FF10 should be discounted.

Final Fantasy 10.

My quibbles on Final Fantasy 10 have gone, so far, largely unspoken, but I've found an audience of one, s I'll write them all out now. I want ti to be known that, far from completing this game, I actually got nowhere with it. As I have completed, and i want to make this absolutely clear: four times as many final fantasy games than NON final fantasy games SO FAR, it takes a LOT of shittiness to make me give up on a final fantasy as quickly as I did 10. If you want to know how far i got, I can't really give you an analogy. I'm on disc three of FF8, and I'm in Nibelheim in Crisis Core. I have NO IDEA where in hell I am in FF10. Okay: I got to the bit where Wakka (yeah... Wakka? I can't even be bothered to complain about THAT name) briefly suggests that as Rikku (ditto) is a priest or something, my chances of getting into her kekks without playing more of this game than was worth it where zero. Then I pretty much lost interest.

I raised my first eye-brow ten minutes into the game. I hadn't moved. Presuming this was my fault, I pressed every button on my controller 14 times. This is quite a feat, as a PS2 controller has too many buttons to start with. (Please note too many is the right amount of buttons). Nope, nothing happened. I'll never know what it was, but somehow the game progressed from what I can only assume was a ten-minute cinematc of all the characters sitting on the top of a cliff picking their nails and humming Nobuo Uematsu's hot new trax. Disgusted as I already was, It Got Worse. Apparently I had to decide if I wanted to use the COMPLICATED version of the whole Sphere Grid Leveling Up System, or the "WHAT THE FUCK!???" version of the Sphere tessellation game. (For those who are not mathematically minded, Spheres don't tessellate. Ever.)

I decided to play it safe and go with the simplified version. Now, I don't know what the fuck Square was thinking at this point. I really liked the difficulty thing in Dirge of Cerberus. It is worth as much as two maybe three play-throughs to get a lot of items in hard mode and level up every possible gun to ridiculous levels so you can shoot the crap out of all the easy level-1 monsters at the begging of the game in an immensely unsatisfying and actually kind of dull way. Did Square somehow thing I would REPLAY a Final Fantasy RPG? No. No-one could expect I would replay a game which is mostly story with some repetitive combat for anything but nostalgia and dementia. That would just be stupid. That being said, I'm pretty glad I chose the simplified Sphere grid. Primarily because even the simplified sphere grid was, and I hasten to add this: not so much that it was too complicated for me to understand, but more... it was boring. I didn't want to spend days with a print-out map of the sphere grid theorizing my root across the imaginary plains of my character's sub-concious. I wanted to mash some repetitive drivelous creature's faces in, and enjoy some plot line rendered with real in-game "facial expressions" and voice acting. Yes, finally, I would, with my copy of "The Asperger's Syndrome Guide to Facial Expression" (not a real book, sadly) be able to truly understand how the characters really felt about the wound in their side, the hot chick immediately in front of them or the fact they just got the arses saved by some old guy with a crippled limb. Woo. Hoo. But, back t the sphere gird: Here's my proposed leveling up system: There are certain groups of skills, and in each group the skills get progressively more awesome further up the group, but in order to unlock these awesome skills, you need the preceding ones, so if you specialize in one or two schools of skillage, you get powerful stuff at the end, but if you dither from school to school, you get a diverse character. And you know what? All games should use this system. It's great. Some acceptable alternatives include the skill systems from every other final fantasy game I've played. They're all good. I shouldn't have to think that much just to level up.

The combat system. This is where the game fell down even father, although not as far as the previous suckzorz. I presume that the people at Square Enix had a board meeting, and they thought "You know what? ATB is totally revolutionary. There is pretty much nothing comparable, which is good, because it's innovative and works, but you wouldn't want it in all your games. That being said, it is very playable. Let's fuck it up, and use a combat system which is great, but not as interesting!". It could have been worse. He could have said "Let's crap the Final Fantasy Genere by producing a game with a combat system no-one likes!". As it is, they didn't do that until 12.

I'd also like to suggest the following improvement to the voice acting of Final Fatnasy 10: No voice acting. That would have been awesome. There are also two laternatives to this which I have not mentioned: 1) The game was voice-acted by cats. How cool would that be? Fairly cool. but also, quite random. 2) The game was voice-acted in Japanese with English Subtitles. I ruled that one out, because there has to be a reason for it not to have happened. So far, in my life, I have not met a person who said "I'm really glad they dubbed that game poorly." Talking over every immanent Square Release I have heard the EXACT same conversation every time.

