I didn't think I'd wrap this one up before the end of the year, but this game was a lot shorter than I anticipated. I have such vague memories of watching my older sister playing this game on the PS2 back then, Quina's theme was basically etched into my brain because she spent so much time catching frogs from what I remember. By the time I got to my first Qu's Marsh in my playthrough, it was like I was hit with the enlightenment stick and then raptured right then and there. I remember trying so hard to beat this game myself back then too, but I was too stupid to figure out the first plant boss and thought that the game was fucking impossible, so I gave up. My child self has officially been avenged, but that was in like.. the first hour of the game. How was the rest?

It was very close to perfect in my eyes, from start to finish. The plot is so fittingly Shakespearean, so fluidly tragic and comedic ala Midsummer's Night Dream. Just a group of hooligans befriending each other on the way to killing a God in such JRPG fashion. It's a trope, but it's a trope that I love and this game served that up on a silver platter. There was a very effective emotional punch to the game's themes about individuality and personal existence that resonated with me. It was filled with so much empathy and heartfelt bond that actually grows as the plot moves forward. Some of the characters do stupid as shit things, but it's effectively told through the bittersweet enveloping of the narrative. The twists are gut wrenching to the characters and they're acting in ways rational to them. There's a lot of darkness and death, but also a lot of moments of light peeking in that I really appreciated. I was also a theatre kid after all, it's in the roots of my personality that make me omega cringe.

I like the character's a lot for the most part. There are clearly some that are more integral than others, but those characters help balance out the dreary with some comic whimsy. I couldn't help but exhale air out of my nose every time Quina randomly appeared on screen and I applaud them for being a Blue Mage that is actually useful. I could do with some more fleshing out of specific characters though. Amarant is the last party member you get fairly deep into the game and his motivations for following the party are pretty flimsy. He doesn't have the charm or helpfulness in combat that Quina has for me to be like, "That's a character that's doing stuff", so most of the time I was like, "Why's this guy still here?" instead. Garnet needed to give a little more, she's like almost a perfect character to me (story-wise) but then the game gives her plot MUTENESS and literally shuts her up and deletes her dialogue for a whole disc of story. That and there being another character that is the same class as her, but objectively way better in combat for plot reasons, she ended up getting sidelined near the end for me. Those are really the only character gripes I had, but I will say that Square finally crafted a love story that didn't make my eyes roll out of my head.

There's some fantastic scenes in this game that are hampered down a bit by the game having old disease, and I'm looking forward to seeing those scenes revitalized in the supposed remake of this game that's being made. I really think the character's and emotional beats of the story could thrive with a little more oomph injected into the writing and it's exciting to think about it. (If they don't fuck it up, of course.) I should note that I don't think this game needs a remake, but since one has already been heavily rumored, I guess this review is what I hope they would add/change in it. I'm not the biggest fan of FF7 Remake or FF16's more action-oriented combat, so I pray they don't just copy paste those systems into this one. Anyways..

So yeah, the story slaps cheeks red, but for the gameplay? I would say it's more positive than bad, but I do have complaints that I'm noticing have been spewed out before on here, so let me just add my own vomit to that pile really quick. Yeah, the combat is really slow. It's super duper slow. There's a reason why so many people complain about it. It's not even really the battle animations or the 360 no scope camera zoom ins at the start of each battle that bother me, it's moreso the fact that when I cast spell buffs onto my party, they're already completely expired by the time it's my White Mage's turn again so it kind of felt to me like giving your party buffs was a useless waste of a turn for the majority of the time. At first I actually thought that you couldn't cast buffs on multiple people at a time and it turned out that wasn't the case, it was literally just the first buff expiring before I even got a chance to cast it again because the battle timer doesn't pause during the crazy ass battle animations from each enemy, summon, and character on screen. I know that there's a speed up function that came with this port but I didn't like using it because it made the battles overwhelming. It's harder to focus on what is happening and it would just make the buffs expire even faster, so there was no point unless I was grinding.

Also, Trance is kind of.... uh... ass? I like the idea of it, sure, but it's just a watered down Limit Break that you can't control. There's no way to stop the gauge from filling and there's no way to prevent it from happening, so most of the time when Trance happened it would be in a normal battle where Steiner cleaves a poor goblin in half but then doesn't budge an inch during a life or death fight against a boss who wants to eat our innards. Or, someone Trances on the same turn that the enemy dies so it gets completely wasted entirely. It came in clutch for some instances for sure and I like that it's a brief steroid for all of the characters, but the uncontrollable nature of it definitely ruins it as a mechanic.

