I went into this one really wanting to like it. The art style wasn’t for me, but it’s the favorite of many, so there had to be something else to it. I wanted to see what they saw in it. Unfortunately, this one ended up not being for me.

This game had a fantastic first impression. Those first 5 hours are flawless. Even I, having entered with a distaste for the art style, was enchanted by the opening. The cartoon-like proportions and exaggerated reactions of the characters were a perfect fit for the playful, swashbuckling shenanigans being portrayed. There’s something genius about creating a story and world that feels like a campy puppet performance, and opening that story with an in-universe theater production (especially one in which the actors actually on a heist behind the scenes, and are only pretending to be actors. It’s got layers). Every expectation is subverted. Physical comedy is crammed into every inch. There are even cute details in the gameplay like giving the actors “SFX” attacks that do no damage but play cool animations. Easily the strongest opening to a Final Fantasy game so far.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t last long. It almost feels like the idea for the opening came first, and then they extrapolated into a world, trying to string along a story as they went.

This made it all feel very fake. In a way, that may be what they were going for. These characters look like puppets, playing out a children’s tale. The backgrounds look like detailed dioramas and set-pieces. So we’ve got fake little guys running around a fake little world and telling a fake little story. It’s a cute idea. If they had stuck to that style and kept the vibes of the opening going for the entire duration, I might have attached to it more. Unfortunately, this is a Final Fantasy game. Thousands must die in world-shattering events, and we’ve got to kill god at the end. It clashed, a lot, for me.

This game asked the possibly very interesting question of, “what is god for a puppet?”, and responded with the incredibly unsatisfying answer of “god, as a puppet”. There’s so much potential in that question, and they took it in neither the interesting meta-narrative direction nor the whimsical and fun direction. Instead, they delivered a kids’ show suddenly tackling existentialism, with all earnestness. I was disappointed.

Final Fantasy IX had an interesting development history. Hironobu Sakaguchi had left another team in charge of a Final Fantasy game without his input for the first time ever: Final Fantasy VIII. He saw what they were making, and hated it. So, when starting work on the next mainline game, he wanted to take the game back to its roots. In some ways, there are elements of the game that feel almost spiteful, specifically designed to be the opposite of VIII in any way possible. I could feel this spite while I played, and it was yet another thing that clashed with the otherwise joy-filled, painterly world.

FFIX was also being developed under a lot of pressure. VII and VIII had sold very well. The PS2 was right around the corner, and IX was going to be playable on it. Square was beginning to buy into hype-driven business decisions (like trying to push for online connectivity where it wasn’t needed). I’m sure after seeing how much money could be made on these games, they started seeing green and had all sorts of marketing-based metrics that had to be followed by their developers. Maybe that’s why the game feels a little bit over-grown, with too many characters, too many plot twists, and too many secrets. FFIX was the first game to be released while Square was attempting to push their PlayOnline platform, which had a relatively steep monthly fee. Wanted to get useful FFIX strategy guide information? Pay up for the online service. In some ways, this game feels developed in a way to push people to make that payment. Maybe that’s wishful thinking on my part, because I really don’t want to believe that the way this game was released was the true vision.

For me, this game ended up being a real mixed bag. I loved some things, and hated others—but I found most of the rest to be simply unremarkable. I can absolutely see why someone else may end up loving this game dearly, but it wasn’t for me.

The Review#↑

Visuals#↑

I really wish I liked how this game looked. It’s technically extremely well-implemented for the time it released. The leap between these two images is insane:

It’s insane how far they came in 3 years, without a console generation leap.

Unfortunately, I don’t really enjoy the look of either of these. This kind of cartoonish, super-deformed style has never been my preference. Out of all of the character designs in that FFIX screenshot, I only kinda-sorta like one of them (and even then, I have other problems with it). The rest, I find ugly.

I won’t linger on the overall style for any longer than that, because I do think it’s exceptionally well executed. If you’re into that style, I can see why you love this game so much, and I’m glad you do.

I do want to talk about character designs a bit more though.

This game has a big problem with organizing characters down into 3 categories with very few exceptions: Ugly, sexy, and small with oversized elements. For the most part, guys are intentionally ugly, outside of the protagonist and villain. There almost no women in this game who aren’t designed in a surprisingly horny way. Not just a little bit, but driven to extremes. Like, this woman’s shirt is always open to her navel, that woman very frequently does a salute animation that has exaggerated jiggle physics (through armor, too????), and so on. The female knights are essentially wearing a plate-armor-leotard with PS1 Lara Croft proportions and fully exposed legs. It really stood out to me in a negative way among the rest of the designs. This would be annoying on its own, but it descends into problematic when it also affects girls who are only 16. The last category, extra-super-deformed is used for children, mostly, and was very hit-or-miss for me. Really, the only time I liked that style was Vivi¹.

