Final Fantasy X

Ok so I just finished Final Fantasy X and honestly the game is amazing.  It's a beautiful game with some very powerful messages themed around family and the sense of loss.  FFX is a game that plays with your emotions; and trust me when it ends you will be smacked in the face with "the feels".

************************************Spoilers**************************************

So FFX is a Role-Playing Game in which, as is the norm with Final Fantasy games, you control a team, or party, of people and progress through the game levelling up, getting new abilities and saving the day.  Although you don't level up in all RPGs such as Legend of Zelda.  In the case of FFX you level up but not exactly.  You get experience and grow Sphere levels which you can then use to increase your stats.  Whereas in the long run this is good and dandy, increasing sphere levels is pretty easy and long before the final battle you can make your characters strong enough to not find any enemies to be a threat.  Other than that this is a pretty standard RPG.

Now with the story and why I consider this an amazing game.

You start off as a character called Tidus, who lives the life of a blitzball star.  Blitzball is like football......but cooler (boy am I gonna get hate for that). One night during a blitzball match Tidus' city of Zanarkand is under attack by a giant whale like creature who's called Sin.  This monster sends down parts of it called Sinspawn to attack our main character and his protector Auron.  After the attack Tidus gets washed away and wakes up alone in some ruins, and after a run in with a monster is saved by a group of people called the Al Bhed.  Sin attacks and he loses his new friends waking on a shore near the town of Besaid.

There he meets summoner Yuna and her guardians, Wakka, Lulu and Kimahri.  A summoner is a person who goes on a pilgrimage to enlist aeons, powerful beings created from the dreams of the fayth.  The fayth are people who willingly had their souls sealed in stones so that they could continue dreaming.  Spira, you could say, is a place where dreams come true.  As the pilgrimage continues Sin attacks the party multiple times, Tidus finds out that the monster Sin that has been terrorising Spira for hundreds of years is his long lost father, the Final Aeon will become Sin upon it's death, the main religion are the Teachings of Yevon and the maesters (kind alike the popes) of Yevon turn out to be assholes.  All of them being unsent which are basically zombies....kinda.  Maester Seymour in particular has the party accused of treason, attacks the party, is killed and then tries to become Sin in order to kill everyone on the planet so they can stop grieving about death.......logic? The fuck is logic?

After the entire Yevon religion has been brought into chaos, find out that Tidus is a dream who will disappear when Sin is destroyed for good and Tidus and Yuna have a small makeout session (about 7 minutes with a japanese folk song "Suteki da ne" playing under the full moon) they move on to the ruins of Zanarkand and meet Lady Yunalesca who admits that the summoner must have one of his/her guardians become the Final Aeon by being sacrificed.  The Final Aeon would then become Sin over the course of the next 10 years thus continuing the spiral of death. After Lady Yunalesca is sent to the afterworld (aka the faplane) the party makes a plan to destroy Sin once and for all.  From the inside.

Once inside Sin they find his core.  Defeat Jecht (Tidus' father) and enter the final battle after a long heartfelt goodbye.  Yuna summons her aeons one by one as Yu Yevon, the one behind the Teachings of Yevon, who is the real mastermind and the real form of Sin, takes over each aeon, planning to use them to kill the party and make a new Sin to continue terrorising Spira.  The party defeats the aeons one by one until only Yu Yevon is left who, without an aeon to hide in, falls easily to the party.  The battle over the main characters must say their final goodbyes, as Tidus fades away. The last thing Yuna tells him being that she loves him.  The first and only time she had said it.  Tidus realising that Yuna truly loves him, attempts to hug her but can't as his body is dematerialising.  He then disappears.

Spira celebrates as the monster who destroyed their homes, their families, their hopes and dreams is finally gone.

Honestly this game was so sad and yet so amazing.  It reminds me why I love Final Fantasy.  Yeah the endings aren't always happy but the stories are always the best.  Final Fantasy X truly delivers in that department with an expected yet sad ending.

This game does however have it's faults such as methods to obtaining the ultimate weapons being a huge pain.  But hey the story is worth it.

