I first tried to play Final Fantasy X-2 right after finishing X for the first time when both games were remastered for Vita. X quickly became one of my favorite games, so I went into X-2 with high hopes that were dashed in the first cutscene. Packaging these games together really does a disservice to both of them, because X-2 is such an immediate and dramatic tonal shift that I can’t imagine anyone having a positive response to it unless there’s a significant time gap between finishing X and starting it. I had a gap of over a decade now and had fully come around to the J-Pop cosplay elements of the game, so surely 2026 would mark X-2‘s long-awaited redemption arc for me.
So it seemed for the first few hours. The opening cutscene and silly magical girl transformations were actually fun now that I was expecting that kind of game. The first few battles don’t do an amazing job of showcasing the battle system, but I could see its potential. Changing jobs on the fly mid-battle is a great idea, and the use of Garment Grids to give each character a custom jobset and unique bonuses for switching adds even more depth. The early hours also make it seem, at first, that this is a very customizable experience where you can either rush through the plot or explore at your own pace to find everything.
The first sign of trouble comes right after you complete the first mission, at which point the game makes you read a massive text dump of a tutorial about the Creature Catcher minigame. This is a half-baked system that allows you to use a really basic map UI to play the world’s saddest Pokemon clone and catch monsters from each region of the game’s world. Those monsters can then be entered into tournaments or, excitingly, added to your party as allies. However, for reasons only Square can explain, the monsters must replace some or all of the regular party and are completely controlled by the AI. So yes, you could catch a Behemoth right away and add it to your party, but it would take up all three slots and you’d spend the rest of the game watching X-2 play itself. There was a good idea here.
You won’t notice the next sign of trouble unless you’re following a walkthrough, but that’s honestly pretty fitting. X-2 is absolutely packed full of optional content, but the overwhelmingly majority of it is not signaled in any way whatsoever. It’s one thing that seeing the extra cutscene in the perfect ending requires you to make extremely specific choices, trigger missable dialogues, and even leave the game running in cutscenes for extended periods, but X-2 takes that level of guide-reliance to an extreme, making the vast majority of its sidequests, jobs, and equipment only obtainable by doing things that there’s no indication you should do.
There are three ways to play this game: You can treat it like a normal JRPG and miss almost everything, leaving you with maybe a quarter of the job system customization you could have had. You could follow a guide and find everything, but kill any sense of exploration. Or you could make the game take a hundred hours to finish by talking to every NPC four times and visiting every area multiple times, as well as giving yourself carpal tunnel from constantly mashing X to catch any times you were supposed to do that for no reason. I’d recommend just using a guide, but none of these are good options. You’ll probably give up and revert to skipping most optional content halfway through anyway – the minigames are bad, most quests are tedious, and while new jobs are a great reward, you just don’t need most of them.
Why don’t you need most of the jobs, you ask? The biggest reason, if you were using playstyle 2 or 3, is that you’ll have earned Paine’s special job from talking to a random NPC four times in chapter 1. You can access it in two turns if you found the Unerring Path garment grid, and from there you turn into a special form with immunity to every status effect, powerful attacks that cost no MP, free healing abilities, and plenty of MP to apply buffs and statuses. This form is capable of soloing basically every enemy in the game, including the entire boss rush in the last chapter, and since Yuna and Rikku don’t earn XP if you finish the fight with this form active, using it becomes a self-reinforcing loop where it just outclasses any other strategy more and more. And that’s without mentioning that each of its segments eventually earns triple HP passives.
If you didn’t find that special job, you don’t need most of the jobs because most of them are useless without extensive grinding. Abilities are tied to earning AP by defeating enemies while using that job, but each one needs 20-100 AP and most fights earn no more than 5. As a result, you’ll probably only have a couple of jobs that are developed enough to meaningfully contribute against strong enemies, and you’d have to stand around fighting random battles for ages to, say, level up Black Mage enough to use Thundaga if you suddenly discover you need it in a new fight. You also can’t see which skills are hidden behind prereqs, so if you’re not using a guide, you won’t even necessarily know which jobs have the skills you need. But you probably won’t find more than a handful of jobs in that case anyway.
So the exploration is tedious and the battle system never realizes its potential. This is where the story could have saved the day, but it’s even worse. X-2 is supposedly about Yuna trying to find Tidus after seeing a recording that showed him, but most of the plot has nothing to do with that and there’s rarely any justification for why you should care about what’s happening. You spend ages visiting minor characters from X who you will absolutely not remember unless you played that last week, then you’re immediately dumped into a new plot where the game introduces a doom weapon that, apparently, will destroy the world unless you act. It never comes together into anything coherent and almost none of the characters have any compelling reason to be there. I’m pretty confident that you could tell exactly the same story without losing anything important if Yuna was the only member of the Gullwings and none of the NPCs were named.
There are a couple of moments where the story seems like it might be about to go somewhere. One scene has Yuna deliver a well-written line about how you might lose everything by risking too much to protect a single memory. At another point, it seems like the game is about to focus on how factionalism can lead to fights over nothing, how people will cling to heroes in times of uncertainty, or on how the ex-summoners are finding new meaning now that their powers are gone. Any of these could have been a solid basis for a story, and they all receive decent scenes at one point or another, but none of them ultimately goes anywhere. It feels like everyone on the writing team had a different idea of what the story should be and, rather than agreeing on a single message, they all just wrote their scenes in isolation and hoped for the best. The only constant theme in X-2 is that everyone in the main cast acts like a quirky teen sitcom cast member from 2004.
Oh, and most of the music is deeply underwhelming. “Real Emotion” is a notable exception, and a few other themes are decent, but there’s mostly nothing worth listening to here. The voice acting is a mixed bag, so you may as well play with the sound off and listen to something better.
Conclusion
In the end, X-2 is a failed experiment. It has a few elements that could have worked if they received attention, but they didn’t, and it wastes any goodwill it might have inherited from X by shifting tone so dramatically that it hardly feels like the same world. It’s unbalanced, poorly written, and suffers from some of the worst walkthrough-dependence I’ve seen in a long time. It avoids becoming my least favorite Final Fantasy only because XV has even worse writing and III is even more tedious, but it’s far from a good game. It avoids a lower score thanks to at least being mostly bug-free (although it did crash in the credits for me), having a battle system that might have worked, and ending before it inflicts too much suffering.
Rating: 50%
Time to beat: 22 hours for getting 100% in the first 1.5 chapters and mostly rushing through after that
Price: $30 as part of the remaster collection, which is actually worth it since X is one of the best games ever. Just don’t play this.
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