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Final Fantasy IX (Steam)
Zidane and the theater troupe Tantalus are in Alexandria to perform the famous play, “I Want to Be Your Canary” and also kidnap Princess Garnet. This leads to war, adventures, black mages, found family, finding your roots but discovering they don’t define you, mental breakdowns, and plenty of moogles and chocobos. It’s a love letter to the Final Fantasy games that came before it.
It’s probably been 20 years since I last played this. Though the version currently available on Steam doesn’t get labeled as a remaster, it absolutely is, with sharper, prettier graphics and quality-of-life features added. You can activate level 99/max abilities from the config menu; and toggle Fast Forward, No Encounters, All Attacks Do 9999 and Always Trance from the pause menu. There’s an autosave/continue feature. And you can redo the playacting fight scene at the beginning. They also made Tetra Master more accessible throughout the game, but I’m terrible at it because honestly it’s a terrible game. (The one thing they didn’t change but they should have: A number of areas and the sidequests attached to them get sealed off in Disc 4/the endgame. In the original, that was clearly to save space on the final disc. This has no such limitations and should have kept those areas open.)
I hadn’t quite remembered how much it annoys me about this game that it was still at the height of the “we expect you to buy the strategy guide” era of jrpgs, where there are multiple missable/perfection sidequests. The Mognet letter-delivery quests, for example, require backtracking at several points that no sensible player would ever think to do, and if you miss one Moogle you break the chain. The Constellation coins are insane pixel-hunts. Several minigames (which now carry achievements) are only available for a very brief time. The coffee sidequest is absurdly obtuse. Even Chocobo Hot-and-Cold, which I do really enjoy, is dependent on you finding several chocograph treasures that are in unmarked stretches of ocean and figuring out how to access the grotto (or that it’s even there) with no hints. And a decent number of equipment items (and therefore the skills you can learn from them) become unavailable after certain points so if you reach the lategame without them, too bad!
In terms of just straight gameplay, the third disk becomes a bit of a slog, despite their efforts to keep mixing things up. You spend a lot of time in a set party without a dedicated healer--or with one who can’t do her job: The parts where you’re forced to use Dagger but she has the “Dagger can’t concentrate” issue are the worst. They do the “man-behind-the-man” schtick too many times. They were clearly pulled in a lot of directions during development (and it came together remarkably coherently despite that) trying to reference all eight of the games that came before and the concerns of fans who thought 7 and 8 had diverged too far from what Final Fantasy was “supposed” to be.
Unlike FF8, I don’t have particularly grand or interesting theories about this one: The worldbuilding is better explained (without having to refer to an in-game encyclopedia, even) and there aren’t any wacky time-travel shenanigans. I think the real weakness of the game is that it keeps you on a solid adventure plot for two discs but then both swerves into explaining the full backstory at the same time the gameplay gets messy. It’s interesting how long Garland’s plans clearly have been running (the main landmass is called the “Mist Continent” and the Mist is just a waste product of his overall scheme!) but the majority of the details you put together are either ancient records from 5,000 years ago or events from the past decade; nothing in between. People make a big deal about Necron coming out of nowhere, but I actually think the Memoria sequence works reasonably well: Kuja is charged up on Trance power but aware that he’s dying and has tunneled into the central existence of the world to try to snuff it out. Necron isn’t a creature, it’s a concept: It’s death. Fighting Necron is the team standing up and saying, “We’ve found things to live for, we’re going to keep this world alive.” Which is very much the culmination of their plotlines.
And by that I mean pretty much everybody’s plotlines: The character themes are all amusingly consistent: Vivi doesn’t know where he comes from but finds a family and makes a life for himself. Zidane doesn’t know where he comes from but finds a family and makes a life for himself. Dagger learns the truth of where she comes from and rebuilds her life despite that. Eiko finds a family and makes a life for herself.
And the ending seems easy to fill in the gaps on: The Iifa Tree collapses and stops impeding the cycle of souls, so both Terran and Gaian souls begin cycling and the planet finds a new equilibrium in the combination. Given what we saw with the Black Mages, the rescued Genomes probably also develop self-awareness. Vivi likely dies soon after the game’s events, but not only has/creates children first, but finds enough joy in his limited existence that he wants to reproduce. Dagger ascends as queen of Alexandria; Eiko becomes Cid’s heir in Lindblum; the survivors of Burmecia and Cleyra presumably reunite to rebuild. Between the fact that the leaders of the countries are all close companions now and the Mist isn’t inflaming wars, the world probably finds peace. It’s as “happily ever after” as an ending can get.
