After recently completing a RTTP playthrough of Resident Evil 2 on my Vita, I was in the mood for another PS1-era game with pre-rendered backgrounds. As I swiped through my pages of installed PS1 Classics, I stopped on Final Fantasy 9 as it's the only PS1 FF game that I never played past the first few hours or so. I have a few weeks until Street Fighter V comes out, so playing FF9 on a handheld seemed like the perfect way to fill that time in between.
So here I am, about two hours into the game, and I'm still gobsmacked by how damn high the production values were for the opening hour of the game. I want to show this to someone who is too young to have experienced Square/Squaresoft in their glory days to convey just how impressive their output was during the PS1 era. I feel that FF9 represents the apex of their mastery of the PS1 hardware, and sadly I also get the sense that FF9 was the last of its particular "brand" of FF that we're ever likely to get. So many of the key figures involved with FF during that era ended up leaving the series after FF9, and I'd argue that they went out at the very top of their game. It serves as a wonderful swan song for the series on the console that catapulted it into the upper echelons of international fandom.
So what is so great about the opening hour of the game? Well, everything! The writing, the pacing, the way it introduces the basic mechanics in a non-intrusive way, the eye-meltingly gorgeous CGI cutscenes, the endearing characters, the music... the list goes on and on. It's the complete package in terms of hooking the player right out the gate with jaw-dropping spectacle, and it did it long before games like God of War popularized this front-heavy approach to game design.
I mean, seriously. This game looks so friggin' good. After coming from RE2 and appreciating its comparatively simple pre-rendered backdrops, the detailed, animated backgrounds of FF9 show just how far developers like Square were able to push this technical limitation-driven art style. The cinematic shots and lived-in detail that you can get with pre-rendered backgrounds were simply not even remotely doable any other way back then, but even now I almost feel like modern games with full camera control lack the clarity and visual detail of some of these areas (barring the low-resolution, of course).
Not only are the in-game graphics stunning, but Square's legendary CGI cutscenes are cranked up to 11 here IMO. Not only has the quality/bitrate of them seemingly been improved over FF7 and FF8, but the lighting and particle effects along with bustling crowds and other fantastical details sprinkled throughout add up to something more impressive than anything done in real-time even today. Sure, we can render more detailed character models and higher-res textures on today's hardware in real time, but the final product when all of the dazzling effects come together in these CGI cutscenes is still more impressive on the whole.
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I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I just wanted to praise this game's opening a bit, as I feel it was far ahead of its time in terms of polish, pacing, and presentation. It's also bittersweet looking back on how much better the writing/dialog reads in text than it does when poorly delivered by second-rate voice actors like in every FF since 9. The characterization of several characters is more believable and endearing in the opening our of FF9 than it is for any given character in the later games, IMO.
Around the time X-2 released, and then 14, I figured the market just moved on without me.
