Warning: This review includes some spoilers of Final Fantasy X. If you have not played Final Fantasy X, but plan to at some point, either skip this review or skip the second paragraph.
Even though I am a huge fan of Final Fantasy X, I avoided Final Fantasy X-2 for years because I thought it looked unbelievably cheesy and dumb and I simply didn't think it was worth my time. Then, after recently playing Dragon Quest VIII, I decided I needed a very short RPG, so I chose this one. As it turns out, the game is actually pretty good underneath all the cheese and campiness. It doesn't do a very good job of building on Final Fantasy X's legacy and the story is wildly inconsistent, but the gameplay is arguably some of the best the series has ever seen and the customization is robust and addictive. And even despite the misguided story structure and the cringeworthiness of some scenes and events, Spira is still a beautiful world to inhabit.
As you can guess from the tagline of this review (and even from watching footage of this game), the story is lacking in a number of ways. The premise is this: after defeating Sin, Yuna's days of calm come to an end when she sees someone in a video sphere (Spira uses spheres to record certain events) that looks suspiciously like Tidus, a young man that she had a romantic relationship with in Final Fantasy X, but who faded away due to reasons that I won't go into in this review. Thinking she might see Tidus again if she finds more clues, she becomes a sphere hunter and is joined by the high-spirited Rikku and a sarcastic, mildly taciturn warrior chick named Paine. Together they form the Gullwings and travel around Spira, looking for these spheres. And it all seems like good fun until trouble starts brewing between Spira's new "factions", the Youth League and New Yevon. These two factions start conflicting with each other over who is going to fill the power vacuum left by old Yevon, who pretty much lost all their credibility with the defeat of Sin in the original Final Fantasy X.
As you can see from my description, there are some interesting things going on in the story. The sphere of the man that looks like Tidus creates some intriguing mystery and the warring factions creates an interesting political struggle. There is also an interesting love story that you definitely won't expect. The problem is that the most interesting elements of the story are not nearly fleshed out enough. You keep expecting for the Youth League and New Yevon plotline to deepen and it never really does. Instead, the game spends a lot of time with cheesy and campy stuff that makes one long for the serious tone of Final Fantasy X. Not all of the lightheartedness is bad: some of the scenes in this game are genuinely funny. But a lot of the cheese that the game throws at you is just too much to take. The pop concerts are absolutely cringeworthy; I couldn't wait for them to be over. Likewise, rival sphere hunters, the Lyblanc Syndicate, are probably the lamest villains in Final Fantasy history.
Part of the problem with the game's story is the fact that the structure is "non-linear." Instead of traveling through Spira by foot, you immediately have an airship, so you can go anywhere you want. The game is broken into missions that you can take on in your desired order. Some missions are required and they are marked with "hot spots." You can, and should, avoid the hot spots until you've taken on all the chapter's sidequests. Not only do these sidequests provide you with much needed experience points, but they also give you good items and additional scenes. The additional scenes don't really add too much to the story, but both the side missions and the story missions are pretty well-paced and enjoyable. The game often has you doing fairly interesting things (there is quite a bit of variety in this game) and the missions never overstay their welcome. The problem is that the mission-based gameplay means that the story frequently feels like it is going nowhere and the game never has a strong sense of journey. Picking locations from a menu can feel extremely mechanical, especially compared to the seamless quest of the first game. Not to mention that the supposed non-linearity of the game makes it so the developers have to water down the story to make the "pick your path" gimmick work. When playing this game, you'll start to understand why Final Fantasy X was so linear.
That all being said, the story is not "bad" by any means. It's just not that good either. It is so-so. It works fine as a set up for Yuna's adventures and it is actually quite enjoyable to catch up with what the inhabitants of Spira are doing in the aftermath of Sin, but as a standalone story, it is not going to impress anybody but the most zealous Final Fantasy fans. There is also way too much spotty dialogue, even if Yuna has become a much more colorful character since defeating Sin and Rikku is as endearing as ever. I would recommend only playing this game after you have completed the original Final Fantasy X.
