Nikki LeDree

This is a guest post by my good friend Sam-chan. I’m hoping this will be a regular thing as he never fails to amuses me.

Sometimes I have to wonder to myself, whether I would be vastly happier in life if I were in fact to come from Japan. Most of my current interests seem to be based around there, mostly from watching various anime and playing JRPG’s – so surely in the land where both of these things rule, it would be like if heaven came to Earth? Then I realise that’s probably just an offensive stereotype that could lead me to having the stuffing kicked out of me by some Yakuza style gang and left as a broken shell of a man on a rainy street corner.

But I digress.

A couple of days ago a huge event occurred that shook the very foundations of the planet- Final Fantasy XIII was released. Judging by the title of this post it may give away that I’m a huge fanboy of this series of games, and have played the majority of them (some random spinoffs such as Dirge of Cerberus still elude me.) And, so, acting with behaviour you might expect from someone such as me, I immediately rushed out to the nearest game shop and… bought FF7 and 8 for the PSP. Because of one main reason:

Final Fantasy has been shite since FFX.

So because history has taught me not to instantly buy and instead wait to see what others think, instead of talking about FFXIII, I shall instead rant about how bad the previous couple of games were.

As one of the first PS2 games I had, I loved FFX like it was my own child. I put it to bed every night, took it on days out during the school holidays and let it climb into my bed if it was scared during the night. In an innocent way, don’t get any ideas. You can imagine then my excitement when I saw FFX-2 was being released! My old naïve self bought it instantly and… wow. Just wow. I’ve never had such a girly experience vomited onto me in my entire life, and my first thoughts were these:

To enjoy the game you must fall into the following categories:
•    A girl so girly that you are a walking bastion of clichés
•    A feminist who was desperate to see a game with no decent male characters
•    Of questionable sexuality
•    You are a girl so young that boys still have ‘cooties’ to you
•    You are a pervert, playing solely to see the girls change their clothes to be more suggestive with each dressphere (stupid name anyone?)
•    You hated the storyline of FFX, and play simply to see it raped

Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against the above parties (other than the 10 years or younger girls – stay the hell away from my genre!). However the audiences were a problem to me as, logic would say….

If you make a sequel to a game, why would you make it for a different audience? It just makes no bloody sense.

Honestly the ladies of FFX were some of the least slutty in the series before X-2. You have Yuna, quiet and shy, going on a suicide mission so has other things on her mind than guys. Rikku, has no real love interest and is bossy loud and overall slightly annoying. Lulu, well despite her ample cleavage she’s so tight with her privates her dress is literally made out of belts. Compare these to say, Tifa – just google her and you have seen enough. So why is it in X-2, I find myself in a strangely suggestive situation with Yuna sitting on top of the apparent antagonist who wears so little that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out she’s the female star of the Emperor’s New Clothes. If this weren’t bad enough, you have to play a minigame where you give her a massage whilst she makes very suspect noises beneath your scantily clad body. Square….

What did you do to my beloved characters?!

Yes yes, I know that they don’t technically belong to me. But if they did I would be sure to save them from this virtual rape. In the FFX-2 secret ending, they even bring back Tidus? What exactly was the purpose of this, for the sake of a few seconds of cinematic at the end? I liked the fact that Tidus disappeared at the end of FFX. Sure it was depressing, sad and all the rest of those words but it made for a decent ending. It felt conclusive, and was a break from the usual happy endings of previous FF games. This really didn’t need or warrant a sequel, especially one with as poor a plotline as this.

Speaking of characters, I’ve got two main complaints. Firstly – who the fuck is Paine? A strangely masculine, quiet and serious character, which seems to be like the Auron of FFX-2. That is, Auron if he was far less awesome and his background was far less developed. You might be getting the impression here that I don’t like Paine, which is true but I’m not totally set against new characters for a sequel. This can at times work well. However in this case, such an obvious clone of Lulu, Auron and Squall really didn’t work for me – kind of ironic such an emo character was called Paine too. But this is only touching on the depths of the awful. Next up…

Shuyin. What. The. Fuck.

He looks like Tidus. He acts like Tidus. He was once a Blitzball player from Zanarkand. He’s voiced by the same guy who did Tidus (in both English and Japanese). His actions when you fight him resemble that of Tidus – some of his moves are even copies of Tidus’ limit breaks. Christ, what were they thinking?

This was such a cheap move it blows my mind, to have the main ‘bad guy’ as a pretty much recycled model. They are clearly the same person, yet this is barely explained in the story at all. What in hell’s name made Square think they could get away with this? I wish I knew. Yet being the cashcow that Final Fantasy is, I’m ashamed to admit my fanboyishness made me instantly rush out and buy it on release, and despite how horrified I was, I sat and completed it fully.

So coming to the end of that, I wouldn’t recommend FFX-2 to anyone who liked FFX. It wasn’t so much a bad game in general, just to anyone who thought the story would continue somehow – it doesn’t. It just sort of wallows a bit in a slimy sea of vague and strange plot points, that the game is quite careful not to delve too deep into for fear of revealing how shallow they really are.

So I hear you ask, what about FFXII? That completely changed the way the game worked, surely you liked that? Well… I’ll open THAT can of worms next post.

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