I hope they have left Japanese Audio.
Yeah, that would be so awesome.
The bastards MUST have learned their lesson by now. EVERYONE wants it to be in Japanese. Basically they are INCREASING costs to DECREASE customer satisfaction. It will be in Japanese.
I hope you're right.

I wait, patiently, for someone to come in and say "Though, I actually want it in English, I don't want to have to read.". So far, It's never happened. And yet, every game is dubbed badly. 3) English dub that isn't annoying. Technology newly released immediately before the release of Crisis Core has made this finally possible. Now, it seems, the people responsible for dubbing games select people to do the voice acting based on criteria. Rather than, as was common at the time "had like, a voice". As I said, the technology is new, and cutting edge. It simply wasn't a possibility for 10. *Fingers crossed for Dissadia*

after making the same trite observations everyone else already has, I'm going to remind you of Mystic Quest. Mystic Quest sucked. So does 10. It's pretty much the same audience.... THICK PEOPLE. Square need to know their audience. Their audience: literate Anime Fangirls who have secret, deeply cut desires for homo-eroticism, Literate anime fan-boys who would hapilly turn a blind eye to some homo-eroticism in exchange for Tifa coming out of her top, or literate Anime Fangirls who have openly stated desires for homo-eroticism. An additionaly point is that your audience are people who play computer games. People who play computer games pretty much never like sport. Don't alienate the player by focusing on a sport-playing character. Also, agina guys with crippled limbs aren't particularly exciting to play.

Basically, Final Fantasy 10 plays SLOWLY. The same COULD be said of 9, as 9 has too many mini-games, to many non-battles and too many status effects, but 10 is crowned for it's slow gameplay. In general, in testing: watch people play. If they put their controller down, the cut-scene is too long. Cut-scenes are allowed to be too long at the end of each disc. Or if a major character dies. (Which should never happen anyway. Thankyou.)

So, here's the verdict: too many cutscenes, boring. Slow game-play, boring. Ridiculous character customization: Boring. No sound because almost everyone had to mute the TV to continue living: boring. Unlikely to get to sleep with Rikku: boring. Storyline that seemed to random to bother following, boring. You get the gist. It's just plain dull.

I'd like the opportunity to also review Final Fantasy 12. I've never played it because I've played Dirge of Cerberus, Star Ocean Till the End of Time, Crisis Core, Mystic Quest, Mystic Quest 2 and countless games that basically make the same conclusion: Square Enix should never make anything real time ever. I'd like to draw your attention to something my boyfriend say, after playing the game for a good while and taking time to really voice his opinion in what I, at least, think is a very frank, articulate and poignant summary of the game: "I just happened to notice, the wolf I was fighting had an actual arsehole. Don;t you think that's really cool? Look I'll show you: See. They actually bothered to give the animals real arseholes. Cool, huh?"

think that pretty much sums it up.

Hapfairy conversation

M: It's been in Armand and now you don't want it back?
Sweet.
*puts some other things she wants in Armand*

D: I hope for his sake you didn't want my cactus and broken glass collection.

M: I didn't want your broken glass collection. *nods*.
Man, that's a SWEET pineapple....
Oooh! Massive pine cones!
Scissors!

D: *Calls a doctor*

M: That might be a good idea.
Y'know that doctor's kinda hot...
fantasmagorical, now you've just exacerbated the situation.
Meh, at least he's god a good view of the problem.

One of the the communication problems I had with my mother is her consistent tenancy to see everything I said as pessimistic. A kind of pessimism itself, this made no sense to me. Apparently, If I said I had Asperger's Syndrome, I was being pessimistic. Personally, given that I was most definitely strangling people until they passed out without reason, having panic attacks in cafes and running away until I got lost and screaming and helpful passer's by, some reason is infinitely better than no reason. Doesn't matter if the reason was headcrabs, I would rather that not just be who I am. Partly, my mother thought if I could blame some "brain" thing, I would never try to get better. Boundless optimism. Fuck Asperger's Syndrome, I decided. There's not anything I can't do. Apart from sport. (Okay, maybe it wasn't BOUNDLESS optimism. Never bothered with a "Fuck Dyspraxia" attitude.)

There are plenty of thoughts that can be perceived as optimistic or pessimistic.