>>12617103its good
>>12617103Great overall game design, nice aesthetics, solid mechanics, excellent music. On a technical and design level it's as good or better than the other PS1 FF games.My only real issue is that none of the characters or plotlines ever felt all that engaging. Stuff just sort of happens so there's a reason to go somewhere and it doesn't make a lasting impression. I could not tell you what the Redhead dreadlock dude's deal was and Quina just wanted to eat things and the rat girl had some kind of tragic whatever and the main villain was actually Zidane's brother and had some random motive which didn't even seem to make sense...it was almost like dream logic where shit doesn't actually connect together and you just roll with it. It was fun but it didn't feel meaningful.Also I hated the encounter rate and the fact that there was no way to moderate it, and that the card game was pointless after Triple Triad was so useful. But unlike a lot of people I really enjoyed chocobo hot and cold. I didn't find it nearly as random or frustrating as most did, I was shocked at how many people thought it was janky.
Fun game, bad story
Visually impressive. The peak of what a company could squeeze out of the PS1's hardware. Mechanically a very boring game that had tediously long fights. An extremely forgettable story and cast. The weakest soundtrack of the PS1 FF games. By the time 9 dropped everyone had already moved onto waiting for the PS2 and 10. Garnet is a cute though. Shame she's part of one of the worst FF casts from the golden era.
>>12617103Good things wasted on a boring game
>>12617103Fun game, good story, nice characters.
best musicbest art directionbest graphics
>>12617103It's a serviceable FF game. Combat works ok for a JRPG, the story is somewhat interesting, and it's fairly pretty for a PSX game. If anything, I could say it's in a weird place where does most things well, but nothing really outstanding, and because of that I'm not as interested in going back to as other games in the series.For instance, the battle mechanics are more tightly balanced than FF7 or FF8, but because of that, progression is very linear and boring. You learn new abilities via your equipment and the way it's paced, you'll often find yourself using older and weaker gear despite having found or bought better stuff. This in turn makes you grind a bit or forgo some abilities, which then makes you notice even more how slow the battle system is.The story is reasonable but failed to excite me in most ways. It has the same problem most Japanese stories have, in that they seem to write the set pieces long before the overall plot and then have to tie them all together. Individually, things like the Iifa Tree and Terra and the Mist are neat, but overall their presentation and use within the story are fairly short and skipped over for other story beats until far later. This makes them less effective than they could've been.FF7 had a really good plot and pacing, even if sometimes I feel like it was a happy accident. FF8's junction system at least made battle very easy and included the ability to turn off random encounters, making the game flow better as a result. FF9 struggled in those areas, resulting in a sort of dull feeling of whatever. I think the game would've been much better if it could figure out how to handle battle encounters to move the player through the game faster, even something like Chrono Trigger/Cross's setup where you saw enemies on the map would've helped.
The synthesis system is highly underrated, and finally gives you a reason to not sell off your weaker gear the moment you get something better. It actually encourages you to collect more stuff just so you don't miss out on a powerful synthesis later on. Between that and all the optional treasure you can find and some specific grind-zones, the game really lends itself to repeat play-through's for people not using a guide.
>>12617141Replay it and pay attention, anon. Aside from Arumat, pretty much all of those things are developed in the game beyond your cursoury memory of it, though there's a lot of shit going on which is why you likely only remember bullet points. If the nitpicks still bother you, check out the moguri mod. Its an amazing game but its density makes it easy for stuff to go over people's heads, just keep in mind that the overal theme is about the mortal reminder.
The world is cool and the music is great too. Most characters look great, but the more human ones look like shit and out of place (e. g. Zidane, Garnet, Beatrix, partially Eiko).The story was largely OK, but they really should have rewritten the whole life stealing stuff to NOT make Zidane into we-have-Goku-at-home.Unfortunately, the gameplay is a complete disaster, you always have to worry about missing stuff, and with that skills, etc. Learning skills from gear instead of having actual classes was crap, too. Fuck magic stones. The worst is that battles C R A W L and are ruined by the low damage cap, coupled with retard grindable character skills that easily hit the cap and make basically everything else obsolete, including later summons. Summons are pretty shit in this game, come to think of, not only damage-wise but how they look shitty as well. They even managed to make stealing just not fun with everything having a billion items to steal. Having Garnet randomly fuck up her actions for a large portion of the game was one of the dumbest decisions of the decade. Trance is obviously retarded as fuck and might as well go off whenever.Basically, a good setting wasted on shit gameplay.
