Is Blitzball a divisive mini-game in Final Fantasy X? It is the Internet so regardless of the question you ask you are going to get multiple answers and the same goes for players' feelings about Blitzball. Some love it, some hate it, and some are ambivalent about it. Me, I am not a fan of Blitzball, especially after playing my first round of Blitzball nearly seven hours into the game. I could not tell you if you are predestined to win the first Blitzball tournament you actively play in, because when I played it, last Saturday night, that was how it felt to me. That I was supposed to win, which I will get to below. And if you are not wanting to read an entire article about why I played Blitzball so horribly and why I am going to put 86.47% of the blame on the game and not my own competent JRPG skills, then we will see you on Monday because the rant/complaining/git-gud-fest is about to begin.
For people who are not familiar with Final Fantasy X (like me a few weeks back), Blitzball is a fictional sport played by people in the fictional world of Spira where Final Fantasy X takes place. It is a mix of soccer/football, water polo, and rugby. There are six players on a team, including a goalie. Each team tries to get the ball into their opponent's goal by passing between players and eventually shooting/kicking the ball past the goalie and into the goal. The game is played in a sphere that is filled with water, so all the players are swimming (albeit without any kind of self-contained underwater breathing apparatus or any explanation as to how people breathe underwater so I am just assuming that this is a normal trait for humans or humes in this world), but the plane is only horizontal to keep the game from being too complicated; so the players are only swimming left and right, and not up and down. Each player has active abilities such as special tackles and shooting moves that they can use at the fourth level when they engage other players. As you play in the game, characters can level up and learn new skills, but the opposing team levels up and learns at the same time too, which makes the game progressively more difficult. That is all the background I will give because you could probably write an entire Prima Guide about Blitzball and we are not that.
The player is first introduced to Blitzball during the opening of the game when the main character Tidus leaves his bachelor boat to go play in a Blitzball game at a massive stadium in the metropolitan city of Zanarkand. At this point, you do not actually play Blitzball, but instead, just watch a movie of the characters playing, and then you take control again after a giant amorphous sphere called Sin attacks Zanarkand and destroys parts of the city and the stadium. I received my first tutorial in Blitzball about five hours into the game when the team that Tidus finds himself on presumably goes into the water sphere for practice before a tournament. This tutorial is long. As in there are 12 topics to cover, each with multiple pages of text to read through. Thankfully though a lot of the tutorial is hands-on so you are reading the description of what a particular action does or what a specific attribute is and how it relates to the player offensively and defensively and then you perform that action or see how your actions affect other players. I appreciated that much at least because, for me, I tend to learn better by doing as opposed to reading something and then knowing how to do something.
After you finish the tutorial, you do not actually play a match of Blitzball, instead, you then go on a hunt to look for another character which leads to another character getting kidnapped and you do mostly typical JRPG running, talking, and battling. While this is happening, your team is playing a match and ends up winning, but one of the key players, Wakka, is injured and has to sit out. All of this would probably take about 45-60 minutes, except for me, I played over the course of two nights, so I went through the tutorial on the evening of Tuesday, May 3rd, and then played my first Blitzball game the evening of Friday, May 7th. So it is my fault a bit for waiting nearly four days before playing my first game, but in my defense, I thought that I was not going to play because there was the whole 'rescue the kidnapped person' instead of playing Blitzball.
So Tidus is pulled onto the team and takes the proverbial field with all the skills of someone who has never played Blitzball before even though the character is presented to be a superstar in the sport with a multitude of fans who wait outside the stadium and crowd around him as he enters. And then the game starts!
And I have forgotten almost all of the terminology, what any of the buttons do, and apart from getting the ball in the opponent's goal, I am utterly lost.
However, I did take the in-game advice and I left the game on auto-play, so the computer controls your characters as they swim around in the sphere and you only make decisions when one of your players carrying the ball is stopped by an opposing player. Then you can decide what action to take while evaluating your opponent's stats. But again, I have forgotten specifically what the various stats meant, how they are calculated against your opponent's stats, and really everything else. I was pretty irritated to find out that pausing the game did not bring up any kind of refresher or tutorial and the options menu and button config screen did not have anything specifically for Blitzball, which did not play as much into my frustration until overtime, but I am getting a little ahead of myself.
So the first quarter of Blitzball started with the game on auto-play, figuring that this was the safest option because I could not remember a lot about the tutorial and figured the game would do a better job of playing than I would. I cannot say for sure, but it felt like the computer was playing a stalemate game against itself with a little intervention from me because, at the end of the first quarter (5 minutes in-game), the score was tied 0-0. You are then brought to a screen that shows you how each player leveled up (or didn't) on the other team, the Goers, followed by your team. You can then move your cursor through the players, but what this is supposed to show I don't know because there was no additional information presented on-screen and it didn't seem to matter who you clicked on to take you to the player position screen. The positions were essentially like soccer with an L/R Forward, Midfielder, L/R Defense, and a goalie, but you could move players around. I guess? I don't know if a particular player excels in a specific position and if you move them around then your goalie Sasso is going to be a garbage Left Forward and the game does not give any explanation as to how the stats affect a player in a particular position. So I just left everyone in the positions the game had them default in. You can also equip players with skills/abilities if they are a high enough level (level 4) and then you can assign them marks, being other players to learn a new skill from them (think Blue Mages in the FF series, which are usually my least of the magic users), but only if that skill is highlighted blue and if that skill is used against them. I think. Then you move on to the next quarter and repeat.
