Originally written on 2021/09/04

I’ve been putting off writing about FFX for months. It’s the first game that I’ve added here that is both not new to me and a childhood favourite - that brings a lot of baggage with it, and it’s hard to pick through and elucidate those feelings. I have a built-up significance for this game in my head that is impossible to shake, which I can only hope adds value to the critique.

Let me first start with the game-y parts. As the first JRPG I played, it created a lot of frankly unrealistic expectations that I still carry with me. In further attempts to play JRPGs, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to use every member of my party and swap between them at will, why the members of my party seemed so interchangeable, or why sometimes the game didn’t even show them attacking enemies in any meaningful way. I certainly didn’t understand why ATB was a thing (it’s still not a combat system I gravitate towards), or why I wasn’t planning 3 moves ahead the way FFX sometimes expects you to do. I would read game reviews for other JRPGs where the writers complained about how linear they were, and couldn’t figure out why they cared - is non-linearity what people come to these games for? Because FFX certainly isn’t that (and while I understand the desire for some amount of exploration in games like this, it’s still not one I share - it is not the strength of JRPGs). The Caribbean and Southeast Asian flavour of FFX’s world design is so unique and its combination of fully 3D graphics and pre-rendered backgrounds is vibrant and lived-in; Squaresoft in a short-lived technical transitional period that sadly could’ve never lasted. The soundtrack is maybe not quite FF7 level, but it’s pretty damn close. This is, at a base level, a good game to hang around in.

When it comes to its personal significance, I should start with the most exaggerated thought I have possible - I’m pretty sure there’s a version of me that, at the age of 12, gets GTA3 instead of this as my second PS2 game and turns into a different person. I don’t want to put too much significance in media and how it shapes a person; certainly there’s a balance to hold between the ideas that 1) art is significant, more than simple entertainment, and can affect real change in the world and 2) there are many more factors than what videogames a person played that colours their viewpoint and overall personality. But FFX opened doors to me in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, or at least would’ve happened later in my life. It was not the type of game people around me were playing, which were primarily the major Nintendo games of the day, sports games of both the sim and arcade variety, and as mentioned, Grand Theft Auto. It was not only the first non-Pokemon JRPG I’d ever played, but the first one I’d ever seen. Perhaps more importantly, it was a game with an honest-to-god story, a long one that you followed over a span of several hours, with themes at its core and characters to fall in love with. And those themes are important ones.

It’s a meme that at the end of every JRPG you and your ragtag party attack and dethrone god. Strangely, in most JRPGs this is a twist that happens at the end, often removed from the core conflict of the game, and that is ignored or unknown by the populace of the world. Outside of its contemporary Grandia II (a game I will hopefully be logging some time in the next couple years) FFX is the only JRPG I know of that is explicitly about this, that builds a world around religion and has every major and minor character relate to it in some way. The player characters, too, have various levels of investment in this religion and how it has shaped their world; their development into a group of pariahs has a wide range of reactions both internally - Tidus, the outsider with no real investment other than the friends he’s met, is all-too-happy to tear down a nakedly unjust system, while the true believer Wakka hems and haws even though he knows you're doing the right thing - and externally, with the party treated with scorn by assorted corners of the world. In short, FFX is often a game about how for all the good religion can bring, it is perverted by its institutions and the individual desires of the people who run them. It does this elegantly and sympathetically, understanding that religion can be truly valuable and that when people come to it honestly, it’s because it gives them something - hope, community, belonging - and not because they’re uneducated yokels. This is the rare JRPG that ends with the state of the world being significantly changed rather than returned to the status quo; it’s telling that this is the first Final Fantasy game with a direct sequel, because there really is so much ground to explore by the end of it.

To a kid who had been in the private Jewish education system for 7 years at that point, this was mind-blowing stuff. I was not a particularly religious kid, and had already been questioning the things I was taught (The Matrix had hit a year or two prior) but this was primarily out of annoyance rather than any sort of moral stance - I hated bible study, didn’t much care for learning Hebrew, and DEFINITELY did not see why I had to spend my Friday mornings in school praying. FFX captured and cemented so much about how I related to my Judaism, and turned what was a nagging feeling into something I could hold onto and develop.

