The story and music are great. The art looks great, and I think it's aged pretty well.
However, the actual game parts, the combat elemenets, cloisters, and other minigames, only come out to "passable at best".
While the combat mechanics are interesting on their own, the actual performing of the fights isn't so fun. You're either having to fight too many small encounters to get all your sphere levels built up, or you're fighting a boss with twice (or more) as many HP as it should have to avoid being tedious. And all the high-damage spells that you'd use on a boss have animations that are neat the first few times but that kinda just take too long after that. And to top it all off you have to switch around the party every fight to make everyone gain EXP evenly.
The sphere grid sounds interesting when first presented, "ooh, so many possibilities to level up!", but the actual amount of player choice it adds to the game, compared to the amount of busy work it makes the player do, is just abysmal.
Ever since FF7, the Final Fantasy series has mostly consisted of cool stories with great music trapped inside of bad-playing video games. FFX is a proud member of this tradition.
However, the actual game parts, the combat elemenets, cloisters, and other minigames, only come out to "passable at best".
While the combat mechanics are interesting on their own, the actual performing of the fights isn't so fun. You're either having to fight too many small encounters to get all your sphere levels built up, or you're fighting a boss with twice (or more) as many HP as it should have to avoid being tedious. And all the high-damage spells that you'd use on a boss have animations that are neat the first few times but that kinda just take too long after that. And to top it all off you have to switch around the party every fight to make everyone gain EXP evenly.
The sphere grid sounds interesting when first presented, "ooh, so many possibilities to level up!", but the actual amount of player choice it adds to the game, compared to the amount of busy work it makes the player do, is just abysmal.
Ever since FF7, the Final Fantasy series has mostly consisted of cool stories with great music trapped inside of bad-playing video games. FFX is a proud member of this tradition.