Final Fantasy IX

I've played this game many times, but the definitive version is the Steam version with Moguri Mod - it is worth replaying just to experience it.

Final Fantasy IX is arguably one of the best games in the series, and my personal favourite. By returning to their roots, Final Fantasy IX feels like the perfect swan song and love letter to its fans. Playing the game now feels like a bittersweet celebration of the golden era of RPGs which is now long before us.

Despite being disregarded on release, it has since had a retrospective renaissance amongst fans of the series. I think one of the reasons for this, is that the game has aged beautifully. The art style is simply stunning to look at (and is even more jaw-dropping with the Moguri Mod). The character models are drop down gorgeous and the pre-rendered graphics are equally captivating. The music is as good as anything that came before it; though it would be hard to call it the best OST because Final Fantasy always had stellar music (it was Uematsu's favourite though, so that must mean something). Being at the end of the PlayStation’s lifecycle meant that Square were able to push the technical boundaries of the system. Where Final Fantasy VII and VIII look like dusty old relics of their time and have aged horribly, Final Fantasy IX still has a mesmerising timelessness to it. Added to that, the characters themselves have so much personality, charm, and life to them, it's hard not to fall in love with the cast, the world and the inhabitants in it.

Of course, as with every Final Fantasy game there are some flaws. There are some issues with the gameplay being a bit slow, both in terms of battles and in relation to the story pacing. I admit the story lacks the urgency of previous titles, but I do personally love the fantasy-style setting and the story is is one of the most heartfelt and deeper stories to come out of the series. Despite being light-hearted in nature, there is a lot of dark tragedy along the way, as it tackles mature themes of the meaning of life, death, identity and coming to terms with our own mortality.

As for the battles. Yes, they are slow. I think that is partially down to the system being pushed beyond its means. Load times are much longer, and the ATB system was probably getting a bit tired by this point. Despite these flaws, I do really like the class-based system that was used in this game. The simplicity of the ability system is welcomed over previous convoluted systems like the materia system in FFVII or the junction system in FFVIII. I’m happy to trade character customisation for more balance. Characters have pre-defined roles which is great because it means every character retains their individual strength and weaknesses right up until the end game. I don't think we've had a game since FFIV whereby every character feels essential and balanced in their own unique way, and this really helps the gameplay because at many points you will be following characters through their own story scenes and you'll have to approach different strategies depending on who your party is. I just wish the battles were harder to capitalise on the different classes.

One of the reasons why this is a firm favourite of mine, is the huge amount of replayability. There are loads of secrets and trophies to collect that are not essential to the overall game, but are very satisfying to collect. Getting the Excalibur II (Steiner's ultimate weapon) requires a speed-run in under 12 hours which is very challenging but satisfying once you've achieved it. Mastering all the little mini-games that show themselves throughout the game can be fiendishly difficult. I spent over 100 hours getting a perfect rank in Tetra Master - it's a mini-game that is widely criticised, but I have to say, the more I played it, the more addictive and fun it became. I just think it’s a shame that the rules were not explained well because I think had more people understood the mechanics more people would have enjoyed it. Getting all these trophies took me 400 hours, which is insane considering a normal playthrough would take you maybe 30-40 hours. Even after those 400 hours I was sad to finish the game, and wanted to do it all over again.

There has always been some strong contention as to what the best Final Fantasy is, but I really do think Final Fantasy IX is the pinnacle of the series and the most representative of the series. Unlike other games in the series, FFIX hasn't aged much at all and I think has so much heart and soul throughout that it stands above all the others.

Not a fan of this game. The pacing is leaden in both the storyline and the combat system. The characters range from meh to annoying and lack good development, the art style is very inconsistent with some areas and characters looking more human but cartoony and others looking incomprehensible and off putting, main character and villain are Cloud and Sephiroth lite, musical score is very average and not memorable like 7 and 8’s scores were. Just not a very good game and very overrated.

Vivi my beloved.

Square's storytelling talent peaked with Final Fantasy IX, that boasted perhaps their most charming cast to date. Standouts range from the wisecracking protagonist Zidane to the tragicomic, hyperbolic Steiner to the anguished subplot-ridden Vivi (easily Square's finest effort, a masterful exercise in video game character-building), to the incredibly goofy Quina (who wouldn't feel out of place in FFVII's roster). Even outside those highlights, the overall cast, setting, story moments and atmosphere carry a refreshingly harmless sense of whimsy - ostensibly meant as a tribute to their roots.

That's where the positives end. Gameplay-wise, it seems as though Squaresoft took one too many cues from the slow-motion cinematic battle experiences of Xenogears and Chrono Cross. The heavy load times and elaborate, but overlong animations don't help shake the feeling that their ATB system is beginning to show its age. Their systems fared even worse - providing yet another slight adjustment to FFV/FFVI's skill mastery, while the Trance mechanic is simply unreliable and unfocused. Square's knack for breathtaking moments had reached its formal zenith at the expense of gameplay. Final Fantasy IX remains a delightful romp that also - in some way, signalled the end of an era.

