Final Fantasy IX

The Good
FF9 was my first traditional, console RPG and the start of my interest in story-driven games. I remember when my cousin had borrowed it to me one day a few years back and I was a little reluctant to give it play. When I started to play, I couldn’t put it down. It was unlike anything I had ever played before.

Graphics: First you thing you’ll notice when you start this gem up is the beauty of the FMVs. Characters are cartoon-styled (not that I’m complaining, they still look neat) but the environments are quite believable. Same goes for the in-game graphics. I guarantee that FF9 is one of the most visually impressive games on the console available. There is detail that is well implemented in both characters and areas. The way the graphics are is full-polygonal characters in pre-rendered environments, which I may add are truly works of art.

Gameplay: The game involves exploring environments, interacting with NPCs, creating weapons/equipment, building up your characters (by combat), and engaging in turn-based combat for leisure or to advance the story. Plus there are some mini-games here and there that give you items. Some of them are optional while others like combat are used to advance the story. Did I mention you get to fly airships in the overworld map? It’s truly fun and offers a change of pace from traveling on foot instead. You really get that sense of soaring through the skies!

Story: This was the game’s strongest point. It was what hooked me into it the first place. Both the story and its memorable cast of characters was what made the game magical. The dialogue between them was enjoyable and well-written. The story goes at a solid pace and there’s constantly something unexpected happening. That’s another great thing about this epic story…the unexpected twists and turns. A lot of mysteries to encounter here folks! But don’t worry, questions are answered and this epic tale comes to a powerful close which will leave you satisfied. Plus there’s a bit of philosophy implemented into the story’s themes and characters. Some people may think they were just put in to make the game seem intelligent, but to be honest it does just that. The themes are well implemented and complement the story and its characters well. The themes include powerful ones like courage, love, existence, and corruption.

Music: Ahhhh…the music! Its’ so well done that you’d probably wouldn’t mind owning the soundtrack. There is a huge variety of musical themes that fit well with the scenes. The tracks range from ones that are comical, emotional, dramatic, action-packed, or just plain evil sounding.


The Bad
Alright that’s enough praising this gem and time for the negatives. Actually to be more specific, I only found two negatives with this game. First is the battle system. It was enjoyable but you don’t really get to control your attacks on the enemy. It would’ve been neat if they had put in attack options instead like Chrono Cross. Second are the random encounters, they tend to get annoying at times but that’s something I overlooked.

The Bottom Line
If you’re looking to get into the console RPG genre then give this gem a rent! If you’re the cautious type then rent to see if it’s to your liking. Above all if you’re looking for a game with an engaging epic story/characters, beautiful visuals/audio, plenty of places to explore, and long length, then this is a dream come true for you.

The Good
Welcome to my review for the game Final Fantasy IX (from now on FF9) for the PlayStation.

FF9 is the third and last game of the three Final Fantasy games of the main series released for the PlayStation. With two excellent predecessors already on the platform, will this game live up the high expectations ? Let's see.

The game really follows the steps of its two predecessors. You incarnate a hero and his comrades, and go out to fight in order to save the world yet again. Like usual, the game is very linear and focus a lot on the story line, with developed lovable characters, many interesting places to visit and many interesting NPCs as well. Just like the two previous games on the system, the field take place on a pre-rendered screen with 3D characters pasted on it, and when a battle starts, the whole screen changes to a fully 3D rendering.

It is not easy to judge the graphics, first because I'm not someone particularly interest by game's graphics, and then because graphics from early 3D consoles overall didn't age well due to their low resolution and lack of proper shadowing, and so on. However, for a game of this age, the graphics of FF9 aged very well. The pre-rendering screen are absolutely gorgeous and very well architectured - actually I could bet that Square hired real architects to build this game !

3D character models are also very well done, although you can clearly see they suffer from the system's limit in terms of resolution. The characters are very well animated and lively. Just like the two previous games, now and then a FMV cutscene will trigger, showing the progression of the story like a film.

Which leads me to how the world of FF9 overall feels. It is hard to describe, however the world of FF9 feels complete, vast, and overall very interesting to explore, because it was so beautifully designed with master and grace.

