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Why Everyone Hates It: Some people hate Final Fantasy 10-2 by association, having hated FF10. Others hate it on the belief that it's just a giant sexist pile of Barbie-dressup, magical girl transformation sequence, Charlie's Angels drivel. Particularly those who have seen the intro sequence.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: FF10-2 does indeed share a setting and some characters with FF10, has the lack of difficulty typical to the more recent games in the series (although not nearly as insultingly easy as the game to which it is a direct sequel), and provides a wide array of evidence that Tetsuya Nomura is a talentless hack of a character designer with no aesthetic sensibility or concept of practicality. Additionally "Final Fantasy Ten Two" is such an affront to the meanings of words that it can't be ignored.
Why I Like It Anyway: Final Fantasy 10-2 is a Final Fantasy game with a Job system. Really, that's all that needs to be said. More specifically, almost the exact same incarnation of the Job system from Final Fantasy Tactics. Nice solid OCD-friendly, building up class abilities one by one in an order of your choosing, FFT jobs, with no having to learn abilities piecemeal from weapons and armor. That's enough to justify playing the game alone, honestly. The unique take on it in this case is that it's possible to fully switch from one job to another mid-battle, altering their ability selection and stats on the fly.
Each character picks from a selection of pattern to customize with nodes for varying different jobs. Mid-battle, it's possible to shift between any jobs connected by a line on the pattern when one's turn comes up. In addition to providing a bonus in and of itself, different patterns have differing numbers of nodes, some are linear when others branch out allowing more switching options, and each character has a special status activated by switching to every job their pattern will hold in a single battle, temporarily taking the other two characters out of the action and switching the user's job to, essentially, giant robot pilot for the next few rounds. It's an option somewhat similar to the functionality of FF10's summoned monsters, but between the extreme hassle of activating it, and the fact that an actual party member is down when one is defeated, this is actually quite nicely balanced.
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This is the big surprising sequel of FF10-2. While again, it is far from a difficult RPG, at least by my admittedly higher than average standards, the abilities characters have access to are well balanced against each other. The traditional damage cap of 9999 is not a number you are prone to see every round in combat, nor will you ever see it popping up a dozen or so times after a single attack. Basic attacks won't become so overpowered that special moves are pointless. Black magic isn't totally pointless in light of incredibly overpowered summons with long cut scenes. Of course, this last point is in part due to respect for the preceding game's ending removing summoner from this game's selection of jobs.
Mercifully, this is one of only a few notable plot connections between the two games. Regardless of one's opinion on FF10's story line and characterization, there really isn't anything about it which demands a follow-up, and 10-2 for the most part doesn't try to force it. Instead, we're skipping ahead a few years, with all the surviving mail characters from FF10 returned home, no longer having any reason to provide their bodyguard services, and with the three girls, now significantly less prone to martyred moping, forming an upbeat company of freelance mercenaries, taking various odd jobs around the world... with one slight change to their roster.
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While Yuna and Rikku are still around, Lulu (the black mage who wears an amazingly slutty dress even by modern Japanese RPG standards and uses magically animated stuffed animals as weapons) has been replaced, with little to no explanation, with a very similar looking newcomer named Paine. Now, if you will indulge me in a bit of editorializing here, Paine is my absolute favorite thing about this game. Not because I have some weird fetish for the 80's punk rocker look. Not because I'm laughing at giving the obligatory dark brooding girl of the trio such an on-the-nose name. No, it's because Paine's very existence and the lack of any proper explanation for her presence in-game leaves such an obvious explanation. Clearly, upon seeing the game's script, the actress playing Lulu was disgusted and walked out, forcing a last minute casting change to one of the others who first tried out for the role. Since she looked too different to pass off as the same character, some minor changes were made to the script, and tada, we have Paine. The game's overall aesthetic is honestly tongue-in-cheek enough that this may honestly have been what they were going for. Arguably, there's a more properly in-universe variation on this, wherein Lulu, being one of the three low-key, likable, surly party members from FF10, quite frankly was absolutely sick of these two bubbly idiots and couldn't get away from them fast enough. Her cameo appearance in the game though honestly supports the first theory more than the second.
The mercenary aspect incidentally has a huge impact on the flow of the game. Much like Final Fantasy Tactics A2, or any given PC-style RPG, FF10-2 is a mission based game. At any given point, the player may take their airship, fly to one of a variety of locations, and find a simple little task to be done, in a light low-pressure approach to providing the meat of the game. Again, this is an interesting contrast to FF10's map-free straight line trudge from point A to point B over the entirety of the game.
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Now, usually at around this point in the feature is when I would begin to discuss the other games in the series, and my thoughts on them in brief. However, this game is in the Final Fantasy series. There is no chance of you being unfamiliar, if only from passing mention of the series in other articles here. There are a few games within the series you may be missing out on. First and foremost, the entries of the series found on the SNES are more or less universally agreed to be amongst the best, if not the best RPGs of all time.
Also of note is Final Fantasy 4: The After Years, AKA Final Fantasy 4-2. Much like 10-2, this is a direct sequel in a series which rarely recycles settings, set many years later, and recycling the vast majority of its artwork from the earlier game. Most likely, it will be due for it's own Devil's Advocate article at some point in the future, but being an episodic game in progress, the jury is still out on its mainstream acceptance. It is very much a game however doomed to a poor reception. Those who have grown bitter and jaded towards the franchise are likely to pass it over, while those still loyal to the brand at this point will in all likelihood be completely alienated by it's shocking difficulty. Between the fan-fiction like story, recycled SNES artwork, and battles which are markedly tougher than the early 90's game that inspired it, the entire experience feels like playing through some strange, ambitious ROM-hack by an obsessive fan than a modern Square-Enix release. So whether the game strikes you as appealing or inherently terrible, odds are very good that it is not the game you're inclined to believe it to be.
Honestly, this same mindset can also be applied to Final Fantasy 10-2. Apparently, as a rule of thumb, when Square-Enix decides to release a remake of a game, they crank the difficulty down significantly, but when they decided to produce a direct sequel, the mechanics are aimed at the more old-school inclined among us. Oh, and for those still disturbed by the crazy, psychedelic rock concert intro to 10-2, you can take some solace in the fact that it really is more or less just being played for shock value, with the rest of the game being much more subdued.
