It upgrades Wakka's Defense and Tidus' attack, I thought.

That's in the fight with Seymour, I think.

Yeah, it doesn't make sense for Wakka to talk to Jecht since Tidus is the only one related to the Final Aeon. Main thing is getting the "F___ you I win" overdrive from being activated. But I still can't remember if the talk function stops after a certain time...

Just promise me, NonCon:

Whatever you do, do not play Final Fantasy X-2.

Do you hear me? Whenever anyone mentions the theoretical existence of a "sequel to Final Fantasy X," you roll your eyes disdainfully and remind them that Squaresoft never makes sequels to Final Fantasy games. You hold your damn ground when they hold up images of Yuna and Rikku and an effeminate looking man in negligible amounts of clothing to convince you otherwise. Those are doctored photos! They aren't real!

You must persist in this illusory state of serenity. Against all odds, this conviction must hold true in your heart. When Final Fantasy X ends, it's over. Anyone who dares mutter thoughts to the contrary is an enemy of the state.

I liked FFX-2.

Shitty story, music was a step down, but the combat system was fun. It wasn't soul-destroying or anything, just a very different game set 2 years later.

WHAT

You lie.
No seriously there is quite possibly no game I hate as much as FFX-2. It's not that FFX-2 is actually a terrible game -- on its own merits, and if it were released as a title with no correlation whatsoever to FFX and a completely different cast of characters, it'd be merely a generic below-average JRPG. But what makes the game despicable is the moment Square tries to assert that this piece of junk is tangibly related to Final Fantasy X. It's like if an artist paints a masterpiece and then some stranger walked over and just started throwing random splotches of paint on there. (And to clarify, FFX wasn't even my favorite Final Fantasy. It was just pretty good. But the ending of FFX was masterful, and then Square utterly demolished its bittersweet resonance for no justifiable reason.)

See, I've conditioned myself to keep them as two separate entities in my mind. They're parallel universes; FFX happened in one, and in the other (FFX Spoilers!) the fayth never stopped dreaming. FFX-2 is what they dreamt up because the party failed. Instead of Dream Zanarkand, we now have Dream Spira. Makes everything palatable.

FFX-2 is by no means a bad game. It's got a great battle system and the ability to change classes is a welcome replacement for the multiple party members of FFX. Also, the music is good, the story is good on several merits (for one, you get to see Yuna get all territorial about Tidus and you also learn about Paine and her connections), and Spira is as pretty as ever, only blown wide open for you to explore.


The only real complaints people have about it are a couple of scenes worth of cheesecake and the ending, but the ending is really the only appropriate reward given Yuna's quest and it does tie things up well.

FFX left it open for a sequel(Spoilerific).Considering that the video after the credits in FFX set up the secret end in FFX-2 means it didn't destroy it, as it was always going to be a happy ending. That shit was planned.

Proof of such
The true ending to X-2

If you didn't expect a sequal and a happy end after the after credit vid on X, you are crazy.

(Mild Shadow of the Colossus spoilers are also included in the spoiler-tags. You are forewarned.)

Nah man, I totally interpreted Final Fantasy X's post-Credits ending as metaphorical or something and did not make any connection whatsoever to the possibility that Tidus was going to show up alive in Spira and immediately be reunited with Yuna upon his reawakening in perhaps the most terrible happy ending in the history of all pathetic, melodramatic happy endings.

When the entire emotional impetus of the game revolves around a tragic ending, retconning it into "happily ever after" frankly sucks. Like, take Shadow of the Colossus. If a post-credits scene in that game established that Wander actually somehow survived and the horse fully healed and Wander runs up and embraces the woman he rescued that shit is lame. The entire plotline revolves around the tragic consequences of Wander's morally ambiguous actions in slaying the colossi. Similarly, Tidus being merely a dream conjured by Sin or whatever the hell he was -- it's been a while -- is the entire point of Final Fantasy X. Tidus' sacrifice is poignant in part because it's completely out of left field -- you spend the whole game assuming Yuna's life will be sacrificed, when in reality Tidus is the one who bites it.

And Tidus' ending is beautifully scripted -- he has a reunion of sorts with his estranged father, Jecht, and there's the awesome sequence of Tidus slappin' five with Jecht and Auron after Tidus fades into obscurity. The whole message is about Tidus' maturation as a character. He starts the game off a spoiled brat, and finishes the experience as a noble hero, who Yuna is left to fondly remember. Then Tidus is back in the water in the end but given the allegorical meanings of water itself there's no real way to tell exactly what that means.

Instead Square-Enix shuts down that beautiful bittersweet ending for some happily-ever-after bullshit and you call that good storytelling? No, that's shit storytelling. It's the kind of storytelling written in bad fanfiction that eradicates all semblance of theme and character progression and emotional investment by having Deus Ex Machinas up the ass rescuing all the main characters at just the right moment to ensure that the main characters can spend the rest of their precious lives in fairytale land. That's the comparison I was looking for! It just occurred to me -- Final Fantasy X-2 takes an approach similar to Dominic Deegan. Your investment in the characters and their well-beings are thoroughly destroyed as there are effectively no stakes because you know the storyline will end with every important character surviving and every such character having their cake and eating it, too.

Of course there's ALSO the problem of how Yuna's characterization actually regresses in two years from a mature woman willing to sacrifice herself to stop Sin and understanding the tragic consequences of truly loving someone, into a goddamn cheesecake Diva who explicitly refuses to sacrifice anyone's lives in the game's ending in order to stop a Doomsday Machine. Allow me to repeat this as it's critical as to why I hate FFX-2: Yuna refuses to sacrifice the lives of any friends in order to stop a Doomsday Machine, effectively meaning that if the Doomsday Machine is subsequently successful, Yuna's own stinginess in sacrificing the lives of a few friends would condemn all of Spira. Nice job with that character progression, Yunie!

Also there's the whole concept of Spira itself advancing into a fun-filled reality-TV nonsensical adventure park in a mere two years' span after Sin is destroyed. Hey, this once religiously devout society dominated by a spiral of death and fear of destruction is liberated from Sin and...in TWO YEARS... society completely and utterly transforms? The entire psychological welfare of the people of Spira goes topsy-turvy? Everyone's obsessed with MTV-style presentations of pathetic pop songs? WHAT?!??

I'm sorry but I could seriously keep going FFX-2 is seriously an affront upon all reason and copies of it should be burned and Square-Enix should be forced to apologize for ever making this game.