Current Events > The first time I played Final Fantasy X I almost cried

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When you're about to have your first high stakes Blitzball game and never having played it before, the game shoves 20 Blitzball tutorials in your face.

What the fuck, man? Those tutorials took like an hour to do and I had no context for anything before being thrown into the hardest game of Blitzball you'll ever play!

I know it has its fans but.... Blitzball sucked.

It certainly was a choice to make the first playable blitzball match in the game be plot related and also very difficult given your shitty team. Like, in the story you're an amazing experienced blitzball player, but as a player you're literally just learning how to play the game.

After that match I didn't play it again for a LONG time because with an introduction like that, why would I? I did eventually come back and learned how it worked so I could get Wakka's weapon and Overdrives. Then I actually started to like it. But come on, if you want players to like your mini game, introduce it better.

havean776 posted...

I know it has its fans but.... Blitzball sucked.

Whether you enjoy Blitzball or not seems to largely depend on if you got Jecht Shot.

Tyranthraxus posted...

Whether you enjoy Blitzball or not seems to largely depend on if you got Jecht Shot.

Nah I had Jecht shot it got me one goal and than Tidus was useless afterwards.

havean776 posted...

I know it has its fans but.... Blitzball sucked.

I'm one of those fans. Loved the hell out of Blitzball. In my most recent playthrough, I spent like 30 hours just on Blitzball. Turning the Aurochs into a powerhouse team was a lot of fun. I would totally play a standalone Blitzball game.

I didn't like Blitzball when I originally played FFX. I replayed the game relatively recently and I got hooked on Blitzball this time and ended up playing it a bunch.

Love Blitzball, but hate getting the Jecht Shot. Re-doing that one part over and over, while being unable to skip the cutscenes is a real pain in the ass. Its not as bad as chocobo racing or lightning dodging, but its still bad. What the fuck were the devs thinking?

The *concept* behind Blitzball is a great one. Being able to sign random NPCs in the overworld to your team, discover hidden stars, and manage a team while being able to play a weird underwater soccer game sounds amazing. The problem is the execution:

-Once your team is good enough to comfortably win, it will rapidly snowball to become an unstoppable powerhouse and the game becomes trivially easy at that point.
-The game itself is simplistic and uninteresting. You don't even get to play in the third dimension, which would be the entire appeal of, y'know, playing this game in a big sphere of water.
-And, of course, the only real reason to play Blitzball - unlocking Wakka's ultimate weapon - requires you to play the game an unreasonable amount of times.

If Blitzball were developed as a system a bit more - if the game had interesting mechanics and perhaps something like a salary cap to avoid teams getting too disgustingly good - it could have been more interesting. As it stands, it gets tedious after the first little while and every game becomes a carbon-copy of the next.

Jecht: Why are you crying

TakashiMifune85 posted...

Love Blitzball, but hate getting the Jecht Shot. Re-doing that one part over and over, while being unable to skip the cutscenes is a real pain in the ass. Its not as bad as chocobo racing or lightning dodging, but its still bad. What the fuck were the devs thinking?

Lol i gave up after several attempts and moved on

Lucky for me my friend told me about hiding behind the goalie exploit, so I Jecht shot to take the lead and did the exploit the rest of the game to win and never played Blitzball again.

Hambo posted...

so I could get Wakka's weapon and Overdrives

I didn't care enough to try lol, I'm not a perfectionist so I did without.

Can't you just kinda button mash during the Jecht Shot sequence? As long as you hit all of the lines, there's no penalty for mashing X or hitting them out of order. Unless there's more nuance to it than I remember? I think I missed it on my first playthrough cuz it's like "wtf is this" on your first try. But after that I didn't think it was too hard.

Hambo posted...

Can't you just kinda button mash during the Jecht Shot sequence? As long as you hit all of the lines, there's no penalty for mashing X or hitting them out of order. Unless there's more nuance to it than I remember? I think I missed it on my first playthrough cuz it's like "wtf is this" on your first try. But after that I didn't think it was too hard.

Yeah I fell like it's super easy to get the shot if you understand what the hell you're supposed to be doing. I missed it my first time too and then never missed it again.

I liked Blitzball

I never signed any other players and just maxed out the Aurochs. They werent there when the team was in last place so they cant hop on the championship train.

I like Blitzball a lot. I could play it for hours even though after a while it gets repetitive. I would change two things about it if I could: I would make it so that as long as you get the shot off before the buzzer, it still can count. I think if you shoot with under 5 seconds left in most cases the animation will time out. I also don't like how the other teams gain levels at the same time and speed you do. Blitzball is not hard to master, even if you don't seek out the best players. It just requires time. But that would make the XP exploits a lot more fun to exploit. The game is also very repetitive in that in most cases you can have a good endurance center pass to a good shooter on the left or right and just dominate. there is little variation in matches themselves.

I am a huge fan of random numbered year sports games so i absolutely loved the effort put into it and the fact it was, despite those issues a competent sports game in a huge RPG. I also enjoyed the version of it in X2, probably because it wasn't as interactive, so it required less time if i remembered right.