The original FFX had a story with many elements of maturity and many elements of immaturity. Story-wise, FFX-2 actually elected to discard all of the elements of maturity while keeping all of the elements of immaturity. Paine's character is PAINEfully underdeveloped, for which there is no excuse in a 128-bit game with only three playable characters. This game is the only one in the series with poor music, which is campy and repetitive, with the exception of the two vocal J-POP songs, which are decent. The animation of the 3-D models is also noticeably uninspired in this game, with many NPCs engaging in unrealistic and irritating animation loops.

Despite having a weak story and poor music, this is still a good game, and probably the best in the series in terms of diversity of play. Less time is spent battling in this game than any other in the FF series, and more of that time is spent playing mini-games. Rather than having field screens be bland paths seperating towns, there are many things in each environment to interact with. 'Hanging out,' in the world of FFX-2 is fun at times, but the poor overall presentation of the game keeps the player from wanting to do too much of it. Although FFX-2's battle system is slightly worse than FFX's overall, the battles in FFX-2 can be fun, with the combination of FFX's battle camera and ATB. Re-working ATB to consider the position of enemies, and giving the characters the ability to delay enemy attacks by hitting them at the right time, was a good idea, but the variety of mechanically-unique battle scenarios in the game wasn't sufficient to encourage players to actually formulate tactics around this mechanic.
The original FFX had a story with many elements of maturity and many elements of immaturity. Story-wise, FFX-2 actually elected to discard all of the elements of maturity while keeping all of the elements of immaturity. Paine's character is PAINEfully underdeveloped, for which there is no excuse in a 128-bit game with only three playable characters. This game is the only one in the series with poor music, which is campy and repetitive, with the exception of the two vocal J-POP songs, which are decent. The animation of the 3-D models is also noticeably uninspired in this game, with many NPCs engaging in unrealistic and irritating animation loops. Despite having a weak story and poor music, this is still a good game, and probably the best in the series in terms of diversity of play. Less time is spent battling in this game than any other in the FF series, and more of that time is spent playing mini-games. Rather than having field screens be bland paths seperating towns, there are many things in each environment to interact with. 'Hanging out,' in the world of FFX-2 is fun at times, but the poor overall presentation of the game keeps the player from wanting to do too much of it. Although FFX-2's battle system is slightly worse than FFX's overall, the battles in FFX-2 can be fun, with the combination of FFX's battle camera and ATB. Re-working ATB to consider the position of enemies, and giving the characters the ability to delay enemy attacks by hitting them at the right time, was a good idea, but the variety of mechanically-unique battle scenarios in the game wasn't sufficient to encourage players to actually formulate tactics around this mechanic.