Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster Review -- Still Aged

Author’s note: this is an evaluation of the updated release of Final Fantasy X/X-2, and not of the games themselves, since they don’t contain new original content.

Last year, Nintendo released Wind Waker HD, and it was very pretty and all that, but it was also changed -- enhanced, if you will -- to make it better and more effective in the modern day. And they charged a premium for it with a $50 price tag. But, hey, you get what you pay for.

And what you pay for with the $40 Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster pack for PS3 and PS Vita (not cross-buy, though) is better-looking versions of games from the PS2 era. And, to be fair, these do look far, far better than they did back when. But that’s all this is. It’s HD textures on the “international” versions of these games (released only in Europe and Japan originally), and there’s nothing more to it.

That’s what we’ve come to expect from these things -- Wind Waker was an exception, not the rule -- but that’s become increasingly frustrating for me. I have the Ratchet & Clank HD collection, for example, but I’ve barely played it because the controls on those games are so wonked next to those of the PS3 Ratchet & Clank titles. And while, yes, Final Fantasy X in HD is beautiful, that Square Enix didn’t do anything else to bring it up to date leaves us with an experience that is less exciting than it should be.

Aside from redrawing the textures, Squeenix did also clean up the visuals quite a bit. These titles were full of texture clipping originally, for one thing, and that’s mostly been dealt with here. And while the massively improved visuals don’t exactly bring gameplay on par fidelity-wise with the pre-rendered cutscenes, they’re actually closer than you might expect.

The grand delineator is the animations, which are steeped in old school. And, yeah, I mean that in the negative sense. It’s a little bit disturbing, actually, to see such visually attractive groups of polygons behaving in such a manner, and the stilted canned animations of yesteryear are constant reminders that you aren’t playing a truly new game. They aren’t alone in that, of course, as stilted animations are accompanied by stilted line readings that really drive the point home.

It’s an odd thing; nobody’s going to say that James Arnold “Ratchet” Taylor is a bad actor, but he’s not exactly acquitting himself well here. That’s another odd relic of the early 2000s and beyond -- good actors being bad in video games. Here it’s just another reminder.

But there is a reason anybody cares about HD versions of the FFX games. Despite the now-awkward presentation, these are still some strangely alluring titles that are easy to get into. Final Fantasy X in particular, which I spent the most time with here, moves along at a nice clip and feature a nice balance between gameplay (puzzle temples and turn-based battles) and story, which you might not expect looking back from the Final Fantasy XIII era. Playing on Vita probably helps; handhelds are now, in my estimation, much better for long JRPGs than consoles because being locked to the couch makes these experiences feel much longer than if you can move around.

While hoping for new animations and vocal performances probably would have been a pipe dream, there are plenty of things Square and Enix could have fixed up. For example: save points instead of being able to save from the menu; the lack of prompts on most things or people you can interact with, and sometimes there are “press X” prompts in spots where you can’t interact with anything; and the heinous tutorials. These are small-ish things that really should have been dealt with.

Those tutorials are particularly egregious, by the way. JRPGs have never been known for effectively easing you into a new mechanic, but the instructions on a couple things in FFX are downright obscene. The tutorial for the game’s leveling mechanic, the grid sphere, makes what is actually an easy and simple thing seem impossibly dense, and good luck having any idea how to play blitzball after the 15-minute series of tutorials for that deal, which you’ll view a solid 45 minutes before you can even play that odd sport. Is there any good reason for those tutorial to be brought forth into the present day intact? I can’t think of any.

With a clean, gorgeous new look, the Final Fantasy X games are good enough to hold up despite a number of surface elements not really aging well. So on one hand you’ve got a lot of game that’s still worth playing all these years later with a pleasant makeover for a solid price, but on the other hand Square Enix is still giving you functionally the same games from back when. A bit of effort in cleaning up some of the mechanical mess in these games could have made this pack an obligatory buy for a lot of folks, but instead the Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster box doesn’t feel like it’s going to do much to help bring new fans to the ancient series.

Final Verdict

7.5/10

Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster was developed and published by Square Enix. It will be released on March 18 at the MSRP of $39.99 on PS3 and PS Vita. A copy was provided by the publisher for the purposes of review.