Overall, a lot of fun. The game is light on story and heavy on side stories/content. It's tonally all over the place but at it's core it's a light hearted epilogue that does a fantastic job of showing the world of Spira after Yuna and co brought an end to the apocalyptic force of nature known as Sin.

The highlight for me would definitely be the fiend stories. From the Behemoth wanting to sell balloons to the flan that just wants to become the perfect dish, there's a lot of silly (and some incredibly dark, if you think too hard about them) stories here and while the process in unlocking them can be quite esoteric (as with a lot of this games design), I found them to be very enjoyable and well worth the effort required to unlock them.

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.

Sorry to it's (few) fans but as a sequel, if you count this as a mainline Final Fantasy, it's one of the worst FF games I've played (finished it just because it's FF).

The battle system is way off and after a while you may get tired of the characters, who just get more annoying than in FFX. By making it less serious and lowering the stakes in the story, they ended up diluting the game, combat and narrative too much to the point that I just wanted it to be over so I could move on to a better game.

It’s chill. X-2 is an excuse for experimentation rather than some genuine and necessary sequel to X. I’m really not here for the story or drastic shift in tone, but it’s fun to see how unserious this entry was considering it’s the first direct sequel in the series.

The combat system is astonishingly interesting for what some would consider more of a spin-off title. Direct sequel final fantasy games always get weird with battle mechanics. It’s almost an excuse to try new ideas instead of scrapping them during production of a new game. The combat here is totally a precursor to XIII’s combat. I think I like XIII’s more but X-2 does often feel more tight and easier to grasp. It’s super fun. I really dig getting to see characters from X again too. It has this incredibly long epilogue feel to it in regard to them and I think that’s cool.
Not sure I fully vibe with certain ideas in the ending, but it’s also harmless and does not detract from any moments in X.

This game kind of owns. It’s more of a fun goofy ride than a dramatic and lush narrative experience. I like it for that though. It’s not like this was ever meant to be the new high budget mainline title of the FF series at the time, but it’s cool that the series is capable of lighter moments that don’t take themselves too seriously.

Of all the direct prequel/sequel games, I think it’s a little better than XIII-2 for me but not as good as something like Crisis Core. It’s half the length of X as well so it’s a quick jam.

A sequel to one of the greatest Final Fantasy games out there, this had a lot to live up to. In many aspects, I think it did live up to the reputation, but in several more, I think that the game did not. I found the plot to be a bit hit or miss for me, with the main plot not hitting the same highs as the original. The characters were still likable, but I missed some of the other team members from the previous game. The combat is still as fun as it was in the original, and the new Dressphere system reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy V's job system, which I enjoyed. The music is so much funkier now, and while not as memorable as the original these tracks are still fun to listen to. Graphically this game looks good even by today's standards, which is saying something. Overall, If you liked the original, you should at least check this one out. Most copies of the original have this bundled in any way, so I say no harm in checking this out.