Audio#↑

I didn’t like this soundtrack as much as the entries that came before it, but it was still quite good. Again, I think it was executed extremely well, it just attempted a style I’m not a fan of. I additionally found it hard to attach to many of the tracks because the sound effects were so loud that I often couldn’t hear them very well.

There were some standouts though.

Every Final Fantasy has at least one iconic Battle Theme. This one is as playful and bold as the game’s amazing opening hours.

Vivi² is perfect, and so is his theme. It’s full of whimsy and curiosity. It’s simple, but effective.

I also enjoyed some of the early chill songs, like Border Village Dali. This song is so relaxing.

I think my favorite track in the game is Vamo’ alla Flamenco. It has such an infectious energy to it. I couldn’t help but compare it to the Final Fantasy XIV version, though. I have heard a rumor that Nobuo Uematsu first composed the music for IX for an orchestra, and then went back to try and capture that energy using his old methods of production as a throwback to the older games. I wonder how much more I would have liked this OST if we got those (rumored) orchestral versions instead, because I absolutely adore the XIV version of this track. I think the life brought to it by the musicians is a huge part of why (but also Soken is the greatest of all time).

Gameplay#↑

Final Fantasy VIII caught a lot of flak for repetitive, overcomplicated gameplay.

Final Fantasy IX responded by having no gameplay. Truly innovative!

I kid. It’s worse than that. It had gameplay I didn’t like. I think, so far, it’s in the bottom 3 for gameplay.

I think this is the worst version of the ATB system yet, which is a shame because I believe this is the last mainline game to use it. Maybe this is part of the reason why they moved away from it. For starters, it’s incredibly slow. Every battle begins with a period of waiting, while both sides stare at each other until somebody’s ATB bar fills up. Then, it never matters again because of the second flaw: there are so many long animations. Even though these ATB bars are the slowest I’ve ever seen, every single animation is so long that every single ATB bar gets filled by the end of it. Not to mention, animations can be triggered outside of turns. For example, if you equip the auto-potion ability, your character will take a full turn’s worth of animation time to do a potion drinking animation—every single time they take damage. This ability sounded amazing, so I put it on my whole party. Then I got hit by a single AOE, and…

I watched in horror as every round of combat now took four times longer. The whole time, everyone’s ATB bars were maxed out, just waiting. This made turn order feel extremely inconsistent. When I get an opportunity to give an order to a character, I have no idea if they will act immediately or in 7 turns. It’s effectively impossible to actually strategize in this system. If I get hit by an AOE that nearly kills my whole party, I’d want to heal. However, I can only attempt to heal 7 turns from now. That’s not going to work. So instead, I just spam heals and hope it works out. That summarizes the entire combat game-plan for this game. Just kinda flail around and spam the same 1 ability for every character and hope the random-feeling turn order is kind (or grind a lot and get so strong that you can tank the RNG).

The Trance system also sucks. It triggers as soon as you earn it (and you only earn it by taking damage), instead of letting you save it up for an important moment. Since you fight way more random encounters than anything else, 9/10 times it triggers, it does so right at the end of a pointless random encounter. When it does trigger, it not only feels like it barely does anything, it plays yet another long animation and makes your characters uglier. I was only ever annoyed by a Trance getting triggered. It always felt like a waste of time.

Speaking of random encounters. For a game with glacial combat, it sure tries to get you to play with it a lot. This is one of those games where you can’t walk 10 feet without an encounter, and it feels even more punishing when it’s this slow.

Making matters worse, the game wants to to spend a lot of time in menus between each of these fights. The progression system in this game is based on learning abilities from equipment. Each piece of equipment has a set list of abilities. By having that item equipped, you can then go into a different menu to equip those abilities. Once you’ve worn that piece of gear into battle a few times, that character learns how to do that ability without needing that piece of gear equipped. Of course, wearing equipment with nothing left to learn on it is a waste, so you are encouraged to swap to a new piece of equipment as soon as possible. You have a four character party, each with five pieces of equipment, each with potentially three learnable skills. That means that every battle, there’s a chance that one of sixty things has been progressed and its time to shuffle equipment around.

Okay, that’s annoying, but surely there are some quality of life features to help make this more sane, right? No. In fact, it’s actually even more complicated. Every piece of gear can only be equipped on certain characters. You can see this when you buy equipment, but nowhere else. The only way to see what skills each character can learn from each piece of gear is to view it in their equipment menu. Even worse, you can’t see equipment currently on another character. So, the only way to check if you can learn new abilities is to swap around gear between the characters extremely often and to make sure nobody is ever holding on to one piece of gear for too long. You have to do that for 20 gear slots. Worse, when you get more than four characters in your group, you can only check on abilities and change gear of the characters in your active party. So you also have to switch characters around a lot. Yeah. This sucks. Final Fantasy II is my least favorite so far, in large part due to its gameplay—but at least the progression system was basically automated.

