Blitzball Is Bad And Square Enix Should Feel Bad For Making It

What is it with JRPGs and mediocre minigames?

You Are Reading :Blitzball Is Bad And Square Enix Should Feel Bad For Making It

I’d like to have a very polite word with whoever designed blitzball in Final Fantasy 10. I understand that a fictional world like Spira needs a few nationwide sports to help it feel real, to convince us that its inhabitants exist in a place with a culture that has persisted for centuries. blitzball is a cornerstone of this idea, essentially acting as a weeaboo rendition of football. Or is it rugby? Basketball? Water Polo? It involves throwing and kicking a ball around, there’s a goal, and you do loads of swimming – honestly it’s such an odd combination of different elements that I’m unsure how to describe it. What I can say with absolute certainty is that it sucks.

Our introduction to blitzball comes during the game’s opening moments. Tidus is the star player of the Zanarkand Abes, a legendary team who have conquered every opponent and tournament they’ve come across. They’re unstoppable, the city they inhabit a monument to technological capitalism that will soon come crashing down upon them. Our first strides through the metropolis are accompanied by playful commentary from two blitzball experts, shrouding the upcoming match in a fog of hype that will soon dissipate. From an outsider’s perspective, this sport seems fascinating – I mean, it must be if the entire world is tuning in to watch a single game. I much prefer viewing things as a spectator, but Final Fantasy 10 forces us to step into the shoes of Tidus and get to grips with blitzball ourselves.

Well, it does eventually. The first glimpse of blitzball we see is through a gorgeous CG cutscene where athletes maneuver about the water with unparalleled majesty as they score absolute screamers and pelt rival team members out of the arena and into the crowd. It looks badass, the raucous heavy metal soundtrack and its screaming vocals only increasing our investment in it all. But then the cutscene ends and the game begins, and we don’t see a slither of blitzball for several hours.

Upon arriving in Spira, Tidus is enlisted by Wakka for his blitzball skills, primarily so he can become the star player for the failing Besaid Aurochs. The team’s chances of victory are slim, but with Tidus hundreds of years out of his own time, clinging to a familiar sport with a newfound group of friends is one of the only things he can find comfort in. So we go along with it, the game’s opening locations providing small hints about opposing teams we’ll be competing against in this illustrious blitzball competition. Once we reach the modern city of Luca, the sport becomes our entire focus for a couple of hours, and this section of the game remains an exhausting slog to get through.

You don’t have to win at blitzball, you simply have to play a handful of games and progress through the story, but even this is a chore that has me rolling my eyes whenever I strap in for another playthrough. I dread the inevitable involvement of blitzball, a virtual rendition of sporting mediocrity that seems to misunderstand how anything and everything works in its real-world counterparts. You carry the ball with your hands, yet goals can only be scored by seemingly kicking or throwing it towards the goalie and praying to RNGesus that the numbers that determine everything don’t screw you over. There’s no skill involved, the various players you can control don’t matter, and the pacing of each game is so scattershot that assembling some form of strategy is utterly pointless. My advice is to score an early goal and swim behind the net because the AI can’t handle it – the other team will simply idle around confused as a goldfish until the timer counts down to zero. Job done.

Final Fantasy is no stranger to minigames, but not many of them impede your progress like blitzball does. 15 lets you go fishing, while 9 has a great little card game for you to play. 14 is filled with loads of these distractions, but you could pour thousands of hours into the MMORPG without seeing any of them. That’s how optional activities like this should operate, but Square Enix must have been super proud of blitzball to give the pile of garbage a starring role. Once the tournament is over you won’t hear about blitzball again until you acquire an airship and the ability to revisit old locations becomes a thing. You can recruit Wakka to your team despite his early retirement and play ball to your heart’s content, but you’d have to be a masochistic completionist to ever entertain such a thought.

I’ve heard fans talk about wanting a standalone blitzball game in the past, and I’d love to try what they’re smoking. Maybe I’m so against it because I didn’t want a boring sport mixing itself up with my JRPG. The weird thing is, I admire blitzball in terms of the substance it brings to Final Fantasy 10’s world. It truly belongs in the setting, bringing a sense of community to many of its locations as citizens gather around and cheer for their teams as they prepare for the global tournament. But the sport itself just isn’t well realised, held back by an archaic set of rules that make the act of engaging with it a chore. The genre should have components like this, but maybe keep them in the background next time?

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/final-fantasy-10-blitzball-sucks/