FFX-2 Basic Weapons Pack

Description
Y\'know what I think when I think of FFX-2? I think \"Jesus, way to hook the adolescent male gamer population, SE!\". While there were some neat gameplay elements, half of them didn\'t come into play very often. Chain attacks, for example - Squall\'s limit break system was more controllable than those. Oh, and the \"ultimate dressphere\" stuff was lame. Shoulda just had a summoner class, or a tamer-type class (since the Aeons were, like, apparently dead). One other thing that annoyed me is that they killed off Bahamut, Ifrit and Shiva - the main summoned characters from throughout the series. Other than those few things which would only really annoy long-term fans of the classic (i.e. pre-FF7) games, s\'all OK.

(Yeah, screw Valefor and Ixion, they only got in \'cuz Square couldn\'t afford Fenrir and Ramuh\'s salary demands. >_> )

*cough* Y\'see, there\'s a classic example of adhering to Shakespeare\'s #1 proverb: \"If you don\'t know what to say, just talk about some random {beep} and hope nobody notices!\"

What does that have to do with anything, you ask? Well, it doesn\'t, actually. I just couldn\'t think of a good way to start the review. Don\'t judge me. :(

Anyway, this pack contains - as if you hadn\'t already guessed or skipped straight to the screenshots - Paine\'s Warrior sword, Yuna\'s Gunner pistol, and Rikku\'s Thief knife-things from FFX-2.

The first thing I did, as usual, was check for authenticity. Now, where the hell Inyri got her refs from, I don\'t know, because from the junk I found I certainly wouldn\'t have been able to model these. Guess that makes Prima guides reliable for two things: being wrong about everything, and providing good reference images. These aren\'t perfectly accurate - perfect accuracy on these weapons is impossible to achieve simply because there are no perfect reference images - but they\'re as close as can be, if Inyri had the same pool of references as I have.

One inaccuracy I did find was Yuna\'s pistol - the fancy-but-impractical design thingy on the back of the barrel seems vastly smaller than in X-2; however, I always thought having a gigantic decoration on the back of your gun was stupid anyway, so I\'m fine with that change. Oh, and that same decorative thingy is the wrong color. But whatever, that\'s nitpicking.

Second thing I checked for was errors. I couldn\'t find any, of course, even when looking pretty close. That\'s not to say there are no errors, I just couldn\'t find them. So, if they\'re there, they\'ll have no effect on gameplay.

Most of the things I could pick out to mention are purely aesthetic. Yuna\'s gun, for starters, seems blocky. Then again, the Q3 engine handles considerably less polies than the engine used for FFX-2, so it shouldn\'t really suprise me, although I think maybe the detail could have been a little bit better. Paine\'s sword is accurate enough, the hilt guard just doesn\'t look exactly right to me - can\'t explain it, just seems a little off. Naturally, Rikku\'s weapons have a gameplay imbalance, and don\'t really look right since the animations were made for lightsabers, but hey - they work, so who really cares?

As an extra, versions of Rikku\'s thief [i]things[/i] are available which seem to have been redesigned for Paine and Yuna.

Two bugs were pointed out in the readme. #1: When throwing/dropping the Paine and Yuna thief [i]thing[/i]s, you\'ll see the default - this is because of an engine glitch in rendering weapons using the CustomSkin line in the .sab files. #2: This pack will clash with other files that use a modified sp_ingame.str file. To fix these clashes, open this pk3 in Pakscape and delete the file - it\'s not necessary anyway, just a little extra addon.

Well, for those FFX-2 fans out there, or just general people who like the look of the weapons, download away.

~ Kouen