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Heavy story spoilers ahead

I really didn’t mean for this much time to pass between talking about Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy IX, but life kind of got in the way in a way I didn’t fully expect. One of the biggest barriers to actually finishing and sitting down to talk about this game is that I got laid off from my job last August, and as strange as it sounds, that job had plenty of downtime where I could just have a game running beside my desk and chip away at it throughout the day. On top of that, I transitioned into being a stay-at-home parent, and it turns out if you actually want to be a good parent, spending all your time grinding random encounters isn’t exactly conducive to that goal. It’s kind of ironic that losing my job ended up meaning I had less time for video games, but here we are.

Regardless, I’m finally here and ready to talk about Final Fantasy IX. This one released on the original PlayStation in the fall of 2000, right at the tail end of that console’s life, just before the PlayStation 2 came along. Just like how I grouped Final Fantasy I, II, and III as the NES trilogy and IV, V, and VI as the SNES trilogy, you can similarily group Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX together as the PS1 trilogy, but what really makes IX stand out immediately is how hard it pivots back toward the series’ roots. Especially when contrasting it against Final Fantasy VII and VIII, as they leaned much harder into a more modern, sci-fi aesthetic with experimental systems. Final Fantasy IX is a love letter to the series, a return to it’s roots after a sabbatical in the futuristic sense.

The Final Fantasy call backs come fast and hard, starting with the aesthetic. Airships, castles, knights and princesses dominate the setting here. And again, contrasting against the more realistically preportioned character models from the previous games, the character models in IX are much more exaggrated, more chibi in nature. I’m not totally against this art direction, the moments when the game is trying to be funny, the aesthetic lends to the goofiness of the situation. But the child-like character models does make some of the more emotional or dramatic scenes to feel a bit flat in my opinion. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start by talking about the story.

Story

Final Fantasy IX begins with a plot. The Tantalus Theatre Troupe are en route to Alexandria to perform the famous play I Want to Be Your Canary for Queen Brahne and the royal family. Inside Tantalus, we meet Zidane, a plucky young thief with a monkey tail and a can-do attitude. The play is a ruse; their real goal is to kidnap Princess Garnet. As the play is underway, Zidane sneaks into the castle and bumps into Garnet, wearing a classic white mage robe to keep her identity hidden. Before Zidane can say anything, she asks him to kidnap her. How serendipitous.

During their escape, Captain of the Knights Steiner catches onto Zidane’s plot and gives chase. In the mayhem, a lone black mage named Vivi gets caught up in the action, and all four end up on the theatre ship, which soon crashes into an evil forest. Garnet is separated from the group, so Zidane, Vivi, and Steiner set out to find her, Zidane always eager to help, Steiner determined to return her to Alexandria, and Vivi simply happy to see the world.

The forest is filled with a malevolent mist that turns people and animals violent, and after an encounter with a Black Waltz, the forest begins to petrify itself. The party narrowly escapes, though Blank is left behind, and they pass through the Ice Cavern to the village of Dali. There, Garnet adopts the name Dagger, and Vivi is kidnapped. Finding him leads the party to discover black mages being manufactured as weapons of war. For Vivi, who has never seen anyone like himself before, the revelation that these mages are lifeless golems raises sincere questions about his origin.

From there, the party heads to Lindblum to meet Regent Cid, who refuses to offer help. This splits the group. Steiner smuggles Garnet back toward Alexandria while Zidane and Vivi travel to Burmecia. Upon arrival, they find it destroyed by Alexandria’s forces and encountering Kuja for the first time. Meanwhile, Garnet and Steiner are captured and imprisioned upon returning home, and Zidane’s party moves to warn Cleyra, only to witness Queen Brahne use Garnet’s extracted eidolons to destroy it.

Back in Alexandria, Zidane and Steiner reunite and free Garnet before her execution. Up to this point, Steiner has been unwavering in his loyalty to the crown, dismissing any claims of Brahne’s warmongering. But when forced to choose between his queen and the princess he swore to protect, he finally sides with Garnet, asking Zidane to protect her while he stays behind.

As the story unfolds, Garnet learns more about eidolons, while the party discovers Kuja has been supplying Brahne with black mages, all tied to the mist’s mysterious origin. On the outer continent, they encounter a village of sentient black mages who have defected, and Vivi learns that his kind have a limited lifespan, forcing him to confront his own mortality.

The party meets Eiko, a young summoner connected to Garnet’s past, and Amarant, a lone wolf who joins after being defeated by Zidane. Their journey leads them to the Iifa Tree, where they stop the flow of mist, only to witness Queen Brahne launching a final assault on Kuja. Her attempt to destroy him backfires, and she is killed when Kuja captures and turns Bahamut against her fleet.

