william liang

I love RPG games and all the FF series in the old PSX console. I started playing FFX back in 2003. Although this game has better graphic compare to the previous FF games due to its release in the new PS2 console, there are many major changes in the game design that I think would bother most players. I am going to list some of the most annoying changes below: 1. Magics - You can't attack all monsters with elemental magics or heal your entire party with healing magics any more. They changed it to a single target. Blue magics you can learn from fiends are pretty much useless. There are not many of them, plus you can only use blue magics in overdrive. How pitiful. 2. The AP reward system is unfair - A character beats a monster with a single strike get a reward for 100 for that character. If 3 characters beat the same monster, then each of them is rewarded for 100. In other words, if you want to level you whole party, you have to make each of them do some actions. 3. Too much to customize and limitations - In the old FF series, you only need APs to level up. In FFX, it goes by a sphere system which you need to collect different spheres that drop from the monster in additional to the APs. You also need to share these spheres with your summing Aeons. In addition, you need items to unlock some of the character's overdrives, weapon and armor abilities. There's a limitation of 99 for every items in the inventory but some of the abilities requires a high amount of items to unlock, like 80-99. Not to mention the items are extremely time consuming and hard to collect. 4. Side quest/mini games nightmare - ok, if you only try to play this game by the basic story line, this probably won't bother you. Collecting the ultimate weapons and beating the side quest bosses is utterly miserable in FFX. Just give you an idea, how do you feel like dodging lighting bolts that strike you unsuspectingly for 200 times in a row without messing up. And how about stuck in a water polo mini game for probably hundreds of hours? 5. Unable to skip cut sense/dialog - Yes, you have to watch the entire cut sense and listen to their dialog. You can't press a button to skip it or go back to watch/listen to it again. 6. Long animation for Aeon summing - Big thumbs down on FFX. Unlike the boost system on FFVIII that you can power up your summing by smashing the button while watching the animation, you have to sit through the entire animation, you can only watch, can't skip it either. I can go on and list a lot more of these annoying changes, but overall I think the game story is good and it has nice graphic. The bottom line is, unless you just play the basic story line, beat the final boss and through with it, but if you're a perfect gamer and want to collect all items and conquer all the side quest, you will find this game consumes you a lot of time and it's really annoying to play. On the other hand, I feel like the game makers are really slacking on the main story. I think normal play can probably be done in less then 10 hours. You just get really frustrated on some temple quests that I almost guarantee you would look up for help.