The first disc of FF9 is an utter masterpiece. Playing it for the first time, I really felt like I was playing Sakaguchi's magnum opus. From the immaculate pacing to the synergy between the gameplay and the story, this was poised to be the culmination of everything the series had been building up to. Even the skill system fixed my issues with 6 and 7 where every character played virtually the same. I was giddy with excitement for the rest of the game.

And then disc 2 happens.

What follows is a slow and gradual decline that still hurts to remember. FF9 is a good game, maybe even the best in the series, but it could have been so much more.

The first clue that I got that something was wrong was when the cast visits Cleyra, a city that the game had build up continuously as impenetrable, only for it to be eviscerated in a matter of minutes. This felt to me like a lost opportunity where the game never managed to truly convey the city's status as a stronghold in a tangible manner. But still, this was simply a small misstep, nothing to worry about I said. And then the main characters use magical teleporters that are conveniently installed on the enemy's airship to rejoin the other party member's. And this is when I started getting worried. This felt like a such a cheap asspull from the writers to reunite the party in the most nonsensical way. Why the fuck would these transporters be there and why wouldn't the enemies use them as well? What's even the point of having airships if you can instantly teleport to other locations? This unfortunately set a precedent for what was to follow for the rest of the game.

Oh look, Garnet lost her voice, how dramatic. Except she gets it back in less than an hour.

Here's Amarant, he's a badass who's gonna join your team and he sure seems mysterious. Except he has no personality whatsoever and is completely pointless.

Zidane is just a charming rogue character who goes against the archetypes of the previous melodramatic protagonists. Except he's actually a clone, or something, from an alternate dimension and this gives him an existential crisis that's just a repeat of Cloud's.

Here's Garnet and Eiko's backstory as summoners, this sure seems important to the overall narrative. Nah, forget all about that and let's focus on this dimension warping villain.

Boy I sure hope we get more info on Freya. Nope, the writers forgot she ever existed.

Wow, I love how operatic and gleeful Kuja is as a villain, almost feels like a satire on Sephiroth. Surely they won't do anything wrong with him. Oh what's that, he's also a clone from a different dimension and he also goes through a generic existential crisis. Well, Fuck Me.

And so on and so forth. FF9 was at its most elegant and masterful when it kept things simple. I truly wish the cast was kept at 4 with Zidane, Garnet, Vivi and Steiner since they're also the only ones the plot develops in any significant way. The chemistry between them was magnetic whereas every additional member felt underused in comparison. There are still moments in the latter parts of the game that manage to briefly recapture the game's earlier sense of magic but they are far and few.

In summation, I like FF9 overall and I adore the first disc specifically. So much so that I wish the rest of the game was just as great.

The problem here is the same one I have with every other Final Fantasy game I've played (VI, VII, and the GBA remakes of I, II, and IV): it's too damned easy. Every Final Fantasy puts so much work into creating some really cool combat, leveling, and ability systems with a bunch of great party members, and then gives you little to no reason to actually explore those options in any depth. In this particular instalment, you have eight main party members that have a variety of skills they can learn by equipping certain equipment, and to really bring out the best in these characters you have to fight multiple battles with that equipment so they can learn those skills permanently and build a repertoire of great abilities. The characters all more or less fit established Final Fantasy archetypes - thief, knight, summoner, black mage, blue mage, dragoon, white mage, monk - but some unique abilities give each character their own spin. (I particularly like Quina's method of acquiring blue magic from enemies, which functionally is more like catching Pokémon than simply hoping RNG blesses you with the right move.) Make interesting pairings of certain characters and you'd have the potential for some interesting strategies.

Yet to be able to learn those skills across multiple characters and test out different combinations in a meaningful way would require difficult encounters; instead, the game keeps things easy so the casual player isn't overwhelmed, and if you want to really dig into the systems you become so overleveled that you'd have no use for advanced strategies anyway. (Making this worse is the autosave feature present on later releases of the game, which ensures that there are zero stakes in dying to a boss and actually discourages experimenting with different loadouts, since you can just zip back in with what you just used to try and make that work.) On top of that, half the areas in the game really dial back on random enemy encounters, to the point where I could go halfway through an area and still be unsure whether or not it had enemies. The only real challenges come through secret bosses locked behind obscure sidequests that have nothing to do with the actual good gameplay and tend to involve playing awkward minigames that aren't very fun to play. (The Chocobo Hot & Cold RNG shit that the bulk of this game's sidequests revolve around seemed extremely not worth my time.) I suppose the final area of the game ramps up the difficulty a bit, but even then, I barely prepped for the area and still made it through without too many hiccups.

Of course, the core Final Fantasy gameplay is enjoyable even when it's easy, and to the game's credit, there are some obvious things being done in an effort to prevent stagnation - the first twenty hours or so of the game are very linear, with your characters constantly on the run without given much reason or opportunity to explore and therefore grind. (It also means you're working with limited gold, so you have to be a little more choosy with which equipment you're willing to buy.) The game also constantly switches up your party, forcing you to spend time with every character to learn them a little and give them a shot. The unique leveling system of Final Fantasy VIII - which scales enemies' strength based on your own level - suggests Squaresoft were aware of this common RPG pitfall and trying to fight it, but without committing to a full-on hard difficulty (or a separate game mode) and building the game to accommodate, I don't know if there's a way to successfully do it. (Honestly, I think the only turn-based JRPG I've personally seen pull it off - though I'm sure there are others - is Dragon Quest XI with the "Tougher Enemies" Draconian Quest turned on. Pitch-perfect difficulty.)

