This review contains spoilers
Final Fantasy Marathon Review #4
The spirit of early Final Fantasy always felt like it channelled the appeal of stageplays. This idea might seem unintuitive at first, but it fits the more you think about it: The tiny sprites with their exaggerated animations recreate the experience of watching distant actors from the back of a theatre, only able to make out the broad strokes of their gestures, the melodrama and straightforward personalities recreate the archetypes and emotional simplicity of theatrical personae, even minute gameplay mechanics like walking through walls into the blackness of the background (an extremely common way of hiding secrets in early FF) feels like a metaphorical curtain-pull of an actor walking off stage.
Most of all though, it was Final Fantasy IV which channelled this most confidently, an unsurprising fact when we remember that it was the directorial debut of Takashi Tokita - a man who set off for Tokyo at age 18 with the desire to become an actor, only to find himself working at Square as a graphic designer. In IV most of all we see the use of character positioning and proxemics as an expression of personality, the most creative use of animation yet, and an act-like approach to character appearances, where party members would be swapped out regularly, disappearing for hours, waiting for their next appearance on stage.
As a throwback title, Final Fantasy IX borrows elements of IV: There’s a village of summoners, a monarch turned tyrant by villainous corruption, an 11th hour trip to a different planet where it’s revealed that the protagonist and antagonist are really brothers, fixed jobs with fixed abilities, a return to four party members rather than three. Most importantly, though, it picks up on and plays with this thread of the stageplay. Zorn and Thorn play the arlecchinos in reference to Palom and Porom, slapstick is much more pronounced. The game begins and ends on a play by Lord Avon - a name that references Shakespeare’s title as “The Bard of Avon” - and characters are influenced by his work, most of all Eiko, who grows up in an isolated village and naively tries to emulate his ideal dramatic romance. Certain scenes like the one where Beatrix and Steiner are tricked into a moonlit confession are tropes directly taken from Shakespearean romantic comedy, and the character-switching is similarly act-like in the way IVs was, with certain characters absent for significant chunks of time. Even the (gorgeous, intricate) environments have a certain Tudor stage prop feel (at least in inhabited areas) and the instruments of the OST feel chosen for the theatre’s orchestral pit.
More than any superficial similarities though, IX understands that shifting character dynamics are the heart of any good play, and it feels like the focus of the first half: The bickering of Steiner and Zidane, the slow deconstruction of the former’s conception of knighthood, Zidane’s flirtatious nature that gets gradually replaced with a more committed love and Garnet’s piecemeal embrace of the mannerisms of everyday people. In none of the previous Final Fantasy games did it feel like characters bounced off of and mutually shaped one-another to the same degree that they do here, something I particularly appreciate coming from VIII’s frigidity, and the dialogue can be genuinely witty at times, a quality I feel only VI came close to capturing previously. ATEs are a great idea; they complement the focus on characters by making exploration of a new town something that the party performs simultaneously, and the cutting back-and-forth feeds back into the theatrical feel. The cutesy aesthetic didn’t stop them from embracing existential themes either, Vivi’s struggle with the artificiality of his life and inevitability of his death being an obvious highlight.
It’s a shame that the back half seems to mostly forget about this. Like VIII, so many plot threads don’t receive meaningful resolution, which is especially disappointing when it comes to characters (Freya and Sir Fratley going nowhere gets my pick for the most disappointing), certain late-game character moments feel rushed, like when Zidane goes mad with grief over the revelation that his whole life is a lie, only to walk two rooms down and miraculously get over it and revert to being normal again. There’s a moment in Disc 4 where Zidane yells “I don’t care about this Terra and Gaia stuff!”, and yeah… same buddy. I think it’s especially jarring for this game to stick-shift into typical JRPG abstract concept territory considering the quiet, interpersonal notes that cement the appeal of the story, and I was rolling my eyes extra hard when my party started yelling about their will to live and power of friendship to some nameless god who was introduced in the last 30 minutes of the game.
While the story mostly feels like a wonderful synthesis of the SNES and PS1 eras of Final Fantasy, the turn-based combat fares a lot worse. Let me say something bold; out of the 9 games I’ve played as part of this marathon, this one has the worst combat (except maybe II). Like VIII, animations are sluggish and there are awkward pauses between turns, like the game chugging to figure out who goes next. Unlike VIII, however, the ATB bar doesn’t pause when characters are doing their attacks, which means that turns pile up and create incredibly long gaps between inputting a command and it going off, resulting in horrendous game feel. This is especially obvious in the lategame, where high-level abilities and summons with immense animation times cascade over each other, sometimes taking over a minute for the game to get through a single round of attacks. Never have I seen a stronger argument against the ATB system, and retrospectively it’s obvious why VII and VIII went for three party members instead of four. The extreme slowness of this system is revealed by how strong regen becomes, it’s strong because it keeps going through all the animations, and with how slow they are, you can recover over a thousand HP in a single turn, making auto-regen an insta-pick for lategame.
