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So I realized Final Fantasy IX is approaching its ten year anniversary in America

Lebron

Member
Fimbulvetr said:
At(To?) Zanarkand and Hymn of the Fayth are pretty much the best tracks in the game. I should've assumed that Uematsu did those.
I don't know, I've seen At, To, and just Zanarkand by itself. I really have no idea which one is the actual title, hah. But yeah, those are my two favorites too, and are in my all-time list. Even though he was burned out, Uematsu could still bring the magic.

Shimomura will bring back the FF music dominance with Versus, I'm sure.


Anyway, I wish I had my PS3 with me so I could boot up IX again. Grrrr, this thread has brought back the urge.
 

Rebel Leader

THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
Mama Robotnik said:
Square's finest ever game. I salute you and your thread.

179296bigbosssalutesupe.jpg
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
I really need to play this.

I've had it sitting in my closet for 2 years, telling myself I'll play it sometime soon. My brother keeps pushing me to play it and something else always comes up.
 

Rebel Leader

THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
Plinko said:
I really need to play this.

I've had it sitting in my closet for 2 years, telling myself I'll play it sometime soon. My brother keeps pushing me to play it and something else always comes up.


STOP! HEY PLAY THIS GAME!
 

Lebron

Member
Plinko said:
I really need to play this.

I've had it sitting in my closet for 2 years, telling myself I'll play it sometime soon. My brother keeps pushing me to play it and something else always comes up.
If you don't put it in that damn tray right now my avatar and I, while not actually knowing you, will hate you forever.
 
I started playing it for the first time this year and I love it. Easily one of my favorite JRPGs. I'm on the last dungeon and unfortunately am in the middle of too many games right now. I'm hoping to finish it soon so I can free up the 2 freakin gigs it's taking up on my memory card.
 

Yoboman

Member
Any chance the talent that made this game would ever get back together?

This is what Final Fantasy should be.

I always wanted to eat a gysahl pickle
 

Rebel Leader

THE POWER OF BUTTERSCOTCH BOTTOMS
Yoboman said:
Any chance the talent that made this game would ever get back together?

This is what Final Fantasy should be.

I always wanted to eat a gysahl pickle

Would you stand the smell?
 

Lebron

Member
I could literally pop in and play the IX OST and then IX OST Plus from start to finish and enjoy all 6 hours of it. In fact, I've done it before on long study days.
 

Plinko

Wildcard berths that can't beat teams without a winning record should have homefield advantage
Lebron said:
If you don't put it in that damn tray right now my avatar and I, while not actually knowing you, will hate you forever.

Alright, I'm starting it tomorrow first thing in the morning.
 

GhaleonQ

Member
It's the 3rd greatest game of all-time, and 1 of the few video games that actively aspires to be high art. I've gushed enough about it.

*copies and pastes pet theory about it here*

1. It has the series' best music. I can provide favorites if you like, but I think The Place I'll Come Home To, Someday is a chorale that tops even V's Distant Home. That it's used and remixed so effectively is a bonus. There are so many fantastic songs that are only used once that I feel Uematsu's just playing me (This Blade Is My Life is a perfect early example). When he made Sakura Note's soundtrack in that style, he could only muster the standard 35-or-so songs.

2. It has the best cast in the series. That's up for debate, of course, but even though I really love, say, Freya, it's mostly the uniform strength of the characters that makes the cast appealing. Even Beatrix delivers. The world's fully realized, too.

3. It has the BEST ability system. I love that it's been used again. It provides linearity and flexibility. It challenges you to fight smarter when using weaker or disadvantageous equipment. There are tons of abilities. I adore it. It's my favorite RPG ability system, genuinely. It also lends itself well to strategic battling.

4. Insert the usual praise for the aesthetics, town design, and other miscellany here.

5. It's the smartest game in the series (use "RPG" everytime I say "game in the series," too).

Final Fantasy IX is absolutely an existentialist examination of Final Fantasy and of human life. The creators (unwittingly?) formed a moving meditation on the player's and the franchise's existences. Archetypal party members and their experiences (below, so you know I'm not constructing something of nothing), the spectacular final boss, the profoundly meaningful bookends - each slice uses the series' symbols, 19th century Russian novel-style, to examine the ways in which we define the self. The series, torn between 2 traditions, turned its questioning back on itself: "Does Final Fantasy's future sever it from its past?" This is not to say that Chocobo Hot And Cold is a Kierkegaardian metaphor for repetition leading to the self, of course.