I do really enjoy the ability mechanic in this game because it reminded me of Bravely Default's ability mechanic in a way. The difference here is that the abilities are leveled up through the use of each character's weapons, so when they kill a certain amount of enemies with said weapon, they'll be able to use that ability permanently without it. I like it a lot, but I also think it could be better to be honest. The plot is constantly ripping the characters away from each other and separating them all the time, so there's some segments where you're forced to use a set of 2 or 4 for hours, and I don't mind that in a story sense at all, but it left some of the characters in the dust when it came to their abilities. By the time you get some of them back, they're under leveled and missing abilities that you'd have to grind to get because the stores would have updated weapons with stronger attributes but different abilities attached to them. Maybe it's more my fault for not grinding them out at every chance I had, but it's not like the game outright warns you that you won't be using character X once your toe touches this specific pixel of the place you're in. Overall though, I find these complaints to be really minor and the story makes me forget about them for the most part in the first place.

This concludes my review of Square's Final Fantasy IX released in 2000 for the Sony Playstation 1! Now I am going to review Square-Enix's Final Fantasy IX released in 2016 as a port for PC:

THIS PORT IS ABSOLUTE DONKEY PISS!!
I wish so bad that I could have played the original, but I have no way of obtaining it so I have to play with this beat up, chewed on, curb stomped, crumpled, doo doo ass version instead. This port looks so.. bad, man. What the fuck happened? Apparently it's a port of a port made for MOBILE? and you can tell. The backgrounds look like the crusty, ambiguous paste I can find on the pavement of a Floridian parking lot. It's so bad that there's literally a whole modding team that had to overhaul the graphics on this game just to make them slightly better. They did the absolute best they could do, but it's still so hard to see what is an interactable object on screen when it's blended in so harshly with the pre-rendered backgrounds that look as bad as that. I find it so ironically comical that Square would give Garnet a high-definition ass on her character model, but won't change the overworld model of Madain Sari even slightly so you can tell it's an enterable place and not a crusty dog shit you can't interact with.

I honestly really don't care that much for graphix, but it's so grating to play this game on a monitor that's bigger than a 4:3 box, because you can literally see the character's blip in and out of cutscenes off to the side where you're not supposed to and it's really annoying. The special effects don't leave that ratio either, so when you get flashbanged by a boss, there's just a white square covering the middle of the screen while you can still see the outskirts of it. It's just awful.

To top it off, my game crashed in the transition between the final dialogue and the ending CGI cutscene right after I finally beat the final boss, so I had to watch the ending on Youtube instead. The game doesn't acknowledge that I beat it because of this and if you think I'm getting my ass pounded by the final boss for 3 hours straight again, you are fucking wrong, bucko.

Anyways, I like this game a lot and I really hope the remake isn't a lie because I'd play the hell out of it. It's not my favorite Final Fantasy ever, (I still think mine is 10) but it's definitely up there. My complaints are super minor and I don't want to change my score on it just because I played the port instead of the OG, but holy shit, just play the OG version if you can. Square did this one so dirty and it's a bit of a shame.

Let's get this out of the way first: The final boss in this game is bullshit. Yes, I love every bit of this game, but it was still bullshit. BIG difficulty spike. I tried at least ten times, but kept dying off to its overpowered attacks. I thought about cheating (I'm a grown man, I've got shit to do), but I wanted it do it 'right,' because I had grown to love this game and didn't want the last bit to be spoiled like that. I didn't want a second healer in the party either because my favourite character, Vivi, had to be there for the last fight. So I changed my equipment around, tried some new tactics and it wasn't so bad after all. And now that I avoided ruining the final boss for myself...

The further this game went on, the better it got. It started off as a good game, was hitting greatness by the end of Disc 2, and in the endgame - helped by some incredibly moving and epic music by Uematsu - became excellent. This is among his best work. This is among everybody involved's best work. The game feels like a look back on the series up till that point as it said goodbye to the PS1 era. Designs from the 2D games return, but never at the expense of FF IX's own identity.

I loved the cast. Vivi is my guy, of course, but everyone's personalities are a good mix of cartoonish and sympathetic. The story got better and better as it went on, where most games fizzle a bit at some point, and even the villain felt like he had a point. Also the villain is incredibly sexy so even if he didn't have a point I'd root for him.

The combat is straightforward and rewarding, the level scaling is appropriate, and the game is really good at making you feel your progress. If there is one thing I had to nitpick, it's that the Trance/super saiyan mode was irrelevant to most battles and couldn't be influenced much by the player, but it doesn't really matter.

