20 hours down the drain

I’m just about to hit the 20 hour-mark in Final Fantasy X (22 hours according to the game clock, but 2 of those hours were it just sitting there paused). I’m still enjoying the game, but I do have some complaints… But right now I’m just going to talk about the good stuff: The fighting is the most perfect turn based fighting I’ve ever played. The elemental rock-paper-scissors system isn’t overly complex, and it’s clear which members of your party are good against which monsters. Also, you can switch in and out other characters at every player’s turn, so you don’t have to micromanage your party BEFORE battles.

Apparently a new system added to this installment of the Final Fantasy games is the Sphere Grid. Instead of just leveling up after you get enough experience points, you gain sphere levels fairly frequently (also based on experience, but just lesser batches of it). The sphere levels then let you move around this giant board (the Sphere Grid) and activate nodes which in essence level up your characters bit by bit. Some example nodes might be +200HP or +4 strength, or even new abilities or spells. As you start off with your standard collection of characters (fighters, black mage, white mage, etc) they all start off on different sections of the grid, with their own abilities to activate. The really cool thing is that the board is all connected, so down the road it’s possible to break your black mage into the fighter section of the grid and beef her up physically. There are locks on certain nodes that prevent you from doing this too early, but I’ve got one character that was clearly meant to do this, he didn’t have much of his own grid, and he was very close to 3 other grid sections. So, I’ve got this so-so fighter that also knows the low level black magic spells AND thief moves AND he’s on his way to the white magic section of the grid. This system is nice because it gives you more control over the development of your characters (there are branches that you must choose whether or not to take) and it also gives you the joy of leveling up far more frequently than most other RPGs.

Maybe soon I'll post about the BAD things of FFX...