A prequel following the only interesting characters (Auron, Braska and Jecht) would be fantastic. A sequel following the parade of bland, vapid dipshits starring in X-2 would be a disaster of X-2 proportions. Pretty much the only thing X-2 got "right" was the combat, the rest was droll, tedious, boring, grindy or just downright annoying... like every line of spoken dialog delivered by any character anywhere in the game. They even fucked up Blitzball, turning an almost-interesting and certainly engaging RPG soccer minigame into Football Manager 2002. Snore.
Pretty much the only times I woke up from my daze while playing X-2 was when Gippal, Nooj or Baralai were around, because they were roughly twenty times more interesting than Yunsnore, Rikzzz, and pain. Hell, a X-2 featuring those three as the main cast would have been great, with political elements and rallying support from their communities to vie for power over Spira instead of 3 herpderps trying to find a hunky boy in their day off from shopping for more clothes. God that game was terrible.
verdant monkai said:
I haven't played FF X-2 yet as the wide spread condemnation has put me off. That and I dont want to play as Rikku.
I would only recommend it if you wanted to play a parody of Final Fantasy. It has some of the characters from a good game, in the same setting as the good game, but pretty much nothing else is good. The dialog is both over the top outrageous and hilariously stupid, poorly delivered from a variety of B-list voice actors. The writing is terrible, the story goes nowhere and has no resolution, the (many) minigames are all less engaging than Blitzball or even Triple Triad, but luckily you don't have to play them much (although, iirc, you still have to get a "perfect" time on each of the timed ones in order to get a 100% completion).
There are snippets of a good game buried in the pile of shlock. You get occasional cutscenes of more interesting characters doing more interesting things, but you quickly return to the parade of silliness and mundane bullshit following the 3 dipshits on their quest to get more dresses. And the 100% completion I mentioned? It's utterly insane. I mean, I'm a person that would struggle to do a 100% completion in an actually good game - but in this pile of trash, it was just the final joke icing on a cake made entirely of laughter.
You have to talk to every NPC in the game, you have to complete every minigame with the best result, you have to get every dress and sphere grid in the game, and the game is split into 5 acts, requiring you to return to each area multiple times, a single fuckup anywhere on the journey easily leading to a missed 100%, which you don't "see coming" until you get to chapter 5 and the game says oh, fuck you, you weren't following the guide closely enough, so no 100% for you.
Basically comparing the openings is all you need to do. X opens with a badass underwater soccer game getting interrupted by a giant monster blasting the entire city with laser beams, all to a death metal track playing in the background... while X-2 opens with the stuttering summoner herpderp doing a pop concert while herpderps 2 and 3 watch. And you learn quickly that it wasn't even Yuna, so that takes even more meaning out of the intro. What a pile of shit.