Final Fantasy IX

The Good
Born in an age of technical limitations, Final Fantasy borrowed elements of classic Western RPGs of its time and turned their slightly repetitive epic deeds into more personal affairs with players feeling attached to their avatars through more than their stats and gear. Its often soap-operatic quality aside, the drama that shone through even in the earliest instalments has persisted, mixing it with humour and the spirit of adventure, but never quite belying its video game roots. Final Fantasy IX came after the first two PlayStation instalments which not only marked the series’ change to a new hardware generation allowing for a much more cinematic story experience. Final Fantasy VII and VIII also veered drastically from their predecessors’ plots and settings by being darker and more futuristic. However, instead of trying to top the modernism of VII and the graphic realism of VIII, IX makes an almost 180° turn and celebrates everything that was quaint (and corny) about the classics 8 and 16-bit Fantasies. Its renewal of time-honoured traditions, game mechanics and also clichés feels strangely fresh and series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi’s guts to create such an anachronistic game must be admired, especially considering IX was originally meant to be a ‘gaiden’ spin-off to the main series. However, a return to what first made the series great in this case doesn’t mean a degeneration of an early 21st century game to gameplay and characters from two decades ago.

Final Fantasy IX is set in a medieval fantasy world in which colourful monsters still roam the countryside freely. It even allows for some mild technological advances from other ages, such as steam power, to add plot elements to the upcoming adventure. So far, so classic. The graphics are as in the preceding games a combination of real-time rendered 3D characters and animated, pre-rendered backgrounds. The overall art style is colourful, whimsical and cartoony, populated by people with slightly over-sized heads (perhaps a nod to the 2D sprite graphics of the series) and the odd anthropomorphic animals wandering around as ordinary citizens. (Not to mention series staples like moogles and chocobos!) Pre-rendered FMVs tell especially dramatic events and don’t fall short of the technical quality of the cutscenes in Final Fantasy VIII. The adventure starts when a band of roguish bandits under the name of Tantalus gets hired to kidnap princess Garnet Til Alexandros of Alexandria. Already some changes to past formulas are noticeable because the kidnappers’ field agent isn’t a run-off-the-mill adventurer or moody mercenary. One Zidane Tribal by (default) name, players are instead introduced to an impish boy with a monkey tail and the bravado of a teenage Errol Flynn. As if that wasn’t enough, the plot takes off on an unusually humorous note as Tantalus bumble their way through the kidnapping under the cover of a courtly theatre festival. All eventually comes to an end when not only the princess unexpectedly request her kidnappers to whisk her away while her comically fussy protector, Adelbert Steiner, tries to intervene. Her wrath incurred, Alexandria’s vile-looking queen Brahne tries to stop the getaway of the involved in a way demonstrating a startling disregard for her daughter’s safety. One airship crash-landing later, bandits, princess, knight protector and an innocent black mage bystander who got dragged along find themselves trapped in a magical forest. It is there that after the vibrant prelude the classic RPG mechanics fully take off: party formation, exploration and combat. Final Fantasy IX strays from the previous two games’ convention by allowing players to field four party members at a time instead of three. Combat plays out using the series’ innovative ATB system in which enemies and party members take it in turns to act once their individual time gauges are filled. Instead of allowing character customisation through classes or jobs, Final Fantasy IX establishes well-imagined personalities whose defining abilities adhere to their backstories and advances during the story. It is, however, possible to outfit them not only with the standard RPG gear of weapons, armour and assorted stat-boosting trinkets. Similar to the job system of Final Fantasy V, most equipped gear grants the characters special abilities which can be learned to be wielded indefinitely over time.

The continuative story turns of Final Fantasy IX are perhaps not the most original in the series, revolving around queen Brahne’s attempts to conquer her neighbouring kingdoms with the help of an effeminate arms dealer named Kuja. True to Final Fantasy tradition and cliché, however, the person who seems to be the root of all evil is seldom more than a puppet behind who an even more powerful mastermind eventually manifests. Apart from its pleasantly whimsical world, Final Fantasy IX derives a great deal of its appeal from the main characters’ personalities. Almost all have deeper motivations and dilemmas they are facing which are well balanced with the funnier aspects of their characters: Zidane, a thief by profession, is boisterously boyish and philandering, yet has problems admitting his deeper feelings for his leading lady Garnet. Garnet, a white mage, struggles with the huge responsibilities of her future rule and being the last of the summoners known as espers. Her guardian Steiner is duteous and stubborn to a fault but must ask himself whether his sometimes misguided sense of responsibility is the only trait defining his character. The party’s painfully shy and clumsy black mage Vivi makes some startling discoveries about his origins and questions the very purpose of his existence while the dragoon Freia’s search for her missing lover and loss of her people’s home at the hands of villains she can’t fight make her question the worth of her knightly lifestyle. The team roster is completed by gluttonous blue mage Quina, taciturn bounty hunter Amarant and Eiko, a cheeky six-year old with mystic powers not unlike Garnet’s. Although the various characters aren’t always deep by themselves, there’s an undeniable chemistry between them, be it Steiner’s obsequiousness towards Garnet and Vivi and his disdain for Zidane or Eiko’s crush on Zidane and bossy attitude towards an easily intimidated Vivi.

