So I played about an hour of FFX last night before collapsing from exhaustion...
And honestly, so far, I'm a little underwhelmed.
Word of advice number 1: When you fire up the game, do not watch the credits/intro that start playing, not because they spoil anything, but because they're long and they're repeated when you select "New Game." And the second time, you don't have any way to skip them.
The graphics aren't nearly as fantastic as I was expecting. The environments are great, but the character movements are sometimes jerky, and very unrealistic. And some models are still very blocky in places that I wasn't expecting.
The main character (Tidus) has a chubby face! Every time I really watched him I noticed it. I'm not going to be able to get over this. Chubby Cheeks!
The voices are acceptable, but some of them are definitely much lower quality than others. Pity there's no option to turn them off should I decide to give up on them halfway through.
The control and dynamic camera is going to take me a little while to get used to. It's very strange to be holding left, then have the camera switch such that I'm still holding left but the character is moving up on the screen... But then if I let go, and press left again, the character goes left, in a different direction than he was before despite pressing the same direction. It's meant to make sure you keep going in the same direction when the camera goes nuts, which will probably work out okay once I get used to it... But so far, my first instinct upon seeing the camera change is to let go, and then when I press the same direction as I was going before I go off in some other direction, and I have to struggle to reorient myself.
The camera feels a lot like Devil May Cry, for those who have played it and are wondering. (Or vice versa)
And finally, despite having played an hour into the game, I have no fucking clue what's going on. I mean, I understand that it's meant to put you in the same state of mind as Tidus, who, certainly has no clue what's going on either, but it had the wrong effect and kind of put me off... Instead of making me fight my exhaustion to stay up and play the game and find out what was going on, I just found myself saying "Fuck it, I don't know what the hell is going on, I'm going to bed, I'll find out later."
And I think that's a bad sign. It doesn't draw you right in in quite the way that the first hour of FFIX did, with its festival and dual and kidnapping and airship escape and subsequent crash.
It's not enough to stop me from enjoying the game, and now that I'm awake again I want to go shake some answers out of it... But I fear that the casual gamer is going to be put off by this, and that's not so good.