Funny enough, I had a choice to check either this game out first, or Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Considering the fact it is summer break and I don't have a lot of work in the summer, this was the better option at the moment. I knew this game would take a long, long time to go through. I knew there were sidequests, minigames, and grinding. That last part, well, it's mostly the ability grinding. By the end my girls were pushing Lv75 but levels don't matter. Abilities and dresspheres do, as do all the rewards for doing all sorts of things as well. More garment grids! More dresspheres! More accessories! Half the time it felt like I was really doing a nonlinear collectathon.
That's arguably the game's biggest strength in my opinion. It's nonlinear from the start. Final Fantasy X-2 only has a measly 5 chapters, those who want to do the story will realize that the chapters don't really take as long as they really do. But since you can explore every part of Spira (except in those scenarios where places are locked), that lends way to all the sidequests, which could impact other chapters and DEFINITELY impact the percentage of completion later on. Sadly, I didn't really get 100%, this is because I decided that doing Via Infinito (among other things) was gonna take way too long, and I wanted to check out other games later. I still used a cheat code to actually put the game's completion at 100% and found out that the only thing that it really does is add new ending scenes.
I'm a little desensitized with Final Fantasy as a franchise from having played so many games in it. Tons of stuff make this a good game, the customizable garment grids and ability grinding were the gist of my gaming experience here. The return to the Active-Time battle system works out alright, being able to change your dressphere in the midst of combat is a nice touch, but in the end not entirely necessary for most battles that aren't boss battles. This is cause bar specific enemies, a good-leveled party just breezes through encounters. You only have problems whenever the encounter rate dictates you have a battle every three steps, you get ambushed quite a lot (me thinks it is an attempt to balance easy encounters), and most encounters that are troublesome have fixed-damage attacks (those annoying amorphous gel enemies in particular). Oh, and the Oversoul gimmick! Kinda cool, kinda annoying with some encounters, but really not as consequential as it looks.
Character-wise, it's nice to see new faces, who were arguably the most interesting, and the returning ones are either moving on or unfortunately got on my nerves (looking at you, Rikku and Brother). Minigames are so worth talking about. Blitzball is significantly worse but thankfully not truly necessary, but it's better playing than coaching. Gunner's Gauntlet is a kind-of fun third person shooter gimmick but I got all the prizes after figuring things out. Sphere Break is a fun math game but unfortunately requires some luck and math knowledge. The massage minigame is ENTIRELY luck, you want to hit the right spots and that is up to total chance. Shoving the band into the airship elevator was completely unnecessary. The Calm Lands minigames are also not necessary but the publicity stuff sucks. That Cactuar war minigame is beyond stupid, thankfully it's not necessary to win. Thunder Plains tower calibration was quite fun the first time, then not once you got to the last few towers. They give you directions and tutorials on most everything at least. So a varied experience, and honestly a quite worthy sequel in my book, but given how much time things took, and how I felt my usual RPG fatigue at the end, it's obvious that no NG+ playthroughs of any kind will come in soon.
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