The story of the game is not as overly complicated as the stories of the two predecessor games, which is in my opinion a good thing. There is no genome biologic manipulations and fake identities, and there is no time travel. Just simply a story that will always give you an excuse to go to the next dungeon or city in order to continue to make your progress. The fact that FF9 didn't try too hard to have an incredible story like FF7, FF8 and FF10 did is probably its good selling price, you are guaranteed to understand what is going on just by playing the game once, without the need to replay multiple times and/or too look things up on the internet.

The idea of FF9 was that the series should return to its roots. Many things that were long forgotten were re-introduced. Especially many elements from FF1 came back in this game. The four elemental crystals, the four fiends of elements, Garland, white mages, black mages, they all come back, which is very good news. Moogles which were almost abandoned since FF7 (they appeared only as cameos and not as important characters) are also back and play an important role as they act as save points.

FF9 abandoned the super serious dark tone that the series had taken to come back to a really magic and fantasy filled world. The main character is no longer a depressed teenager with identity crisis like in the two previous games, but is a humble happy-go-lucky thief, which is a total 180° turn, for the best. Even if his insistence on helping others can be a bit exaggerated, he deserves the medal of a strong leadership needed to make a party of very diverse people fight together.

The game is not a huge spoof either, it just doesn't try too hard to be serious like it's 2 direct predecessors. Although the game features a love story, this is a really discrete and subtle one that will not get in the way of the main story or gameplay, unlike what happened in FF8.

Now I guess the story and has been enough been covered. Let's talk about the battle system. Again, the battle system could be called a return to the series' root. The series has a long tradition of bringing up a new battle system which each new game, and FF9 is no exception. The materia system of FF7 as well as the junction system of FF8 turned out to be rather complicated to master, and those systems made characters into blank puppets that could be turned to powerful warriors or strong magic casters by using their systems. In FF9 however, the battle system is directly inspired by the FF4 system where people have jobs (like in other early FF games) but the jobs are hard-wired to the characters for story purpose and cannot ever be changed. This might sound like the system is too simple and might not make the game interesting enough to be played, and this is partially true.

However, they added a feature that was absent from FF4 in order to make the game more interesting. Instead of learning new abilities simply by levelling, the characters learns abilities with equipment (weapons, armour or accessories). There is two kind of abilities, the action abilities that can be directly used in battle (such as "Fire", "Cure" or "Steal"), and the support abilities that helps you implicitly in battle for example by increasing your stats or protecting against status aliments. The support abilities can be individually enabled up to a maximum number of points, which increases with levels. So as you level up and equip many different pieces of armours, you will not only be stronger but also be given more opportunities to protect against status aliments and other very useful things.

The really strong point of this system is that it encourages the player to cycle through available pieces of equipment for each character, even if they are not the strongest in his possession, in order to learn as many abilities as possible. This made the game overall much more interesting to play just with this simple system, and works masterfully.

A big flaw of FF8 was it's very long summon sequences, that were very time consuming to see again and again. Square would not want to reduce the length of the summon sequences, as their impressiveness is one of the selling points of their games. They gracefully solved the problem by making a new system which automatically alternate between a "heavy" variation, beautiful and impressive but long, and a "light" variant, less impressive but short, of the summon sequence. This makes summoning less time consuming and less annoying while still being very impressive.

The music in this game is absolutely amazing, it is Uematsu at his best. It is overall a very sentimental and varied soundtrack, much in the line of what was done for the previous FF, but with even more care for the detail and even more different songs. The music is almost never re-used from place to place, so each moment in the game no matter how short gets its own song : There is approximately 90 different pieces of music in the game, all of them being equally amazing. Actually my only complain about the music is that you might not hear enough of some of the songs, as they only play for 20 or 30 seconds in game when actually you'd like to listen to them for at the very least 5 minutes.

The battle theme, which you will obviously hear again and again, is without a doubt the best of the entire series. Just like other elements in the game, it was made to "return to the roots of the series" by using the very famous baseline at the start, and is overall a good piece of what sounds more like a 70s rock piece. It will be no problem to listen to the battle theme again and again while professing through the game.

For the reasons mentioned, I think I can say pretty confidently that FF9 has the best soundtrack I have ever met with any video game, because not only of it's high quality, but also high quantity of different pieces of music.

In addition to that, the game provides a lot of sound effects such as wind, footsteps, running machines, birds, etc... and does so masterfully. There is really nothing to say about it other that the sound is perfect.