Before dying, Brahne admits the war was her own ambition, Kuja only gave her the nudge towards war. Garnet returns to Alexandria and is crowned queen, only for Kuja to attack again. With Eiko’s help, Garnet summons Alexander to defend the city, but Kuja is ultimately driven off by Garland, a mysterious figure with ties to both Kuja and Zidane.

Chasing Kuja leads the party deeper into the mystery of Terra, where Zidane learns the truth of his origin. Terra, a dying world, sought to assimilate Gaia by replacing its souls through the Iifa Tree, with Garland orchestrating the plan. Kuja was created to accelerate the process, and Zidane was created to replace him, making the two basically brothers. Garland seeks to discard Kuja, but refusing to accept his fate, Kuja rebels, ultimately choosing to destroy everything when faced with his own mortality.

The final act takes place in Memoria, a realm shaped by memories, where Zidane and his allies confront Kuja who’s trying to destroy the original crystal, from which all life was born. Upon defeating him, Necron, a being born from nihilism that seeks to return everything to nothingness appears. The party prevails, affirming their will to live despite the inevitability of death.

In the aftermath, Kuja uses his remaining strength to save the party. Zidane returns alone to the collapsing and writhing Iifa Tree to save Kuja, but the screen fades to black when all possible routes of escape seem closed. Time passes, and Alexandria gathers for a performance of I Want to Be Your Canary. Vivi has passed on, leaving behind “Vivi’s sons,” and the cast reunites. Freya is rekindling her romance with Fratley, Eiko has been adopted by Cid and Hilda, and Steiner and Beatrix are at Garnet’s side. During the play, Zidane returns, revealing himself at the play, and Garnet runs to him. the crowd chears as she leaps into Zidane’s arms.

I don’t know if I’m in the minority or not, but I never really found the story of Final Fantasy IX to be particularly gripping. I never thought the story sagged at any particular point, but it also never really had me on the edge of my seat. There were some moments, like when Queen Brahne ruthlessly destroyed Cleyra, that were devastating, but overall I felt like the story didn’t ebb and flow. The plot just continually moves from one scene to the next in a straightforward escelating progression, instead of the narrative arcs that we’ve seen in previous games. In Final Fantasy VII, when you end the Midgar arc, it feels like a definate shift. You’ve moved on from Act I. But I didn’t feel that in IX. I think at least some part of it has to do with the fact that so much of Zidane’s background and Kuja’s motivations aren’t revealed until the very last dungeon. For most of the game, Kuja is just the mysterious character who keeps showing up as things are getting destroyed.

I also perpetually question Zidane’s motivations for continuing with this quest. Zidane as a character would say, “I don’t need a reason to help someone,” and some part of his motivation for sticking close to Garnet has to do with their mutual attraction for each other, even if neither will admit their affection until the final scene of the game. But the happy-go-lucky thief perpetually gathers people around himself and encourages them to help everyone they come across. As said in Klaus, “A truly selfless act always sparks another.”

The characters in Final Fantasy IX represent both high and low points in their personal arcs. Vivi is an obvious standout. A charming, naive black mage who is excited about life and the world, it’s difficult to imagine anyone not falling in love with Vivi. The story also presents sweet Vivi with his own mortality, and Vivi comes out the other side as optimistic as ever. If his time is short, he better start living now. Zidane’s unending optimism, Garnet’s growth as she rises to the role of monarchy, Steiner’s growth from blindly loyal and contemptuous toward Zidane to making his own decisions and considering Zidane a comrade-in-arms, and even Freya’s short bit of story, her intense longing for Sir Fratley, the elation she has when she finds him, only to have her joy ripped away when he announces his amnesia, are all emotional high points.

While some characters have strong growth, others remain relatively flat. Quina is a one-note comic relief character whose only goal is to seek out new foods. Amarant is prickly and emotionally unavailable for the entire game, only slightly coming around to Zidane’s way of thinking right at the end. I even find Eiko to be relatively flat, as she serves more as a way to provide Garnet’s history than any kind of growth herself.

Mechanics

Mechanically, Final Fantasy IX returns to the series to familiar ground, especially after VII and VIII were such departures. The party is back to four members instead of the three-person setups from the last two games, and the combat is more straightforward, with each character falling into a clear archetype. Zidane steals, Vivi nukes things with black magic, Garnet and Eiko keep everyone alive and can summon, Steiner hits hard and tanks big hits, and so on. There’s comfort in this structure, but it also comes at the cost of flexibility. Unlike VII and VIII, where anyone could concieveably do anything and you could often of break the system in half if you really wanted to, IX keeps everyone to their prescribed archtypes.