The problems don’t stop there. Trance is criticised by everyone who plays this game for reasons so obvious I feel I don’t need to repeat them. The game is incredibly easy, even for PS1 standards (In the PS1 trilogy, I game overed twice in VII, once in VIII, and never in IX) with boss design rarely venturing beyond the basics of a single-target foe targeting one element and maybe inflicting a status effect every now and then. I wish the game took as much in terms of gameplay from IV as it did from the story; as I’ve progressed through these games I gain more and more appreciation for how fast IV was to give you high-level spells and abilities, but IX is the polar opposite: “-aga” spells are reserved for only the final portion of the game, the accumulation of abilities is a slow burn due to how it all has to be funnelled through the equipment system - a lot of which are just “resist x status effect” or “do more damage to x enemy type” or “gain more xp or gold” and so on. Only a handful actually change the way you strategise within an encounter. The only part I like is how it forces you into certain character combinations. For example, an early combo of Vivi, Zidane, Freya and Quina results in a strain on healing, where Freya’s regen needs to be relied on until Quina can learn some healing, whereas a later combination featuring both Dagger and Eiko leaves you flush with healing options but strained on non-MP intensive damage options. That being said, having set jobs and character combinations should allow for more tightly designed battles, but I feel that things have only marginally gone in that direction. The SNES titles felt more tight simply because they were more willing to put the player into scenarios that they could conceivably be underleveled for. Large margins for error resulting from a lack of difficulty will always result in a game that feels loose to some extent, and the product is one of the least engaging turn-based systems I’ve played in this series.
It’s clear to me that this will be one of those games that evokes fond memories, but isn’t as fun to actually go back to and play. I still think overall this is one of the better games I’ve played in this series thanks to its appealing character interactions and theming and backgrounds, but not my favourite.
---------------
Previous FF Marathon Reviews:
VIII
VII
V
The spirit of early Final Fantasy always felt like it channelled the appeal of stageplays. This idea might seem unintuitive at first, but it fits the more you think about it: The tiny sprites with their exaggerated animations recreate the experience of watching distant actors from the back of a theatre, only able to make out the broad strokes of their gestures, the melodrama and straightforward personalities recreate the archetypes and emotional simplicity of theatrical personae, even minute gameplay mechanics like walking through walls into the blackness of the background (an extremely common way of hiding secrets in early FF) feels like a metaphorical curtain-pull of an actor walking off stage.
Most of all though, it was Final Fantasy IV which channelled this most confidently, an unsurprising fact when we remember that it was the directorial debut of Takashi Tokita - a man who set off for Tokyo at age 18 with the desire to become an actor, only to find himself working at Square as a graphic designer. In IV most of all we see the use of character positioning and proxemics as an expression of personality, the most creative use of animation yet, and an act-like approach to character appearances, where party members would be swapped out regularly, disappearing for hours, waiting for their next appearance on stage.
As a throwback title, Final Fantasy IX borrows elements of IV: There’s a village of summoners, a monarch turned tyrant by villainous corruption, an 11th hour trip to a different planet where it’s revealed that the protagonist and antagonist are really brothers, fixed jobs with fixed abilities, a return to four party members rather than three. Most importantly, though, it picks up on and plays with this thread of the stageplay. Zorn and Thorn play the arlecchinos in reference to Palom and Porom, slapstick is much more pronounced. The game begins and ends on a play by Lord Avon - a name that references Shakespeare’s title as “The Bard of Avon” - and characters are influenced by his work, most of all Eiko, who grows up in an isolated village and naively tries to emulate his ideal dramatic romance. Certain scenes like the one where Beatrix and Steiner are tricked into a moonlit confession are tropes directly taken from Shakespearean romantic comedy, and the character-switching is similarly act-like in the way IVs was, with certain characters absent for significant chunks of time. Even the (gorgeous, intricate) environments have a certain Tudor stage prop feel (at least in inhabited areas) and the instruments of the OST feel chosen for the theatre’s orchestral pit.
More than any superficial similarities though, IX understands that shifting character dynamics are the heart of any good play, and it feels like the focus of the first half: The bickering of Steiner and Zidane, the slow deconstruction of the former’s conception of knighthood, Zidane’s flirtatious nature that gets gradually replaced with a more committed love and Garnet’s piecemeal embrace of the mannerisms of everyday people. In none of the previous Final Fantasy games did it feel like characters bounced off of and mutually shaped one-another to the same degree that they do here, something I particularly appreciate coming from VIII’s frigidity, and the dialogue can be genuinely witty at times, a quality I feel only VI came close to capturing previously. ATEs are a great idea; they complement the focus on characters by making exploration of a new town something that the party performs simultaneously, and the cutting back-and-forth feeds back into the theatrical feel. The cutesy aesthetic didn’t stop them from embracing existential themes either, Vivi’s struggle with the artificiality of his life and inevitability of his death being an obvious highlight.
