“The exercise will do us good” – Final Fantasy X-2

For my journey, 2004 is the year of the sequel. Twenty-one games topped the charts over its course, and not one of them was an original concept. Each and every one was either a sequel or based on a well-established external franchise that had already lent itself to many video games. 2004 was the first year for which this was the case, although not the last — 2009 would be the same. And here, exemplifying the pattern best of all, is a series reaching double figures and initiating a new kind of Final Fantasy sequel, a sequel to a sequel. A sequel squared. Final Fantasy x².

Sequels were no new thing for games. My journey started from Jet Set Willy, sequel to Manic Miner, and indeed Arcade Idea’s recent post on Jet Set Willy does a great job setting out reasons why video games are so conducive to successful and acclaimed sequels compared to other media. Broadly: marketing taking an overpowered place in critical discourse; opportunity presented by the diminished importance of story; the centrality of rapid technological advances.

There were extra forces contributing to the even greater supremacy of sequels here by 2004. The PlayStation 2’s overwhelming success meant that the console life cycle was now more at play. It had been around for long enough to produce its own dead certs and for companies to be thinking about holding onto new ideas for its likely successor. That success also contributed to the consolidation of the industry into one where mainstream success was almost exclusively available to a few huge and generally risk-averse publishers. (By the time it made it to the UK, Final Fantasy X-2 was not just a sequel squared but a sequel Square-Enixed, thanks to a corporate merger between the Japanese companies responsible for Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest).

Bringing together that consolidation and the question of technological advances, it was getting more expensive to make big games. The expectation of huge environments and highly detailed graphics was an additional expense that there was little way to address, something that would only ramp up further in future generations. The ability to reuse assets made sequels was therefore an ever more attractive prospect. That was a significant factor in Square breaking with tradition and not moving onto a new story but following up on the previous one. And illustrating the commercial prospects for sequels, they were rewarded with the second biggest UK first week sales for a Final Fantasy game after Final Fantasy VIII.

Final Fantasy X-2 starts two years after the events of Final Fantasy X, and tells a quite different story, while mirroring it in cute ways like Yuna taking on Tidus’s role of The Wonder Years style voiceover. As befitting a cost-saving exercise, the game takes place largely in the same locations as the original, although you can get about them a bit more freely extensively thanks to a jump mechanic which takes after the worst pressing-a-button-here-but-not-here-arbitrarily-does-something parts of 3D Final Fantasies past. You also start off with access to lots of places, with missions appearing on a couple of them at a time.

Square used the freedom of a sequel to do three things, all of which involved more risk than they necessarily needed to take, and all of which worked well for the most part. One of them is to go for a new aesthetic, with a smaller, all-female main cast and a much more pop feel. It starts off with a pop concert and in battles you can dance your way towards victory. There is a lot of room for broad comedy, which relies on a taste for ridiculous accents and characters saying “oh, poopie!”. Or more enjoyably, stuff like Rikku greeting a machinegun/serpent enemy with a Metal Gear Solid-style repeated cry of “SNAAAAKE”. The pop music elements are underwhelming (my most obvious reference point here being Tokyo Mirage Sessions perhaps presents an unfairly high bar) but as a coherent refreshed way of doing things, X-2’s aesthetic fits.

The second part of Square’s approach was to face the new question of what to do after the story of your carefully structured Final Fantasy epic is finished, by making that question itself the topic of much of the narrative. Yuna’s awkwardness as an action hero and attempt to carve out a new way of doing what she wants becomes a central part of the story. You revisit Zanarkand, scene of some of the most moving parts of Final Fantasy X, and see it turned into a tourist attraction, to the discomfort of the characters. And then you take them to do some action missions and comedy on it, because if you’re going meta you might as well go the full way.

The final thing which brings together the changes is the combat mechanics. Square’s record of changing these up between each Final Fantasy instalment, often in quite significant ways, meant an overhaul was an obvious route for Final Fantasy X-2 to go. Final Fantasy X’s approach was to have a team of characters who could be substituted in and out of battles, with each having their own broad specialism which could slowly be modified via its sphere grid. With just the three characters, X-2’s dressphere system instead lets you swap their specialisms in-battle. You collect new dresspheres as you progress and, furthermore, get garment grids to arrange the choices into, letting you set up different characters with quite different tactics and offering extra rewards along the way.

Each time you use your turn to make a change in battle from, say, songstress to gun mage, it’s accompanied by a transformation animation, one outfit replaced by another in a wave of sparkle or fire or smashed glass. This acts as a counterbalance to the flexibility becoming too overpowered, in that the time it takes up is an incentive not to bother. The animations in all of their Magical Girl glory are also one of the best uses of cultural shorthand since The Getaway’s wall-leaning healing. Decades of Creamy Mami, Sailor Moon and others had established the transformation sequence as a way for new powers to be granted, and so Yuna, Rikku and Paine, newly acting in the right genre, open up that possibility for themselves too.

The other fabulous thing about the combat system is how personal it makes different tactics feel. Getting into a routine of just hitting the X button through fights for basic grinding can be a dull fact of some RPGs. In Final Fantasy X-2, optimising a way of being able to do that and come out without any loss of MP and HP (white mage/songstress/warrior) felt like a worthwhile achievement, my preference for an attritional approach getting its slowness balanced out by not having to pay full attention. The fact that some grids offer significant rewards for making changes, with checkpoints to go past as part of their layout, adds a new dimension too. You can take on bosses head-on, or you can set two characters up to defend while the other does a full loop of their grid, transformation after transformation, and becomes such a magical girl by accumulation that they can eventually wipe out the enemy with a couple of spells. Which is a lot of fun.

Final Fantasy X-2’s combat system is a big success and it needs to be. It doesn’t have the appeal of gradually getting to know characters and a world that its predecessors did. Neither does its story get going particularly fast, though there are a lot of side-stories to explore. But pushing on with its missions is its own reward in a way that stands out from its predecessors. Together with the other changes, it doesn’t conjure a better way for Final Fantasy to be, but a viable different one. That’s not a bad result for a sequel squared.

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Top of the charts for week ending 21 February 2004:

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