Character progression is tied to equipment, which grants abilities that you learn over time by equipping the equipment and earning AP in battle. Once learned, those abilities can be enabled independently of the gear with each skill costing a number of skill crystals. The skill crystals are limited in number and acquiring more for each character is tied to their level. In theory, this creates an interesting decision space where you’re choosing between better equipment stats or prioritizing learning new abilities, but in practice, it almost always felt like the correct choice was obvious. If a piece of equipment teaches a new ability, you equip it until you learn that ability, and then you move on. If it doesn’t, it often felt borderline useless, even if the stats were just a bit better that what you were doing before. Often, instead of feeling like I was customizing my characters, it felt like I was just checking all my equipment for new skills, and if there weren’t any skills left to learn, just picking the one with the highest stat. Some equipment in the late game let you absorb certian types of elemental attacks, rendering some bosses absolutely trival, providing you know what elemental attacks they’re going to use ahead of time. But in the year 2026, who isn’t following a guide these days?

The battle system itself also suffers from pacing issues. First off the loading screens are brutal. From the moment your character freezes due to a random encounter starting, the screen swirling, 6 whole seconds of black, another 4 seconds of the camera panning and zooming around before you get to do a single action. the loading time after the battle to get you back into the overworld, it’s a lot. Now, saying 10 seconds of loading doesn’t sound like a lot, but keep in mind that you’ll do hundreds of battles throughout a playthrough. And sometimes when you’re just aching to get to the next story beat, the long loading time of the random encounters is brutal.

The Active Time Battle system is still here, but everything just feels slow. The bars fill up and then prompt you to take an action. You choose what they’re going to do, and then you wait. If another one of your characters bars fill up while you’re waiting for your action to take place, you choose thier action too. The challenge becomes when you’re balacing 4 characters and multiple enemies attack animations. It seems the orders you make are put into a queue, and will activate in the order that you make them. But the enemy attacks and ATB bars are hidden from you, so they might take actions inbetween your characters, which will often make you wish you could undo the actions in the queue. Like when you’re going to cast cure on a low health character, only for them to be attacked 3 times before Garnet gets her turn to act. Even worse is Doom, more than once a character afflicted with the curse, only for the timer to tick down to 0 before I was able to input a new command. But on the flipside, it’s certainly handy to cast Regain on a character, then launch a long eidolon animation, letting your regain activate several times before any enemies continue their assault. It’s not usually a game breaking feature, but I certainly found it to be annoying.

Another annoyance is the Trance system. A seperate bar under your ATB metre fills up as your character takes damage, and when full, activates their Trance form. Every charcter’s trance form has a unique ability, but in general for the time they’re in Trance they are much more powerful. Think, Super Sayain from Dragon Ball strong. The challenge with this system is that the Trance often fires during a random encounter, then the metre is completely depleted for the next fight. It’s a power I certianly would have preferred to be able to trigger during the boss fights when I actually needed the power boost.

On the positive side, the combat camera usually remained locked in a single view, not swinging around wildly, making it difficult to know who exactly you’re targeting like it did in the previous couple games. And unless you have boost equipped, you only really see the full summon animation the first time you use a ediolon. Everytime after that, you get a much more cut down version of the animation, which after the lengthy movies that VIII used for it’s summons, it was a very welcome change.

Tetra Master

While Final Fantasy VIII had it’s card game, Triple Triad, Final Fantasy IX sought to level up the card game with Tetra Master. You can challenge most characters in the world to a game of Tetra Master at any time, but not many characters actually reference the game. In Tetra Master each player has 5 cards cards each on a 4 by 4 grid. Each card has it’s own stats and arrows. If you play a card somewhere and your card’s arrows point at another arrow, the cards engage in a “battle” and whomever is the stronger card wins, and flips the opposing card to the opposite colour. The tutorial of Tetra Master walks you through that much, but then refuses to tell you what the numbers on each card means. “Figure that out on your own!”, it says.

I messed around the Tetra Master a bit, but grew really fusturated with not understanding how the mechanics work. This is something I already know about myself and my game group, we are not the “figure it out as we go along” type of gamers. We’d rather spend an hour going over the rulebook until we all understand the game before we make any decisions. So the in-game tutorial of Tetra Master being so sorely lacking and purposefully opaque, absolutely fusturated me. I figured out that if you place a card with an arrow pointing at nothing, you simply capture the card, but arrows at each other initate battles, but then in one game of Tetra Master I had conqoured almost the entire board, then the opponent put down his final card and flipped 8 cards due to a chaining mechanisim that I didn’t understand, I almost threw the game across the room.

Looking at a guide online lead me to discover that the stat line works in a base 15 hexadecimal format, with the numbers (in order) corrospond to attack value, attack type, physical defence, and magical defence. If you have an arrow pointing at them and they have an arrow pointing back, you enter combat. You attack them with your cards attack value against the defense value on their card based on your attack type. if you win, you capture that card and any card that card has arrows pointing at, this is a chain.

