take in terms of graphics. The quality is pushed well through the roof, forcing the player to sit back and enjoy them.

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