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Honestly I love this game.  The gameplay isn't out of this world but it's familiar and a traditional RPG style, the story itself while not a masterpiece is simple and entrancing, the graphics for it's time are gorgeous (although it has been remastered for the PSVita with even better graphics).  This game honestly deserves the utmost respect and truly lives up to the name of Final Fantasy.

Rating: 9/10

Would I play this game again:
Not only will I play it again I would advise others to play it too.

Remember to follow me on Twitter for updates on when i'm going to next post.

Updates (Twitter, ask.fm)

Hey guys I apologise for the brief *cough* 1 month *cough* absence, but life's been a bit tough lately.  I do have a couple posts for you guys but I will only be posting once a week for now.  That's the best I can do.

On other news I have made a twitter account so that you guys can be updated as to when I post and for any updates I may or may not make in the future. So if you guys have twitter follow me: @DarkfireDremp

Oh as for you lovely people who managed to find my ask.fm well I deactivated it mainly because I don't really use it, but if you guys wanna contact me you can message me on twitter; which should also be up on the sidebar too.

Alright guys thanks for being so patient, and to those of you going to uni or school have an awesome academic year.

Lightning, butterflies and balls oh my!! (Minigames: FFX)

Ok so everyone who has played a game know what a minigame is.  These are little games within the games, usually they take no longer than 20 minutes and are....alright.

Minigames range from really good to poor to awful to a nuisance.  Case in point I've been playing Final Fantasy X....lots and lots of Final Fantasy X, and one of the things I love to be in RPGs is overpowered.  That being said FFX has some of the most annoying minigames to complete in order to get the ultimate weapons.  These include butterfly capturing, blitzball and dodging lightning 200 times (admittedly not exactly a minigame but a feature of the game in a specific area but still).

So how do these work.

Butterfly hunting: you need to get the 7 blue butterflies without bumping into the red butterflies under time conditions (roughly 30 seconds).  Simple right? Well the added twist is that the red butterflies are nearly indistinguishable from the environment, to the point that you need to increase the brightness of the console you're playing on before attempting this.  There's also very small room for error as these butterflies are quite difficult to dodge, oftentimes finding yourself surrounded by 2, 3 even 5 at one point.  And the most evil butterfly of all is that one blue one that decides to sit right at the exit to the forest, go to far and you will exit the area thus resetting the minigame.

Blitzball: this is actually quite a big feature in the game.  You have 6 players who play in a large sphere filled with water and from then it's basically football.....but with more tackling that can cause poison or sleep....I still don't get how you can punch someone and they fall asleep....doesn't that mean they need hospitalization? I just don't....anyway so the goal is well to make more goals than the opposing team.  There are no fouls or extreme rules you just throw the ball from teammate to teammate, get it to Tidus (the main character) get him to use Jecht Shot next to the goal, repeat and voila, you win.  The game itself isn't difficult...just irritating.  You have to playthrough 3 league/tournaments to get a character's overdrives (ultimate attacks) and then you only have a 50% chance of getting the item you need to upgrade his ultimate weapon.  The leagues take far too long being 10 rounds each, and it just ends up being a nuisance having to do this over and over and over again. The funny thing is, if you've beaten everyone (not that hard) and reach round 7 without losing then there is no team that can catch up to you points wise, so you could literally sit there and let them have goal after goal and still win the league.

Lightning dodging: this......this is just pure evil.  The goal of the game is to press x when the screen flashes white.  The times this happens in are random, the lightning comes within the same second as the flash and sometimes you get 2 in a row just coz why not?  At least I don't need to do this crap 200 times right? ......right? .........damnit........It gets worse when you realise you can't save or exit the area because if you do the number of times you dodged gets reset.  This means you need to dodge 200 lightning strikes in 1 sitting.....

...nope. I'm done. Who needs ultimate equipment? I'm fine with only dealing 9999 hp damage.  Who needs that glorious 99,999 hp damage......*Sigh*

Alright well hope you guys have an awesome day, as for me? I'm going to grab some rubber shoes, a butterfly net and fill a dome with water. Gotta get that beautiful 99,999 hp damage.....some day you shall be mine