But how is the attack and defense calculated? Randomly. During a battle each card is basically rolling their attack die and smacking into the opponent, but that attack die’s highest limit is based on the attack stat. So a low attack has a low ceiling, and then the attack is subtracted from the opponents appropriate defence which is also a random number based on the stat line. If the attacked card is still alive (it’s randomly determined defence didn’t fall to 0), it takes a turn attacking, and back and forth the cards swap until one of those cards loses.

Convoluted to say the least, but what fusturates me the most is that Tetra Master is absolutely pointless. There are no tangiable rewards for playing this stupid mini-game. At least in Triple Triad you could mod the cards to get items or spells. Sure, the card mod system absolutely broke the game, but it was a reason to play the little game. Tetra Master on the other hand, gives you nothing for sumbitting this random and arcane system into your brain. There is one spot halfway through disc 2 where you HAVE to play in a Tetra Master tournament, but other than that, curating a deck list and engaging with this mini game offers you nothing in return. But on the subject of a fusturating mini-game that does offer you rewards…

Chocobo Hot and Cold

Everyone knows the apex of fun exists at the intersection of randomness and tight time limits. add in a healthy dose of blindness and button lag, and you have yourself a rollicking good time. Chocobo Hot and Cold shows up early in the game, but unlike Tetra Master, this one rewards you in items. And some of the items you can dig up are the strongest items in the game!

To play Chocobo Hot and Cold, you basically run around a little field and peck the ground. Then your Chocobo will say “keh” if you’re far, while “Kweh?!” mean you’re closer, and “Kwehhh?!” means you’re very close. The challenge is that you need to be pixel perfect to get the coveted “KWEEEEEEEH!!”, indicating that you found an item. At this point you just need to mash the peck button until you dig the item out.

The real treasure from Chocobo Hot and Cold are the Chocographs. These are little treasure maps that have a screenshot of somewhere out in the world, that require you to take your chocobo out to find the exact spot. But the rewards for doing so can be pretty lucrative, the very first Chocograph gives you 2 Elixers along with some other decent items considering how early in the game it shows up. Several of the characters best gear in the game are rewards you get for finding Chocographs.

The real problem with Chocobo Hot and Cold is that you only have 60 seconds to peck the ground and find items. And then you’re just running back and forth trying to get closer and closer to the item. The Kweh?! system had me circling items only to finally hit the KWEEEEEEH!! just as the time ran out.

I found Chocobo Hot and Cold to be utterly fusturating and boring. I don’t think pecking the ground and having someone yelling out “warm, warmer, warmer, hot!, hot!, YOU FOUND IT!” is intresting or clever game design. To find all the chocographs would take hours that I’m just not willing to pour into this luck based mechanic. Too bad, as I really could have used some of the gear at the end of the game.

Final Thoughts

Obviously, I have criticisms that I could levy at Final Fantasy IX. The game is too slow, the story didn’t grip me, Tetra Master and Chocobo are bad mini-games, some character arcs are flat, and so on. But the more I reflected on my time with Final Fantasy IX, the more I realized how charmed I was by it. It’s unfortunate that I lost an hour of progress halfway through playing it and then put the game on hiatus for four months, but it is what it is. I can’t change the past now.

I’m very glad I finally played through this. The focus on characters and their interactions between each other is something I adore in video games, and it’s interesting seeing how some of my favourite games that came out after IX were obviously inspired by this game. I know there are legions of fans that adore this game, and it’s easy to see why. Even with all its blemishes and nitpicks, Final Fantasy IX succeeds in being an emotional and touching entry to the series. When people ask, “What’s a Final Fantasy?”, this is the entry that they should point to.

Final Fantasy IX absolutely succeeds as a love letter to the franchise that came before it. There are so many great references that would have went right over my head, had I not embarked on this Final Fantasy project. Like, Garland and Sarah’s names appearing from Final Fantasy 1, the reference to Kefka kicking Ghestal when Kuja kicks Garland off his pedastal. The elemental fiends showing up and mini-bosses, Ramuh’s story being a retelling of FF II, all the musical references, the list goes on and on.

It’s safe to say that Final Fantasy IX is the swan song of Hironobu Sakaguchi and Nobuo Uematsu. A celebration of everything that made Final Fantasy a beloved series of games up to this point. And looking forward from here, the series was ready to leap off the PlayStation onto the PlayStation 2, and with that leap, it started to move in bold new directions, often breaking some conventions that had been in the series from the beginning. Many of the games that come after Final Fantasi IX would often make people question what it even takes to be called a Final Fantasy game anymore, but that’s a question to explore on another day.