Why Final Fantasy X SUCKS! My point of view!

I have to agree with the great and wise Spoony One that Final Fantasy X is god awful Final fantasy X PT1

After hearing how great seven and eight were I was always a little bitter that my friends never got them so I could experience the games first hand. I'm not a gamer, in fact these days I hardly ever pick up a game controller. I'm either reading, watching or listening to something else. I simply don't have time to play.

Take right now for instance; while I'm writing this I'm also watching classic episodes Star Trek Next Generation. In a while I might switch to the original series and try to finish a chapter of Fan Fiction, or load up BBC's iPlayer and watch whatever episode of Doctor Who has been repeated recently. I'm multi tasking, using my mind not to it's fullest potential but using it.

Paying computer games you're forced to spend all your time focussed on this one thing that is all too soon dull boring and pointless. You're just going over the same old routine, select and apply an action. It costs hundreds of pounds for a console these days, between £30 and £40 for the game, which denies you the plot unless you jump through certain hoops. There is none of the convenience of a book, which you can read any where without worrying that the batteries are running out. Games that force feed me my imagination always handcuff me from options.

There are all sorts of names for developments in games; "None linear game play", "AI scripting", "alternate endings" are all ideas that try to pretend their giving you an option. The fact is you don't. There are no options, decisions, goals or objectives that you can achieve that haven't been programmed. You have no choice but to jump the hoops offered.

Fiction is much more honest about it, knowing that the inter action isn't pushing buttons but conveying ideas. More importantly an episode of Star Trek doesn't force you to spend hours doing exactly the same thing over and over again until you hope for death. If even to change the monotony. This is just the start of my problems with Final Fantasy X.

If I wanted a story I'd read a book. If I wanted a story as predictably mindless as this one, with acting that could peel paint at fifty paces and cause sever internal haemorrhaging, I'd watch an Enterprise marathon. The story is rubbish, the plot twists predictable and the only character you could possibly like is hideously underused. Tidus is a whiny pathetic moron who's feminine Tokyo-pop features belong on the bottom of someone's shoe rather than anything else. I want to root for the hero, not jump into the screen and beat them half to death with a clue stick!

Playing the game is worse than annoying. You spend all your time "level grinding", fighting the same monsters over and over again to gain experience. After about four hours of grinding you can finally play the damn game, defeating the super powerful bosses and progressively harder monsters. Twenty minutes of game play layer the bosses are too powerful and monsters almost as strong. You're stuck, dying every time you turn around. The solution? Another four hours of grinding against another level of monsters. I'm not kidding, the only thing that makes it seem longer is the cut scenes.

The badly rendered, pointless, droning cut scenes that make you want to take a knife to your own wrists. Yes the cities and landscapes look good, but I don't care, we have holidays and paintings for that. I want to PLAY THE FUCKING GAME! Not watch someone with the brains of a common garden slug fart around trying to attract a witless fluttering and suicidal fool.

Yep, not only do I loath Tidus but Yuna has all the intelligence and personality of a maniacally depressive lemming. Her great quest across the world is to defeat the monster from Cloverfield by holding a seance. I wish, I truly wish that was a joke. It's not. for more than a thousand years this magically powered future have thought the only weapon was prayer. Just don't get me started on the rest of the mess with the characters. I'll leave that to grand master Spoony.

What I won't leave to him, even though he's hit upon it already, is Blitzball. You see for this game you have to, in order to get money and points, play in Blitzball tournaments. A made up game that is sort of like water polo, lacrosse, football and the bastardisation of reality. The game is played in a giant ball of water where, without breathing apparatus, you swim around for fifteen minuets at a time. Trying to score a goal in a net half an inch bigger than the ball. First, as pointed out, you cannot throw, kick, punch in water. Physics won't allow it, it's a simple act of compression. Second, WHO IN THE NAME OF THE GOOD FUCKING LORD WANTS TO PLAY SPORTS WHEN THEY PLUG IN A FANTASY GAME. Seriously, why the hell would you want to play sports, let alone the worst badly managed mangled excuse for a sport you have here? Why is it mangled? Because of point three of course. A sport that is a hideous mishmash of Football and Lacrosse should not, under any circumstances, be turn based! We should play it as a managerial game, where the player picks tactics before the match starts and watch the play through. Instead it is turn based, where whoever has the ball has a turn and what your players do depends on the settings you pick mid match! You have to pick, because the default settings are useless.

It's been years since I've played this game and I'm raging just remembering it. The real problem is just how much an impact the Final Fantasy series has had on gaming. Maybe it's wrong to lay the blame at it's feet, Zelda and several other game series are to blame too but in the end this is the game that sealed this opinion for me. A game is a game, a story is a story. Pong, for instance, is a game. It's a challenge between two players, the console is only the medium. Like a deck of cards or cricket stumps. The outcome is down to you and who you're playing against. Games like Space Invaders are played against yourself, your own highscore a target to beat. That's game play, that's entertaining, best of all you can kill the sound and play music over it. You don't need to arse around with save points or struggle for hours skilling up just to die on your way back home.

Final Fantasy X was a massive disappointment to me and it coloured my view on RPGs and modern consoles forever. I gave XII a chance and while the burns weren't as deep they still hurt. I'm not even going to entertain the idea of playing the new XIII. Even though Blitzball is gone and the characters are getting a little better the core problem I have outlined here has not changed and no matter what I keep coming back to this point

These games aren't games. They are sub-par, cliché riddled, poor stories masquerading as interactive cartoons that actively prevent you from enjoying the plot by forcing you complete pointless and suffocating tasks in a vain excuse to make the exorbitant fee required feel justified.

To those of you that like and enjoy Final Fantasy go an buy a book, I don't care if it's an I-can-read book with a few big words and a lot of pictures. Spark your imagination, put those controllers down and revel in what inspires you. Love life, shove a play list on your iPod and go for a walk. Go to the pub and utterly fail to chat up a woman. Watch Star Trek. Do something other than waste hours, days even weeks of your life farting around this pointless series of games.