[HEADING=1]#1[/HEADING][HEADING=2]
Final Fantasy IX[/HEADING]
and I have a rather long history.
VII was the first RPG I ever played (excluding
Pokemon), and it began a long-running love of the franchise that has led to... a fairly turbulent past few years. I've played through every main-series installment since
VII (and a few of the spin-offs), and I've tried pushing my way through the older titles, but to this day nothing surpasses the crowning achievement that is
Final Fantasy IX.
It still has all of the staples you'd come to expect from a
Final Fantasy game - Fairly linear progression through the first few hours of the game, an absurd plot with hammy and campy writing, twists from out of nowhere even before the actual thrust of the story starts winding up, and an androgynous male main character. But even with all of that, it manages to elevate itself above the groundwork laid down by the previous games. The characters are well-realized, the twists are poignant and meaningful, arcs actually feel like they have weight because we've seen these characters exhibit actual emotion as we've been following them, and certain elements of the plot (which I won't spoil) actually have tangible effects on the active gameplay as you proceed through the discs, which is something that I had never seen before and have rarely seen implemented well ever since.
As well, the musical score is just fantastic. While there isn't any singular iconic track like "One-Winged Angel", the entire soundtrack just feels like it's some of composer Uematsu's best work. They compliment the environments you're traveling through in a way that even
Final Fantasy VII could rarely accomplish. And as for the environments... well, they're fantastic. While the previous two games had adopted a pseudo-realistic post-modern industrial-fantasy world (that's a lot of describing words there),
IX elected to go for a simpler, steampunk-inspired world, and it does the setting a lot of favors in terms of getting away with crazy things. The world has a rather grandiose scale, as well, which you don't discover until quite a few hours in. Initially you get tricked, as your world map only shows you the continent that you begin on and by about 6-8 hours in you feel like you've seen most of what that continent might have to offer, but then it opens up and you realize that there's another three continents that you haven't explored yet.
The game is jam-packed with little extras, as well, ranging from the reintroduction of Moogles and the "class" system to a weapon that you can only obtain if you reach one of the final areas of the game within 12 hours of playtime. But most importantly, it
felt like a
Final Fantasy game. There was exploration, there were people to pointlessly talk to, there was a lot of silly dialogue used just to give the characters a more human appearance, there was equipment and inventory management, there were shops, there were mini-games and side-quests, and there was the fanfare.
