The GWJ JRPG Club: Final Fantasy IX (Q2 2023)

Welcome to the long weekend, a perfect time to binge on RPGs!

The Iifa Tree turned out to be one of my favourite parts of the game so far. Spectacular looking, mysterious atmosphere, slightly spooky music and of course full of undead for my white mages to zap. After that events seemed to take off pretty quickly and I feel like we've been shuttling from location to location without much time to catch our breath.

I found myself in Lindblum again when I stopped last night, not really sure how we all got there or what all these recent events mean. It feels like having spent a long time larking about on our breezy adventure, things are getting more real and urgent now. I'm not sure I've got my head around all the recent events, like

Spoiler:

wasn't Mist their power source? What happened to Kuja? Was he just trying to bait Alexander the whole time? Is Alexandria completely destroyed?

but the upside of being a himbo like Zidane is I'm sure someone will kindly explain it all to me in words of one syllable. I have to say the music throughout these sections has been low key excellent too.

Oh and I also won the card tournament, completely unexpected since it was the first time I had played TetraMaster. I had no idea what I was doing, just picked cards with the biggest numbers and most arrows, and that seemed to be enough.

Now that Tales of Arise is wrapped, time to kick this off. Will this be the first Final Fantasy game I actually finish? Only time will tell!

Good luck! My hour count is in the twenties now and it's been pretty smooth sailing so far.

I played a little more yesterday, long enough to answer most of my questions about earlier events. Got a fairly disappointing boat (aw, I wanted an airship!) but couldn't find much to do with it, so I moved ahead with the main story and am now on a new continent.

Garnet's condition is interesting, and I'm surprised I don't remember anything about it from before. I'm not sure where they will go with it, but

Spoiler:

I was impressed that they try to depict post traumatic shock, not just in cutscenes but also gameplay. Having her silenced (but still in the party) is an interesting twist for a summoner/magic user who is wracked by guilt over what she did.

Another short session yesterday, arrived at Oelivert (?) and peeled back a few more layers of backstory. Yep, it sure is a Final Fantasy game! I'm a sucker for these kinds of worlds and stories so that's no bad thing to me.

What I don't like as much is timed mini-games that block the main path, completely out of context. It reminded me of the cactuar sidequests in FFX but at least they made those optional. Anyway I eventually got through it and am looking forward to the next section.

In general I like how the combat is scaling up so far. The enemies are getting more tricks up their sleeves, but not noticeably more beefy. It makes me pay a bit more attention in battle but doesn't seem to require any grinding beyond what happens naturally traversing dungeons. Just hope I haven't jinxed it...

Finishing up Citizen Sleeper in the next day or two, so I hope to be turning to this shortly!

I made it back to Alexandria and completed the running minigame. I definitely had forgotten a lot of the plot since the last (first) time I played the game, but my memory's getting jogged as I see things happen now.

I finished up Treno today and while there is still a lot of mystery and the story is moving pretty slow at this point (typical for a Final Fantasy), I am quite enjoying it.

Up through Treno:

Spoiler:

I am really enjoying the split party and them each getting substantial story in their vignettes. Every time I have a large cast of characters and can't use them in a single party, I want the game to split them up and force me to use different combinations, rather than sitting back and relying on favorites. Makes each character feel important and the uniqueness is fun. Also means they can dial in the challenges a little bit better, since they know which characters will be participating.

Garnet/Dagger is in for a very rude awakening. People have tried to warn her about Queen Brahne, but she won't listen and keeps wanting to talk to her. Well, she finally reached Alexandria just to be imprisoned by her own mother. And Steiner is not helping her at all, clinging desperately to his "duty" and unwillingly to take any responsibility or action. He is very much just going with the flow and refuses to swim against the current.

I really hate Zidane. At least when I reached Lindblum he fell squarely into the most annoying male trope for me, just flirting with every girl he comes across in the city. It's a personal thing, but I just cannot stand womanizers, I had the same problem with Ringabell in Bravely Default.

I started up the game, and did the first sequence where we explore and escape Alexandria. That was very…. Bombastic, wasn’t it? Compared to something like the Legend of Heroes stories which at least allow for dozens of hours of world building and character introduction before things pop off, this one just goes right after it. I guess I haven't played all that many Final Fantasy games, and certainly none recently, so maybe this is normal.

