Episode 105 - Final Fantasy X - Arms Are Sweaty

I know it’s selfish, but this is my podcast! Welcome back! Twenty years after the game’s release and five years of doing this podcast, we are finally going to talk about our first Final Fantasy game. Ten specifically is a game that we have a history with and which has been specifically requested, so we carved out the time to talk about it. FFX is the first Final Fantasy game to be released on the PS2, and made use of the new hardware to create a game that was of an extremely high fidelity for the time, spawning an association between the franchise and high quality visual presentation. Crisp 2001-era graphics aren’t the only innovation though, and FFX also introduced us to the Sphere Grid, an intimidating-looking change to the way leveling was handled that didn’t really get revisited afterward, but is extremely interesting nonetheless. All this set against the typically high-stakes story about saving the world from an ancient evil, now with fully voiced characters portrayed by a professional cast. We’re going to be talking about how the game feels scaled-down from previous games in the series and how this linearity affects everything from mechanics to the plot to the end game content, how complicated the sphere grid really is, and which character is actually an animatronic shark behind the scenes. Thank you for joining us this week! Doing JRPGs like this always takes us a bit, since they tend to be on the longer side, and that’s probably reflected in the length of this episode. So, I apologize if you prefer us to be a little snappier, but we wanted to give the game its due. Still, it feels like there’s so much involved with this game’s legacy, do you think there’s anything we left out? Were we too hard on Kimahri? Let us know in the comments or on our Discord server! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Supergiant’s Hades, so that I have a reason to stop playing it and do something else with my time, so I hope you’ll join us then.