Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission Review

As part of the "international" release of Final Fantasy X-2, Square decided to conclude an epilogue to the Final Fantasy X world of Spira. This epilogue would be done in a completely new game, done in the style of what we like to call "rogue-like" games. A randomized dungeon that you must progress through using only what you find inside. Does this game bring closure to the saga? Is it a game that you as Final Fantasy fans should be excited about, and pick up the HD Remastered version to play? Let's take a closer look.

First, as always, let's look at the story. The game takes place 3 months after the conclusion of X-2. The world is at peace, or at least trying to get there. No earth-shattering evil or danger is present. Yuna has returned to Besaid and has been spending time with the resurrected Tidus. Rikku has been keeping herself busy with all sorts of odd jobs. Paine... well we find out eventually is writing a book about the adventures that happened during X-2, and in doing so started to reminisce... so she wrote letters to Rikku and Yuna to convene for a new adventure at Iucytyr Tower. The significance of this tower is never really stated.

So, we climb the tower, and the girls realize that really they are different people, and they start to fight. Maybe they were never really close to begin with, and were only able to stick together because of the circumstances. Who knows, really. They climb to the top, and find a broken machina, which fixes itself once the girls renew their friendship... yay...

Yeah, not much of a story. Really, it starts out pretty well as you learn what everyone has been up to in the last few months... however, once that is over, the story kind of stalls out, and becomes incredibly uninteresting... almost a little reality showesque.

On to the mechanics. I stated before that this is a rogue-like game. What this means is you crawl through a dungeon, 80 floors in all, each one randomly generated with spawning monsters and randomly placed treasure. You must accumulate treasure with VERY limited inventory space and you can only use this to make your way to the top. This is also a turn based game, each time you move or attack, the enemies on the floor will then get their turn. You can use this information to create the best possible strategy to keep you from getting too hurt or dealing the most damage possible before you get hit.

What's unique in this game is the class system. All the dresspheres from X-2 appear in this game but work differently. You collect dresspheres, and you can combine ones of the same type to make a stronger version of that dressphere. You can equip up to five dresspheres, each one giving its own stat boosts, and conveying certain abilities onto you. Certain combinations of dresspheres also give you "auto-abilities" or passive abilities, whcih if you have them equipped for long enough you can create accessory versions of. You can equip up to two accessories. You should also know that equipped dresspheres and accessories still take up room in your inventory which is limited to 16 spaces.

So, basically, the game is one of inventory management. You can only hold so many items, and you need to reserve 7 of them for the current dresspheres you have equipped and the accessories you have equipped. You may want to carry some healing items or pick up more dresspheres you'll want to fuse later, it really becomes a game of choices.

Now, each dressphere you have equipped has its own life bar, and if it goes to 0, it is destroyed. In addition, whichever girl you choose to play as, has her own life bar, and if all life bars go to 0, it is game over... well sort of. You get kicked out of the tower, your levels reset, and you can only access what you have placed in your vault via a certain book you can find. This personal HP is also a resource used by some skills... which may or may not... okay they are... quite overpowered.

Every 5 levels, you are prevented from advancing until you perform certain actions, which including reading a certain number of books, killing a certain number of enemies, dropping a certain number of items, throwing a certain number of items, passing turns, attacking air... etc. This is fine and all, though it is extremely annoying if you are trying to play the game blind, as there are no indications of what you are supposed to do. Seriously, I can't find clues anywhere. Also, seriously, when you start off, read the tutorial and make sure you have all the commands down... the passing turn thing is so obscure, and there's very little visual indication if you're doing it right...

All in all, this makes for a fun game. It is simple enough, and goes on just long enough... or maybe just longer than it needs to... to keep it from getting too repetitive. You get cutscenes every ten floors which makes for a good carrot to chase. I will say though, that the balancing is really not great. There are some abilities and combinations of spheres which are just amazingly overpowered. Once you find something that works, you can just grind up your power and will have absolutely no trouble getting through it or fear for death at all. Seriously, even in my initial run, before I used a restart guide to start over with all my items, levels, and dresses... it was just taking longer to kill anything... I was never really in any danger.

