Cindi Mayweather
Member
Confession. I love Final Fantasy IX. It was the first game I ever saved up for and bought for myself, being a Final Fantasy lover at the time. It was also the first game I ever got really, really addicted to. I played the shit out of it, beating it a mere month after release. I never did that with games then.
Problem? In later replays, despite loving the game, I have found the game utterly unplayable. The reason? The long load times and horribly slow battle system on top of a above average encounter rate (or at least, it feels that way?) made it impossible to enjoy. Everything outside of battle? Fantastic. But this made the experience considerably lesser than VII, VIII, X, or XII. It was a slow, plodding slow as molasses game that was, despite my love for it, completely unplayable.
When FFIX HD was announced for Steam it was my hope that Square Enix would fix this. They are the games most glaring flaws and puts it far below the aforementioned games despite its quality in everything else because it's just such a fucking slog to play that constantly makes you ask,"what were they thinking?" They gave us a fast speed mode, but fast speed mode makes the game weird and look like it's always in fast forward mode. It gets grating because sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy the game like normal without it looking like it's on drugs. Another problem with it is that it can't be activated by the controller itself. Or, I haven't found a way anyways. You have to hit F1 on the keyboard to enable it, so it's tedious to enable too because I'm sitting on my couch trying to get my FFIX on and I have to get up, making it entirely counter intuitive. Even with the fast speed mode, load times for battles are fucking awful especially for a port of a game from 2000. It's also arguable that speed mode feels TOO fast. There's also the problem in that even if the battle system is faster, the characters still wait between turns. I have no idea why this feature is still in the game because it's dog shit. So if you want to play FFIX kosher, you're fucked and not any better than the original, which for the issues it has - which were understandable due to the limitations of the original Playstation - making the port kind of pathetic in many ways. If you want to play it like you're on Speed, all the more power to you. I think that experience sucks the life out of the game.
Enter Memoria.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/ff-modding/discussions/13/357284131804133221/?ctp=15
You can make battles faster by custom fps. In the video I made below I have it on 40 frames per second. Fast, but not stupid fast as "fast forwarding on a dvd" fast. So you can make the battle system faster but to you own speed and liking. Even better and more importantly, you can stupid as hell wait feature off. So when Dagger uses Cure, she does it instantly as soon as possible right after you enter confirm, assuming there are no other actions queued. You know, just like every other Final Fantasy ATB battle system. This makes fights blazingly fast and no longer tedious. You can reduce the battle load time as well by limiting the battle swirl fps.
It's perfection and finally puts FFIX on par with VII and VIII.
I made two videos below with two different battle speeds.
https://youtu.be/xbeZRHczbW4
https://youtu.be/RLkQJX4AUlQ
https://youtu.be/uIN-098XTCg
BONUS: There's also an option to change the jump rope count number. That side game is stupidly hard anyways, so you might as well cheat.
Look how fast actions occur after I confirm them. Pro-tip to Square Enix, this is how FFIX should play, if you're thinking of porting this to PS4.
I feel sorry for the PS4 people who are waiting for FFIX PS4 because it will be by far the inferior version because there's no fucking way Square Enix has the goddamn common sense to reduce the load times, speed up the battle system, and take out that STUPID wait feature from the battle system.
Hallelujah.
Problem? In later replays, despite loving the game, I have found the game utterly unplayable. The reason? The long load times and horribly slow battle system on top of a above average encounter rate (or at least, it feels that way?) made it impossible to enjoy. Everything outside of battle? Fantastic. But this made the experience considerably lesser than VII, VIII, X, or XII. It was a slow, plodding slow as molasses game that was, despite my love for it, completely unplayable.
When FFIX HD was announced for Steam it was my hope that Square Enix would fix this. They are the games most glaring flaws and puts it far below the aforementioned games despite its quality in everything else because it's just such a fucking slog to play that constantly makes you ask,"what were they thinking?" They gave us a fast speed mode, but fast speed mode makes the game weird and look like it's always in fast forward mode. It gets grating because sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy the game like normal without it looking like it's on drugs. Another problem with it is that it can't be activated by the controller itself. Or, I haven't found a way anyways. You have to hit F1 on the keyboard to enable it, so it's tedious to enable too because I'm sitting on my couch trying to get my FFIX on and I have to get up, making it entirely counter intuitive. Even with the fast speed mode, load times for battles are fucking awful especially for a port of a game from 2000. It's also arguable that speed mode feels TOO fast. There's also the problem in that even if the battle system is faster, the characters still wait between turns. I have no idea why this feature is still in the game because it's dog shit. So if you want to play FFIX kosher, you're fucked and not any better than the original, which for the issues it has - which were understandable due to the limitations of the original Playstation - making the port kind of pathetic in many ways. If you want to play it like you're on Speed, all the more power to you. I think that experience sucks the life out of the game.
Enter Memoria.
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/ff-modding/discussions/13/357284131804133221/?ctp=15
You can make battles faster by custom fps. In the video I made below I have it on 40 frames per second. Fast, but not stupid fast as "fast forwarding on a dvd" fast. So you can make the battle system faster but to you own speed and liking. Even better and more importantly, you can stupid as hell wait feature off. So when Dagger uses Cure, she does it instantly as soon as possible right after you enter confirm, assuming there are no other actions queued. You know, just like every other Final Fantasy ATB battle system. This makes fights blazingly fast and no longer tedious. You can reduce the battle load time as well by limiting the battle swirl fps.
It's perfection and finally puts FFIX on par with VII and VIII.
I made two videos below with two different battle speeds.
https://youtu.be/xbeZRHczbW4
https://youtu.be/RLkQJX4AUlQ
https://youtu.be/uIN-098XTCg
BONUS: There's also an option to change the jump rope count number. That side game is stupidly hard anyways, so you might as well cheat.
Look how fast actions occur after I confirm them. Pro-tip to Square Enix, this is how FFIX should play, if you're thinking of porting this to PS4.
I feel sorry for the PS4 people who are waiting for FFIX PS4 because it will be by far the inferior version because there's no fucking way Square Enix has the goddamn common sense to reduce the load times, speed up the battle system, and take out that STUPID wait feature from the battle system.
Hallelujah.
_/¯
