How do you make Final Fantasy X any better? It has a wonderful plot, awesome characters, amazing graphics, so what could make this game better? Make a sequel to it that completely disgraces the Final Fantasy name. Only by showing what complete crap a game can be can one truly appreciate the greatness of the original game.
     The entire premise seems like a lonely teenage boy's best animated dream. In fact, I think a teenager who as been bludgeoned several times in the head with a baseball bat must have written this game's plot and dialogue. It's Charlie's Angels meets Hamtaro or Pokemon or some other cutsie dumb anime. Enough of the putdowns though. If you haven't played this game yet (lucky bastards) then I'll tell you what you're missing.
     First off there's the story. Now, if you've played the game, then you're probably saying: “Wait, there was a story?' In response, I assure you that no, there was not a story. The game has a faint plot that it follows, but the whole game is basically a side quest (as if FFX didn't have enough). You have the option to do several side quests, but if you choose not to, the game is very short because the main plot is very simple. Yuna joins up with a bunch of Al Behds including Rikku, Brother (the driver of the airship in FFX), Shinra (no, not like the electric company in FF7, this Shinra is a small, self-proclaimed genius with a speech impediment), Buddy (the first black Al Behd), and Paine (the new chick). They're a group known as the Gullwings that find spheres. Basically, these spheres are like the ones Auron, Jecht, and Braska used to film themselves before, and somehow these are powerful. Then Yuna gets involved in a conflict with Shuyen and Lenne; two people from Zanarkand 1000 years ago. These two people supposedly look like Tidus and Yuna, so there's this big boring love story conflict thing that fits into the story to muck things up and make the overall plot worse.
     Taking a break from the bad things in the story, it's time to discuss characters. Once the game has finished destroying all the old characters by turning Yuna and Rikku into valley girls and old cameos such as Issaru into retarded tour-giving morons, there is a small list of new characters, some of which are really really good characters. There are some more disgraceful characters such as LeBlanc and her henchmen that are just as bad as all the other over-the-top characters that try to be funny but just come off as annoying (i.e. Yuna, Rikku, and Brother). However, there are four characters that try as hard as they can to save the quality of this game. These characters are Paine, Gippal, Nooj, and Baralai. Awesomely enough, all four of these characters have a past together. First off is Paine. Somehow she got stuck with the Gullwings and seems to hate every minute of it. Several times when Yuna and Rikku start getting very very annoying, Paine makes some snide comment about it. Sure there are times that Paine joins in the stupid antics of Yuna and Rikku, but she is never quite as peppy as they are and she never really loses her coolness. As for Gippal, Nooj, and Baralai, they're all on separate sides of a dispute in Spira picking sides with the Youth League (led by Nooj) and New Yevon (led by Baralai). Gippal is with the Al Behd that don't really have a stance in the fight between the Youth League and New Yevon.
     Now onto the villains. Y-yeah. The villains. There had to be some villains somewhere. Umm. I guess the only villain is Shuyen, and he doesn't even really exist. At one point you fight Shuyen, which leads me to the cheapness of this game.
     Because this is a sequel to a game that had some rockin' graphics, there was very little need to change anything. Almost all of the settings are the same as in FFX with the exception of the rebuilt Killika, and the skins of all the old characters (except for Yuna and Rikku) are the same, so very little was needed to create this game. Even the fight with Shuyen is horrible because the only things he does are Tidus's overdrives but with different names (i.e. Spiral Cut became Spin Cut! Ooh! It's new!). Also, while some facial expressions that were added are neat such as Rikku's constant smiling, there were others that ruin the graphics of the game such as anime squinty-happy eyes. The character that does this the most is Shelinda (the annoying girl in green from FFX). Thankfully she isn't in the game too much. As for blitzball, I thought that it was fun in FFX, but it had some flaws. Did FFX-2 fix these flaws? Hell no! They made the game even worse by adding in positions, speeding up the game, and letting your poor brain try to keep up with all of this. I normally wouldn't be too opposed to this because I felt the major problem with blitzball in FFX was the turn-based slowness, but the real problem with new blitzball is that unless you change your view point, you control arrows on a grid! Not people, but arrows! It's like playing a fuggin' Atari game again!
     So how about the music now. FFX had that badass song “Otherworld' and tons of other rockin' tracks, so FFX-2 has to have good music, right? Ha! No. The music sounds like a crappy SNES game's soundtrack. Like, you know those games you accidentally bought/downloaded because they sounded cool, but when you turn them on you see a title screen with a very pink background and this fruity music is playing in the back? That kind of music. It's bad.
     Even though I'm sure any fans/potential players of FFX-2 have already stopped reading, there is one cool thing about the game: the battle system. Much like blitzball, the battle system got extremely fast compared to the very slow system of FFX, but this change I feel is for the best. This game has one of the best, most realistic turn-based systems ever. Each character still has charge bars, but when it's a character's turn to attack, she does. Right then. No waiting. It's really fun because you don't wait for another turn to end before attacking. If Rikku and Paine are both set to attack, they'll run at the monster side-by-side and beat the hell out of him. Spells still have a slight delay, but it's still moderately quick. In addition, the characters don't always return to one side of the screen for the battle. If Paine runs up and hits a monster, then another monster hits her, she won't go back to where she was. She'll stay right in the middle of the circle of enemies. This can be very fun because your characters can sometimes surround enemies and get back attacks that do more damage.
     The ability system is a job system much like FF3 (NES), FF5 and FF Tactics, but unlike these games, FFX-2 had to out-gay them by including classes that make you want to rip your hair out. There are still the good standard classes like white and black mages, warrior, samurai, and thief, but they also included several horrible classes such as mascot. As a whole, the job system in this is not too great, but aside from the classes that make you vomit, it's a decent job class system, especially since you can change your class by simply changing your dress-sphere (job) to something else on the garment grid (grids containing slots to insert dress-spheres at your choosing and different added attributes) that you're wearing. Confused? Good. It's a decent job system, but I still prefer FF Tactics overall, and FF5's Bare class.
     To sum up everything, it seems like a cheesy, cutsie game intended for ten-year-old girls, but because of the active battle system and girls wearing very skimpy clothes, I think it is meant for boys. Maybe it is just trying to pull in all audiences, but instead it scares away all audiences. Deep down this game has some elements that form a really rockin' game, but other elements dominate to make this the stupidest FF ever (that's right, it even surpasses Mystic Quest's horribleness). I'm a true FF fan who basically collects the FF games and movie, but this is the first thing I've honestly strongly considered selling to a used game store.