The Bad
There is not much not to like about FF9 honestly. One thing that immediately comes to mind is the extreme linearity of the game, but then again it is how the whole Final Fantasy series were designed, and the fact that we never feel lost in them despite the universe being large is thanks to the game's linearity. I do not like when you feel lost and have no idea where to go, and this never happens in FF9 thanks to the game's linearity so this is a good thing.

A thing I didn't like is that you cannot backtrack to most places after you go to the CD4. Only a couple of towns are accessible any more, and this is a problem. I understand they had to save space on their CD, but here, they could just make you able to insert another CD if you want to backtrack. FF8 already suffered from a similar issue, so it's very sad they didn't fix that.

There is really few side quests that you can do in comparison to FF7 and FF8. Perhaps I didn't look hard enough I don't know. But it seems to me that there is very little to do outside of the main story.

My last complaint is that one particular spoof character in the game, while being very funny, is particularly ridiculous and tend to be extremely annoying in story scenes where the story is supposed to be serious. I'd have liked if they made that particular character optional and/or didn't make her play any major role in story scenes. The characters are quite unbalanced. Some of them are extremely strong (such as the hero, without a surprise) and some of them are very weak and cannot ever have a true utility in your party. At the begin of the game,

Garnet and Eiko the two summoners are extremely weak and are an annoyance to have in your party. However near the end of the game as they can summon the strongest monsters in addition to have unlimited healing abilities they are by far the two strongest characters, and overpowers the others who are just here to give them ethers to refill their mana.

The Bottom Line
FF9 combines the tradition of grace and master of the early FF games with the enhanced graphics and gameplay of the modern Playstation area FF games, and does so very gracefully. The story is interesting without being overcomplicated, the gameplay is simple but fascinating, and the music and graphics are amazing for what we'd expect from a game of this category.

Both FF7 and FF8 were also very great games, but those had some minor flaws, almost all of them having been fixed in FF9. The game is almost without any flaws, and as such can easily be considered as the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy series, and of JRPGs in general. Of course if you do not like JRPGs you will probably not like the game, but I'd say as a modern reincarnation of older games it defines the expectations for the genre for the modern consoles, and is a reference of quality.

The lack of side quests is probably the only flaw of FF9, which will affect its replayability. However, FF9 must be played at least once.

The Good
The beginning of the game is wonderful: Final Fantasy IX fascinates with a very atmospheric fairytale setting. Every part - the backgrounds, the character graphics and the sound - supports it very well. The dialogue has much more humor than the two predecessors and sometimes I almost had the feeling I'm playing a comedy game. Not every gag is a winner and the silliness becomes overwhelming at times, but I still enjoyed it because it fits the atmosphere and setting well. The characters, with exception of one comic relief character which didn't work for me at all, are sympathetic and their dialogue is good enough.

The battle system is the standard ATB fare, but thankfully with four team members again. It offers no surprises at all and, because of the manageable random encounter rates, never becomes annoying. The character system has a new angle: now the characters learn abilities through the equipment they wear. If the piece of equipment is worn long enough, the abilities can be chosen even if the equipment is changed. I enjoyed this system because it creates an interesting trade-off: should I use a better weapon for the extra damage or do I keep the old one because I want to use its abilities?

FFIV is the most linear Final Fantasy so far. Of course there is a lot of uninteresting side content to explore, but the destination and the party composition is fixed for the vast majority of the game. However, since the plot is well thought out (up to a certain point) and the pacing is relatively fast, I don't consider this a negative point.

The Bad
There was one exact moment when my positive impression changed: towards the end of the game, the player visits a mysterious new world called Terra. Here the story became idiotic and esoteric hogwash. It completely lost me and I instantly stopped caring about the world and its characters - which is a shame because the combat started to become more interesting and challenging. It all accumulates with an annoying boss fight (the party can instantly lose it when the random number generator doesn't go their way), a stupid ending and a completely unsatisfied player.

Otherwise my biggest complaint are the too long animations, especially the summoning spells during battles. However, the most annoying instance is saving the game: instead of just standing on a save point and entering the menu, the player has to endure a long animation of a Moogle dancing around. In this version this point is mitigated by a comfortable auto save which kicks in after every screen change, though.

The Bottom Line
The majority of the game is very good and refreshing change compared to its two predecessors. If Square didn't flunk the ending so badly, it would have potential to become the best Final Fantasy. As it stands, it is still a worthwhile play, but can't hold a candle to Final Fantasy VI.