Final Fantasy IX

"A good effort but several pegs short of a true epic"

Suspicious and jaded after playing FFVII and FVIII, I decided to give FFIX a try because it was advertised as being a throwback of sorts to the earlier Final Fantasy games. While I found this to be only superficially true, and despite the fact that FFIX is hardly perfect, I nevertheless found this game to be far more enjoyable than its two most recent predecessors.

Now, I don’t want to come off as being horribly biased in favor of the “old school” days of Square. However many people, not just myself, are of the camp who feels that FFVII and especially FFVIII suffered due to an obsession with creating dazzling graphics and full-motion video (which have since become one of Square’s trademarks) at the expense of all the “other stuff”, which led to a general dumbing down of the gameplay and resulted in a serious decrease in playability and enjoyment.

With Final Fantasy IX, the pendulum has finally begun to swing back to center. While there is no disputing the stunning look of this offering, the gameplay, story and pacing are indeed more like FFIV or VI than the pseudo-modern teen melodramas that were VII and VIII.

In Final Fantasy IX we are introduced to Zidane, who, with his nondescript features and strange monkey tail probably qualifies as the ugliest Final Fantasy hero to date (narrowly beating out Cloud and his funny Dragonball-Z hair). Nevertheless, he is an easy personality both to understand and to sympathize with-- important qualities in a hero that you’ll be forced to stick with for four discs. The other main characters are uneven in their development. Some, like Princess Garnet and Vivi, a young black mage grappling with the meaning of life, have important sections of the plot devoted to them and as such seem very real to us. Others such as Freya the dragoon and Amarant, a mercenary, seem interesting but are never given enough “screen time” to fully realize their potential. The rest of the playable characters more or less fall into previously established Final Fantasy stereotypes, thus making them seem rather one-dimensional. There is Steiner, a general of the Knights of Pluto who ends up rebelling against his former establishment (just like Celes in Final Fantasy VI); Quina, a strange genderless creature who uses blue magic learned by eating things (memories of Caitsith from Final Fantasy VII); and Eiko, a spunky child with powerful spell-casting abilities (much like Relm from Final Fantasy VI or Palom and Porom from Final Fantasy IV).

The story, augmented by numerous subplots and video cutscenes, is executed rather well and does a good job of moving from simple to more complex ideas in the later discs. Unfortunately however, the story also suffers from too many forced and unbelievable plot twists. The antagonist in the first half of the story is Garnet’s mother Queen Brahne, ruler of the kingdom of Alexandria. Brahne has recently acquired a powerful new technology which has apparently pushed her already greedy and power-hungry mind over the edge to the point where she is attacking the other kingdoms in a bid to take over the world. From this initial threat, a second more sinister villain emerges who goes by the name of Kuja.

Neither Brahne nor Kuja struck me as particularly effective villains. Brahne would have been more credible had she not also been the mother of Princess Garnet. I found the fact that a sweet, honorable, petite girl could have been raised by an evil green-skinned 500 pound brute of a woman to be utterly unbelievable. Kuja was also disappointing. Not as sympathetic as Golbez, nor as fiendishly wicked as Kefka, nor as cool as Sephiroth. Comparisons to past FF villains aside however, Kuja still comes up short. We never really get an insight into his mind, perhaps because there is no real motivation for his destructiveness except an “if I can’t have the world, then no one can” attitude. How boring.

Final Fantasy IX resurrects the “jobs” system, where each character has a specific classification and learns skills accordingly (i.e. Zidane the thief, Eikos the summoner, Steiner the knight, Freya the dragoon and Amarant the ninja). Certain skills are inherent to the job and can only be learned by that character, while others can be learned by more than one person. The learning of these special spells and skills is done by equipping certain items and gaining enough “AP” from battles to level up the item and learn the skill. Thankfully once a spell or skill is learned, it is there permanently and time can then be devoted to level-building rather than relearning the same spells over and over again.

Besides this nod to the older games, the four-person battle system has been brought back with great results. While in battle characters can go into a trance which makes their speed increase for a short period. As well as attacking and using magic and items, there is a “skill” command used during the fights where specialized techniques like “steal” and “eat” can be used. The presence of moogles, chocobos, airships and Cid (good old Cid, who appears in a slightly different incarnation as the king of Lindblum in this game) ensures a link with other games in the series. These links seem to be growing more and more tenuous with each new title, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing since Final Fantasy was never meant to progress as any sort of linear series, as for example Suikoden did.

From an aural and visual standpoint, Final Fantasy IX does nothing to diminish Square’s awesome reputation in both those departments. With the music, Nobuo Uematsu seems to be entering a renaissance of sorts in which we can hear glimpses of the old pre-FFVII glory. Nothing sticks out in my mind as much as the 45-second loops from those old games, but many of the melodies in FFIX came damn close. Part of the reason may be the general trend in video game music which is heading away from simple looped melodic hooks (which he was a master of writing) into more ambient and atmospheric music in the tradition of films. If this is the case, then Uematsu has certainly stepped up to the challenge.

The graphics are simply gorgeous, and while much has been said about the “return to old-school graphics” in FFIX, I found the very opposite to be true. Rather than a return to old-school, I saw these graphics as a coming of age of the whole polygon and full-motion video era. With FFIX, graphics have finally evolved to a point where the characters look believable, mobile and full of expression. Believable in that for once, I didn’t feel like I was looking at a jumble of polygons, but rather a real being. That being said, the style of the graphics could I suppose be considered old-school since many of the characters appear cartoonish and exaggerated. There are generous smatterings of FMVs in the game, and for once they didn’t seem to get in the way but rather complemented the story. Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that the FMVs in FFIX were like cinematic sequences that acted as a smooth transition from one part of the story to the next—not just things that occurred out of the blue for no good reason. And they looked almost as good as movies as well, unlike FMVs in earlier more primitive games which were painful-to-watch haphazard collections of polygons shuffling around like jerky puppets.

I finished Final Fantasy IX without too much trouble; I didn’t find it to be an overly challenging or frustrating game and granted there were some extra little mini-games that I didn’t bother to complete which would have added to the game-time. The mini-games include a variation on the popular card game from Final Fantasy VIII, and another challenge that involves using a chocobo to dig for buried treasure. I must admit that the linearity of the game was rather frustrating at times, as was having to click through dialogue that often seemed to go on forever. But I have come to expect both of these things from Final Fantasy.

The bottom line is that Final Fantasy IX doesn’t really offer much that is new. The game seemed more than a little formulaic, using rehashed bits from other FF games and not taking them any further. On the other hand, I’m glad that Square didn’t just throw in some poorly thought out new features just for the sake of being different (such as the magic acquisition disaster in FFVIII) and there’s no denying that the game is well-crafted and carefully and thoroughly put together so that it can be enjoyed with minimal frustrations. It’s a step in the right direction and I’m interested in seeing where Square will go with it in the future. Unfortunately this particular instalment of the series is several pegs short of a true epic.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 10/22/02, Updated 05/06/03