Anyway, we’re now totally lost in a dangerous forest, so we’ll see how many make it out. Also, I couldn’t help but notice that Garnet had some pretty big summons (that we couldn’t use) in the battle where she participated.

I’m on Switch, so no achievements and no real need to try to 100% the game. If I miss stuff, then so be it.

Having recently replayed this, FF7 and FFX, it's definitely noticeable that they are downright snappy compared to some more recent RPGs, including the newer Final Fantasy games.

Speaking of, I played some more yesterday and went through a sequence of dramatic plot reveals, which I'd completely forgotten about since last time. It's hard to talk about without spoiling, but apparently I am now on to Disc 4 according to my save file icon. I think I must be on the home stretch!

Yeah I think I’m about halfway through “disc 3”, according to a walkthrough chapter list. This game definitely seems like it’s moving along at a nice clip compared to other FFs.

I'm starting to realize that, if I want to get all the Chocographs in the Chocobo Hot & Cold game, I'm going to need to download an awful lot of podcasts...

So, been playing without updating here for a couple of days or so. I am now at the point where Zidane has found out more about his past and is mulling over the parallels with other party members' own plights.

I haven't checked where in the "Disc Line" I am at, but I think I may very well be way, waaaaay past the story's mid-point.

I'm thinking I'll give the Chocobo minigame a proper try. Spoiler tag coming since I don't know if it would be a spoiler to say what one of the results of the Hot and Cold game is...

Spoiler:

I'm trying to get to that pesky optional boss, since I've been pretty diligent about feeding the friendly monsters that also tie into the optional boss battle - just missing the last one since I can't remember how to actually land or reach the shore of that one out of the way island where it can be found.

If you are playing on a modern version of the game, using the speed up option on Hot & Cold really helps. Speeds up everything you do, but the timer still runs at the normal speed. You may want to set the default movement back to walk while you do that though. That's about the only help I could find online though.

FF9 location spoilers are below, showing roughly where the disc boundaries are:

Spoiler:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/AdmHwT3.png)

I advanced the story enough so as to get that one airship version that allows me to land just about anywhere. Natch. Made my way to that one island I mentioned in an earlier post to meet that one final friendly monster and... Well, crap. It acted like I was missing one of the earlier monsters. I kept a tally and am certain I that I met the criteria for feeding all the friendly monsters and had met every single one before, but I should have known something was up when I had a repeat of Mu, the first of the friendly monsters, in one of the forests. This means that this either glitched or I have to do the whole series of friendly monsters again, which I simply don't feel like doing, so I decided to mainline for the ending.

I have beaten the main story of FFIX for the fourth or fifth time since it released way back in 2000 (it's weird to me just saying the year). This playthrough has flooded me with memories that I didn't conjure up the last time I replayed it. It also afforded me a new appreciation for the storytelling and character nuances I didn't have before.

I also didn't do the blackjack cheat at the credits this time. That's another first.

Jumped back in today: I'm still in the intro, bumbling around Alexandria as Vivi right now.

I’ve pressed on, and gotten through the Ice Cavern, and up next is getting to the first town of the game. Which is good, since I’d like to start getting people better equipment.

I’m basically using Zindane as a stealbot (I have like 40 potions now), and Vivi is the MVP for just nuking fools with fire (need more ethers). I’ve also liked the system of learning abilities from equipment from the Tactics games, and hopefully it will work well here. I’m also amused how easily I slid back into grinding as I go in the old school JPRGs. I am already a bit tired of random encounters, though; I think I like enemies being visible on the field much better.

And I love that there’s a continue mechanic now so you don’t even have to get to every save point in one long run. Stuff like this really makes older games much more pleasant to revisit.

For those who played this closer to when it came out, was it seen as a graphical powerhouse? I didn't play any JRPGs on the PS1 (and the N64 was pretty weak in that regard too), so going back to the prerendered screens is a little jarring, but may have been top of the line at the time. I remember seeing somewhere that the FF games were often on the cutting edge of technology for the platforms they were on (see 6 and 12), but I haven't played enough to know if that was true.

I just got to Disc 2 without realizing I was quite that far, and hope to put some more time in it tomorrow.

