i finally finished final fantasy ix. this was...a journey. i feel like this is going to be a weird retrospective post; it's hard for me not to compare this game to a bunch of other stuff
i tried to play this game around, i dunno, 2012 or 2013 probably, on the vita. i gave up really early for reasons that will come up, and a year or two later, i played ffx hd and finished that game for the first time. i could complain a ton about x, and in terms of the mechanical and interface design it's one of my least favorite rpgs of its era that i've played. but still, there's something there that's holds a strong grip on my mind; a few weeks after i finished it i played like 2/3 of the game again. the world and music are gorgeous and there's a real richness to a lot of the story i think. even if i hate having to switch party members constantly, i hate the sphere grid, and i really hate the battle camera. (9 has the same problem but it's so slow that i've almost never been "got" by it in the same way, lol)
in 2021 i decided to give 9 another shot, playing with my girlfriend next to me and i felt the same deep division in the experience, but basically even more so. a lot of this comes from having still played on an unembellished ps1 version with all the load times and slow battle animations that brings, but even aside from that i was not cool with a lot of the battle design. anytime i wasn't in a dungeon, i was having a pretty good time! and then after like 3 fights i'd start leaning over and holding my head every time a new random battle started
i still got to around disc 3 and then stopped playing the game for a long time. early on in my playthrough, though, the square enix b-game dungeon encounters came out, a game, like ff9, directed (and, i believe, more directly designed) by hiroyuki ito. the battle system in dungeon encounters isn't bad but the progression the game implies early on isn't exactly super enticing to me. the numbers and their growth and interactions are put out so nakedly that it seems pretty simplistic, and the game's flavor for weapons and spells is like the rpg version of the "no name" brand or something. but it gets fairly fun when you start scoring gimmick weapons or fight an enemy with a way higher number who happens to be on a way earlier floor than it normally would be (it really comes off as being like a boss fight) and stumble on some superpowered weapon that boosts you through the next chunk of the game. eventually you gain the ability to only get into encounters by choosing to (rather than being forced to fight things to pass them on the map) and i spent a long time running around the maps happy and uninterrupted till it was time to finish the game. so to me it was kinda carried by that stuff, which gets really funny and clever. it's a dungeon crawling rpg where you level up against the dungeon, too, and there's a super tough area near the end where you have to use all your tools and everything you've learned. overall it's a good game and i totally recommend it even though the music is the game's most unfortunate 80s pc game callback (it's chintzy rock covers of classical music)
still, it was hard not to notice some things. the game has an atb system with 4 characters, including a bunch of wacky ones you can swap in and out, and you can tell pretty quickly that the game wants you to use a mixture of all the different attack properties: physical and magical, multi- and single-target, fixed- and random-damage, along with some gimmicks of your choice. and, uh, hmmm, a lot of that sure sounds familiar. i finished a few more dungeons over the next year and change, and i started to see how that sort of thing is clearly what the game is going for in ff9 too, even if i still felt convinced the game just wasn't designed to handle that much complexity. too many counterattack triggers (i quit the first time because i attacked one of the black waltzes after a 10 minute scene and got hit by one so hard that i game overed a couple turns later), not enough information about how things work, and animations so long that you end up just waiting anyway because the entire battle could turn on its head in the 30-60 seconds between when you queue something up and it goes off. it really made me think the people working on the battles spent too much time running numbers in excel and not enough actually seeing what the game was like. certainly, i think it's abundantly obvious why ffx ended up cutting out the bars and just putting up each turn as it arrives, because there are times where that feels like the only way to play this one anyway.
still, things started to slowly come together. getting holy, trying out some of freya's skills, and learning blue magic till i discovered a bunch of super useful things and a fun combo to play around as much as possible (auto-life + limit glove to try and hit guaranteed 9999s on any and everything) started to make the game more interesting, and especially that last part kind of gave me something to go off of through disc 3. also the fact that you get ACTUAL FEEDBACK when you try to eat actually made spending time trying to get blue magic feel less annoyingly eccentric than trying to win normally. but it got harder and harder to actually stay at 1hp reliably even with covers, auto-reflect, auto-haste. so when i went to the last dungeon i went to a party comp of like, summoner, offensive white mage, and freya (who actually did most of my healing...) this worked fine through trance kuja, and i was kind of stunned to realize that since i was relying so much on regen i actually needed to not stall time sometimes to heal during his spell combos. "wow! all the mechanics come around! there's upsides and downsides to everything! maybe they really did playtest the game a lot!!"