The graphics... are not fantastic. I mean they're not bad for what's really obviously a quick, thrown together side game. All the monsters are in a nice 3D model, the cutscenes use the same engine as X-2, and I will say the backgrounds for the little areas the cutscenes take place in are real nice. Obviously, there's not a lot of selection in the music, but it makes for fine background music, I never really got too sick of hearing it. Its not anything special, in conclusion... but it is not supposed to be.

So, in conclusion, I would not fault anybody for skipping this game. Sure, play it, if you want to be a completionist, or get all the trophies, or you really like rogue-like games. There are probably better rogue-like games out there... there are certainly better Final Fantasy games out there... but I guess if you are bored, there are worse things you can do then just plug away at a few floors. I wish the mechanics didn't have to be so restrictive, and there's probably enough variety in the spheres to give some replay value, but the story is not worth anything. This is a kind of unnecessary epilogue to a game that didn't need one.

Day #589 Recap (Final Fantasy XI)

Current Game(s): Final Fantasy XI

Current Play Time(Final Fantasy XI): 211:13
Total Play Time - 1,421:43

Current Deaths(FF XI) - 51
Total Game Overs: 72

Where I Currently Am(FF XI): Windurst Mission 9-2! (Current Levels RDM 91/DNC 45(50)... BLM 50... THF 30)

Stuff Did Today (FF XI): Headed down to Crawler's Nest... why? Well, though I'm up at Level 91... I haven't done any skillups since the Maat fight... whoops. So, that needs to be done. I headed down to the big room in the lower level to take on some King Crawlers and Vespos... why? Well, might as well still gain some exp while I'm skilling up... yeah, these fights take a while... but still its kind of nice to have a change of pace for a bit.

Status & Notes: 

Wow, these are going to be so much shorter for a while. Not a bad thing, it gets tiring typing all these up. So, where I'm currently at in FF XI is still needing to work up to level cap, and probably taking a break somewhere around 95 to go take care of the last Windurst Mission. As I talked about above, the problem is since I've been levelling up on low level enemies, I haven't been getting any skillups. So, that needs to be done, as I'm really woefully weak right now and its going to be very important that I cap out all my relevant skills at some point.

So, today I'm planning on probably starting work on my Last Mission review, hopefully will have it done this week. Also, continuing skilling up... I'll probably hit Level 92 today as well.  Who knows, maybe by the time I'm done skilling up, I'll be strong enough to be alot more efficient down here.

Your daily race update... Both players finished up FFIV:TAY... including Lost Babil... not bad. Crumps has just booted up FF V, and I'm sure in the next couple hours once Cereth wakes up he'll be making a start on it as well... all being said, I'd be very surprised if this race was done by New Years...

Day #588 Recap (Final Fantasy XI)

Current Game(s): Final Fantasy XI

Final Play Time(Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission): 17:46
Current Play Time(Final Fantasy XI): 211:13
Total Play Time - 1,421:43

Current Deaths(FF XI) - 51
Final Deaths(Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission): 0
Total Game Overs: 72

Where I Currently Am(FF XI): Windurst Mission 9-2! (Current Levels RDM 91/DNC 45(50)... BLM 50... THF 30)

Stuff Did Today (FF X-2 Last Mission): So, continued hiking up the tower all the way up to Floor 79... where there was no elevator... huh? Well, we let the Founder come and kick us out... but wait! He does not kick us out, instead he boots us down to Floor 77?!?!? Okay... well, while contemplating this turn of events he shows up again on Floor 77 and this time boots us UPSTAIRS to Floor 80!

On Floor 80 we prepared for the almighty Major Numerus... a 4 headed hydra thing, that we killed in the Creature Creator in X-2... so anyway, this version is a heck of a lot simpler. At my almighty end levels... Yuna 98/GNM 98/DRK 99/GUN 24/LDL 19/WHM 19 and my magic rating of 215... he stood no chance. After 4 Black skies, he busted on through a wall and ran up some stairs... another 4 black skies... busted through another wall... after 4 more... yeah, it was all over.