Zidane: Virtue - You don't need a reason to help people.
Instead of living to manipulate, he lives to preserve and serve, becoming his true self (literally) in the process.
Vivi: Sorrow - How do you prove that you exist...? Maybe we don't exist...
He doesn't know whether he has a soul and he never finds out, but since no one knows for sure, we can only hope that we acted rightly (which his kind children prove).
Adelbert: Dilemma - Having sworn fealty, must I spend my life in servitude?
He doesn't know whether one can truly become one's self if he lives to serve others, but he comes to understand that servitude is the best mindset for achieving that.
Sarah: Devotion - Someday I will be Queen, but I will always be myself.
She has an identity crisis twice, but learns that her actions define her self, not some hypothetical potential to act.
Freya: Despair - To be forgotten is worse than death.
Does experience cease to exist if no one's around to recognize it (including the person with whom you experienced it)? No, to live is to be forgotten, and the actions you do exist ouside of time. She's my favorite.
Quina: Indulgence - I do what I want! You have problem!?
The aesthetic person who only lives for sensory pleasure leaves the party to pursue pleasure throughout the game, but ends the game using her love to care for others.
Eiko: Solitude - I don't wanna be alone anymore...
We can only experience repetition in relation to other souls, so the girl who tries to destroy a repetition (between Garnet and Zidane) ends up finding her own (her new family).
Amarant: Arrogance - The only dependable thing about the future is uncertainty.
The nihilist who lives by recollection (i.e. hateful of the future, recollecting the past) instead of repetition (less exciting repeated experience to generate a meaningful life) learns to repeat (with Lani).)

The existentialism isn't formalized, but it is sketched and filled in a way that doesn't make this overbaked theorizing. That's especially true because it's also unambiguously about the existence of Final Fantasy itself. There are the obvious postmodern references to the player-game relationship, especially the opening and ending. The 1st run of the play is "faked" to deceive the crowd (the audience), while the 2nd alters the play (the video game) in order to directly relate to the crowd. There are loads of references to past games. The final boss, Necron, is a masterstroke. He doesn't just attempt to kill the characters, but to wipe the world out of existence. The entire game (Genomes/Black Mages without "souls," lost memories, essentially everything listed above) is a metacommentary on RPGs in this new age and how Final Fantasy fits into them. If it changes, is it still Final Fantasy? Will past entries cease to matter if it does change? If it perpetuates, will it remain unique or will it become another "soulless" series? Necron attempts to prove that Final Fantasy cannot last without its Nintendo/Super Nintendo trappings and tropes, while you struggle to revive its spirit. I could go on, but it's even more plainly obvious than the human-related stuff I listed.

All of it's couched in a traditional tale that's genuinely moving. The opening/closing bookends are legitimately mature storytelling. I still can't believe that Square did something so daring with its flagship series. It remained fantastic when I was 13 and didn't understand it, but I replayed it at 16 and suddenly saw how they fed the player every double meaning.

6. Charm is, by far, the most important thing in video games. All of my favorite series and games have it. This game has charm and care etched into every detail.

...Most people just like it because it has a sense of humor about itself, though.

I'm so sorry, but I HAVE to post it every time.

*salutes*
 

isny

napkin dispenser
You can still pick this game up for around $10 brand new. There is no reason not to own this game. (Be it digital download or disc based)
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
At the time, my opinion was that one last classic FF is cute, but let's get on with the "next gen" FFs that push the envelope...

little did I know that X-XIV would throw a lot of "babies out with the bathwater".

I thought next gen would bring better, more realistic airship control sections... Not turn them into menu selections, the "gameplay" of which could have been done on the Famicom :p
 

scotcheggz

Member
GhaleonQ said:
It's the 3rd greatest game of all-time, and 1 of the few video games that actively aspires to be high art. I've gushed enough about it.

*copies and pastes pet theory about it here*

1. It has the series' best music. I can provide favorites if you like, but I think The Place I'll Come Home To, Someday is a chorale that tops even V's Distant Home. That it's used and remixed so effectively is a bonus. There are so many fantastic songs that are only used once that I feel Uematsu's just playing me (This Blade Is My Life is a perfect early example). When he made Sakura Note's soundtrack in that style, he could only muster the standard 35-or-so songs.

2. It has the best cast in the series. That's up for debate, of course, but even though I really love, say, Freya, it's mostly the uniform strength of the characters that makes the cast appealing. Even Beatrix delivers. The world's fully realized, too.