I did this for the entirety of the match until overtime, not really knowing what was going on and feeling pretty lost, but all the while fortunate that the Goers had not scored, through whatever luck I was experiencing. Before the beginning of OT, Wakka apparently recovered enough and swaps out with Tidus, and it was at this point, once the first quarter of OT started that I read a FAQ about this specific match, to find out if you are supposed to win, or supposed to lose, or what, that I switched the game over to Manual A (no idea what the difference between Manual A and Manual B is though) halfway through the first OT. This just meant that I could control whoever has the ball as well as pick the actions when prompted. Again, I became pretty frustrated with the controls because nothing seemed to activate anything or bring up a menu except to switch from Auto to Manual.
I kid you not when I say that I lost track of how many overtimes we played, but I know that there were at least seven OTs because I knew there were five and at least two past that. There was one instance somewhere around the third or fourth OT where I had Wakka in a good position, I managed to press (I think the B button?) to have him make a shot on the goal with a good enough SH score against the goalie's lower score, but I made the shot with only 6 seconds left on the clock and apparently when the time runs out, the game stops, regardless of where the ball is, so I will never know if that ball would have gone into the goal or not. The same thing happened against the opposing team a few OTs later too, with the time running out on the clock before their shot, which definitely would have gone into the goal, could be completed. It was definitely around the end of the 5th OT that I genuinely stopped caring and at least one OT quarter I tried to actively lose, but that obviously did not work.
Eventually, sometime around OT 7 or 10, I managed to get Wakka in position to shoot against the goalie (having read that only Wakka or Tidus have the SH skill high enough to score against the goalie) and managed to score the one and only goal.
I was tired and frustrated. After saving the game, it was then I noticed that the entire match, which I had expected to take 10-15 minutes because it is a mini-game after all, took 1 hour 23 minutes 28 seconds (at least from the last save point before the match starts). I recognize that the game took a lot longer than it should have from all of the OTs, but I was still frustrated with how this game was introduced to the player by way of the tutorial, taking a fair amount of aspects of the game for granted, and the execution of Blitzball as a mini-game within the larger foundation of the game. I get that in Final Fantasy there was the whole Chocobo raising mini-game, in Final Fantasy VIII there is the card game Triple Triad, and a similar card game of Tetra Master in Final Fantasy IX, so Final Fantasy X had to have its own world-specific mini-game that everyone plays. I also read that recruiting various players for your Blitzball team is its own thing and you have to do something Blitzball-related after building your S-List team to get some of the best gear in the game and that kind of Gold-Chocobo-level-grinding I do not want to deal with.
I am just not into Blitzball.
Now, I am fewer than 10 hours into Final Fantasy X but I do get that in the world of Spira when there is a giant nearly immortal entity that wreaks destruction across the planet, the population needs an outlet for entertainment to take their minds off the fact that an entire village might have just been destroyed the previous week. I do like the idea of an activity that is usually skill and dexterity-based turned into a turn-based battle (which is probably why I liked Hybrid Heaven so much), I just am not a fan of how Blitzball has been handled so far in the game. I feel like there were plenty of instances where the tutorial could have been used, such as an earlier flashback between Tidus and his dad, or sometime after Tidus washes ashore on Besaid and he could have had amnesia resulting in him needing to relearn Blitzball. Instead, the player is given a forward-heavy tutorial with little practical practice and is then thrown into a final match against a superior team with a character who is a superstar in the sport.
Maybe I am being too harsh, but I really do not think so. Maybe? There have been a couple of times that upon saving the game, you are given the option to play Blitzball (how/why?) and I just do not feel interested. I read that there will be at least one other required Blitzball game and I just hope that the game will not expect me to have built up my team to the level where I am expected to win in order to proceed with the story, because I will be very disappointed in the game. I really hope that will not be the case.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
P.S. Just so I get it out of the way, if you have made it down this far, I am not a fan of Gwent in The Witcher III either. I could probably write a similar article about that in-game card game, but I do not know if I have it in me after today's Blitzball article. Maybe I just do not like mini-games in my RPGs?
P.P.S. And no, I did not make the Jecht-shot while on the boat. I thought I was watching a cinematic and plus, there was no on-screen prompt to push whatever button you were supposed to press the learn the Jecht-shot. Just another thing I was annoyed about.
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