So, we made it to the very top of the tower with some broken ancient device... sigh... and a great view of Spira and some falling stars... and a giant mobile???? Well, yes, apparently they'll all be connected forever, yet different... yes, I got that over the last 40 floors or so...

Stuff Did Today (FF XI): Finished up a little levelling... up to 91, then headed back to down to do some inventory management and buy some new spells, including Refresh II!!! Yay 6MP/tick!

Status & Notes: 

So, okay, done with X-2 Last Mission... and while I'll write a full review soon, would just like to talk a little about it here. First of all, I really wish there was some more story to tell in the game. It's like after Floor 40, they just ran out of story and created some conflict between the girls. It was a little disappointing from an epilogue point of view.

From a gameplay point of view, really its pretty good. The secret room stuff is pretty game breaking really, but honestly, there's only so much you can take of using a roomwide attack that kills everything before it gets kind of boring... Also, I don't understand how you're supposed to figure out how to break the barriers if you don't have some kind of guide. Yeah, I kind of stumbled upon the solutions to the first 6 or 7... but like once you get to the ones where you have to pass turns... I mean, I doubt I'd have EVER figured that one out without looking it up.

Which brings me to the equally cryptic end of the game... seriously, you've spent the whole game avoiding the founder... and then you HAVE to let him get to you twice in a row...  I don't know how necessary this really was.  All in all kind of interesting, a game based on around inventory management... by no means was this a great game... but eh, was worth something I guess....

Now, time to start focusing on XI.

For those interested int he race... they're both on the last area of The After Years... Cereth is currently on the last stretch as we speak... just got Bahamut back.... I think Crumps is closer to the top of the ruins. But, really, in trying to speedrun this, they've just made things difficult for themselves... Cereth is honestly playing this rather blind... and it shows.... neither runner did any work in the challenge dungeons... and are woefully low-levelled... all kind of funny really.

Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission Complete

So, you may have noticed I'm not doing completion stats anymore... but that said, I still would like to mark when I complete the games... rest assured, in tomorrow's update I'lll have the completion time (17:46) and a review of the very strange end of the game... so now its time to focuis a bit on XI, before beginning our Ivalice story in XII...

Final Fantasy X-2 Creature Creator Review

When Square Enix rereleased Final Fantasy X-2, they decided they needed to beef it up a bit. Maybe they realized what I did, that they had a really good combat system, except the difficulty was a little lacking. Maybe they just wanted to add something new... or maybe they just wanted you to be able to fight as a chocobo or tonberry... well whatever the reason, they added the Creature Creator which works in conjunction with the main game. This addition substantially changes the gameplay, but is it for the better, or the worse, and does it maybe make this into a game that should be played by the Final Fantasy masses.

As far as story goes... well, there's not much. Shinra has created a system in which he can trap certain fiends and store them. You can then train them and fight with them. As you train them you learn more about their stories, and if you raise them enough you can get cutscenes showing what happens to the fiends after you release them back into the wilds of Spira. Since there's REALLY not much of a plot, and really, its not the biggest spoiler ever... I'm going to spoil the ending of the plot here, since it will be important later on in the review. It is revealed at the end of the game, that Shinra created this system because his mother was killed and believes she is a fiend, and thus would like to find her.

On to the game mechanics. You first must catch fiends. You do this by placing traps in different areas in a way that is very similar to using the airship. There are four different types of traps. Small, Medium, Large, and Species. The size of the trap corresponds to the size of the monster you'll catch, and species lets you try for a specific type of monster. The list of possible monsters you can catch depends on a few things. Mostly, it is based on the Chapter you are in, but finishing certain monster's stories or certain game events can also lock or unlock certain monsters.

