I really didn’t mean for this much time to pass between talking aboutFinal 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.
In the fall of 2019, my wife and I started climbing at our local gym. We fell in love immediately. It was a cathartic challenge—physical, yes, but also deeply mental. There’s something uniquely satisfying about staring at a wall of coloured holds, mapping out a route, failing, adjusting, and finally sticking that move that felt impossible ten minutes earlier. And because I am obsessed with maximizing my value of something, we both bought our own harnesses and shoes, paid into the monthly membership plan and started going three times a week. For months!
Then, spring of 2020 happened. The gym shut down. We moved, had a baby. The membership lapsed. We’ve never made it back, even though it’s one of those activities we both agree we genuinely loved. Fast-forward to January 2026. My five-year-old daughter has just started bouldering. We sign her up for a climbing class, and suddenly I’m spending three days a week back in that chalk-dusted environment, watching people try a problem over and over again. And just like that, the itch is back. I miss that carnal feeling of accomplishment, that feeling of strength of pushing my body past previous limits.
So imagine my surprise when I boot up my Steam Deck and saw that someone in my Steam Family has purchased Cairn. I’d heard nothing about it, but I saw it had strong reviews (I’m pretty good at dodging video game media).
A climbing game? Sure. Why not. What have I got to lose?
Cairn casts you as expert mountaineer Aava attempting to summit Mount Kami, the most dangerous mountain in the world. If you take the time to explore the posters in the tutorial area, you’ll learn that around 30 people attempt the climb each year. Few ever return. None have ever reached the summit.
Past the tutorial area, the game begins simply. You’re on the mountain, starting your ascent. Better get climbing.
The climbing system initially defaults to an automatic limb-selection mechanic. You move hands and feet individually with the left thumb stick. Up, sideways, diagonally, everywhere you’d think your limbs can go. While the game automatically suggests which limb should move next, it’s tactile, deliberate, and slow. You don’t just “hold forward to climb.” You’re supposed to think through every placement. Just planting your foot against a smooth rock and counting on your smear to hold is going to result in a bad time.
Also, Aava is absurdly flexible. At one point I had her hooking a foot somewhere near her own ear to gain leverage. As I often tell my daughter, video games are not real.
But this system is also where my first major frustration surfaced. Sometimes the “obvious” move like adjusting the bottom-left foot as I’m moving to the left, wasn’t the move the game wanted. Instead, it would shift the bottom-right foot, which then I couldn’t even see behind Aava’s back. Suddenly her leg is dragging across her body, toes reaching where her hands should be, and she’s clinging to the wall by fingertips, and I’m scrambling to fix a problem I didn’t mean to create.
More than one fall happened that way.
On most difficulty levels, you can place pitons into the rock to act as checkpoints. If you fall, you’re hauled back up to your last placed piton. They’re limited, though. If you misuse them or fall too often, you’ll need to collect scraps to forge new ones. and Falling in Cairn stings. Not just because you failed, but because of the time and resources that arelost.
Cairn is a slow game. A tricky problem can take 5–10 minutes to work through. Sometimes 20. One time, 25. And inevitably, you’ll be right at the end of a brutal stretch, one final foothold between you and a cave or hidden discovery… and then Aava’s foot slips. You scramble. You panic. You fall.
Aava’s voice actress has a couple of great screams and curses that I feel in my soul when this happens. If you haven’t placed a piton recently, then you’re falling the way down until your rag-doll body stops rolling. If you’re lucky, you’ll just die and restart from the last save. Otherwise, you now need to climb out of whatever crevice Aava’s body just fell into. And when you get back to solid ground and look up at that climb that you just failed at, you have to ask yourself if you really want to try it again. Spend another 20 minutes scampering up that wall and face the risk of falling again. And when you’re low on food, low on water, freezing, and exhausted, that lost time also means lost resources.
I don’t think Cairn intentionally wastes your time, not like other games that make you backtrack unnecessarily or have runs ruined by randomness. Cairn demands time through the slow, methodical, and purposeful gameplay. It’s the kind of game that every step is slow, but you’re always progressing. You focus on only the next hand or foot hold, and after a few minutes, you’ll pan your camera around and be a little breathless at how far you’ve gone.
That being said, when you finally conquer that tricky section? When you stick the move that previously sent you plummeting? It’s absolutely euphoric. The dopamine rush is so real. It mirrors real-world climbing in a way I did not expect from a video game.
