What a great game. It kept me enthralled from start to finish. Definitely a huge improvement over the mediocre FFVIII. I never played FF IX so I can't compare it to that one. I'd say it's better than VII too, but not quite as good as III on the SNES.

The story was interesting, the voice acting added to the game IMO, and the graphics were great as always. The battle system was the best in the series so far. I loved being able to switch characters in and out of the battle at will. It made it easy to keep all the characters leveled up.

Speaking of leveling up, the sphere grid was great. It was actually fun and interesting to level up in this game because you could see how your characters were going to grow. Many times I'd just keep walking in circles getting attacked to get AP to advance a few spots on the Sphere grid to get some spells, abilities, attributes etc.

It took me about 42 hours to get through it. I didn't bother with any of the side quests you can do before the last battle as I was already powerful enough that I figured I could finish it. And I was right as I only died once through the series of last battles and that was at the very last battle. Well before

Anyway this is the best game I've played in some time, and easily in my top ten all time.

It always made me wonder why What's the point? Somewhat an anti-climactic battle if you ask me. The final battles with Sephiroth in FFVII, however..

Until now I thought we had similar tastes in games. I found FFX to be slow and boring though. The last 10 hours really dragged for me. I do agree that Sphere Grid was a cool idea though. I liked being able to customize the characters but in reality there wasn't much customization that could be done. For example, you can't really turn Khimari (sp?) into a good magic user. That's something I tried and it totally didn't work. If I remember correctly you don't like PC games but maybe you should try a PC RPG like Baldur's Gate II to see what character creation and customization should be like. I had a lot of other problems with the game but I'll just keep those to myself. Congratulations on beating the game.

One dislike I forgot to add, I hated the Cloister of Trials. You know the dumb temples where you had to move the spheres around. They were trial and error puzzles as there was no logical way to figure them out. You just had to screw around until you got it right. I used faqs for the last 2 or 3 as I was sick of them.

Other than that the game rocked.

LethaL Nemesis- I liked the

Kellehair- we do have fairly similar taste in games, but no two people are going to agree on every game.

FFX is the best game ever.

Read the credits.

I suppose you're right. I guess I had spent so much time with the sidequests and leveling up that the bosses seemed like push-overs and the final battle just felt anti-climactic when
Sephiroth was really tough for me, too, my first time through. On my 2nd time around, I spent way more time leveling up and I took the time to acquire Knights of the Round. Eventhough some may say that summon is cheap, I found it useful.

Oh yeah! Knights of the Round. The last Sephiroth didn't even have a chance to attack.

I'm about halfway (I think) through FFX and loving it, and I'm still deciding whether to do all of the side quests. Blitzball is fairly tiresome in my opinion, but maybe once I get better it will be more fun.

joshhinkle - I agree completely on the Cloister of Trials. At first I was excited because in the first temple there is a method to the puzzle. By the one in the middle of the game with the moving platform that you ride up and down I was so tired of even dealing with them.

What I say doesn't matter to most Final Fantasy'ers anyway though because I liked FF8.

stoolie

I agree with Stoolie. So far I have finished FF7, FF8, and FFX (I'm half way through FF9) and I also loved #8.. Each one has their own unique traits that makes them great. FF8 is no less of a game than the others.

DARTH GAMER

Well, I'm one of the people who didn't really get into FF8. Don't get me wrong -- almost everything was great about it. The only things that detracted a lot for me was drawing magic and the junctioning system. I suppose if I were to play it again, the junctioning system would be somewhat easier for me to manage, but drawing magic does get tiresome.

I love FFX. It's probably been my favorite PS2 game so far. I loved the story, the animation and the music. Sure it did get a bit tedious at times, but I can look past that. The side quests were very frustrating though. Very fun nontheless.

The Draw and Juntion system was what made me dislike FFVIII as well. That and I couldn't seem to keep leveled up to where normal attacks did decent damage. I was always having to summon over and over to win battles, and sitting through the summons got old.

In FFX I had 3 or 4 characters that could do good damage with plain attacks and two that did big damage with magic.


I also thought of another positive about FFX I forgot to mention above. The straight forward, linear nature of the game. I loved not having to wander around on a huge world map figure out what to do and where to go next all the time. It was nice to follow the arrow and just fight your way through the game, leveling up here and there. Plus they through in side quests for those interested in that kind of thing.

I hope the next non-online FF features this same type of play.

AS much as I love the FF series I felt it was a bit harder to get into this one.

Granted I didn't get into the series until VII. I beat VII, gave up on VIII but I do hope to go back to it since I was pretty far into it, beat IX. All of them were great for one reason of another.

The Cloister of Trials just got more and more annoying in X. Voice acting was a nice touch but Yuna's voice actor went about it so poorly anything she says just makes me laugh. I restarted X recently in the hopes that I'll enjoy it more and so far so good.

I very much agree with you on this point. This has been really my only complaint. I can't stand searching for things that I'm not even sure I should be looking for. Thats why I loved FFX and one of my all time favorites on the PS1, THE LEGEND OF DRAGOON. That was just an incredible game.

DARTH GAMER