Once you catch a monster, it is time to train it up. You can either keep it for your battle team or train it up and release it to see its story. If you want to see its story you must have it gain 4 story levels. A monster can gain a story level by either having it gain an experience level or through having it win a tournament or when you finish certain events in the main game. You can fight with your monsters in a few different ways. You can have it join your team in the main game by replacing Yuna, Rikku, or Paine. You can have it enter a tournament or you can enter the Battle Simulator.

I'd like to talk a little more about having your monster join your main team. In fact, in any of the above mentioned modes, you can actually use any battle party, including Yuna, Rikku, and Paine. So, literally its like adding party members. Monsters you catch fight differently, though, and I'll get into that shortly. When you place a monster into your fighting party, its size is very relevant. A small monster is the same size as one of your main members and takes up 1 slot in your party. A medium monster will take up 2 slots in your party, and so can only have a small monster or one of the girls along with it. A large monster fights alone as it takes up all 3 slots in your party.

The main difference in fighting with a monster instead of one of the girls is you don't have direct control over it. Each monster has an AI, that actually changes depending on how much you use it. A monster can learn different abilities, and chooses one to learn on each of its turns. As with any memberof your party, it can be equipped with a Garment Grid, Dressphere, and two accessories. These can sometimes have different effects on monsters than with your main members usually giving them additional abilities. In addition to any abilities learned from equipped items, a monster can learn 4 active abilities and 4 passive abilities. They can learn these either from having certain abilities used ON them, or by feeding items to them. Feeding items to them can ALSO give monsters PERMANENT stat boosts. So yes, you can train your monsters to really be infinitely stronger than Yuna, Rikku, and Paine.

Now, I said before you can't control what you're monsters do in battle. This is not entirely true. When fighting with caught monsters, you get a bar at the top of your screens that contains 5 stars. The more stars you have in this bar, the more damage your monsters will deal, the more they will take and the more likely they will use offensive abilities. Conversely, the less stars in the bar, the less damage they will deal, the less damage they will take and the more likely they will use support abilities.

Now, there may not be a plot to the creature creaotor, but there certainly is a progression to the game. This is mostly found in progressing through the tournaments of the game. There are a total of 10 tournaments in the game. Each tournament has you progressing through a single elimination bracket against different named preset teams. Winning a tournament gets you new traps to use to catch monsters, as well as one of a list of preset items, generally accessories that can be used to improve your monsters. The challenge in these rises very very quickly. You unlock new tournaments by either winning the previous tournament a set number of times or through catching and seeing the stories of certain monsters.

To train your monsters, you are going to be spending most of the time in the Battle Simulator. This is a room where you can fight against any of the preset teams that you have faced previously in a tournament. You can fight them over and over again without limit. This makes it incredibly easy to gain levels or to fight certain monsters if you want to steal something from it or get a certain drop or anything like that. It makes farming incredibly easy and really makes alot of these functions in the main game kind of useless since it is SO much easier to farm them here. Not EVERY monster is available in some capacity in the Battle Simulator, but most are.

Since a large portion of this game can be played while you are still in Chapter 1 of the main game, you can also unlock certain items that are VERY powerful for the early part of the game, and really remove any challenge from it if you are willing to work on levelling and improving your monsters to the point that they can win some of the middle difficulty tournaments. While this is not easy, you really can trivialize the main game very early on by putting some effort in here.

Now, while you can trivialize the main game, in no way can you trivialize the progression through the Creature Creator. The end game here is VERY difficult. Let's go over the different levels of difficulty you find here. You begin by going through the Standard tournament which you can farm easily with very little training. Beat this a few times and you unlock Standard Cup: Hard. This is a small step up, but again, just by training some experience levels, you should be okay. Grand cup is next, and here, already you are going to start fighting some monsters which are not found until Chapter 5 of the main game. Here, you are already going to need to learn how to balance your party properly and start optimizing your damage output. You're really still just focused on offense, however.

The first real brick wall of the game comes in the fourth tournament, Grand Cup: Hard. Here, you will eventually unlock Tonberry the Ripper, a Mega Tonberry. He will basically one-shor any of  your characters until they have really high defense, a lot of hp, and probably auto-protect. It is now you really have to start training your monsters pretty high, and even then its a crap shoot if you're going to kill him. You get through this fight, and you really earn your way into the next phase of the game.