There is also so much to do in the towns aside from the main story. They'll make a minigame out of anything. The card game is really fun and I'd love to play it irl, and it's easy to get sidetracked by something to do so long as you wander around. Both the in-game graphics and the FMVs are astoundingly good for the PS1, and the remaster makes them even better.

This game feels like one of those stars-aligned moments where a bunch of creative folk got together, decided they were going to make something good and did it, without pressure. There's almost nothing to criticize in it. Nothing feels like it had to be compromised on. The game doesn't have the weight of being the end of an era, or a retrospective, or anything like that on it - it's just there to be enjoyed. Highly recommended to people who like RPGs and people who don't, because this is as good an introduction as could be.

When fans have proclaimed that this was the best Final Fantasy game I figured it was all just exaggeration seeing as the same fandom has a lot of fans praising Final Fantasy VII as the best Final Fantasy game. I can attest that these claims for FFIX are not off-base or exaggerated.

The combat of Final Fantasy IX, as with pretty much everything else in this game, is a callback to the early days of Final Fantasy before its modern era which I'm sure those reading this have heard time and time again. Very simple turn based combat with nothing special other than like a super Saiyan mode when your ATB meter is filled. I feel like this game is one of the first 3D Final Fantasy games that also properly does open world exploration right. A lot of FFVII "open world" aspects still felt very linear and small, and FFVIII wasn't much of an improvement either. FFIX on the other hand feels just about right. It still has a linear approach to open world maps, but the areas you explore feel far more explorable and massive than the last two games had. Also, the environments also just look really well made!

The story for FFIX is truly one of the most charming and endearing stories I've had the pleasure to witness in a Final Fantasy game. It has a children's fairytale story to it that I'm also sure the people reading this have heard about it as well. The characters themselves are all memorable and lovable to the very end. I think this is also one of the few Final Fantasy games where I actually don't have a problem with the characters. The story and characters have this symbiotic relationship where they both improve each other after each event taking place, or in other words, the game's story and characters are really well written.

There's just a lot about this game that you cannot go wrong with and that is a good entry for a Final Fantasy fan who wants to experience the older titles, but has neither the means or confidence to do so. This game is definitive Final Fantasy experience for sure.

I'd highly recommend this for the following:
-JRPG fans
-Incoming or relatively new Final Fantasy fans
-a low poly enthusiast
-looking for a wonderfully written cast and story in a video game
-loves video games in high fantasy settings

That Moguri Mod goes hard though.
This is my first Final Fantasy and goddamn what a great game this was. Every character is just so memorable and likable, even the ones who didn't get as much fleshing out as they shoulda (Freya).
Zidane was a great protag and he really just made all his scenes so much better with his charisma, kind-heartedness, and every moment near the end game once you get into around the final 7ish hours of the game. Vivi needs no explanation he's just the best and a good kid.
Steiner is great and an absolute goof, Dagger is immediately interesting, some of her mid-game sorta interactions are a bit meandering, but she really ends up as a great character by the end. Freya didn't get enough closure but still a good character that I can't help but really like cuz she's just cool and a really big humanoid rat. Amarant is one of those characters who're weird and subtle in how they develop, even during the explicit development parts, and I really like him for that.
Eiko is cute and a gremlin and while she initially seems like she'll be an annoying child, she ends up being quite likable by the end. And Quina is just the weirdest thing ever, but they're very funny sometimes so they get a pass.
Tons more major and minor characters I could talk about, but the gist is that they're all great and memorable and I love each and everyone of them cuz they're so goofy and unique. Music is amazing, too. The final boss theme is just so good especially considering this is a PS1 game. Highly recommend.

The combat and traversal felt the slowest compared to VII and VIII, mainly because for some reason every random encounter has a loading black screen which can last up to 15 seconds, and since you have the intro animation for every battle you end up waiting like 30-40 seconds to start a battle, which just ends up emphasizing that you have to wait 5 more seconds to be able to choose what to do thanks to the ATB system.

Although the combat was really slow, I was enjoying it at normal speed with no cheats for the first 5 hours, but Zidane... thought his treatment to female characters would improve the more the story advanced, but it kind of just kept getting worse, which just made me want to get over the game quickly, so I started to use the fast forward/cheats that come with the remaster to essentially skip the combat.

My favorite character has to be Vivi, who had the most compelling arc in my opinion in second place would be Amarant since he seemed to be the only character in the late game that would shit on Zidane anytime he could.
The main plot just felt generic to me, which was weird since VII and VIII had some crazy fun main plots, at this point I can´t even remember the main antagonists name, his scenes for like 80% of the game were all according to plan or he laughing, I just facepalmed when Zidane abandons all his friends to try to save him, and then for some reason waits years to come back to them, don´t know exactly how much time, but enough so that Vivi has died and had kids, it was such a selfish act to end the game on, Zidane has to be one of the worst characters I have played as in a videogame.

