hastypixels's FINAL FANTASY X HD Remaster review

Yikes, dude. That's a hell of a ramble. You jump around your points chaotically sometimes but it's an interesting review of the last FF game that managed to hold my interest enough for me to beat. Put hours into XII and XII, but they always felt like a chore.

EmP, funnily enough, I didn't beat this one (I reviewed it for a contest, was in Yunalesca's late-game dungeon when I had to get it written for contest deadline, picked it up once after that, went the wrong direction at the save point I was at, left the dungeon, went back to the save point, quit and never played it again), but did endure XII and XIII.

XII, to me, was a chore, but it was the sort of chore I enjoy in games (find really tough monsters and figure out how to beat them) and felt more Western with how it was devised. I didn't kill all the high-end Marks (the ones far tougher than the end-game fights), but beat it.

That last part was true for XIII, where I beat the game, but didn't get through all the high-end marks (quit around the one big dude god thing challenge where you go through a series of rooms, fighting one in each, until a giant Ochu or NeoOchu killed me repeatedly until I lost interest in the game), but the game itself was more of an un-fun chore. Too much walking in straight lines, fighting battles at certain points. Really pretty to look at, but boring to play until you get to the fairly open area where all the marks were. And by then, my interest was fading to the point that when it's time to leave that area to do the final couple chapters of the game, it was hard for me to be interested in doing so.

@EmP: I'm coming off of the worst bronchitis+possibly everything else I've had in maybe decades, and I might well have given myself more time to write this more clearly. On the other hand I could have written four times as much, so I'm not sure it would have helped. About FFXII/XII, it takes more than an attractive lead to keep my attention, and Square's penchant for RPG experimentation went off the rails for an on-rails title - at least, in the first one.

Given how conflicted FFX is with its own narrative, I doubt that anyone's relationship with it is going to be other than "...it's, complicated."

I'd agree it would be easy to just keep talking about FFX if the mood did take you. I actually tried to review it back when, and gave up for a few reasons. I suppose the most relevant one to this discussion is that, because I live the UK, we got our version about half a year or so after the US, so what was new and shiny for me had already started being old news on the interwebs. The big upshot of this was I got the International version, which the remaster is built upon. So got to play with the all Dark Aeons and such well before the rest of you.