Final Fantasy X brings to life an entire world made of living creatures, cities, natural spectacles using a complex system that connect seamlessly real time rendered environments, pre-rendered sceneries, and mind blowing FMVs.

As I said before, the most important novelty of Final Fantasy X is the introduction of a graphic engine that renders the environments of the game in real time. Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX all made use of pre-rendered backgrounds – and they were artistic, wonderful backgrounds that anyhow represented a big limitation to the possibilities given to the game director.

From the very beginning of Final Fantasy X, the potential of the environments rendered in real time is evident. The atmosphere of the game, also thanks to excellent camera movements that follow the character, is unbelievably rich; light effects create a strangely sinister world of shadows, and mangificently realistic water effects . Anyhow, whenever there was no need to have camera movements – for example in small rooms – the developers decided to use beautiful prerendered backgrounds. Thanks to their extraordinary skills, most of the players won’t notice the change.

To make things clear, Final Fantasy X is based on what we could call a composite graphic system – a system that according to the case makes use of a graphic engine to render in real time the sceneries, of the classic pre-rendered backgrounds and of FMVs.

One of the first places you’ll visit in the game, Besaid Island, is an example of the versatility of this system. You walk through the island in a beautiful tropical forest where all is rendered in real time. The winding road moves across palms that move slowly in the peaceful sea breeze. For the battles, the same graphic engine is used – in this way you don’t notice the transition between exploration and fights. As you enter the town, you see a series of igloo-shaped houses and people walking around. As you enter in the houses, you can hardly notice that some of their interiors are rendered in real time, while others (like Wakka’s house or the Items shop) make use of pre-rendered backgrounds.

FMVs are the most spectacular moments in any Final Fantasy game and they are still here, even if the in-game graphic engine alone would be enough to amaze the player. The work done by Squaresoft’s CG artists is pure art. Anyhow, it’s interesting to notice that the game opens with a scene rendered in real time.

The characters are built with a high number of polygons. Every slight detail is here to make of Final Fantasy X the best looking game to date. The dresses are just gorgeous, built with an incredible richness of textures. The faces show a wide range of expressions and they are a proof that the name “Emotion Engine” given to Ps2’s graphic processor is not there by chance.

There is just a limit in Final Fantasy X’s graphic engine. Characters’ body movements look always unnatural and not enough fluid to be the ones of real living creatures. While this not happens during the battles, where there is a series of well defined animations like in previous Final Fantasy games, it becomes immediately evident in dialogues or narrative moments.

Throughout the web and on gaming magazines, many reviewers and readers tried to make a comparison between Final Fantasy X’s graphic engine and Metal Gear Solid 2’s one, and I’ve received many e-mails from our readers on the same subject.

Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy X are completely different games. When comparisons like this are done, we should always keep this in mind: developing a game is not like creating a movie. When you create a game you can’t just think to create the most beautiful looking game ever realized. A game is first of all a toy, and the gameplay is what should guide all the developers throughout the realization of the game. With this in mind, considering the different conceptions behind Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy X, a comparison is possible.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is an adventure-action game that takes place in technological realistic environments that are necessarily repetitive. With this in mind, the developers couldn’t create a game that was aimed to amaze the player with its richness of colours or with the variety of the environments. They had to focus on weather effects (and the ones in Metal Gear Solid 2 are surely superior to the ones of Final Fantasy X), they had to create characters able to move fluidly, in an absolutely realistic way. And from this point of view, Metal Gear Solid 2 is a perfect game.

Final Fantasy X is an RPG based on the exploration of a whole world. The creation of completely different places, atmospheres, effects, characters, creatures is needed by a game of this type. A continuous spectacle made of ever changing colors that is able to simulate the range of different environments existent on a planet – this is what the developers of Final Fantasy X were able to create.

Maybe the character movements in Final Fantasy X are not perfect, but overall the graphic system created for this game is the most impressive spectacle ever seen on a gaming console. You can take any game on any platform at present available on the shelves, but none of them will show the wide range of beauties offered by Final Fantasy X.

Expectations are always high when it comes to soundtracks of Final Fantasy games. Usually, everyone who has played at least one of the games of the series has one or more favorite themes. In this case it’ll be hard for the player to choose and pick only one among them.

For Final Fantasy X we have to thank for their work Junya Nakano, Masashi Hamanzu and Nobuo Uematsu. Three different composers for a fully orchestrated soundtrack, including the new vocal song ( after “Eyes on me” – FF8 and “Melodies of Life” - FF9) “Suteki da ne”, that many Final Fantasy fans seem to love, from what we have read in the many fan sites. Final Fantasy X features wonderful and dreamy songs and delicate piano songs, excellent for creating particular atmospheres, underlining and making precious every single moment of the story. You will find several musical genres in it, not only the typical “fantasy” songs.

The most important - and discussed - innovation to the series is surely the introduction of voices. Before Final Fantasy X, we couldn’t even imagine to hear the heroes of a Final Fantasy game talking to each other with real voices. Someone said it is a loss, because we will never be able again to imagine the ideal voices for our heroes. But things have to evolve and improved, and voice acting in games like Metal Gear Solid or Soul Reaver became one of the strengths of these games. But it must be done in the right way, with good professional actors. This said, the voices of the American version of Final Fantasy X are all quite good, with some disturbing exceptions. In fact, among the actors, a couple did an amazing job, like those who gave their voices to Auron and Wakka. On the other hand, the actors chosen to play the primary characters - Yuna and Tidus - are those who did the worst job. Sometimes, you will just hope that Tidus will keep his stupid mouth shut, just to not hear his stupid, irritating voice.

There’s only another little issue in Final Fantasy X's sounds : bad lip synching. Look at other games as Soul Reaver 2 or Metal Gear Solid 2, and you’ll notice a great difference. It mainly depends on the fact RPGs like FFX are very long games, where good lip-synch means dozens of hours of additional development time. Lip-synching all the dialogues would have been a long and costy affair, even if future RPGs will have to deal with this problem.

RPGs in general are longer than the average 15 hours of other games. For Final Fantasy we can’t talk exactly only about replay value: in fact Final Fantasy X, despite its extreme linearity, is a very long game, that requires at least something like 40 hours to be completed. Not forgetting that if you want to improve the level of your characters, you really need to play more! The game also features many sidequests, even if less than in the previous instalments, and the Blitzball game might add hours and hours of gameplay, but only if you like, in some way, sports games.

Greatest fans of Final Fantasy usually play the game several times, sometimes for more than 100 hours, to discover all the little things creators put here and there, and every time they play it, they understand a little more, they recollect single moments and they combine them together until they have a global view, made of different experiences.