Final Fantasy X-2

released on Mar 13, 2003

Final Fantasy X-2 is the direct sequel to Final Fantasy X, developed and published by Square Enix. It was the first direct sequel game in the Final Fantasy series and the first to feature an all-female playable cast. It also returned to the job system not seen in the main series since Final Fantasy V. The game uses a character class system where the equipped dressphere determines her abilities and stats. Party members can switch to any dressphere in their Garment Grid to swap to new skills and adapt to different opponents. It makes use of the Active Time Battle system that was absent from Final Fantasy X. The party has access to all locations early on and can visit them through the Celsius, complete several minigames and sidequests in a chapter before progressing through the story to the next one.


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Perfect job system perfect turn based combat perfect girls being girls doing girly stuff (saving the world and your boyfriend).

Love me a job system in Final Fantasy! I really enjoyed the battle system for this as it was quick, flowed well and the dress spheres made for interesting fights...but man they did my boy, Brother, dirty. So many characters are horrendously obnoxious and the story was utterly forgettable. They also made the cardinal sin of forcing interaction with the main mini-game, sphere break, making the 3rd chapter a truly miserable experience.

This review contains spoilers

In spite of myself I liked it. I admit it, I just wanted Tidus and Yuna together.

Hate abandoning this game because it’s honestly not even that bad but the parts that are bad make this a miserable experience so either I abandon this now or keep slowly playing it for another month or so and I have too many other games to get to.
This is the first sequel to any Final Fantasy game and honestly, X was a great choice for a game that could get one. The world of Spira is interesting and even with Sin gone there is a lot of potential for further conflict with the old establishment. The only thing that makes it a bit less suitable for a sequel is that the map is pretty tailored to the journey from Besaid to Zanarkand and since this game isn’t about that the maps feel just kind of lackluster.
And while I only made it to chapter 3, I enjoyed what I’ve seen of the story so far! The conflict between New Yevon and the Youth League makes sense for the setting, even though those are two very silly names for these groups to have, and I am kind of curious what is going on with Tidus, might watch a playthrough of the game at some point to see how it ends.

My only major issue with this game is its combat (I also dislike some side characters like Brother or Leblanc and her syndicate, but they’re minor enough to not really bother me).
The combat isn’t even all bad. I really like the garment grid as an evolution of the character switching of X. You can still have the freedom having access to all* of your jobs but you’re a bit more restricted in when you can use which one, so instead of swapping in Yuna at the last possible second when someone needs healing, I might not have White Mage on the grid of the current character, or it might take a bit to get there.
I do find it a bit weird that you get rewards for progressing through the grids because switching dresspheres is basically free but at least it made the combat a bit easier and slightly more bearable.
Unfortunately, the new system also made one of the big flaws of X’s character switching, the levelling, even worse. It was pretty annoying to have to swap in all the characters every now and then to keep them levelled, and now there is even more I have to keep levelled, going from seven characters to at least 3 dresspheres (but probably 4 or more) on each of 3 characters and you don’t even get full AP for each dressphere used in the battle. I think. I’m not actually sure how you gain AP in this game. Negative shoutout to Black Mage, why do I need AP to unlock higher tier spells, this is equivalent to needing AP to improve your attack damage on other jobs, there was a reason you purchased spells in III and V.
There are also some other minor nitpicks like blue magic learning sucking again (I still love blue magic on principle but please eating enemies as Quina or using Lancet as Kimahri was so much better) or Songstress being the worst way to handle status effects yet (though tbf status effects kinda sucked in all games other than X) and also some major nitpicks like healing being able to “miss” again by going off after the target is already dead but ultimately the reason I got so tired of this game I decided to abandon it was pretty simple and boring; enemies just have way too much hp.
I don’t know if I was just severely underlevelled the entire time (though even if I was, refer to my aforementioned issues with grinding) but every single combat encounter took way too long. Random encounters took like 5 minutes and boss encounters 15 or more. Of course, long boss fights aren’t inherently an issue but they weren’t very interesting either. I felt like the strategy for all of them was lowering their attack with a Warrior spamming power or magic break while keeping everyone healed with a White Mage and having the third character spamming attacks of some kind. Which, if the soundtrack is just this gets repetitive and boring after about 2 minutes. And random encounters should never take this long, and I kept running into ones that randomly killed me with stone breath or confuse or massive damage that then killed me because my healing spells missed, and it just got incredibly exhausting.
The game has a lot of potential, and I can see why so many people love it, but I played it for over 10 hours and just want to play something else now.