FFX has also been a white whale for me because I never beat it despite my love for it. I didn’t know how to approach games like this yet and it’s got a couple pretty nasty difficulty spikes that still messed me up even after becoming more familiar with the genre over the past decade-and-change. But this also cemented the game as an important moment in my longest-lasting friendship, as it led to me trading off the game with said friend, passing it back and forth with new, better-spec'd save files and so on. I bought the same friend a little 500 yen figure of Yuna when I went to Japan 3 years ago. I gave it to him at his bachelor party. He was so excited about it; it sits on a shelf in the family room that he now shares with his wife. We still hang out frequently.

I think the thing with games is that I care about them a lot as a general thing, but that there are very few individual ones that are important to me. FFX is one of the rare ones. It’s such a delight to reevaluate a piece of media that was momentous to your youth and know that you were really onto something, even back then.

An all-timer. Outer Wilds feels of a kind with Breath of the Wild in some ways - a game about seeing something vast ahead of you, and slowly chipping away at it until it becomes familiar. But where Breath of the Wild was (reductively) a refinement of and reckoning with many trends of the 2010s - open-world gameplay, survival mechanics, crafting - Outer Wilds is a prototype for what games can be. You can reduce it down to an equation of games it's sort of like, but it fails to capture what makes it so exciting. It is minimalist beauty and organic, player-driven gameplay by way of smart UI and painstaking level design. It is both cosmic in scale and intimate in feel, making incredible use of its odd cozy spaces and ramshackle tech design. It is the most I've leapt out of my chair from discoveries in a game, even moreso than explicit detective games like Obra Dinn or Her Story. And by the end of it, I was both deeply touched by its warmth and incredibly excited for the future of games influenced by it.

Where to even start with this thing? Like every post-Demon's Souls FromSoft project, this is an Important Game and that already makes it difficult to talk about. Elden Ring specifically is also HUGE which makes this even harder. At a basic level I would say I don't like it quite as much as the Souls games I've played, but it's still better than uh like 99% of other AAA games by a wide margin. With Elden Ring FromSoft has clipped as many teeth as you reasonably could while still keeping what makes these games special. This one actually has proper tutorials, makes it easy to summon whenever you want, keeps invaders away from you unless you invite them in, and its open world nature means that if you find a challenge insurmountable you can just go somewhere else interesting and come back. It also has the clearest storytelling these games have ever had, which isn't to say there isn't tons of fuel for theory videos, but most of the story here is relatively easy to follow, and it's the most I've actually felt connected to the characters therein. People will often just....tell you what their deal is, or what someone else's is. It's refresing!

This is the stuff that's actually surprising about Elden Ring. The rest is pretty much a known property! It is not surprising that FromSoft could take their skills at making action games, memorable locations, and deep lore and turn that into an extremely engaging once-in-a-generation open world game. You could say "Breath of the Wild Dark Souls" to anyone and they would immediately understand it as a thing they want. Elden Ring takes the core tenets of BotW - clear sightlines, a tangible reward or cool interaction at any part of the map that looks remotely interesting - and applies a Dark Souls veneer to it. In the process, it loses some of the crunch that these games' interlocking puzzle-box environments provide. It is still novel to see a castle in the distance, fight through various tight tunnels and elevators for 20 hours and end up in the basement of that very same castle, but I've seen a mountain in the distance and been able to go there a million times. Open-world gameplay brings some amount of open-world cruft with it too - having to constantly smash the Y button to pick up materials for an uninteresting (though unobtrusive) crafting system, empty space between interesting areas, etc. This is a long game and frankly by the end of it I missed some of Breath of the Wild's verticality, emergent gameplay, and oblique puzzles. There's no Eventide Island here, just endless combat and a smattering of decent environmental puzzles.

But it gains a lot from the transition too. Secrets everywhere, themed pocket dungeons, higher mobility, a couple choice boss fights that favour theatricality over difficulty, the ability to mash up disparate environments and have them basically hang together as a complete world. Personally, I've always shied away from magic in these games, but the wider spaces got me to experiment with it finally and I had a good time.

I just hope that this isn't the mode FromSoft operates in from here on out. I would feel sorry to lose those clockwork worlds, those tightly-packed structures, the pressure of needing to beat the challenge right in front of you. I would be sad if every FromSoft game - which, at this point, I'll be playing on release for the rest of time - took 2 months out of my life, no matter how much I enjoyed that time. After the success of Elden Ring, I just hope there is still a place for the 30-50 hour labyrinth, or something else entirely.