3. It has the BEST ability system. I love that it's been used again. It provides linearity and flexibility. It challenges you to fight smarter when using weaker or disadvantageous equipment. There are tons of abilities. I adore it. It's my favorite RPG ability system, genuinely. It also lends itself well to strategic battling.

4. Insert the usual praise for the aesthetics, town design, and other miscellany here.

5. It's the smartest game in the series (use "RPG" everytime I say "game in the series," too).

Pretty much agree with all five points here. All the characters are spot on and I love that it delves into all of them. I don't really have any special love for Eiko or Quina, but all the rest are fantastic. I think Steiner, Beatrix and Freya are my favourite characters in all the final fantasy series. Beatrix is a great example of the fantastic character development in this game, she's relegated to the sidelines for much of the game, but you still feel her struggle and understand why she is there. Even Puck, Dr Tot and Ruby have more backstory and character development than most characters and they're minor characters really.

I mentioned it earlier but the title cutscene is amazing.

Edit: New avatar to celebrate :D Though ten years makes me feel really old...
 

ULTROS!

People seem to like me because I am polite and I am rarely late. I like to eat ice cream and I really enjoy a nice pair of slacks.
I really like this game to be quite honest, the soundtrack is amazing too like:

Mystery Sword
Dark Messenger
Loss of Me
Place of Memory
The City that Never Sleeps ~ Treno

The soundtrack has a mix of quirky-charm-y songs and dark-moody songs. Although FFVIII takes the cake of having the best dark-moody songs. Although FFIX has one of the best piano arrangements in the FF Piano Collections.

Oh and this game has the best looking final dungeon in the series (or probably on par with FFVIII's).

This is my 2nd most favorite Final Fantasy game.
 
Fantastic post, GhaleonQ.

I really, really love this game - by far the best of the PSX FFs (Tactics aside), even if it's also one of the least breakable FFs (and I do so love to break them).

The one thing that stops me from basically constantly replaying this is the slowness of the battles and the loading. I'd KILL for a version of the game that had exactly the same ability system but used FFX-2's ATB Kai system. Maybe a slightly less weird/opaque stat progression system as well, but that's not such a big deal.

Final Fantasy really, really needs a new entry in which the different characters are as well differentiated (in battle) as they are in FFIX.
 

hitsugi

Member
interesting to see so much appreciation for this game. this, combined with FFX-2 are the only FF games that I've never played
 

Boney

Banned
GhaleonQ, you're copy paste makes me love you more and more.

I kinda have a similar problem since when I played it, I was 11 years old, but with you spelling out it's incredible personality and grace you characterise it itslef i understand why I love it so. Truly the greatest FF to update it's lore, while at the same time speaking about it's identity.

What truly interests me is that how IX was planned as a side project, similar to RE3. This one is truly a work of art. Yet the entry barrier is so slow, a masterpiece in videogame design.
 

Ellis Kim

Banned
Man God said:
I was playing it just yesterday, the battle loads are blessedly brief compared to the actual speed of battle.

It might take ten seconds to load a fight but it takes fifteen to twenty seconds to fill up the atb bar.
I went and finally finished 9 after beating X-2, and god damn, I had to set battle speeds to max for all of the PS1 entries and it STILL wasn't enough, lol
hitsugi said:
interesting to see so much appreciation for this game. this, combined with FFX-2 are the only FF games that I've never played
You should definitely give X-2 a chance. Its the epitome of the ATB battle system, and the story is deservedly light and saccharine.
 

sikkinixx

Member
I'll never forget getting it on my birthday when I was 15, pouring over the instruction manual on the car trip home from the store.

The opening FMV looked so awesome. Lighting the candle in the middle of the room. How could a game look so pretty? The menu shape, the text font... it just seemed fucking perfect. I knew you could have four guys in your party and when that first "battle" fired up I got giddy.

Running through the town as Vivi, the clever little quips like the OP noted, the animation of the characters running or walking just was so much nicer than FFVIII.

My buddy was over and we obsessed over trying to get 100 on the play Zidane and Blank act out. We all night'd it to just after the ice cavern I think. Funny thing is it felt like we played forever but really that's not too far into the game. I guess it took longer first time through since we were checking EVERY corner, talking to EVERY person over and over. It was like my first play through of FFVII took 9 hours of get out of Midgar. Now I could coast through in 3 hours maybe? I look back and wonder what the hell I did that took so long.

Fucking memories man. Good shit.


edit: Oh and the fucking tournament in Lindblum (?), killing that beastly fucker was awesome. So much fun.
 