It's taken this long to feel like the game has actually gotten to the point. Now we've got our evil expansionist empire threat and our mysterious man behind the man, now we have our central conflict. Took it long enough. Burmecia was also the most substantial "dungeon" so far, and I enjoyed the feeling of actually playing the game, despite the dungeon design being nothing special. I do love the system of learning skills from equipment and being able to adjust my "build" on the fly, similar to Paper Mario's badge system, and I like how every character feels very different in battle compared to FF7 and 8's characters, who mechanically were nearly blank slates.

Character-wise, this game has a bad habit of its main characters being the least interesting ones so far. Zidane is a himbo and Garnet is a stock rebellious princess white mage. The side characters shine, though. Steiner's pompous, earnest straight-man act is endearing, Vivi is adorable of course, and I wish we'd gotten introduced to Freya earlier, because she feels like she has more of a personal stake, more to lose, in this conflict than just about anyone else. I love her stoic facade and the little hints we get of the hopeless romantic that always seems to lurk under such surfaces. ...Quina I could take or leave.

Sundown wrote:

For those who played this closer to when it came out, was it seen as a graphical powerhouse? I didn't play any JRPGs on the PS1 (and the N64 was pretty weak in that regard too), so going back to the prerendered screens is a little jarring, but may have been top of the line at the time. I remember seeing somewhere that the FF games were often on the cutting edge of technology for the platforms they were on (see 6 and 12), but I haven't played enough to know if that was true.

It was released very late in the PS1's life cycle, and while it arguably did the PS1-era polygonal characters / pre-rendered backgrounds style better than most, that style was definitely showing its age even in its strongest exemplars by the time it came out. I remember playing it when it was new and thinking that it looked like I was viewing it through a layer of crushed glass.

The Dreamcast had been in the wild for almost a year before it launched, and it came a couple months after the PS2's release in most major markets including Japan and North America. From a technical standpoint, it very much felt like old news, and the launch timing may be why this one often seems to be overlooked in the history of the franchise compared to the other two PS1 titles and X, which came only a year later.

hbi2k wrote:

It was released very late in the PS1's life cycle, and while it arguably did the PS1-era polygonal characters / pre-rendered backgrounds style better than most, that style was definitely showing its age even in its strongest exemplars by the time it came out. I remember playing it when it was new and thinking that it looked like I was viewing it through a layer of crushed glass.

The Dreamcast had been in the wild for almost a year before it launched, and it came a couple months after the PS2's release in most major markets including Japan and North America. From a technical standpoint, it very much felt like old news, and the launch timing may be why this one often seems to be overlooked in the history of the franchise compared to the other two PS1 titles and X, which came only a year later.

Yes I remember playing it alongside Dreamcast RPGs like PSO and Skies of Arcadia, and thinking it looked pretty tired at the time. Strangely enough I've been more impressed this time around, with the benefit of distance (and a bit of nostalgia).

I finished the game last night! It turns out the "Disc 4" part is really just wrap up and one long final dungeon, so after wandering about for a while on my swanky new ride I decided to see what it was like. And in keeping with the rest of the game, it turned out not to be too convoluted or require intensive levelling up to get through. I did end up using a guide to tell me each boss's strengths and weaknesses though, because I got tired of the routine of dying to a boss to learn its tricks, then reloading and refitting the party to beat it.

The ending left me with a few questions so I'm keen to talk about it some more when others are ready! Overall though Zidane never grew on me as a MC. Despite a lot of stuff happening to him and around him, he seemed unaffected by it all until the very end, at which point his actions seemed a bit out of place. The other party members grow and react more convincingly to events, which made it weird when in true JRPG style they all give credit to Zidane as the leader for teaching them so much.

I finished with a little over 40 hours on the clock, and dabbled at least in all the side quests before dropping those that seemed too tedious (sorry chocobos!). Some were definitely worth it though in terms of new areas to explore and useful items. Daguerreo for example was one of the most interesting locations and completely missable I think. Overall I'd still rank this somewhere in the mid-tier of FFs but I'm glad to have revisited it. In terms of world building and pacing it actually shows up a lot of newer RPGs.

Sundown wrote:

For those who played this closer to when it came out, was it seen as a graphical powerhouse? I didn't play any JRPGs on the PS1 (and the N64 was pretty weak in that regard too), so going back to the prerendered screens is a little jarring, but may have been top of the line at the time. I remember seeing somewhere that the FF games were often on the cutting edge of technology for the platforms they were on (see 6 and 12), but I haven't played enough to know if that was true.

