Final Fantasy IX

The Good
I have never been a huge Final Fantasy fan. Those who know me are well aware of this. That is not to say however, that I dislike all Final Fantasies. To me the Final Fantasy series is kind of like Halo. As serious FPS fans pay little attention to Halo, it seems to me that most serious RPG fans play little attention to Final Fantasy, as I do, and I am a hardcore RPGer, and FPSer, for that matter.(I prefer the term “Fragger”.-MM-)

However I did enjoy Final Fantasy IX on the PSX. Released in 2000, FFIX harkens back to the good old days of RPGS. And brings back the whole “fantasy” thing. Square’s goal with this one seemed to be to mix the best of the old and the best of the new. In many ways they succeeded, but in other ways the failed. I plan to discuss this duality in full in my review.

Old Skool is the best school….

The plot in FFIX revolves around Zidane, and Tantalus. A trope of actors, that are more like a band of thieves.(Not the cool ones like Garrett, of Thief fame however.-MM) It would seem that Tantalus has a scheme to kidnap the lovely Princess Garnett, from the city of Alexandria. Alas the wayward Princess has plans of her own, that are about to make hell for Zidane and company. Further complicating matters is Captain Adelbert Steiner.(No relation to the badass Rudolf Steiner, of Phantasy Star II.-MM) He will protect the Princess at all costs.

We are also introduced to Vivi, a black mage, and a nod to earlier Final Fantasies. His innocence and Phil Dickian question of his humanity is central to the plot of FFIX.(That’s Philip K. Dick, look it up.-MM-)

So it is safe to say that one of Final Fantasy IX’s strengths is a good cast of characters. Note that I said good and not great. I also thought that Freya was a cool character, albeit a bit underused. Each character has there own back story some better than others. Not only that but in the Gameplay, each character, is useful in various ways, unlike in the previous PSX, Final Fantasies.

Allow me to further explain, the Gameplay. Like the majority of eastern RPGS, FFIX, has random battles with monsters. And of course there is the obligatory, NPCS, world maps, dungeons etc. We all know the RPG drill by now.

What I want to focus on here is what makes FFIX unique. Firstly there are ATE’s. Which stands for Active Time Events. They are NOT as cool as they sound. Basically when exploring a new town, or city the party splits up. During which you get to see what other party members are up to. I felt that these were a mixed bag. At best they offer more back- round info on the people and places. At worst they can be annoying and feel like a waste of time. As in some areas they keep popping up.

Better done is how the party members are used in battle. Unlike in FFVII, in which your entire party is interchangeable. In FFIX all of the party is useful is some way. For example only Vivi can cast black magic, Zidane is the only one that can steal, and only Freya can use the “jump” command. So when forming a party the player has more to choose from that the way a character looks. (Interchangeable party members is one of the things I hate the most in newer RPGS.-MM)

Furthermore, Vivi and Steiner can use magic sword combo attacks. Which is cool. I just wish that there were more things like this in FFIX.

A word or two about abilities….

Now I would like to talk about the abilities system of FFIX. While it is not original per se. As FFVI, Grandia, and Lost Odyssey, to name a few, use a similar system. Say you want to learn a new spell for Vivi, or a stat boost for Zidane. Well first you must equip the proper weapon, boots, what have you. Then as you win battles you gain AP. Or Ability Points. These are key to learning new spells and or skills.

This system succeeds to a point, as it makes combat feel more rewarding. However it can be a double edged sword, as it also means that you pretty much CANNOT SELL any old items, as a particular party member may need it later. So unlike in say Grandia, you end up carrying all this junk around with you, and do not have as much money to buy new items. Which can be quite frustrating.

There are many abilities in FFIX. And they can be broken down into two types. There are “action” and “support” abilities. Black magic would be an example of an “action” ability. While counter would be an example of a “support” ability. Making the system even more complex is the combining of support abilities. For example Auto-potion+ Chemist= more defensive battles that keep up your party’s HP. On the down side this can make the game a bit too easy.

Low choleric eye candy….

The graphics is FFIX are quite good for the PSX. While it offers little that has not been done before, they still get the job done. I particularly liked the character design. And yes it is true that Square brought back famed artist, Yoshitaka Amano, also known for his award winning work on Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman”, graphic novels. But they had others redo his work. So it looks less like his style. Which makes no sense to me, as Mr. Amano’s art was one of the few things that made pre FFVII, Final Fantasies stand out.

And yes the CGI looks good, if a little over the top. So in closing FFIX, is the best looking PSX, Final Fantasy.