TheSeks

Blinded by the luminous glory that is David Bowie's physical manifestation.
Lebron said:
Is IX still the most expensive game Square has done? I seem to recall it being around 40 million or so.

Don't they all get more expensive with the CGI budget? Or did Square somehow scale back on the money after Spirits Within bombed?

GhaleonQ said:
3. It has the BEST ability system.

I have to disagree. 9's ability system where you have to buy shitty armor is pretty much the anti-thesis of RPG store-buying-equipment mechanics. Maybe that's the point, but after every other RPG drills into your head "go into the store and buy the best/highest rated equipment" having to buy a 4 dmg wand compared to a 40dmg wand just to get an elemental skill (fire/ice/thunder/whatever) is plain stupid.

Amir0x said:
sucks for you dudes. We had FFXII, best FF ever. I sob for the future now.

Man after my heart. FFXII is probably the most fun FF I've played. Haters gonna hate.
 
TheSeks said:
I have to disagree. 9's ability system where you have to buy shitty armor is pretty much the anti-thesis of RPG store-buying-equipment mechanics. Maybe that's the point, but after every other RPG drills into your head "go into the store and buy the best/highest rated equipment" having to buy a 4 dmg wand compared to a 40dmg wand just to get an elemental skill (fire/ice/thunder/whatever) is plain stupid.

It's not stupid; it's different.
 

GhaleonQ

Member
Thanks, all, for tolerating reposts.

Himuro said:
Adelbert? Sarah? What the fuck.

I will NOT tolerate the game calling him by his last name when no other game does.

Amir0x said:
sucks for you dudes. We had FFXII, best FF ever. I sob for the future now.

It's my 3rd favorite, and I still trust that they'll pull of XV to continue the "last on the console is the best" streak to 5. On the other hand, blowing it will actually make me consider my affection for Square.

scotcheggz said:
Beatrix is a great example of the fantastic character development in this game, she's relegated to the sidelines for much of the game, but you still feel her struggle and understand why she is there.

Rarely do you understand the unseen plot points of an occasional rival and understand his development. Beatrix is 1 of the few.

badcrumble said:
Final Fantasy really, really needs a new entry in which the different characters are as well differentiated (in battle) as they are in FFIX.

And they can't even use the excuse that it would be less fun when not all characters are available at all times, since XIII might have given you all of the characters EVEN LESS THAN IX. How frequently did you have your whole party?

Boney said:
What truly interests me is that how IX was planned as a side project, similar to RE3. This one is truly a work of art.

It's almost as if the massive burden of the name prevents creativity! Shock?!

TheSeks said:
I have to disagree. 9's ability system where you have to buy shitty armor is pretty much the anti-thesis of RPG store-buying-equipment mechanics. Maybe that's the point, but after every other RPG drills into your head "go into the store and buy the best/highest rated equipment" having to buy a 4 dmg wand compared to a 40dmg wand just to get an elemental skill (fire/ice/thunder/whatever) is plain stupid.

I'm not going to claim that it's the 1-size-fits-all solution to boring grinding, but it absolutely solved the problem for me. It provides difficulty with a practical purpose, and it's optional. I also think it was the 1st in the series with visible equipment, which was a thrill at the time for cycling through weaker equipment.
 

Lard

Banned
Lebron said:
I could literally pop in and play the IX OST and then IX OST Plus from start to finish and enjoy all 6 hours of it. In fact, I've done it before on long study days.

IX OST Plus?
 
For some reason, FF9 did not affect me at a deep emotional level like 7,8 and 10 did. For that reason, I tend to forget the main plot of 9 and 12. 13 is fresh in my mind, but its gonna join 9 and 12 soon. At the moment, I for the life of me cannot recall a single plot event from 9 and 12 other than Steiner trying to protect princess Garnet. I recall the cast of 9, and remember Quina Quen being hilarious. The battle theme was most memorable.

I play FF games for story reasons only. Gameplay is gravy.
 

Lebron

Member
TheSeks said:
Don't they all get more expensive with the CGI budget? Or did Square somehow scale back on the money after Spirits Within bombed?
Yeah, I looked it up and XII surpassed it with like a 48 million budget. Not sure how much XIII cost. Still, 40 million back then was pretty crazy.

Lard said:
IX OST Plus?
Yeah, it's basically a bunch of tracks from the game that never made it into the OST and a few unreleased tracks that weren't in the game at all.
 
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