well, like i said last night...the actual last boss kind of made me doubt that again. i tried the same strategy and found myself in a tedious and deeply frustrating situation of hanging on forever, getting constantly killed by combos that i really think were unavoidable and the rng on grand cross, and the rare times i could actually attack, i was hitting for about 4000 at best, barely half as much as on the previous bosses. obviously, afterward, it occurred to me that quina had a lot of options that would really help (i hadn't even remembered mighty guard...i never cast it before because it costs so much), and that i could equip the ribbon on zidane and use his health pool to survive most things as long as he had enough resistances. which led to him actually getting trance. when that happened i knew it was time to risk it all and use all his trance turns on solution 9 even if it meant not having the chance to have him throw elixirs at someone else (in fact, i had to use one on him, haha). when eiko's trance came up i prepared for the same situation but on her first cast of dispel->holy it hit the boss for 9500 damage and he died. which was appropriate because oh my god i watched that animation so many times and i'm still totally into it. madeen is my other favorite
(i never got ark. motivation for the runback someday, that's like half the reason i wanted to play this game)
all that said, when i finally decided i was going to finish the game about a week or so ago i'm sure everyone can guess what i did
that's right, i started playing chocobo hot and cold again. this is the topic that always comes up when people mention the game, and i always wondered if it was really that good. it kinda is, though. the minigame part is fairly fun but it's the chocobo growth and world map exploring that really feels like one of those big things that ties the game together. i never found the one that's just like, a blank picture of the ocean, though
i think tetra master is fine and not just because the battles dealt way more mental damage to me in general. i actually would kind of love to play more of it but it's the kind of thing that i'd rather do while cutting down on the time it takes to wander around and fight everyone, so while i'm not turning on the game on the playstation again, if i play the game again on steam or something that's absolutely gonna happen until it annoys me too much. but i've been in literal arguments about this where people talk about it as completely random and i really, truly don't agree. am i arrogant after winning the battle tournament twice (i forgot why but i reset after doing it the first time)? yes. but also it's ok that it's not solvable in the same ways as triple triad and there's a very real chance of some bullshit happening. it's a game. you can play the game and accept what comes and continue on. like life
on that note, the story was a pretty big draw overall. this game's got a lot of cool presentation concepts like the side skits and stuff. overall it's hard not to see the similarities to tales, which was the series i know of really carrying the torch for this kind of boat-and-airship expanding world adventure in the following decade. and especially tales of the abyss, which i'd finally finished only a few months before starting this game, and has a ton of similarities in theme and even specific concepts. (symphonia is famously a lot like 10, but i think this might be even closer due to the shared themes...) but the part of abyss i think is by far the weakest is the part where the game is trying to tie up loose ends before heading to the end, which ends up being analogous in a few ways to the bran bal/pandaemonium section of this game. that was when i got totally hooked in here, as the pleasing but familiar fantasy finally opens up fully to sci-fi and spiritual aspects the game had only shown shadows of before. much like the end of ff7's disc 1, the backgrounds get really imaginative and the area themes are some of my favorites in the game as well. and that stuff continues even into the final areas. garland's final speech about the interconnected nature of the universe is kinda funny to represent so literally in the end but it's definitely a central part of the game's themes.
i also love how the fmvs got as much love as any other ff game even though the characters look like that. it's funny but also cool to see the tech pushed for action scenes and detail even though the characters are incapable of looking remotely realistic
there's a few things i'll never accept even aside from grand cross. i don't like the normal battle theme, i never have. i feel the same way about it most people think of chrono cross', lol. i'm also still pretty mad that right after one of the most dangerous bosses in the game there is a minigame that implies you'll get a game over if you fail it too many times. (emily had to do it for me. i was too mad and stressed out after managing to steal the holy spear in one try...) also i'm sorry to all my friends who are super into it but i'm never going to learn the jump rope minigame. i just don't care enough
for a few hours near the end i thought this was gonna end up with 15 (god, lol, i've still not written my ff15 post) and 7 as a top tier favorite for me, but i think the final boss frustrated me just enough that right now it's in the next pack below that. maybe when i forget about that a bit more or play the game again that'll change, though...somehow, despite everything, it's pretty good.