My adventures in Spira continue! Final Fantasy X: HD Remaster Edition is my first Final Fantasy game, I just passed 25 hours and here's what I know so far. For context, I'm currently on my way to Lake Ice World and, yes, I dodged 200 lightnings.

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In no particular order, my thoughts:

Wakka just gets more racist, huh?

I like that most of the side characters have names and personalities, like the chocobo knights. That's really cool.

I appreciate that the linearity of the story is balanced by how open the mechanics are in terms of customizing weapons and navigating the sphere grid.

O'aka seems like an alright guy.

The party members don't have individual levels, so it's hard to know how over- or under-powered they are compared to each other.

Unless I missed it somewhere, they never explained the Jar Jar Binks race of people, the shoopuf drivers. For a game that loves explaining the races and cultures of its world, they seemed strangely ignored.

I love the excuses that are made for using some machina but not others. "Yevon says some are okay, stop questioning it!"

The temple puzzles don't make any sense to me.

Everything in this world is a sphere, but when the characters mention "spheres", they're usually just talking about video spheres, the least common sphere for me to come in contact with.

I like the Noel Coward guy who travels around telling you about different things in Spira.

When walking around hub areas, it's sometimes relevant whether I'm walking around as just Tidus or as the whole party, but there's no way to tell. ("You must not leave without Lady Yuna!" Oh, is Yuna not with me right now?)

Blitzball bad.

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You can join the pilgrimage by visiting me on Twitch, where I stream daily, or catch the archives on YouTube. I'm planning on playing X-2 next, with 7R and XII on the horizon.

Counterpoint: Blitzball good.

@schrodngrsfalco: Hmm, I dunno about that one. I'll have to keep playing and review the evidence.

There is a specific Best Friends a reference I could make in this regard. But in my experience, dark humor and form moderation don't mix well.

Feel free to watch the LP after you're done, and you'll know what I mean.

By far the strangest story beat of the midgame is that they simultaneously beat you over the head with a “racism is actually bad, you guys” trope as far as the Al Bhed go, but then they do everything in their power to make the Guado seem like they’re uniformly up to no good. I have my own issues on the former (cheap shortcuts only superficially addressing a major current issue), but the latter becomes very tonally inconsistent.

Hope you’re enjoying your journey through Macarena Forest!

Every time I play FFX I have to look up how to do all the temple puzzles. They wouldn't be so bad except it takes so long to do everything. And yeah, the first 3/4 of the game is super linear and then it'll open up more.

I love blitzball as a concept, it's cool as hell. But as a mini-game, it sucks. Fuck blitzball.

I never came close to getting 100% in FFX, but I have done it in FFX-2 a couple of times. It's just so much more fun and engaging. It's a true sequel that doesn't have to waste time introducing the world and most of the characters. You also are no longer in a world that just has a feeling of imminent doom hanging over everyone's head with Sin being a constant threat.

@allthedinos said:

At some point Tidus says something like "I didn't trust Seymour from the beginning, but I didn't know why" which was confusing to me, because he seemed okay so far. I think he said it just after Seymour saved everyone at the blitzball game. Tidus just innately didn't like him, independent of anything I'd noticed.

I never really got the Wakka is racist meme. Isn't his whole thing that he's a big rube who's a big Yevon believer? He's fine with other races, it's heretics that he hates. Which makes sense for someone devoutly into a religion centered around collective punishment/salvation. FFX as a whole doesn't really delve into race issues much, if at all; it's more religion-themed.

Since FFX is pretty linear for most of the game, it's pretty good at keeping you at roughly the right level. Though I always hated how it only gives XP to characters who took an action in combat. It's a good way to make sure that players with minmaxing tendencies will waste a turn in every fight swapping characters in and out.

Blitzball is not fun, but I kind of admire how much effort and thought they put into this minigame. Honestly, I really got into it when I played the game for the 1st time. It has a bit of depth, but once you're good enough/have good enough players to win consistently, which doesn't take very long, it just becomes a boring grind you have to do if you want to unlock Wakka's stuff.

I love FFX! I hope they remake it someday. Someone recently remodeled some of the assets in Unreal and it looks pretty dope:

@mittens: If he was fine with other races, I don't think his friends would hide Rikku's race from him. He seems to hate all Al Bhed and calls them "sand-blasted grease monkeys".