I would be more willing to deal with all of this swapping if the abilities were interesting and fun, but that never happened. Most of the abilities are very simple passives. The most exciting of which are still boring, like “cast this spell on yourself automatically at the start of combat”. Those are exciting because they are powerful, especially stuff like haste, but they don’t change the game in any meaningful way. They’re just glorified stat increases. At the other (even worse) end of the scale are abilities that make you immune to specific status effects. These are used as “keys” that fit into “locks” in the combat design. Almost all of these status effects are a fast-track to a party-wipe if you let the whole party get affected. So, to pass certain fights you pretty much have to have the right abilities. This would be annoying if it were only bosses, but it’s random battles too.

You fight someone, they case confusion on your party. So you go into menus and make sure everyone has confusion immunity equipped. The next fight has a beast, so you go into menus and equip the beast slaying abilities on everyone. The next fight has a bird, so you equip that and… oh no! the build doesn’t fit anymore. Do I get rid of auto-haste or auto-life? I’m not allowed to even use the barely passably fun abilities because of this “lock and key” design. I spend way more time in menus than exploring or experiencing the story.

On the note of tedium, progression comes from gear, and the best gear comes from the Steal ability. The thief is literally the main character. This ability should be a pleasure to use then, right? Some items have a 1 in 256 chance. Yeah. I guess the combat wasn’t slow enough yet. Time to stall it forever for character progression purposes. Wasn’t this everyone’s main problem with VIII? It’s at least 5x worse in this game. I don’t understand why it gets a pass. I gave up and modded the game to have 100% steal rate. Even then, I was kinda annoyed with this system.

One final thing: There’s an old tradition in the Final Fantasy games to have (at least some) undead enemies get damaged by healing, as if they have negative hit points. This is neat as an occasional gimmick, but FFIX made an entire dungeon (and accompanying boss) where that was true the entire time. It was so mindless and boring that I almost missed the regular combat in there. FFIX had gimmicks like this all over the place, like a dungeon in which lower level weapons deal more damage with the only hint being “the building is upside down, isn’t that quirky??”

Story#↑

I know this story has touched many hearts. There are many that, even if they disliked the gameplay, were so deeply moved by this story that this is their favorite game of all time. I’m very happy for them for having experienced this. There are many ways to tell a story—many styles, many methods of presentation, many different kinds of story. We all have different preferences when it comes to every single one of those possibilities. When they all line up just right for someone, it’s magical.

On the other hand, there are certain combinations that just have a toxic reaction with us. Unfortunately, this was one of those toxic times for me, not magical. I’m not making a value judgement on this story. I’m sure there are plenty of stories that were magical for me that were toxic for someone else.

When I look into what people loved about this story, I see two things: Vivi is perfect³, and some emotional arcs that didn’t resonate with me.

So, I’m about to tear into this story. I apologize. I won’t linger long on it.

I’ll start with the characters. I did not like this party. At all. Except for Vivi⁴. Lets go down the list, in no particular order:

Zidane—The least interesting and most annoying kind of Shōnen protagonist. He’s pulled directly from the big book of “don’t make this D&D character”. Tragic backstory, check. Orphan, check. Thief, check. Mysterious past and secret godlike power, check. Unrepentant pervert who hits on literally every woman, check. Why the hell does he have a tail? He uses it like, once, and it’s never explained why he was made that way. I don’t like the goofy oversized gloves and shoes. At least he wasn’t made intentionally ugly like most of the rest of the male cast.

Steiner… For starters I can’t stand the character design. He’s made to be big, dumb, ugly, and mad. The kind of cartoon character that’ll turn red and have smoke come out of their ears. He was almost interesting, with a self-doubt arc, but it was really hard to take seriously between the explosions of cartoonish, indignancy.

Speaking of almost interesting, Freya. Her arc just sorta, goes nowhere. She’s introduced, she has a tragic backstory, elements from her backstory come back but never actually get resolved. Then she’s just in the background of the party the rest of the time. There was a lot of potential there, and I actually liked her character design (except for the crest on the front, I think that is a little too much).

Quina was actively annoying and a net negative on the game for me. An unfunny at best and a little offensive at worst gag character included as an empty punching bag. Next.

Amarant feels like an afterthought. Introduced super late. Basically no arc. A really poor implementation of the “I just want to fight strong enemies” archetype.