>gets eaten by Quina
>>12618145> coupled with retard grindable character skills that easily hit the cap and make basically everything else obsoleteThis is a you problem, which cascaded into most of your other complaints about stuff like trance and summons. Don't grind up to use them, or save doing so for shit like Ozma like they were intended, and the rest of the game will feel more balanced.>Learning skills from gear instead of having actual classes was crap, too.Fair, even though I like when its a thing like here and in FFTA. Its an interesting take on anti-grinding, the only legitimate complaint would be regarding how it interacts with missables, though IIRC there are only like one or two abilities you can actually miss because of it.>Having Garnet randomly fuck up her actions for a large portion of the game was one of the dumbest decisions of the decade. Honestly I thought it was great narratively, and no more limiting than stuff in other FFs like areas you can't use certain abilities. It encourages you to work around a limitation and made complete sense in regards to both the story events around it and the the game's overall theming.
>>12617947>and finally gives you a reason to not sell off your weaker gear the moment you get something betterNot only is this solving a problem that didn't exist (who is actually sad that their leather hat is now unused because they got an iron helm), you very much would want to sell obsolete gear in a game with a good economy explicitly so you can get the next gear upgrade. But this is Final Fantasy so you always have too much money from simply fighting battles and there's also nothing worth buying anyway because it's Final Fantasy.
I liked it, but at the end of the day JRPGs are just visual novels with a combat systerm tacked on, so unless you're ready to read your TV for 60+ hours it's replayability is limited.
>>12618145>>12618171I think the problem with the Garnet-being-unreliable portion of the game is that you have a second White Mage by that point (Eiko) so you just use her instead. Garnet doesn't really have any abilities that aren't replicable by other characters, so she's just a nuisance in that state. It might be more impactful if, for example, she was the only summoner (and her summons were powerful right out of the gate) making some players choose to endure her unreliability for the sake of being able to pull off some big damage.Come to think of it, her muteness starts right as you're given the jewels for a bunch of her summons, so that would've tied in really nicely.
My absolute favorite in the series. I'm especially fond of chocobo hot'n'cold to the point where having played it many times over the past two decades, I've never gotten the Excalibur II and likely never will.
>>12618171I didn't grind (I tend to explore and get lost a lot however) and thievery, frog drop, etc, already outpaced most other skills. Garnet has nothing going for her, so she just gets benched instead.
>>12617103Looks nice, very dull uninteresting gameplay, nice music, story starts out good and falls apart as it goes on. Maybe 3rd best Final Fantasy on PSX, highly overrated by some people.
>>12618323>I think the problem with the Garnet-being-unreliable portion of the game is that you have a second White Mage by that point (Eiko) so you just use her instead.Exactly, thats why I said it was a narrative choice. You're supposed to bench her since she just went through something very traumatic, and the overlap with Eiko further encourages this. So you either keep her in the party and embrace the limitation, or follow the intuitive choice to let her recover while substituting her out. You're framing it incorrectly.>>12618358You HAVE to grind frogs to boost frog drop, and thievery takes a long ass time to boost, coming from someone who steals frequently. "Outpaced" is relative, and entirely dependent on how you specifically play. Someone who never steals, doesn't spam Quina's minigames, grind dragons, etc will not have that issue.>Garnet has nothing going for her, so she just gets benched instead.Sounds like a pure damage min maxer, makes sense you would have these issues.
was it necessary to have eiko watch vivi and zidane piss?
>>12619292yes.
>>12619309>vivi whips it out
>>12619314
Is Vivi a shota?
>>12617103I've only played through disc one and while incredibly charming, it was slow and the entire cast spent the whole disc questioning their existence without taking any sort of action and it got old. Also the rat lady like immediately forgave some genocidal war criminal and that pissed me off so much I benched her.
It took me 4 or 5 playthroughs of FF9 before starting to feel like I had seen and done everything.Meanwhile, I was still learning new things in FF8, both story and gameplay related, on my 10th playthrough.5 playthroughs is still good.>>12619430Anyone old enough to remember when "the Iifa tree and Necron are the same entity" was a thing is old enough to remember how fucking stupid wikias and fans can be. I remember /v/ posters being like "nooo you don't get it! Necron doesn't come out of nowhere he's the Iifa Tree! Yes I figured this out BY MYSELF you're just DUMB!" fucking lmao this is why I never believe someone telling me he didn't get his opinion from a youtuber when it matches the youtuber's opinion
>>12619441in fairness the translation does a poor job of conveying the situation with the Iifa Tree's 'other side' which is hinted at by Garland. I never really understood what that was about until I saw that concept art of the tree's roots extending down into Terra and wrapping round its Crystal. For a game with such great visuals you never get ANY visual indication that this is the case, only vague descriptions by characters who speak esoterically in the middle of a sea of other plot-important info.So I can see how in the absence of that understanding one might come to the conclusion that the Iifa Tree's 'other side' is metaphysical and connect it to Necron.There should've been a setpiece when visiting Terra where you go to area where the Crystal wrapped in roots is clearly visible.
If you have certain items equipped when a character levels up, you get added permanent stat increases to that character. I’ve always wanted to see how far you can exploit it. If you don’t start leveling until you get the gear that does it, you could really boost certain stats.