Cairn isn’t just a game about limb placement. It’s also about survival. You’ll need to manage your hunger, thirst, warmth, and stamina. You’ll need to shake your pack to cram as many supplies as possible in, as you scavenge abandoned backpacks, derelict cable cars, and broken vending machines. The real treat is when you come cross a delicious egg in a nest during a climb. The survival mechanics and lack of a firm restocking point creates a tension that triggers my hoarding psychology.
I have “Final Fantasy Elixir Syndrome.” I never use the rare, powerful items because what if I need them later? So I end most games with a stack of elixirs and a pile of regret. Cairn pokes that exact nerve. You don’t want to use your good food. What if there’s something worse ahead? What if there’s no food beyond this point? But if you don’t use your best foods and benefit from the stat boosts they give you, you might fail the next section
And that brings me back to the fall. If you fall and have to climb again, all that food and water you consumed is just… gone. You’re no further up the mountain than when you started, but you have less resources to get you to the next checkpoint.
It’s brutal. It’s effective. It feels bad. But that bad feeling is clearly intentional design.
The HUD (heads up display) is wonderfully immersive. Your survival meters fade away unless they demand attention. Most of the time, it’s just you and the mountain. As you climb higher, you’ll discover remnants of those who came before you. Abandoned infrastructure, old campsites, backpacks from climbers who never returned, and most interestingly, artifacts and stories from the troglodytes, a group of people who once lived on Mount Kami.
Your only consistent companion is a small robot called a Climbot, a boxy robot on four spider-esque legs that skitter along the rocks, carrying your ropes and retrieving your pitons. Occasionally, Climbot will receive voicemail messages from her manager gently asking how her progress is going, or her partnerchecking in, seeing if she’s okay on her death hike. Aava’s responses to those messages can vary from indifferent to abrasive or dismissive. She resents the distraction. How dare they interrupt her focus while she attempts something this monumental?
Early on, you meet Marco, another mountaineer. He climbs for the love of climbing. He doesn’t believe he’ll reach the summit, but he’s just here for the good times. Aava tears into Marco for that mindset. Calls him defeated. Weak. It’s one of the first times she really speaks, and it’s not flattering. Aava does soften slightly over time, but so much of her characterization left a sour taste in my mouth. I understand she’s undertaking something life-threatening. I understand obsession. But her abrasiveness made it hard for me to enjoy her company.
Near the summit, you encounter another climber who has lived on the mountain for twelve years. He’s too close to the summit to turn back, but he’s unable to reach the top. He shows you dozens upon dozens of backpacks from those who tried and failed. a graveyard. Here, Marco decides he’s done. He’s going back down. Then the game asks you to choose. Do you descend with Marco? Or do you continue your ascent, despite every warning?
On my first play through, I went down. The reward for choosing that is a quiet montage of descent. Marco gives Aava a ride home in his van. The final scene shows her sitting on her bed, staring into space. Disappointed, but alive. Her partner calls out that friends are coming over. Marco is on his way.
This ending felt human. Bittersweet. Real.
On my second play through, I chose to go up. Shortly after that decision, An avalanche crashed on your head, and reduces your survival meters to a third of what they once were. You claw your way through the final ascent, which, surprisingly, isn’t dramatically harder than what came before. On the final wall, Climbot succumbs to the elements. For his mechanical failure, Aava beats it with her climbing picks, berating it for failing her. You can choose to drag it along anyway, or cut it loose. The choice here, doesn’t matter.
Then, Aava reaches her summit. She trudges through the snow cap, to the highest point of mount Kami. There is nowhere else to climb. She screams, a visceral, guttural howl. Then, she sits down in the snow, quiet. Finally, she reaches toward the stars, grabs them, and climbs into the sky.
Some players will find transcendence there. The culmination of obsession. The ultimate accomplishment. But for me, it felt unsatisfying. There is no joy in the accomplishment, no one to share your victory with. Just a tired woman sitting quietly on all she’s conquered. Maybe she dies there, and maybe she heads back down. The ending is poetically ambiguous, to me, it felt like descending with Marco was the good ending, and reaching the summit was the bad one.
Cairn will not win my Game of the Year.