Eiko. There are some touches of interesting stuff, but she feels included only to serve Garnet’s character arc. Her only other personality trait is being head over heels for the main character, which just felt gross.

Garnet was fine. Her arc feels resolved super early and I was constantly puzzled by the writing choices surrounding her. She doesn’t feel like a realistic character, but rather a vague tale of a distant princess told through a picture book… but that story doesn’t hold up to the closer inspection this game gives it.

Vivi⁵ is perfect.

I really liked the very start of this story. The characters have interesting motivations, a mystery quickly unfolds, and the stakes are raised very naturally. It’s the perfect setup for a fun adventure.

It all falls apart in Lindblum. The party gets split in a way that feels more distracting than interesting. The story keeps jumping back and forth between the two halves, but one side is way more interesting than the other. So it feels like we are abruptly ripped away from the good story to go on a slice of life sidequest. Then, once that awkward period is over, the game blows its load too early and massively ramps up the stakes—and tries to de-escalate back to business as usual afterwards. It repeats this trick over and over again. It felt like the story was constantly undermining itself. It never felt believable. Maybe that was the point. These little puppet-like guys running around in their little diorama world are constantly dealing with larger-than-life issues. Unfortunately, that just made it worse for me.

Speaking of interrupting the story, this game has what it calls “Active Time Events”. I think someone felt really clever coming up with these, because they were crammed everywhere without concern for the downsides they might present. These events are (usually optional) cutscenes you can view occasionally. They interrupt whatever you’re doing, asking if you want to see one, and then disappearing if you opt-out. They show you things happening elsewhere in the world. There are a few problems. First, you can’t tell before opening one if it is something actually important to the story or at least good character development or just some random nearby NPC making a pun. So, I wanted to open them all, just in case, and that both hurt the pacing and made me dread seeing that popup. Second, so many scenes were offloaded into ATEs that it feels like the non-ATE scenes were robbed. We don’t get much inter-party banter (or character moments, at all) outside of these scenes. So many of them are “what is this party member up to right now?” type scenes, that I wish the whole party was there for to have a conversation around it or to at least react. Instead, it makes it feel more and more like the party is a collection of individuals with no connections than a tightly-knit group, exactly counter to some of the main themes of the story. This feature actively harmed the story.

Now, when the story does have emotional moments, they didn’t feel earned to me. They felt like an attempt to manipulate my emotions. They play the sad song. They show the character act depressed. They show the other characters jump in to help. They show the resolution 3 minutes after the emotional arc was begun. It’s like a speedrun of hitting all the pavlovian triggers that typically accompany an emotional moment, with none of the substance or arcs that actually back up such moments. It’s only one step above “please clap be sad”.

Even when the game feels like it has a great (even if obvious) setup for a good emotional moment, it fumbles it. For example, when finally Garnet has an emotional breakdown over all of the crazy things that happened in the story, she loses her voice. When that happened, I thought that it was a little obvious that this would be used for an emotional moment later, but hey, I’d take it. At least it would be something. This is something that goes on to affect your gameplay for a while and the story constantly reminds you of it. It really lays it on thick. How does that resolve? She just kinda gets over it one day. The single other character present is only briefly surprised. That’s it. That’s the whole payoff.

Finally, the story keeps twisting itself into knots at the end. No twist is great enough. No ending is grand enough. There must be more. It constantly says, “hey, everything you saw before? Didn’t matter. Look at this now, it’s the actually important thing”, until that thing is discarded in favor of some other important thing. The twists don’t build, they tear down and replace. Until finally, you work through like 3 layers of “final bosses” and suddenly god was the real bad guy all along, kill him. This is the perfect representation of the whole game. This final threat is introduced literally 10 seconds before you end it, while also invalidating the entire story that came before it. That’s it.

Final Thoughts#↑

Rating: 7/10
Playtime: 20 hours

I had heard so much about this game. From the start of this project, this was on the short list of games I was really looking forward to finally experiencing. Part of why I played through all the older games was to have as much context as possible for games like this. The only feelings this game gave me were annoyance and disappointment, at least, outside of the literally perfect introduction.

I don’t actually think this is a bad game. I just feel very strongly that it wasn’t for me. So I don’t think it deserves a worse score than 7, even though my words above were quite harsh.

I think this game was released at a crossroads for the Final Fantasy series. VII and VIII were paving the way forward for the future of the series. This game took an intentional step backwards into the past. For some, this game is the last bastion and pinnacle of that lost golden era of the series. For others, it is a relic that was already behind the times on release. I don’t think these two sides will ever agree about what the future of Final Fantasy should have been.

As someone who got hooked into the series by the future that we did get, maybe it was never going to be possible for me to like this one. That makes me a little sad, but also far more excited for the games coming up.