Magical Sound Shower

The music is FFIX is pretty good. I have never seen what is so great about Mr. Uematsu’s style as such. I feel he is a bit overrated. Especially seeing as many other RPG composers are more talented yet there praises go unsung. However I did enjoy most of the score from FFIX. And many of the tracks still stand out in my mind, which is rare for me.

The sound effects are also up to par. Nothing new, but the get the job done.

The Bad
The Bad and The Ugly

There are tons of things to see and do in FFIX. This is partly a good thing, but not entirely. Many of the side quests are way too long and tedious. When collecting the best gear for your party at the end of the game. Instead of like in most old skool RPGS, in which you find the best stuff in the difficult end dungeons, you must play mini-games.

“Kweeh!?!”-Chocobo speak for WTF!?!-

Namely a game called, “Chocobo: Hot and Cold”, in which you train a dubious yellow ostrich type thing, aka, a Chocobo. To train it you must dig up treasures. Which range from potions, to rare world map treasure clues. Digging increases his “beak” level. (I can’t make this stuff up.-MM-) Once you find a world map treasure clue, you must, get this, travel to the world map, and try to find the aforementioned treasure. Making this little game even more tedious and a teensy bit contrived, are the different Chocobo types.

Eventually you will find a special box. Pandora’s box? Unfortunately not. Once you open it you and your Chocobo have some sort of acid flash back, in which the Chocobo evolves. Evolution entails him changing color and being able to cross oceans, and eventually fly. You must evolve him at least 4or 5 times to claim the best treasures. Is it worth it? Well yes and no. Playing this very long mini-game, takes about an additional 10-15 hours of Gameplay. Yet it allows you access to the best weapons and items for your party, and thus some of the best abilities. But I cannot help but wonder, could they have done it more like the evolution system of your dragon, Panzer Dragoon Saga? (But I am getting ahead of myself as that review is for another time.-MM)

I also very strongly disliked the story/characters after a certain point. What starts off strong quickly becomes weak and contrived. Most of the heroes were cool, with a few exceptions. Like Quina Quinn, a Pac-man type creature that likes to eat frogs. There is also Amarant, and assassin of sorts, that looks sort of like a giant Chicken-man. I saved the worst for last friends. Lastly there is Eiko. She is an annoying bastard child that is about 7 or 8 years old, and she has a childish crush on Zidane, whom is about 12 years her senior. Her only real use is summoning, and dying often in boss fights.

This weakness in plot is exacerbated by idiotically weak villains. There is Kuja, whom is some sort of wanna be Kefka, or The Joker. Then there is his boss Garland. Now if you thought Garland was lame the first time, wait till you see this one. His evil scheme really makes no sense. His penultimate goal is vague, at best, as are his motivations. I like RPGS to have strong villains with lot’s of presence. Like Laschic, in Phantasy Star, or Darth Ninhilus, from KOTOR II. FFIX lacks this.

Often I felt what was the point? Am I only doing this quest because the bad man told me so? “The Desert Palace” was one of these parts that felt pointless. They make it seem as if the party is in peril, yet is hardly convincing.

Finally, one of the huge areas in which FFIX fails in the plot department, is it’s over reliance on plot points and devices from previous Final Fantasy games. Some are well done. But most do NOT fit the game. For example there is a FFVII, reference, that feels out of place, seeing as FFVII never happened according to FFIX.

Many people complain about Phantasy Star IV’s over reliance on devices from the previous games in that franchise. But at least those fit as PSIV, was the final chapter in that series, and takes place in the same timeline, therefore it fits into the overall story arc.

FFIX, does not have that advantage. As every Final Fantasy game is a standalone game. Set in a different place and time. Now if this were the “final“, Final Fantasy then I could see the point of it’s reliance on previous games. Thus the standalone nature of the series is both it’s best and worst advantage. As I just laid bare using my flawless logic.

Final Fantasy IX, is a very lengthy adventure, easily taking 70-80 hours perhaps more. Which kills any and all replay value it may have had.

What is with the lack of voice acting? It just seems lazy to me. And proves my point that Square is rarely on the ball when it comes to this sort of thing.

The Bottom Line
In closing, I must say that overall I enjoyed Final Fantasy IX. Despite it’s many flaws. It remains, the only post FFVII, Final Fantasy that I have played and actually enjoyed. The only one I have yet to play is FFXII. Have I played better RPGS? Yes. Have I played worse? Again, yes. Does FFIX succeed in it’s attempt to mix old and new skool? Not really. I would recommend either playing a real old skool RPG if you prefer that style. Otherwise Final Fantasy IX, is worth a try, as for I, was pleasantly surprised by it.

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
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.