It’s a shame that the back half seems to mostly forget about this. Like VIII, so many plot threads don’t receive meaningful resolution, which is especially disappointing when it comes to characters (Freya and Sir Fratley going nowhere gets my pick for the most disappointing), certain late-game character moments feel rushed, like when Zidane goes mad with grief over the revelation that his whole life is a lie, only to walk two rooms down and miraculously get over it and revert to being normal again. There’s a moment in Disc 4 where Zidane yells “I don’t care about this Terra and Gaia stuff!”, and yeah… same buddy. I think it’s especially jarring for this game to stick-shift into typical JRPG abstract concept territory considering the quiet, interpersonal notes that cement the appeal of the story, and I was rolling my eyes extra hard when my party started yelling about their will to live and power of friendship to some nameless god who was introduced in the last 30 minutes of the game.
While the story mostly feels like a wonderful synthesis of the SNES and PS1 eras of Final Fantasy, the turn-based combat fares a lot worse. Let me say something bold; out of the 9 games I’ve played as part of this marathon, this one has the worst combat (except maybe II). Like VIII, animations are sluggish and there are awkward pauses between turns, like the game chugging to figure out who goes next. Unlike VIII, however, the ATB bar doesn’t pause when characters are doing their attacks, which means that turns pile up and create incredibly long gaps between inputting a command and it going off, resulting in horrendous game feel. This is especially obvious in the lategame, where high-level abilities and summons with immense animation times cascade over each other, sometimes taking over a minute for the game to get through a single round of attacks. Never have I seen a stronger argument against the ATB system, and retrospectively it’s obvious why VII and VIII went for three party members instead of four. The extreme slowness of this system is revealed by how strong regen becomes, it’s strong because it keeps going through all the animations, and with how slow they are, you can recover over a thousand HP in a single turn, making auto-regen an insta-pick for lategame.
The problems don’t stop there. Trance is criticised by everyone who plays this game for reasons so obvious I feel I don’t need to repeat them. The game is incredibly easy, even for PS1 standards (In the PS1 trilogy, I game overed twice in VII, once in VIII, and never in IX) with boss design rarely venturing beyond the basics of a single-target foe targeting one element and maybe inflicting a status effect every now and then. I wish the game took as much in terms of gameplay from IV as it did from the story; as I’ve progressed through these games I gain more and more appreciation for how fast IV was to give you high-level spells and abilities, but IX is the polar opposite: “-aga” spells are reserved for only the final portion of the game, the accumulation of abilities is a slow burn due to how it all has to be funnelled through the equipment system - a lot of which are just “resist x status effect” or “do more damage to x enemy type” or “gain more xp or gold” and so on. Only a handful actually change the way you strategise within an encounter. The only part I like is how it forces you into certain character combinations. For example, an early combo of Vivi, Zidane, Freya and Quina results in a strain on healing, where Freya’s regen needs to be relied on until Quina can learn some healing, whereas a later combination featuring both Dagger and Eiko leaves you flush with healing options but strained on non-MP intensive damage options. That being said, having set jobs and character combinations should allow for more tightly designed battles, but I feel that things have only marginally gone in that direction. The SNES titles felt more tight simply because they were more willing to put the player into scenarios that they could conceivably be underleveled for. Large margins for error resulting from a lack of difficulty will always result in a game that feels loose to some extent, and the product is one of the least engaging turn-based systems I’ve played in this series.
It’s clear to me that this will be one of those games that evokes fond memories, but isn’t as fun to actually go back to and play. I still think overall this is one of the better games I’ve played in this series thanks to its appealing character interactions and theming and backgrounds, but not my favourite.
---------------
Previous FF Marathon Reviews:
VIII
VII
V
3 Comments
@SunlitSonata Yeah! I booted it up to play the prologue last night and it felt really snappy and responsive, like it was specifically designed in response to IX, The sphere grid gives me path of exile tree vibes though lol, maybe it's a lot simpler than it appears.
@Lordg
When I first played FFX back in 2012 or so I was filtered by the Sphere Grid, but playing it to credits in 2022 I vibed with it a lot more. Most characters have a fairly cohesive skill path to what they’re best at, but the additional spheres you get lets you do some fun things with skills tying them to different characters than who might normally learn them. Some neat things to play around with there!
But I appreciate its influence; The Digital Devil Saga duology has pretty extensive skill systems per character and has the opportunity to min-max your main character into a magic cannon hardcore, a far cry from the Pokémon esque linear learnset from the nu Persona games. Xenosaga III had a similar system but a bit less complex, with every character having two primary skill paths you can choose to invest into and unlockable “keys” you find during the story to teach certain characters kinds of attacks that aren’t on their normal path.
When I first played FFX back in 2012 or so I was filtered by the Sphere Grid, but playing it to credits in 2022 I vibed with it a lot more. Most characters have a fairly cohesive skill path to what they’re best at, but the additional spheres you get lets you do some fun things with skills tying them to different characters than who might normally learn them. Some neat things to play around with there!
But I appreciate its influence; The Digital Devil Saga duology has pretty extensive skill systems per character and has the opportunity to min-max your main character into a magic cannon hardcore, a far cry from the Pokémon esque linear learnset from the nu Persona games. Xenosaga III had a similar system but a bit less complex, with every character having two primary skill paths you can choose to invest into and unlockable “keys” you find during the story to teach certain characters kinds of attacks that aren’t on their normal path.
SunlitSonata
9 months ago