>>12618068I'm not saying they didn't make an honest attempt at developing the characters, I just don't think it worked as well as it did in the previous entries. It made a certain amount of sense while playing it but I forgot about everything that happened 2 days after I was done.
>>12618358In order of speed to 9999 damage it goes Dragon Crest > Frog Drop > Thievery. It's literally faster to kill 100 Grand Dragons than the other two.
>>12619879Its interesting but annoying to work with. Lots of the best stat gaining equipment is late game and you need a lot of levels for it to matter. Funny though, Eiko can get a lot of extra stats for free due to a bug. Usually, any levels Cinna and Blank gain will go to Quina and Amarant and stat gains will carry over. Marcus was supposed to do this with Eiko, but for some reason it only transfers the stats over but not the levels.
>>12617103Movie game. Custscene every 30 seconds.
>>12620297It's a fucking waste of time. FFVI actually has noticeable upgrades in Magic, this FFIX shit is like terminal autism where all you eat is oatmeal.
I got to the start of disc 3 and dropped it. Game suffers massively from linear hallway syndrome, you just feel shoved from one story setpiece to another and they're not really paced well. 8 had poorly paced setpieces too like the balamb invasion but 9 is nothing but poorly paced setpieces. music is the worst of classic FF and peaks at the title screen. the only good character is freya and the game just totally forgets she exists for a reeeaally long time. the whole splitting up characters thing was based though, and the town design is the best in the series honestly. it has the most technically impressive cgs but 8's cgs just have more soul. plot was meh
>>12619879>I’ve always wanted to see how far you can exploit itthere is a faq for this, but you need to be lvl1 until you get eiko and it's a bit hard to do the first time
>>12619457The theory was also based on the fact that the tree when defeated says that it can not really die and that it will be back, which simply refers to it being undead and foreshadowed the return of the mist in disc4.
>>12620164I like stealing shit in rpgs, even if the items suck. Frog catching was also less of a hassle, you just had to leave enough to repopulate.
>>12617103That fucking Excalibur II always hangs over my OCD-ridden head like a literal Damocles Sword and it inevitably makes me give up my run around the Gizmaluke's Grotto/Burmecia area.
>>12621241>and it inevitably makes me give up my runThere's the clock overflow glitch for this.>around the Gizmaluke's Grotto/Burmecia area.jesus that's really early too.
>>12621246>There's the clock overflow glitch for this.Yeah, like I'm gonna wait literal years for that.
>>12621257Wait?
>>12620681>I got to the start of disc 3 and dropped it. Game suffers massively from linear hallway syndromeThat's basically soon after the game completely opens up, though the story has already gone to shit by then if you care about story.If you keep up with the chocobo stuff and ride the boat around you should be able to access a lot of the map at any time by then. And especially in disc 3 there are little hidden things that happen all over in places you're not "supposed" to be.
>>12621805this mini-game is so, so overhatedthis map alone reminds me how finding the chocographs made me cover every inch of the world map in search of them
I just wish more RPGs used the optional-cutscene system FF9 had. It makes replays less of a slog since you can skip 30-40% of the cutscenes entirely by just not pressing the select button.
>>12621805>And especially in disc 3 there are little hidden things that happen all over in places you're not "supposed" to be.Please tell me more. I had fun in a recent playthrough dicking around with a gold chocobo in disk 1, although in disk 2 entering just about anywhere would set flags that would soft-lock progress.
>>12621858I'm not talking about gamebreaking. I'm talking like, you're supposed to go to [X] for the story, but if you have the chocobo and a little curiosity there are little hidden scenes and treasures that only happen for short times far away from where your objectives are and if you go around enough you'll find some. It's designed like that to reward exploration.
>>12621861for me its the spigot of the cask of wine left open
>>12621828Am I the only one who doesn't mind a hallway RPG so long as it's not filled with cutscenes?I had a great time with Final Fantasy X and XIII but shit like FFIX and Mother 3 is the worst
>>12622196What are you talking about? X and XIII are the hallways with unstoppable cutscenes games.Playing X today is infuriating. i got it on release, I know the dialogue a don’t need to hear it all again and there’s SO MUCH dialogue and so many cutscenes. In IX most of the cutscenes are at the beginning and end and you can mash through dialogue boxes.I played X in the last year and had to mod it with dialogue and cutscene skip buttons, it’s much more tolerable to replay that way.
>>12622276FFX has actual massive gameplay areas you can just walk around in and just fight for 30+ minutes with no scenes. IX doesn't have that until like the end of the game
>>12622464X just has the calm lands, and there is plenty of dialogue and cutscenery there. I've beaten both at least 5x, IX gives you that level of freedom and once you leave Lindblum the first time on disc 1, it's called the world map.
