When I first heard the glorious music, sound effects, and yes, voice acting of Final Fantasy X, it was on my brother\u2019s Playstation 2, which was most definitely his and not ours and we were not to even think about touching it without his permission. Anyway, I heard him begin the game, and at first was, believe it or not, unimpressed. The voice acting was cool, sure, but I knew from the second that first full motion video played that the game had to be ridiculously short. It just had to be. That was always the tradeoff with games that used FMV, right?<\/p>\n
Obviously, I was very, very wrong. I was used to the way things used to be, and Final Fantasy X, though not a launch title, was fairly early in the PS2 era. I quickly learned that the game was actually quite long indeed, and get this, it had a bunch of those little FMV\u2019s too! Now I was officially impressed, but I still kind of dismissed it. After all, I had never been able to play a full RPG before, so why should I be able to now? Even with voice acting, it just wouldn\u2019t be enough, would it?<\/p>\n
I remember that I actually tried the demo first. Back in the days of demo discs, I used to receive one per month, and would always mess around with them. I had success with the demo, but even then, I thought it was just a one off. The demo is fairly short, and mostly just demonstrates combat with very little to worry about otherwise. I wasn\u2019t quite there yet.<\/p>\n
It was actually my brother, the very person who got me into video games in the first place, who suggested that I try Final Fantasy X. \u201cYou should start your own game!\u201d he said one day after a particularly difficult battle. I scoffed at the idea, but by this point in my life I had already done some pretty cool stuff in games, so I figured I\u2019d at least try. And so, one fine morning, I started playing Final Fantasy X, and did not stop for many, many hours. Turns out it was pretty playable after all.<\/p>\n
Make no mistake. Final Fantasy X requires a lot of patience if you\u2019re blind. In the first many, many hour session I played, I didn\u2019t get as far as a sighted person might in the same amount of hours. The facts are that the game isn\u2019t designed with us in mind, so we have to take some things into account. We still can\u2019t actually see where we\u2019re going, so we have to be willing to wander a bit until we can find our destination. We also can\u2019t see items or people in the world, so it behooves us to basically mash the X button as we wander in order to find people or items and interact with them. It\u2019s kind of a silly system, but ultimately it works.<\/p>\n
The good news for us is that there is no jumping of any sort. This means that there is never a platform we need to jump to, and thus we know that, wherever our destination is, it\u2019s on the ground we\u2019re standing on. It\u2019s hard to explain why this is important, but consider this. If the option to jump even exists, it\u2019s reasonable to expect that you have to use it in some circumstances. If, like us, you cannot see the platform you must jump to in order to proceed, how would you know when to jump? Even if you just jumped around the whole time, you may not even realize you\u2019re on a new level than you were before, and may keep jumping right off of it. In short, with games that aren\u2019t designed to be played by the blind, the less jumping the better.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s another piece of good news. Combat menus in Final Fantasy X don\u2019t wrap. This means they can be memorized, and even used to determine whose turn it currently is. For example, when the game begins, Tiad the main character only has 2 options in his combat menu: attack and item. Aurin, however, has 3 options, because he possesses a magical ability called armor break. Using this small difference, we can tell if it\u2019s Tidas\u2019s turn, or Aurin\u2019s. The combat menus of all characters will grow as they level up and gain new abilities, but that just means we need to pay attention to when our party members learn new tricks. It\u2019s pretty awesome, and enables us to use essentially the same strategies anyone else would in combat.<\/p>\n
Speaking of leveling, though, that\u2019s one of the problem areas of Final Fantasy X. Yes, the game can be played if you\u2019re blind, but with 2 exceptions. One is the leveling system called the sphere grid, and the other is certain sections of the game called the cloisters of trials, which are unskippable and in some cases quite complex.<\/p>\n
Back to leveling, though. The way the sphere grid works seems simple enough. As you fight, you gain sphere levels, which enable you to move an equal number of squares on the sphere grid. You also earn spheres, which are used to unlock sphere grid nodes, which ar what actually increase your stats. You might be thinking, \u201cwell, can\u2019t you just muddle your way through it and level up a bunch of stuff?\u201d And sadly, the answer is no. You see, as long as you have the sphere levels for it, you are not limited in movement. What I mean by this is that you\u2019re just as able to move backwards as forward, and if you cross certain paths, you will end up in the abilities of your other party members. This latter can be useful in the late game, but is certainly not ideal when you\u2019re just starting out. And, because the sphere grid is full of complex pathways, we couldn\u2019t reliably know which way we\u2019re going, which nodes we\u2019re heading to, or whether we\u2019re just going backwards.<\/p>\n
The cloisters are trouble for a different reason. They are all puzzles involving the removal of certain spheres, (notice a theme?) from one spot, and placing them in the correct other spot. We can certainly remove and slot these spheres, but remember we don\u2019t actually have a reference for where we\u2019re going. We could remove a sphere, wander around for a bit, find an empty sphere slot and slap it in, only to then realize we placed it right back in the slot we took it from. And that\u2019s only one problem. We also have no idea which sphere we removed, as there are several different types, some unique to the particular cloister you\u2019re in. Think I\u2019m done? Nope. You also sometimes have to push pedestals into very specific locations, or away from locations they\u2019re blocking, and so on. It\u2019s kind of a nightmare for a blind person.<\/p>\n
Aside from that, though, the game is quite playable. We are even helped out by the roads in the game, which are essentially straight in most cases. Crazy, right? There\u2019s another unplayable bit called Blitzball, but it is fortunately not necessary to succeed at Blitzball to complete the game. It is necessary to play it once, but you don\u2019t actually have to win. Certainly I would like to be able to play Blitzball, but part of playing games like this, games that nobody expected a blind person to play in the first place, is acceptance of an inability to do certain things in those games. Always, always try hard, but be ready to accept that some things just might not work.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure there are some little things I forgot. The playability of that game is kind of like the playability of Diablo 3. So many little things combine to allow us to play it as much as we can. I am proud to say I have beaten the game, and I have my brother to thank once again for steering me toward something great. The funny thing about that particular incident, though, is that he never did that before or since. Aside from that and the practical joke that got me started, he has never tried to get me to try something. It sort of makes me wonder what inspired him that time. In any case, I hope this has enlightened some of you fine folks. I am of course willing to answer any questions I can, so please discuss and ask and share. Thanks for reading, and continue to be awesome!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I first heard the glorious music, sound effects, and yes, voice acting of Final Fantasy X, it was on my brother\u2019s Playstation 2, which was most definitely his and not ours and we were not to even think about touching it without his permission. Anyway, I heard him begin the game, and at first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[36,97,119,299,293,294,295,67,44,95,66,43,296,297,298,91],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-accessibility","tag-accessible-gaming","tag-audio-gaming","tag-aurin","tag-final-fantasy","tag-final-fantasy-x","tag-playstation-2","tag-playstation-3","tag-playstation-4","tag-ps2","tag-ps3","tag-ps4","tag-roleplaying-games","tag-rpgs","tag-tidas","tag-video-games"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=324"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandoncole.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}