Yeah, I'd say it's pretty amazing. The prerendered backgrounds looked great on a small CRT back in the day. The only bad thing about them, IMO, was that when you had a scene zoomed far out, navigating your tiny polygonal character became quite tricky, sometimes it would be trial and error just to find out where you could go. Comparing to 7&8, FF7's polygonal characters were pretty basic. FF8's improved, but they went for more realistic character designs that aren't well suited to the PS1's limitations. FF9 returns to a more cartoonish style but with all the benefits of being an end of generation title. N64 could do games with prerendered backgrounds but it chewed up so much memory that you had to use so much compression that it compromised the image quality and / or pay Nintendo to manufacture the biggest cartridge sizes. For the N64, that would be 64MB, still one tenth of the space on a CD. The Final Fantasy games came on 3-4 CDs!

Sundown wrote:

I’ve pressed on, and gotten through the Ice Cavern, and up next is getting to the first town of the game. Which is good, since I’d like to start getting people better equipment.

I've cleared the intro sequence and am now in the forest, which feels like the time when I'll actually get to start playing the game. FF9 feels like it may have been at the beginning of the trend of overly long intro sections for JRPGs, though of course it pales in comparison to Kingdom Hearts 2 (one of the worst offenders IMO).

And congratulations to brokenclavicle and Comfortzone for finishing! Levels to come after I figure out what music will be on offer this quarter. I did not expect to have to decide so soon!

Totally open to suggestions on a theme, by the way.

I’ve made some good progress, and have made it up to Disc 2. (just past the events in Burmecia) I’m very grateful for the fast forward button, and also for turning off encounters when health and magic run low, or if I just need to backtrack for whatever reason.

So far, Vivi is probably the most interesting part of the cast, and I’m interested to know where that story line goes. Freya is cool, and Quina is whatever. And the Hot and Cold minigame for the Chocobos is just frustrating. I’ve gotten several of the Chocographs (including one that let my Chocobo now turn blue and cross rivers), but I don’t like such heavily RNG based minigames. Once again the speed up option is merciful to me, since I can get a lot more ground covered since it speeds up movement but not the timer.

It’s also interesting how they make items and weapons available through synthesis which are WAY more powerful than what else is available, as though they are giving you a reward for paying attention to the systems (and also grinding for money to buy more equipment to synthesize). But I’m already in the habit of not selling stuff (unlike what I do in every other JRPG) in case it comes up useful for synthesizing later.

I’m now up through the events at Cleyra. Brief spoiler talk.

Spoiler:

Man, Freya can’t catch a break, can she? Her hometown that she’s been away from for years gets destroyed, then the promises to go defend the stragglers in Cleyra, but that fails and it gets nuked, and also her long lost love has amnesia because of course he does. Surely she will get some sort of happy ending. I'm also surprised they are straight up killing named NPCs, like Dan dies unceremoniously to a Black Mage, and then all the survivors in Cleyra that all give you items before you leave just get wiped. The game seems to have a goofy start but it has a pretty brutal story.

On the plus side, we’ve leveled nicely so things are going pretty smoothly when actual fights are going on.

Someone said that the game is well paced, which it definitely is unless you’re running down side quests. But the main story just moves blindingly fast, and is still loud and bombastic all the way through. I should probably stop being surprised at some point that the foot never really leaves the pedal.

I'm at Lindblum, mostly wandering around town right now and hearing all about this Festival of the Hunt. I've also met someone else that I get to name, so I have a feeling that the game is going to force some party changes too. And, I've been given a primer on synthesis, but haven't yet found the synthesis shop...

Definitely worth finding the synthesis shop before you leave Lindblum, as Sundown said you can make some weapons that will serve you well in the next part of the game.

And thank you for the DQ11 theme! What a classic, I only played the original DQ11 release so I never heard the orchestral version.

About 13 hours in, I'm through the events at Cleyra, and just past a 30-minute timed sequence in which I rescued

Spoiler:

Garnet from Alexandria after getting her summons removed.

I'm sort of not feeling the villains at this point, and the destruction of

Spoiler:

Burmecia and Cleyra aren't hitting me hard enough to carry me. Burmecia was destroyed by the time we got there, I never got a chance to know them except through Freya, who had only joined me like 15 minutes before. Then we show up in Cleyra, and the Cleyrans seem nice enough or whatever... and then they're destroyed too. We never get to know them enough for me to care when they're gone.