But it was a cathartic, memorable experience, especially given where I am in life right now. It gave me an echo of the real-world climbing rush I’ve been missing since 2020.
The first ascent in Cairn is magical because of the discovery. Peaking your head into a cave to find an indestructible piton, or an angry bear gave me such rushes of excitement. Subsequent climbs lose some of that magic. Now, you know where the food is. You know the shortcuts. You know which caves you should explore, and which you can skip. The mystery fades.
Still, finishing Cairn felt like a real accomplishment.
I wouldn’t want every game to use this limb-by-limb climbing system. I cannot imagine playing Breath of the Wild or Assassin’s Creed, and having to individually manage my feet every time I try to scale a hill.
But for a game wholly committed to simulating mountaineering, Cairn does something special. It captured the frustration. It captured the obsession. It captured the fall.
But most importantly, It captured the feeling that climbing gives you. It reminded me why I got obsessed with it in the first place in 2019. And any game that manages to evoke strong feelings, is a special one indeed.
Disclaimer: A review copy of Inkborn was provided during early access. All impressions are based on the game’s current January 2026 state.
Listen, it’s going to be real hard to not directly compare Inkborn to Slay the Spire throughout this review. Both are rogue-lite deck building card game. The similarities and influences are obvious from the first moments of the game. Also, I have over 300 hours logged in Slay the Spire, its gameplay is ingrained into my brain, so when something like Inkborn shows up, standing on the shoulders of that giant, it’s going to draw comparisons at every turn.
That said, I’ll do my very best to focus on what makes Inkborn its own thing, and save the direct comparisons to Slay the Spire for when they’re absolutely necessary. This isn’t a question of whether Inkborn is “the next Slay the Spire.” It’s about whether it brings enough new ideas, systems, and personality to justify its existence in a genre that’s already very crowded.
As I’ve said above, Inkborn is a rogue-lite deckbuilding game, designed by Acram Digital. Acram is well known for their visually appealing board game adaptions. From Concordia, to Charterstone, to Istanbul, Acram has proven themselves to be proficient in adapting tabletop games to PC and mobile devices. Unlike their previous output, Inkborn isn’t based on an existing tabletop game, instead it’s an original game, built from the ground up for PCs (and Steam Decks).
In Inkborn, your character moves from encounter to encounter, battling enemies and reaping rewards, until you either succeed in beating the final boss, or die trying. The rewards can be new cards, upgrades to existing cards, potions, and augments to your character, giving you persistent benefits for the rest of your run. The core loop of Inkborn is immediately comfortable to anyone who’s sunk even a little bit of time into any of the (many) other rougelite deck building games.
What really sets Inkborn apart, is its presentation and style. Everything in the world is built of, and revolves around paper. The enemies are ornate origami creatures with scissor blades for claws, the black and white backgrounds feature papercraft trees. As you or the enemies take damage, the character model gets covered in black, splotchy ink. It’s moody, atmospheric and engaging.
Further to the theme, your buffs and debuffs are also thematically named. Specifically, ‘sharpness’, ‘crumpled’, and ‘torn’ (Sharpness grants +1 to attacks, a crumpled character takes 50% more damage, and a torn character receives damage for every point of torn, then loses one point of torn). These thematic terms for status conditions are a little unintuitive, I constantly have to remind myself that crumpled means vulnerable in Slay the Spire-speak, but it’s probably more of a byproduct of my extensive time with the other game, and not something that Inkborn has done wrong.
Instead of potions, your character gets ideas, one time bonuses to be used in battle and expire at the end of each fight, forcing you to use them instead of hoard them. Quotes take the place of relics. Kind of. Instead of having being able to hold an unlimited number of relics to provide passive buffs to your character, you inscribe quotes to your body parts. These do all the things you’d expect a relic to do, such as make you immune to specific status debuffs, but you are limited by the amount of appendages that your body has. You’re often asked to make trade-offs on which quotes you want to carry with you, instead of collecting them like a rabid pack rat, which is my go-to strategy.
Combat starts off familiar, you draw a hand of cards, select which ones you want to use and the targets, and keep doing that until either side runs out of HP. Inkborn introduces a combo system, where if you play your cards in a certain order, like ‘skill, skill, attack’, you’ll get a bonus attack, or playing two status cards and then a skill will earn you a bonus buff. Personally, I loved this system right from the start. Discovering new combos is exciting, and being able to pull off a clutch combo to deal that final 4 damage to an enemy is utterly satisfying. Some combos even utilize those useless curse cards, turning a bane into a boon.