Overall: I loved this when it came out, but in retrospect it was hobbled by design decisions that were endemic at the time. If someone was playing through all of the FF games in order they’d get to this one and probably find the same joy I originally did, because it was a retrospective and a turning point in a lot of ways. The new Steam version is absolutely the way to play it; it loses nothing and adds convenience (and is prettier).
It’s probably been 20 years since I last played this. Though the version currently available on Steam doesn’t get labeled as a remaster, it absolutely is, with sharper, prettier graphics and quality-of-life features added. You can activate level 99/max abilities from the config menu; and toggle Fast Forward, No Encounters, All Attacks Do 9999 and Always Trance from the pause menu. There’s an autosave/continue feature. And you can redo the playacting fight scene at the beginning. They also made Tetra Master more accessible throughout the game, but I’m terrible at it because honestly it’s a terrible game. (The one thing they didn’t change but they should have: A number of areas and the sidequests attached to them get sealed off in Disc 4/the endgame. In the original, that was clearly to save space on the final disc. This has no such limitations and should have kept those areas open.)
I hadn’t quite remembered how much it annoys me about this game that it was still at the height of the “we expect you to buy the strategy guide” era of jrpgs, where there are multiple missable/perfection sidequests. The Mognet letter-delivery quests, for example, require backtracking at several points that no sensible player would ever think to do, and if you miss one Moogle you break the chain. The Constellation coins are insane pixel-hunts. Several minigames (which now carry achievements) are only available for a very brief time. The coffee sidequest is absurdly obtuse. Even Chocobo Hot-and-Cold, which I do really enjoy, is dependent on you finding several chocograph treasures that are in unmarked stretches of ocean and figuring out how to access the grotto (or that it’s even there) with no hints. And a decent number of equipment items (and therefore the skills you can learn from them) become unavailable after certain points so if you reach the lategame without them, too bad!
In terms of just straight gameplay, the third disk becomes a bit of a slog, despite their efforts to keep mixing things up. You spend a lot of time in a set party without a dedicated healer--or with one who can’t do her job: The parts where you’re forced to use Dagger but she has the “Dagger can’t concentrate” issue are the worst. They do the “man-behind-the-man” schtick too many times. They were clearly pulled in a lot of directions during development (and it came together remarkably coherently despite that) trying to reference all eight of the games that came before and the concerns of fans who thought 7 and 8 had diverged too far from what Final Fantasy was “supposed” to be.
Unlike FF8, I don’t have particularly grand or interesting theories about this one: The worldbuilding is better explained (without having to refer to an in-game encyclopedia, even) and there aren’t any wacky time-travel shenanigans. I think the real weakness of the game is that it keeps you on a solid adventure plot for two discs but then both swerves into explaining the full backstory at the same time the gameplay gets messy. It’s interesting how long Garland’s plans clearly have been running (the main landmass is called the “Mist Continent” and the Mist is just a waste product of his overall scheme!) but the majority of the details you put together are either ancient records from 5,000 years ago or events from the past decade; nothing in between. People make a big deal about Necron coming out of nowhere, but I actually think the Memoria sequence works reasonably well: Kuja is charged up on Trance power but aware that he’s dying and has tunneled into the central existence of the world to try to snuff it out. Necron isn’t a creature, it’s a concept: It’s death. Fighting Necron is the team standing up and saying, “We’ve found things to live for, we’re going to keep this world alive.” Which is very much the culmination of their plotlines.
And by that I mean pretty much everybody’s plotlines: The character themes are all amusingly consistent: Vivi doesn’t know where he comes from but finds a family and makes a life for himself. Zidane doesn’t know where he comes from but finds a family and makes a life for himself. Dagger learns the truth of where she comes from and rebuilds her life despite that. Eiko finds a family and makes a life for herself.
And the ending seems easy to fill in the gaps on: The Iifa Tree collapses and stops impeding the cycle of souls, so both Terran and Gaian souls begin cycling and the planet finds a new equilibrium in the combination. Given what we saw with the Black Mages, the rescued Genomes probably also develop self-awareness. Vivi likely dies soon after the game’s events, but not only has/creates children first, but finds enough joy in his limited existence that he wants to reproduce. Dagger ascends as queen of Alexandria; Eiko becomes Cid’s heir in Lindblum; the survivors of Burmecia and Cleyra presumably reunite to rebuild. Between the fact that the leaders of the countries are all close companions now and the Mist isn’t inflaming wars, the world probably finds peace. It’s as “happily ever after” as an ending can get.
Overall: I loved this when it came out, but in retrospect it was hobbled by design decisions that were endemic at the time. If someone was playing through all of the FF games in order they’d get to this one and probably find the same joy I originally did, because it was a retrospective and a turning point in a lot of ways. The new Steam version is absolutely the way to play it; it loses nothing and adds convenience (and is prettier).