The next tournament, and the final one you can get to in Chapter 1 of the main game is the Youth League Cup. You can win some incredibly awesome items here, but to do it, you'll have to get through some really really hard fights. All the enemies here have a LOT of HP, so your offensive stats have to be insane. The hardest fight here at the start is Nooj. He has an attack called Lightfall which will hit everyone for a flat 5000 HP. Now, you probably have a lot of HP if you got through Tonberry the Ripper, but it is FINALLY here, that you need to learn how to properly control your monsters to be able to heal properly.

Once you beat the Youth League Cup a few times, a new team will appear. Ex-Crimson Squad. This fight pits you against Baralai, Nooj, and Gippal all at once. This fight will make you want to tear you hair out. The increased damage output, and pure length of this fight makes it insane. You will have to endure multiple lightfalls, possibly loss of MP, and just a ton of other damage.

As you get further into the game you can recruit different monsters. The next two tournaments require you use specific monsters to participate. These are the chocobo cup and the cactuar cup. Honestly, these are MUCH easier than the Youth League Cup and I guess just a different place for you to fight as you progress through the main game, not much to say here.

As you catch and release certain monsters as you go through the game, you'll find some monsters that don't have tales. In fact they'll tell you that they possess a fragment of a fayth. When you release them you gain the ability to fight Dark Aeons in the Battle Simulator. Now, these are the Dark Aeons you fight in the main story of X-2. Not the Dark Aeons from FF X... unfortunately... but still. If you find all of them and release all of the Fayth Fragments you unlock the Aeon Cup. Again, and disappointingly... still not as hard as the Youth League Cup.

The next cup, the Fiend Cup is unlocked by going through a long string of monsters that you have to catch and release, which then unlocks the next monster, which you have to catch and release a total of 8 times. At the end of the fiend cup, you either can choose to receive Omega Weapon or Ultima Weapon to train. If you choose Omega Weapon and release him, you find out he was the king of the fiend world and by releasing him the Fiend world will become unstable. Shinra then merges with the spirit of Omega weapon to become Almighty Shinra, whom you then must defeat. This is decently hard... probably could be harder though.

When you have beaten all the tournaments once, the last tournament unlocks. The Farplane cup. Here you fight a lot of special enemies. Also, this contains some of the hardest fights in the entire game. These include Concherer and Trema, a copy from Via Infinito. Paragon, who is a harder version of the one in Via Infinito, and the last enemy... Major Numerus. This is truly an EPIC end boss, who has all the difficulty you could ever want and is nearly IMPOSSIBLE if you use Yuna, Rikku, and Paine. Beating him gives you some of the most insane accessories ever as well as giving you ULTIMATE bragging rights.

Now, the game tracks all the monsters you catch and release, and if you manage to find all of them... including ones that can only be obtained in a new game +, you will find the last entry in the bestiary automatically filled by Shinra. If you select him you can view a special ending including the spoilers I mentioned above. This is very useful since it gives you the ability to make a new start point for New Game + at any point in the game. Now, what REALLY REALLY stinks about this, is once you get it you can NEVER see the bonus Zanarkand scene for getting 100% in the main story again. Somehow it was decided, that the Shinra bonus scene is a "better" bonus scene than the Zanarkand scene. This REALLY bothers me...

That said, this addition to X-2 is completely awesome. It gives you all the challenge you could ever want. It is really fun training the monsters you catch and figuring out all the strategies you need to. Getting through the brick wall fights in the game makes you feel incredibly accomplished, and even once you get really good with your abilities and everything, there is always Major Numerus if you want a challenge. I probably spent as much time in here as I did in the main game itself in my playthrough. I highly recommend going through this entire part of the game... though maybe leave a few monsters uncaught so you can properly see the Zanarkand ending.