By contrast, you look at, say, the Empire in Final Fantasy 6 or Shinra in FF7. You pass through South Figaro before it's occupied, and even though you probably don't spend much more time there than the spoilered examples above, enough time passes that it feels like a status quo gets established before it's disrupted. There's more of a "before" and "after" there. Same deal with FF7 and the sector 7 slums, and there you had a couple of named characters to get attached to as well.

I'm not sure why simple storytelling tricks like that appear to have become a lost technology as of FF9, but I'm finding its story a lot less effective due to their lack. It doesn't help that I don't understand WHY the villains are doing what they're doing, or why people are following them.

In 6, the Gestahlian Empire is an expansionist, colonialist empire, and we see Nazi-like rallies in which Gestahl appeals to nationalism to raise his soldiers' fervor. It's not particularly deep or complex, but it works. In 7, Shinra are capitalists, and their callous, impersonal evil is all too familiar to anyone who pays attention to current events.

Queen Brahne appears to just kind of... like the pretty light show? If she's occupying the places she destroys, expanding her territory, or seeking natural resources, we don't see it. If she has even a flimsy pretext for war, it's not stated. She just kinda... does stuff. Steiner following her out of misplaced royalist loyalty is fine for Steiner, but why does anyone else follow her? It's not just that it's thin, it's that it's inscrutable.

As I recall the map opens up a little bit later on, but as of right now I'm still feeling very on rails. Every time I've been on the world map, it's been a short, linear walk between two points, often so short that I barely have time to get into more than one or two random battles. There's no sense of space, of a journey across wilderness, and I have no idea where any of the places I've visited stand in relation to one another. It feels like the world map is only there at all because it seems like the sort of thing a JRPG "should" have, and this game definitely feels like the pivot point between the classic Final Fantasy style and the "hallway simulator" style of your FF10s and 13s where they dropped the world map altogether, to the series' detriment.

hbi2k wrote:

About 13 hours in, I'm through the events at Cleyra, and just past a 30-minute timed sequence in which I rescued

Spoiler:

Garnet from Alexandria after getting her summons removed.

So I'm about 17 hours in and a few story beats ahead, but all the stuff you are talking about is still fresh in my mind and I have similar opinions. Something I'm noting is that with the way the story is just zipping by (setting aside doing sidequests) is that nothing is ever really given time to breathe. Particularly to the second spoiler, there is just no time to properly set things up. Maybe I've been spoiled over the last 15 years or so where my favorite JRPGs are either Persona or Legend of Heroes of games which are overflowing with character development and world building, but it makes older games (this one included) just not work quite as well for me. Having something clip along is great for keeping a story moving forward and maintaining the spectacle, but actually not all that great at the whole "getting me to care" part, and sometimes makes it harder to go back to older games that aren't as fleshed out (exceptions like Chrono Trigger not withstanding).

To be clear, I am digging this game so far and I'm still interested to see where the story goes, particularly with Garnet and her upcoming purpose, plus Vivi, but it's still with the acceptance that this is an older game with older sensibilities.

Maybe I was too generous but I thought it was a deliberate choice to give the early part of the game a more chaotic feel, like everything is crumbling around us and nobody knows what’s going on. After all a lot of the same people who made FF6 and 7 would also have been involved in this game. Later on you do get more breathing space but it’s never a very contemplative game compared to a lot of other rpgs.

I actually had a story question pop up yesterday, when I met Cid Fabool for the first time. Maybe it's something I missed, maybe it's one of those things that just doesn't make sense:

Spoiler:

So Cid paid Tantalus to kidnap Garnet and bring her to Lindblum, because he's also concerned about Queen Brahne and whatever's going on in Alexandria. Cool cool cool. Then, all of a sudden in the conversation, Garnet says "how can we go back to Alexandria with the South Gate destroyed?" and they're talking like the plan is for Cid and Garnet to go back to Alexandria and confront Queen Brahne about how she's gone off the deep end, or turned evil, or whatever. If the plan was to stage an intervention ... why kidnap Garnet at all? Couldn't Cid have just flown to Alexandria for a talk? And why bring Garnet back?

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/a0T2Lom.jpg)