@eccentrix: Oh he does hate the Al Bhed, but they're not a different race, like the Guado or Ronto. In the context of the game, they're heathens, or heretics, who don't live by Yevon's rules. Since Yevon holds them responsible for the continuous existence of Sin, it makes sense that Wakka (and everyone else in Spira) hates em.

Maybe it's kind of a pedantic distinction, but religious intolerance and fundamentalism aligns a lot more with the game's themes than race does.

@mittens: Wait, so why are their eyes different? I guess maybe I missed that part.

@eccentrix: Aren't they just wearing goggles and gas masks?

Honestly I haven't played it in a few years. I bought the HD remaster recently but didn't get around to it yet. Maybe they made more changes than I thought.

Al Bhed is definitly it's own group with it's own culture and language that you're born into. They have green spirally eyes. What sets them apart is their widespread use of machina. A bit like how dwarves tend to be blacksmiths and explosive experts in most lore. Now you can become a human blacksmith too, and dress like a dwarf but you'd never be a dwarf. If you're against mining operations, there's a good chance you will generally dislike dwarves.

@mittens: I just got to a big conversation about this topic between Wakka and Rikku and they go into the details of Wakka's devoutness and the Al Bhed's use of machina. I don't remember them mentioning Wakka's beliefs much before; his hatred of the Al Bhed was usually related to his brother's death.

Like @onemanarmyy said, they have green spirals in their eyes and they wear goggles to hide that. Also, I just remembered that Yuna is half Al Bhed and I think that's why one of her eyes is green. That adds some meaning to her and Seymour's relationship. Seymour is half Guado, so if they fulfilled the destiny some people wanted them to have of recreating Yunalesca and Zaon's victory over Sin, it would have symbolized the unity of so many disparate people.

I do not think I will ever understand the massive regard that this game receives. I mean, there's nothing inherently terrible about it, but I wouldn't say it was anything other than "fine." I certainly don't think it was as good or as historic as people remember it being. It wasn't as technically mindblowing as FFVII was when it came out and I wouldn't put it in the top 5 Final Fantasies when it comes to story or characters. The music was largely forgettable outside That One Sad Piano Piece(TM).

It was the first FF game to have voice acting, I guess? Maybe I don't view that as this massive historical achievement that other people seem to think it is.

Also, Blitzball bad. Very, very bad.

I thought X was the best playing FF overall. Kind of like MGSV to everyone's MGS3.

It had that transition from 2D (and 2D adjacent games, FFVII to FFIX) to full 3D in XII. So you had a lot of gameplay reminiscent of full turn-based but quicker, but in much better 3D than previous iterations.

I also, weirdly, like the sphere grid.

I wish this remaster had all the fast forward and battle boosters like the other ones, that would be glorious.

@leviathan_dive: It does! Well, I don't know if they're exactly the same as in other games, but you can fast forward and change the encounter rate.

Oh ok, I have the PS3 version. I guess the PC version has those.

@leviathan_dive: Oh, that's a shame. I wonder what other improvements are missing.

is there a correlation between people who think wakka isnt racist and people who think racism is overblown in todays current situations in america...i think its easy to overlook subtle racism in a game when you kinda overlook it in real life. Then you get the other end of the spectrum when they beat you over the head, and people who have experienced racism often, think...ugh this again but others finally get the message. Just food for thought in my shower. XD.

Ill say what I always say to people who think a thing is overrated and hand out the "its fine, it's good/ok, it's 7/10." If you think that a thing you dislike is 7/10 marginally bump that to an 8/10 for someone who liked it since the lowest were looking at is 7/10 for disliking it, then add people who love it 9/10, then those who really liked it 10/10...ends up with a wide range of people who loved it and we're way more impressed by the things you weren't. Its couldn't be perfect given the time it was made and the usual, nothing's perfect, but to come out with a game that looked that good at the time, was a fairly unique plot, decent voice acting given other games didn't, massive art designs, monsters, powers, etc. Plus if you didnt think too hard into blitz ball and how its an rpg, you can enjoy it, thou the internet makes it seem like you had to play bilitzball the entire game, instead of once in a 60 hour game. Thats like 30 minutes making an entire game bad XD. Also hype makes everything seem overrated, as you wait arms folded for everything to impress you, see new switch for example, and those thinking it was an upgrade to ps5 specs.