Day #577 Recap (X-2 Last Mission)

Current Game(s): Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission, Final Fantasy XI

Current Play Time(Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission): ~15:00
Current Play Time(Final Fantasy XI): 211:13
Total Play Time - 1,418:57

Current Deaths(FF XI) - 51
Current Deaths(Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission): 0
Total Game Overs: 72

Where I Currently Am(FF X-2 Last Mission): Floor 71 (Yuna Lv 94/ DRK 99/GNM 38/GUN 24/LDL 17/WHM 17)

Where I Currently Am(FF XI): Windurst Mission 9-2! (Current Levels RDM 90/DNC 45(50)... BLM 50... THF 30)

Stuff Did Today (FF X-2 Last Mission): On Floor 44, I waited and bided by time... and eventually the Founder showed up... he wanted to change me into a Leblanc Goon and kick me out of the tower, I had other ideas. I put on a Thief dressphere and stole the almighty Triple Tiara from him!!! Now I can do 3 regular attacks in one turn...  woohoo!!!

I then made it all the way up to Floor 61... and it was time to finally return to the Mega Tonberry room. I once again got Copy Techniques and brought my Dark Knight dressphere up to Level 99. My Magic was now over 9000!!!! err 190... but still. This time the Mega Tonberries went down in 2 Black skies if I got them by themselves... so... easy peasy... and this time the game gave me the trophy... woohoo!

Continued on til I passed Floor 70... and we get another cutscene. This time Rikku is depressed. Yuna knows exactly why. The more time they spend together, the further they seem to be moving apart, and Rikku doesn't like that, or the fighting that is coming with it... Rikku is SHOCKED that Yuna could read her so well... even though that's basically what the last 2 cutscenes have been about... sigh... Paine stipulates that maybe they really didn't know each other that well to begin with... they made it through before because they had to be for the good of Spira... sure... why not.

Stuff Did Today (FF XI): None

Status & Notes: 

Okay... on the last stretch of X-2 Last Mission now... literally just 10 levels to go. Sort of... the ending is a little weird, and I'll most likely get into that tomorrow... but yes, I'll eventually just make it to Level 80, and I'll take down the last boss... which REALLY shouldn't be that difficult... especially since I can double my GNM level before the last fight and get another... oh 20 or so Magic to put into Black Sky... I know the last boss has like 4000 HP... each time you fight him... so it might take like 4 Black skies... ya know if he has comparable defense to the Mega Tonberries... I'm really not that concerned.

Another thing I'd like to do today is get tot he Creature Creator review... haven't had time to get to that yet, but I'm kind of looking forward to writing it.

My obligatory daily race update... as of this moment... Crumps is just starting the last tale of The After Years... last night Cereth was also on the last tale... just not sure if he finished it or not.

Day #576 Recap (X-2 Last Mission)

Current Game(s): Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission, Final Fantasy XI

Current Play Time(Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission): ~11:00
Current Play Time(Final Fantasy XI): ~183:00 (+)
Total Play Time - 1,386:44 (+)

Current Deaths(FF XI) - 51
Current Deaths(Final Fantasy X-2 Last Mission): 0
Total Game Overs: 72

Where I Currently Am(FF X-2 Last Mission): Floor 41 (Yuna Lv 70/ DRK 48/GUN 22/LDL 15/WHM 9/GNM 6)

Where I Currently Am(FF XI): Windurst Mission 9-2! (Current Levels RDM 90/DNC 45(50)... BLM 50... THF 30)

Stuff Did Today (FF X-2 Last Mission): None

Stuff Did Today (FF XI): None

Status & Notes: 

Yeah... that was 7 hours of Christmas Shopping... interesting stats from the day... 18500 steps taken... 10 miles walked... 3 malls visited... 1 slice of Cheesecake eaten... lots of coupons used...

Heh, we'll get back into some X-2 Last Mission and XI today.

For those interested, the FF race is still on. Cereth is going on Edward's tale in the After Years as I type this... Crumps seems to also be on The After Years, I saw him on Edge's tale earlier today. though, to be honest, I have NO idea how many tales they've all actually finished.