I couldn´t shake the feeling that this game has some really creepy undertones, first with Zidane, then with the outfits of the grand majority of the female cast (soldiers, party members, etc.) which are terrible sexualized outfits, it gets worse the game introduces a 6 year old girl (Eiko) who immediately has a crush on Zidane, and the game plays it up as some kind of twisted love triangle (in some scenes its implied that Garnet/Dagger is jealous of Zidane interacting with Eiko), it doesn´t stop there, the king of the good guys kingdom is cursed to be a frog by his wife for having way to many infidelities, upon the party rescuing the kings wife by complete accident, the king is forgiven.

I have been way too negative, so lets get to the pros of the game, the soundtrack in general was better than VII and VIII, there are some great piano songs that I really liked.

The world of FF IX is fun to traverse, the towns are great in general, Vivi´s character arc though at times felt kind of barebones, the concept of it is great, the way Vivi has to find purpose to his life after discovering he is an artificially created puppet is handled in an entertaining way, though it gets diluted with the main plot since its one of the main themes of the game.

Have to say, when the party had to separate in groups of two to destroy the seals was great, that has to be one of the highlights of the FF franchise in general.

Steiner was pretty cool overall, Freya too, though Freya and Quina felt like the least developed characters overall.

Garnet/Dagger character arc was there I guess, I suppose I got my wish of a more developed main heroine arc compared to VIII with Rinoa, but Garnet/Dagger arc its not very good in my opinion, the arc is about Garnet/Dagger finding her own worth, but since is one of the longest arcs, it gets stretched through almost the whole game, also there was some disconnect between gameplay and story, Garnet/Dagger is supposed to be one of the few persons to be able to summon eidolons, so she is supposed to be super powerful, but in the main story she ends up playing damsel in distress way too many times.

My playthrough was of 18 hours more or less, but felt like the longest to play (VII 30 hours, VIII 20) the creepy undertones are such a shame.

Pure soul. The game's a masterpiece. The story falters in places, but overall tells a great narrative about life, death, and one's purpose. The combat is a bit slow, but still amazing. There are references galore that make this such a watershed entry. The music is peak. Overall, this game's just fantastic.

The only things I really have against the game are that the final boss does come out of absolutely nowhere. At least his small amount of character is being an antithesis to the party to really hit home the narrative's themes, and it also helps that he isn't connected to anything, which avoids the "man-behind-the-curtain" trope that FFIV pulls. However, he's still really random. Also, bosses don't give exp. That's a nitpick, I know, but it really bugged me.

10/10 - Magnificent

I don't really get Final Fantasy IX on a narrative point. I understand the drive forward until it gets to Garland and shit and them I just shrug my shoulders and it all goes over my head. I think im getting the themes, but idk, I feel like the other worldly stuff was done better in the other FF's I played (6 and 7).

I am insanely impressed with the money pumped into this game though. The cinematics are fucking insane for the time. I kind of feel like the money detracts from the sense of globe trotting cause they had to reuse screens more often, but whatever, those screens look amazing.

Maybe the most I've enjoyed a cast in the moment in a classic JRPG? (no voice acting). I felt like they got more moments where you can see them interact with each other/ the world compared to its peers (still doesn't hold a candle to any modern game I've played, but hey). The ATE Events really helped with that. Favourite person is probably Steiner (fail male coded) i guess. LIke i said, i enjoyed them in the moment of playing, but right now afterwards, I don't think i care super about any of them.

The system of equipables teaching you abilities is kind of cool, allowing you to build what you want on your characters when you want them. It doesn't allow as much freedom as Materia does so characters still have pretty straight cut classes. Having passive abilities is cool.

This game didn't break my curse of getting pissed off and cheating at jrpg final bosses.

took me 2 weeks to finish this not because the game is overly long I just have not been in the mood to play video games, hit a bit of a rut recently.
but even with that said this is a great RPG a lot better than 7 and 8 mechanics-wise but in my opinion not as interesting story-wise, than 7 at least it feels a lot more like a traditional final fantasy campaign which is fine I like the characters and I think they are a lot more empathetic then 8's
overall a great rpg that maybe was a bit oversold to me as a lot of people consider this to be the best final fantasy game
also, I played this on Android which has a surprisingly good port for this with all the same quality of life improvement as pc and adequate adaptation of the controls to a touch screen.