FF9's presentation is really fucking good. The music is great as always, the graphics are quantum leaps above FF7, and the English script is very, very good. The story is outstanding and pulls you in right away, the characters are all great, and the Active Time Event system gives you plenty of time with them. The gameplay is almost awesome, with a lot of nice streamlining and a brilliant ability learning system that actually gives equipment more weight than "This sword make number go up, discard old one and use this one now". I also appreciate how generous the game is with level-ups, minimizing the amount of grinding.

FF9's combat is really fucking slow. It's the only thing holding me back from giving this a higher rating. Battle sequences begin and end with several seconds of loading, animations take so stupidly long that your attacks get pushed far back in the cue, and even at max speed, those ATB bars seem to take their sweet time filling up. I've seen people complain about the unreliability of ATB before, but this is the only FF game where I seriously felt it was an issue. Even with speedup in an emulator, the fights are so slow that I can only assume the speed at which they play out was some technical compromise to keep the battle screens looking as good as they do. Combine this sluggishness with random encounters, and dungeons can be a slog at times, even when they're well-designed.

Still a great game, and the ending was really beautiful. I just wish the battles didn't test my patience.