JamesWong's Full Review: Final Fantasy IX for PlayStation 1
At the 2000 E3 Expo in Los Angeles, Squaresoft showed nothing about FF9 except a brief snippet of CG in which Vivi, a black mage, appears to be laying on the ground, in the rain, over cobblestone. The accompanying music was a melody for the game. The CG cuts to an interview with executive producer Hironobu Sakaguchi and a translator's voice saying "we wanted to go back to the basics".
Going back to the basics was right. Final Fantasy 9 is a homage to the strengths of the FF games before it.
Instead of going over the game's plot, I am going to skip right over and focus my ePinion on the core gameplay elements.
Combat
As you progress through the first disc, you'll feel like you're being hammered with plot more so than gameplay. The first disc feels more like an establishing disc: I was able to finish it by playing casually for about 8 or 9 hours. Though this may seem a little frustrating (especially for those of you who want to fight and fight and fight), combat gets stronger from the second disc onward.
Many gamers really disliked Final Fantasy 8. Some blame it on the clumsy "Stock" system, in which you had to "Draw" spells from enemies in order to use them. Because of this it felt as if spells had become items (as opposed to usable spells in older FF games where you had magic points, MP). Also, summon spells took painfully long to sit through when fighting monsters.
Replacing the "Stock" system is the Ability system, which is much more logical. Your characters can acquire permanent abilities based on the items they equip. When you win battles, you receive AP (Ability Points). Different abilities require different amounts of AP, naturally, so some will become permanent quicker. Abilities range from learning magic spells (Garnet as a white mage can permanently learn the familiar Cure and defensive spells, for instance), special attacks (Zidane's skills in combat) or defensive abilities ("Auto-Potion" makes your character use a potion when hit, "Locomotion" prevents the Stop spell from being inflicted on them, etc).
Summoning is once again present in combat. Luckily, during most combat, you won't see the entire summon, which cuts down your "sitting on my butt" time quite a bit. FF8 annoyed players because of the lengthy summon sequences. Now the summon sequences are as long as other magic spells (read: reasonably short). Unlike FF8, interactivity for summoning is removed (gone is the "push square repeatedly to amass more power" feature).
Combat aside, there are small mini games scattered about in towns. Some that you come across may not be back as you progress in the game, so play them to the limit if you want to enjoy them before moving forward. The scenarios for each game range from jump-roping to running a race with Hippaul (yeah, he's a hippo).
Side Quests
The most obvious side quest / mini game involves treasure hunting on the world map with your Chocobo. Through a mini game in Chocobo Forest you can find "Chocographs" that are thumbnail sized hints at where to find treasures on the world map. As you find specific treasures, you're chocobo can evolve so that it walks across shallow water and mountains.
The card game is again a feature in Final Fantasy. As with combat, this makes more sense to me than the card game (with it's varying "regional rules") in Final Fantasy 8.
Graphics
The visuals for battles and other non pre-rendered graphics have not evolved very much, but I'm not saying that they are bad. It's just a hardware limitation. The PlayStation 2 (I actually bought one to USE it, not to sell it) has a 'texture smoothing' option. Once you run FF9 with this setting, the game looks very nice. The fields in combat are smoothed out and characters' textures are soft as well (the moogles look really cute!). No blockiness whatsoever.
Cinematic sequences in FF9 are, as usual, impressive. The characters possess a 'cuter' feel and return to the 'SD' size, and the motion captured action is excellent. Facial expressions are now as realistic as ever.
Music
The original fanfare is here! It surprised me, as the original "you win" battle music was always slightly modified with FF7 onward. There are many points of reference of music from the older FF games, though I can't say I recall them all. Composer Nobuo Uematsu returns to composing what feels like a warmer soundtrack than that of FF8, which is very fitting for the more adventurous and fantastical game that FF9 is.
Conclusion
Final Fantasy IX is very fun and will last the casual gamer a good month, while more seasoned players will probably gobble it up in about a week or two, if not several days (around 40 hours). Those of you who were frustrated with FF8's gameplay can take comfort in buying FF9. The Playstation's last Final Fantasy title turns out to be one grand experience.
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