Without real active engagement, you're basically left to just kinda vibe with the rhythm of the game, fall in with the story and the aesthetics. And they're... Fine? This game was an intentional throwback to the straight medieval fantasy aesthetic after the last few games in the series had shaken it up a bit, but I think the change in scenery for VI and especially VII are what helped make their stories among the series' strongest. Here things seem a little all over the place - we hardly ever get a sense of the history of any of the series' core nations (especially Burmecia, the only truly unique nation the game provides), and entire continents are virtually uninhabited. The game eventually pans out to some larger cosmic plot (with really boring villains) that has little to nothing to do with the warring nations - centered around a pair of antagonists and a set of lore that quite frankly are not very interesting - undermining the personal motivations of the many of the game's central characters.

I think that's the biggest wasted opportunity - once you assemble the entire party, many characters simply become irrelevant, and certain stories that felt like they could be big don't amount to anything. Freya's finds her lost love, only to discover he has lost his memories... And that's it. He just disappears for the rest of the story and it's not commented until everyone gets their happy ending. The seedlings of an arc that Steiner gets early in the game - realizing he was naught but Brahne's puppet - fall away as he simply becomes Garnet's puppet in the end, even if Garnet is, uh, not an evil hideous beast. (Down with the monarchy, etc.) Amarant barely gets a character arc; he joins the party last, so he doesn't get much individual story time and mostly serves as the rogue that complains about Zidane liking his friends.

It's only through the game's core characters - Zidane, Garnet, and especially Vivi - that the game's core themes, of reckoning with your mortality and free will, are potently realized. Vivi in particular is a powerful character, who barely understands his own existence and is mortified to learn how he was created and what others of his species are doing. The way he evolves from the bumbling, shy kid to being very passionate about the lives of his fellow Black Mages is really evocative (so much that I really wish I could hear someone acting him out); the moment where he bursts out in anger upon discovering the Black Mages are voluntarily working with Kuja is legitimately unsettling. Then seeing how Vivi's experiences shape Zidane's own discovery that he was an artificial war machine as well makes the cosmic nonsense of the game's third act a little more potent.

Yet it's arguably Garnet who ties together the game's plot, because she's the only character who has a stake in every piece of the story - she's the leader of a warring nation, an ancient summoner who hosts great power that Kuja wants to steal, and has an intimate friendship with three of the main party members (Zidane, Steiner, and Eiko). Her character is constantly in self-reflection - and I really like how that gets turned into an entire section where she's mute, with gameplay consequences - which adds some contemplative moments to the widespread chaos going on all around her. We meet her as she's already beginning to harbour doubts about her role in the world, as well as being at a young age where she has a lot to discover about herself, and she takes many moments to reflect on her own role in the past, present, and future of the story while also learning from what her friends, especially Zidane, are going through. (Though to that end, I think more direct interactions with Vivi or Freya in particular would've been great!) We're constantly checking in on her through, the story, so we can really see the ways in which she grows from moment to moment.

It's just such a shame that the same courtesy wasn't extended to the rest of the cast. You'd think there would be; there's an entire mechanic devoted to spending time with individual characters every time you enter a town, which gives a lot of small moments that let the characters develop away from each other. And the game, especially in the first half, splits up your party so often that characters often are completely on their own. But the game seems to delegate them only to these moments, such that it feels like the regent who gets turned into a bug gets more character development than some of your own team. (Although I admit I was tickled by the subplot of him trying to regain his old body, after his wife cursed him for cheating on her.) Part of me wonders if it wasn't a time constraint thing, trying to push the game out before the end of the PS1's life while also planning ahead for Final Fantasy X and XI, which were both conceptualized at the same time. It feels like there was maybe supposed to be space for some character-specific side quests at the end that could have fleshed out the characters more.

But as it stands, too much of the game is the Zidane Show. For much of the plot, he's just a horny teenager with a stupid haircut who embodies the old of trope of Doing Things For Your Friends, and it's just not interesting. That's fine, but the way he gets held up as some kind of messiah who taught everybody about the mysteries of life feels like a bit much, especially when the characters saying that are the ones who got shortchanged. He never actually develops real connections with the people he claims to be such powerful friends with, which makes the whole thing ring more than a little hollow.

Part of me thinks that, like Final Fantasy VII, this could use the remake treatment to address all the places where this falls short. But I'm not sure there's enough there to warrant it - at the very least, you'd need more than the DS version of Final Fantasy IV got, but there's definitely not as much as Final Fantasy VII Remake. It's caught in a middle ground with a story that also wasn't ever particularly ambitious, that was never meant to be ambitious - it was a callback to simpler stories that nevertheless tackled a strong core theme. Gameplay-wise, there's nothing that dozens of other RPGs haven't iterated on since, so there's not much reason to go back there. So I guess we're stuck, a game that could've been great that, for my money, never hit the highs it should've.