My backlog is always….backlogged, among several systems. On Steam, my Nintendo 3DS, PS4, or PS3 there are world’s I have yet to explore and quests yet to be completed. During my winter break from work (I work as a teacher in a charter school), I wanted to see which games I haven’t played on my PS3. Unfortunately, it decided not to work and I thought it was broken until I unplugged all the cables, and tried again. Thankfully that worked, as I had already recently tried a fancy technique to fix the hard drive which did not want to finish the system update. The PS3 can be a headache at times.
Well, one of the games I bought years ago but never even turned on was Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster. I’ve already beat both games years ago a little after they were released, so I thought I would just revisit them for a while. I wasn’t aware that there were two never before released bonuses in the game, which are Final Fantasy X: Eternal Calm and Final Fantasy X-2: Last Mission. As of this writing, I haven’t tried out Eternal Calm, so I will play it later on. Last Mission though, I did try it out as I remember Paine and Rikku as funny characters. I’m not a fan of Yuna with a gun, but hey, it’s video games.
The mission starts off with an invitation that the three main heroines receive to a rumored tower. They hijack their friend’s ship and ride out to this mysterious location, which of course, they find immediately. Once you land and prepare to enter, the gameplay changes. This tower doesn’t play like Final Fantasy X-2 originally does, which has leveling, experience, turn-based combat, magic/skills, and other familiar features. If you’ve heard of a “rogue-like” game, then this would fall into that category but a little more difficult. What happens is, you move on the map from a top-down perspective and every step you take, the enemy takes one also. If they are near, they attack, if not you can avoid them. You start on level 1, and gain experience through battles and level up. The issue is, if you lose all your HP then you have to start again from level 1. The tower has floors and as you go up each floor, the game increases in difficulty and greater chances of losing.
I didn’t get very far as I knew I would not be putting the amount of effort and time to see this through. It reminded me of an older game which had this same mechanic called Dragon Seeds for the PS1. You would have a monster/creature as your companion and fight your way to the top of the tower, which I was never able to complete even though I put a lot of hours into it.
Overall, if you want to try a new way to play Final Fantasy X-2, I would give it a try but don’t expect to be blown away. I see it as more of a side game, it’s just too frustrating to put in over an hour of gameplay to just start from the beginning with nothing to show for it. If you could keep your level and lose your items, for example, then I would have given it a chance.
If you won’t get around to playing the game, here’s a video that has all the cutscenes that appear throughout Last Mission together.