The Bad
Ironically true to its concept of ‘back to the roots’, the problems Final Fantasy IX has have plagued the series since its beginnings - and by extension the whole JRPG genre. Like most Final Fantasies and spin-offs, IX is an almost thoroughly linear affair with little character customisation, side quests or important, plot-altering decisions the player can make. Whoever dislikes random battles won’t be too pleased with the game, either, but such people are generally not advised to play console role-playing games. On top of that, however, the battles in IX feel a little more sluggish than in other parts of the series. Time gauges fill up slowly and the game takes almost over ten seconds to switch to its battle screen. That’s ten seconds wasted waiting before every encounter. Levelling isn’t hampered too much by this as the XP rewards are adequate. On that note, it seems odd that defeating boss enemies doesn’t give the party any experience points at all. Although the cities players can visit are full of people going about their daily business, most prolonged stays can bring the game to a halt as some time may be spent searching for manipulable hot spots or approaching people to hear them spout single-sentence inanities about their personal lives or giving useless advice. Although the game’s characters are one of its definite highlights, not all are brilliant. The thoroughly weird Quina features interesting blue mage abilities but in the story is little more than a comic relief. Girly girl Eiko can be a little grating and Amarant seems like a character haphazardly written into the plot so someone could fill the traditional gambler/ninja class. Many fans’ main gripe is with the villain Kuja, and for a reason. The almost painfully androgynous, swaggering pretty-boy appears to channel the most obnoxious qualities of the JRPG genre’s youthfully arrogant antagonists. Being the mere compilation of stereotypes and bad clichés that he is, it’s hard to take him too seriously in spite of his ruthless deeds.

The Bottom Line
I admit to having an ambiguous relationship with the Final Fantasy series. As a video game phenomenon I find it deeply interesting even though I find many of its core mechanics simplistic or downright annoying. All in all it must be acknowledged that several of its concepts have been of an unmistakable gain to video games as a storytelling medium. Final Fantasy IX plays like a revue of past things positive and negative of the series, yet with the enhanced technology of the newer console generations. It is whimsical and light-hearted, perhaps not as appealing as Square gem Chrono Trigger but overall in the same line. Having played I, II, IV, V, VI and X, I can honestly say IX is my personal favourite. It is refreshingly free of overly lofty heroes or simplistic game mechanics that get artificially complicated (e.g. junctioning or the sphere grid), yet gaudy and sometimes even trite in an amiable, nostalgic way.

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 graphics in the final fantasy serie have always (at least on the psx) been wonderful. the 9th episode is no exception : The gorgeous painted backgrounds, the animation of the characters, the modeling of characters and monsters in battle, and the amazing (!!!) pre-rendered cut-scenes are all spectacular
The sound effects are good too, and the music is just one of the best one produced for a video game
The gameplay is as good as in other final fantasy games. Almost the same as in other episodes, which means it's great fun for those RPG fans.
Also, the optional side quests and secrets are better balanced. It is actually possible to discover the vast majority of them without a strategy guide (it ain't easy, but at least, it's not as impossible as chocobo raising in FF VII).
The story is involving and most of the characters you play are really likeable
It's got great longevity : expect between 30 and 60 hours of gameplay before you complete it, depending on how much you care for side-quests and world exploration.
The replay value is not great but at least, there is one, cos you may want to replay the game with a strategy guide to discover all the secrets you missed in the first run.

The Bad
The Graphics, while gorgeous, didn't really improve technically since FFVIII. Granted, maybe FFVIII already pushed the psx to its limits, but at least you could still be amazed by FFVIII if you had played FFIX. Only a very minor complain though
The story is very complex at times, especially in the end : chances are you'll beat the game without knowing exactly what good you have accomplished and how your actions did save the world. And where the hell does the final boss come from ?
The story is also nothing new. It's very similar to other FFs : characters have identity crisis, fall in love with each other, etc. Maybe Square should start thinking about new kinds of plot twists.

The game play is also very similar to previous FFs. I know, I know, there are changes, like the fact that your abilities lie in your equipment, but in the end, those changes are very minor.

The Bottom Line
This is truly a great RPG, with many major good things and many minor flaws (mainly the fact that it's just too plain similar to previous episodes). Anyway, It'll probably delight fans of the serie, and many other people as well.