12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 2Final Fantasy X-2 cold-opens with everyone’s favorite doomed priestess Yuna doing a magical girl transformation into a racy stage outfit and putting on an idol concert for a sold-out stadium, flanked by backup dancers while the guitarist zips around on a loudspeaker-hovercraft. This Yuna is revealed to be an imposter when the other two playable characters crash the party to beat the tar out of her. All unfolding on top of a giant hovering drum-kit automaton, mind.in case you want to set the stageThis shit is so ass and I kind of love it. From the very first moments, X-2 presents itself as a repudiation of everything X tried and failed to stand for. While the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, its gutsiness has earned it my begrudging respect.Of course, this is also the game with the central mechanic of affixing dresspheres to your garment grid so that you can change everyone’s silly outfits on the fly. Hearing these terms casually thrown around online before playing fried my brain a little, and had me dreading the possibility that Final Fantasy X-2’s essence would amount to “woman be shopping”. Luckily, it’s not shallow in that particular way. After chasing Slutty Doppelganger Yuna through the city and going on a quick treasure hunt, it becomes clear that this game is thoroughly a Charlie’s Angels. We’ve got the ass-kicking trio of girls each with their own strong personality and intended flavor of sex appeal – it’s astoundingly of its time, and two decades later we’re starting to see the genre resurface with works like Kpop Demon Hunters, for better or for worse.There’s a very specific yet all-consuming sleaze to this thing. The pose-striking, the skimpy outfits, the maximalist camp – it’s an early 2000’s japanese street fashion magazine given form, with a dash of gravure to spice things up. It’s hard not to be charmed by the UI slingshotting from surprisingly slick cut-ins to the clunkiest PS2 menus upcycled from FFX, or the cheesy jazz soundtrack. The voice acting, while still not good, is a significant step up from X’s nightmare performances, which is crucial because this game is 70% one-liners by volume. Also there’s a jump button and rudimentary parkour auto-platforming??listen to this shit. look at the fuckin sousaphone cat. they could never make me hate this gameIn keeping with the overall aesthetic onslaught, X-2 returns to a real-time battle system crafted to be the zenith of ATB. In practice it’s a sensory nightmare, with everyone constantly running around and repeatedly making the damage yelp sound effect and shouting one-liners and interrupting each other’s attacks. If you cannot navigate the menus fast enough you will be shredded to pieces. Dressphere changes are a half-minute meguca transformation affair, which makes changing jobs on the fly not only important from a tactical perspective but also useful for buying time. It comes as something of a relief when halfway through the game you unlock the Berserker class, which lets you set one of the girls to auto-attack at double damage so you don’t have to worry about her any more.While the main party is trimmed down to the self-proclaimed YRP trio, you can also catch and fight with every monster in the game Pokemon-style, if you wish. There’s no real reason to, it’s just sitting there as a piece of the insanely maximalist game design. Much of X-2 feels like the result of a Square Enix internal game jam, with a plethora of minigames ultimately conceived of and coded by just one or two developers apiece. It’s an interesting approach, and both fits and amplifies the disjointed nature of this game. Of course the quality is wildly variable, but you really can just ignore anything that doesn’t land, since so little of this game is critical for progressing the main story. If shit sucks, hit the bricks! It feels weird to praise a game for including so many half-baked elements and then just letting you skip them, but that’s how you get such wonderful emergent comedy as “Zanarkand got turned into a tourist trap” and “Wakka Coin”.[x]Anyways, this is all set two short years after That Sin Shit. What remains after you’ve killed God and your boyfriend has been deleted from existence? Girl’s night, every night, obviously. FFX-2 is primarily concerned with how a society traumatized by a thousand years of calamity defines itself in the aftermath. Spira at large may still be trying to figure out whether to transform itself with raucous exuberance or keep to traditions, but Yuna has firmly settled on leaving the past behind and grabbing life by the horns. There is a genuine dignity in how she refuses to be defined by the absence of Tidus, even if that’s also partially to create more fanservice opportunities. A larger plot eventually unfolds, but Yuna’s zeal for fortune-seeking primarily serves as an excuse to drop her into every corner of FFX’s map, taking odd jobs and butting heads with all manner of NPCs. I said previously that X’s linear pilgrimage does a terrible job of making its world feel real and interconnected, and X-2’s open-ended approach goes a long way in remedying that. Even if you really ought to just take the airship, it’s now possible to walk from one end of Spira to the other and back, with plenty of characters old and new to check in on along the way. The game’s player-driven narrative approach lets the world speak for itself and feel as delicate and in flux as it is. It’s a rare example of asset reuse that outshines its original context.Through some ancient found footage, that eventual main plot seeks to position Tidus and Yuna as the reincarnations of star-crossed lovers from a thousand years ago. The ghosts of said lovers go on to possess Yuna and the various boys leading each new faction, in order to reenact a failed revenge plot of a thousand years ago. This is an intentional echo of FFX’s unsent spirits, and a clever one – it’s narratively similar to the previous game’s grand reveals but tonally the exact opposite, and they knew better than to try and recycle the dad stuff alongside it. Yuna ultimately demands that she be able to live her own life, finally renouncing the sacrificial lamb status placed upon her in a way that she was never able to previously. We will not be bringing Tidus back, not even a proto-Tidus. Nor will we be nuking everything and starting anew. We have to let stand everything we’ve done, and only then can we move on.Of course, the punchline is that you can have Tidus back, if you want it badly enough. There’s a secret deus ex machina ending available to those who achieve 100% completion. This requires a slavish commitment to the game, participating in countless tournaments, breeding chocobos, selling carnival tickets, playing carnival games, and using Yuna’s childhood island as a shooting gallery. It’s the product of exploring every nook and cranny of Spira and talking to every person at least five times. Sure, Yuna loves Spira and wants to help everyone and try everything, but at this level of meticulousness it stops being her story and becomes your story of one hundred percenting final fantasy ten two. And if you’re that invested, that obsessed with this game as a game, then sure, have yourself another Tidus. Knock yourself out. It’s just a game after all, so why not spawn characters back in all cheat code-like to squeeze everything you can out of it?I only got 61%. Sue me.
Dec 15, 2025 • Subscribe
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