I Can't Believe I Finished This Game: Final Fantasy X-2 HD

I probably started playing originally on PS2 about 5 years ago, which was quite a few years after I purchased it. I just never had the time.
I purchased the HD remake on PS Vita, and I can now play it in bed, during lunch breaks, etc.

The usually turn based combat got a bit more active in this one. Attacks can push back an enemies attack (like a stagger) and you can combo your attacks for more damage if you can time them to hit close to one another.

I also love bringing classes back, this time in the form of dress sphere changes. You can swap mid-combat as long as they're in the grid you're equipped with.

The class levelling system is pretty good, with some holes in a few places. Levelling a warrior is painfully slow, levelling a thief is tedious, levelling a black mage takes a lot of mana, and levelling a white mage is astonishingly easy (just auto-heal every turn). You get a class skill point every time you use an ability basically. You also get a point or two on kills.

The graphics were really good for the Vita, and the voice acting was a bit better than FFX.

I'd say the story was overall weaker than FFX, but I did like Paine.

As per the usual, you can grind to your hearts content, and then the rest of the game will be much easier. The addition of the fiend arena makes this much faster and easier. It's also a great way to get items, gil and level your classes.

Here are a few notes I had while playing the game:

As soon as I found out there was a Charm Bangle. I bee-lined for it. I'm shocked at how close it was to the beginning of the game. Shocked. This helped drastically reduce the tediousness associated with exploring areas for chests and alternate paths.

One of the best classes is Lady Luck. It has the awesome abilities of auto-critical hits, doubling experience, doubling gil, and doubling items. This also stacks if you have more than one in a group. Broken. You have to beat Shinra for this in the sphere break tournament. If you don't, he just runs off with it and says something about being "just a kid." What a D-bag.

Holy crap. Chapter 4 is almost nothing but watching these darn cameras and painstakingly waiting for someone to talk to them for some period of time, which is hard to tell when it's over for most of them. I think I need this for the mascot sphere or I would have skipped this. Also, I had a few hours to burn on a plane, so this was slightly less terrible to do.

Chapter 5 is starting better. There are some length puzzles to be done. Gathering Cactuar's is going to be quite tedious. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get close to 100% story completion, but seriously lost my steam halfway through Chapter 5. I finally got the Catnip accessory and Mascot dress sphere. After that, I was ready to just mark this as done.

This game is extremely crashy. I crashed quite often, and also ran into an issue where combat was stuck in wait mode, with no one acting. So I had to force close it. I sent every crash report I could.