Fans' expectations of Final Fantasy X may be greater than those of any other game at this year's E3. Only small bits of the game could be played, but it should be as much of a hit as its Playstation predecessors were.

Final Fantasy VII's use of the PlayStation's power allowed it to include graphics an order of magnitude above those in VI. Final Fantasy X does not make the same level of graphical improvement upon IX, but improvement is noticable--not so much in the FMVs in and of themselves, but the ordinary real-time rendered sequences are remarkable. Tidus (pronounced TEE-dus by Square's demo movie) has several visible facial expressions, and the movements of the characters' bodies very closely approximate actual humans.

Little could be seen of the game's plot. The situation in the two playable scenes moved fast; FFX will be quite exciting to play if the rest of the game is similar. The amount of spoken dialogue in the game is one of the biggest things that seperates it from PlayStation predecessors: every bit of plot dialogue in the demo is spoken aloud by respective characters. It was not obvious whether this would carry to non-plot dialogue with townspeople, as town exploration was not included in the demo.

As was already known, the characters in Final Fantasy X resemble those from VIII more than IX, so it is likely that those who preferred VIII will enjoy it more. This isn't to say that those who disliked VIII will hate it, though, the gameplay options are notably different. For example, summoning a monster replaces your party with the summoned creature until it runs out of hit points, and you control its actions directly. Whether the game will be enough by itself to warrant buying a PlayStation 2 remains to be seen, but it is possible that Final Fantasy X will have as much of an impact on the new Sony system as the groundbreaking Final Fantasy VII had on the first PlayStation.