Final Fantasy IX is slow, and I don't just mean in terms of combat. Everything about this game is slow; moving around towns and the overworld, the story, just how long this thing takes to get going and how much time it feels like is spent between major story beats. I know modern rereleases speed things up, but I played the original PS1 version because I adore its aesthetic and the rereleases look gross to me (late era PS1 > high end mobile game aesthetic, always).
The story also isn't a whole lot to write home about. Most of the cast is mostly unlikable sans Vivi. Zidane especially is a real creep towards women and never feels like he gets better over the course of the game.
This also just feels like an overcorrection to FF8; that game was packed full of systems like junctioning, drawing, and Guardian Force collecting. Not all of it worked; to about 60% of the playerbase it was probably impenetrable, 25% probably found ways to easily exploit it, and then the remaining 15% probably played it sorta close to "correctly". But the way these systems interacted with each other was really ambitious and fun to figure out.
FF9 pulls things far back, and is the least mechanically involved game in the series since 4. All that's really there are abilities you can learn from equipment, which doesn't take a whole lot of thought and is pretty automated. I liked how basic FF4 was, but mostly because it had excellent pacing and fun combat and story which this game lacks. The abilities system is something you'll have to consider at the very end of the game; the final boss has an attack called Grand Cross which can inflict basically every status move on you, and you'll need to have at least some abilities equipped in order to negate this effect to not have the fight be damn near impossible. This is a cool way to force the player to consider abilities, but I think the fact that it only comes up once at the very end of the game is not very good game design.
Despite this, I like the game (I operate at thee stars being "good," so I have more room to consider how good games are since I don't play a lot of bad games). But why is that? Well, it's all about that atmosphere, baby. This game feels like a chill breeze on a Sunday morning. The audiovisual world it creates is tremendous. The slow combat is something you can ease yourself into and just kind of sit back and enjoy. Prior to picking it back up a couple times in the last year or two to finally finish it, I played over half of this game during 2022 trips and vacations; on a car trip to see my sister graduate college, at an AirBNB by the beach, on a train to visit a friend. I think it'll always intrinsically be linked to those experiences to me, and it's the perfect trip game. Something you can play passively and enjoy the sights and sounds while having conversations with others with you in your vicinity.
It's also a pretty solid and competently designed. Like, aside from maybe the final boss everything felt fairly fair and balanced.
The story also isn't a whole lot to write home about. Most of the cast is mostly unlikable sans Vivi. Zidane especially is a real creep towards women and never feels like he gets better over the course of the game.
This also just feels like an overcorrection to FF8; that game was packed full of systems like junctioning, drawing, and Guardian Force collecting. Not all of it worked; to about 60% of the playerbase it was probably impenetrable, 25% probably found ways to easily exploit it, and then the remaining 15% probably played it sorta close to "correctly". But the way these systems interacted with each other was really ambitious and fun to figure out.
FF9 pulls things far back, and is the least mechanically involved game in the series since 4. All that's really there are abilities you can learn from equipment, which doesn't take a whole lot of thought and is pretty automated. I liked how basic FF4 was, but mostly because it had excellent pacing and fun combat and story which this game lacks. The abilities system is something you'll have to consider at the very end of the game; the final boss has an attack called Grand Cross which can inflict basically every status move on you, and you'll need to have at least some abilities equipped in order to negate this effect to not have the fight be damn near impossible. This is a cool way to force the player to consider abilities, but I think the fact that it only comes up once at the very end of the game is not very good game design.
Despite this, I like the game (I operate at thee stars being "good," so I have more room to consider how good games are since I don't play a lot of bad games). But why is that? Well, it's all about that atmosphere, baby. This game feels like a chill breeze on a Sunday morning. The audiovisual world it creates is tremendous. The slow combat is something you can ease yourself into and just kind of sit back and enjoy. Prior to picking it back up a couple times in the last year or two to finally finish it, I played over half of this game during 2022 trips and vacations; on a car trip to see my sister graduate college, at an AirBNB by the beach, on a train to visit a friend. I think it'll always intrinsically be linked to those experiences to me, and it's the perfect trip game. Something you can play passively and enjoy the sights and sounds while having conversations with others with you in your vicinity.
It's also a pretty solid and competently designed. Like, aside from maybe the final boss everything felt fairly fair and balanced.