Luckily, the gameplay fares about a thousand times better than the story. Unlike Final Fantasy X, X-2 uses Active Time Battle, which is a system in which you can only attack after the ATB meter has filled up. But this Active Time Battle system is taken to the next level. The meter fills up extremely fast, both for you and the enemies, so the battles seem positively rapid in comparison to past Final Fantasy games, and just that much more exciting. The game is quite easy (with the exception of a few questionable difficulty spikes in some of the side missions), so you won't have to worry about being overwhelmed by the game's speed, which keeps things fast and frantic without being frustrating. Furthermore, since you only have three party members, the game has a jobs system that takes the form of "dresspheres". By changing into different outfits, each of your three party members can change their combat roles. The main roles are gunner (a combat role focused on gunplay), warrior (a combat role focused on swordplay), white mage (a support role focused on healing and buffing), songstress (a support role focused on buffing and debuffing), black mage (a combat role focused on casting offensive magic), and theif (a combat role focused on quick offense and stealing). However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many dresspheres you can find throughout the game's campaign, some of which can only be obtained by taking on sidequests. If you've placed the dresspheres onto a garment grid, you can switch to any role at any time in combat, which is immensely fun and rewarding and makes the all ready interesting battle system much more dynamic. The only real complaint I have about the gameplay is this awkward jump function that the developers have introduced into the environmental traversal sections. It is ridiculously touchy and the game makes jumping from one platform to the next a real pain in the ass. If the developers were not willing to get the jump function right, why include it at all?
Final Fantasy X-2 also handles customization in a very smart and rewarding way. Each dressphere has a fairly long list of skills that can be learned. You learn these skills by acquiring AP, which is obtained by using the dressphere that you wish to learn new abilities for. With this system, you can pretty much build your party how you want to. The game will not penalize you for building up certain characters in certain roles, but ignoring other roles. You'll want to have two characters built up as a warriors and atleast one character built up as a white mage, but aside from that, you can build your party the way you want to and not have to worry about screwing yourself over. In spite of the myriad of ways in which the game fails to match Final Fantasy X's greatness, I think this game handles customization somewhat better. Sometimes I wished that the game required that you use all your dressspheres (you can pretty much breeze through the story with two warriors and a white mage), but you can use all of them if you wish, so it's not really too much of a drawback that most battles can be won with one set up.
Visually the game doesn't quite have that new car smell that Final Fantasy X did and the graphics do seem to be a little less polished than the original game, but Final Fantasy X-2 is still beautiful to look at. Some of the new character designs are questionable and they still haven't fixed the issue of character models switching ungracefully between their low and high resolution forms, but Spira looks as good as ever and there is a satisfying number of new areas to explore, even if most of the locations are very similar to their FFX incarnations with a few new twists in some of them (unfortunately, they've also taken away some of the areas from FFX). Even through the course of two games, I am still amazed by how gorgeous the game's environmental art design is. There is a ton of visual texture and attention to detail and places like the mysterious but menacing Thunder Plains and the anciently beautiful Zanarkand Ruins (among many others) remain some of the most stunning you'll ever see in an RPG. Unfortunately, the immersion factor is not quite as high when the words "mission time" or "mission completed" are popping up all the time. Because of this, Final Fantasy X-2 feels much more "gamey" than the original game, which might appeal to some people, but for me, it didn't click nearly as well as Final Fantasy X's much more serious tone and atmosphere.
The music in Final Fantasy X-2 is shockingly downgraded from the original, which I thought had the best video game soundtrack bar none. Many of the songs are pleasant enough, but the lack of the original environment themes lessens the atmosphere of their respective locations (they have been replaced in favor of much weaker themes) and there are only a few standout tracks in the game, including the absolutely gorgeous main theme, which is one of the best compositions in the history of the series. It is a shame that the rest of the soundtrack doesn't live up to the promise of the main theme.
Final Fantasy games have always been extremely good about giving the player tons of side content to indulge in and this game probably has the most side content of any Final Fantasy title. Granted, that side content is much more important to this game as running through the main story with no sidequesting makes for an extremely short game, but that doesn't change the fact that X-2 has a satisfying abundance of things to do. You can always keep yourself busy in this game during those times when you want to ignore the main quest, and with the airship being available from the beginning of the game, you won't have to wait to start uncovering Spira's new secrets. Even some of the mini-games are pretty fun. One of the standouts is the Gunner's Gaunlet, which is a shooting mini-game that has both a first person and third person form. That being said, the developers have totally ruined Blitzball, but since Blitzball wasn't that popular in the first place, most players probably won't care.
Final Fantasy X-2 is a game that could have been much better. It could have had a much more substantial story, it could have been structured better, it should have had much better music, etc. But if you play the game for what it is rather than what it should have been, you will probably have a lot more fun with Yuna, Rikku and Paine than you'd expect.
GAMEPLAY: 5/5
DESIGN: 3.5/5
STORY: 3/5
VISUALS: 4.5/5
PLAYABILITY: 4.5/5
VALUE: 4.5/5