This is really where Inkborn begins to separate itself from Slay the Spire. Rather than pushing players toward specific archetypes or established builds, Inkborn’s systems encourages flexibility, adaptation, and occasional deviation from your intended build. It’s less about executing a perfect plan and more about learning how the systems talk to each other.
The map between encounters is a bit of a mixed bag. You start out in the centre of a map shrouded in shadows, with paths to follow spiralling out. You can take your time to hit extra combats and encounters, or, you can beeline to the Act Boss if you so desire. There is a timer, called the Chronicle Metre at the top of the screen that progresses every time you enter a new map node, that will inflict a curse upon you once it fills up, gently nudging you towards your destination, lest the curses undo all the grinding you’ve just gone through. It’s a neat risk vs reward system that works well.
Something else that makes Inkborn stand out is the town that offers some meta-progression that persists from run to run. It’s unlike Slay the Spire where you start from fresh every single run and have only your knowledge and skill to rely on to get you though. If you don’t get good, you won’t ascend the spire. Inkborn feels a bit more like Hades where the intersection of your skill and the persistent benefits you’ve earned will eventually carry you over the finish line.
Inkborn as an early access game is already really strong. The core gameplay is strong, and the unlockable combos are varied and interesting. The one character that is available feels really solid, and had me coming back again and again to try different builds. Heck, cards can be upgraded in different ways to suit your current deck, meaning taking the same card run after run can still feel fresh. I know that I will really appreciate the variety when the other characters get released, but the one that’s currently in the game offers a really solid gameplay experience.
I don’t know how well Inkborn is balanced, and I’m almost tempted to say that commenting on the balance doesn’t really matter right now, because the game is in early access. You can be sure that there will be lots of changes and tweaks as the game works its way towards its full release, which is currently planned for Q1 2027. Between then and now, two more classes are planned, more cards and skills, more combos and quotes, enemies and bosses are all planned to roll out throughout the year.
I did mostly play Inkborn on my steam deck, and generally found the UI to be passable, but sometimes confusing. The D-pad is used as shortcuts for various things, and I kept trying to use it to select my cards. Every now and then I felt like the timing for the animations were a bit off, but nothing really game breaking. I suspect that as time goes on, the UI will get tightened on various devices. I didn’t have any of these nitpicks while I was playing on my PC with the keyboard and mouse.
Inkborn is a pretty and well-made rougelite deck builder, but it isn’t finished. The theme is well executed, the systems are interesting and engaging, and I’m excited to see more content get added to the game to expand the breadth and depth. In it’s current state, Acram Digital has laid a strong foundation, and their ongoing updates suggest a team committed to refining and expanding the experience. If you’re the kind of person who likes to see a game change over development, or value being part of the early adopter crowd and having your input help shape the direction that Inkborn moves in, then Inkborn gets a solid recommendation from me.
Welcome back to the Final Fantasy Project. It’s literally been months since I finished Final Fantasy VII, and it’s not because Final Fantasy VIII is a very long game, it’s more that I so deeply disliked it, that it literally made me want to do anything else. But I persevered, because if I can’t commit to self-imposed challenges, then I don’t even deserve to have a blog!
Final Fantasy VIII was released on September 9th, 1999. 9/9/99, about two and a half years after the hugely successful Final Fantasy VII. I wasn’t aware at the time, as I grew up in the middle of nowhere, but I think it’s hard to understate just how big Final Fantasy VII was, and I often wonder what it would have been like to be on the team at Squaresoft during this time. Having a monumental hit is no doubt exciting, but the thought of following it up is terrifying. Suddenly you have millions of people watching, and comparing it to your previous works.
World and Characters
Final Fantasy VIII starts off with a montage of scenes and characters. One scene that keeps popping up is a vicious sword fight between a young man wearing black, and a young man wearing white. The scene ends with blood splattering the ground, and both boys sporting a large gash across their noses in opposite directions.
When the game starts in earnest, you’re in control of the young man in black, Squall Leonhart, who is laying in bed in the infirmary. You’re told to get to class, where the boy in white, Seifer, sits next to you. Your instructor, Quistis, chastises Seifer, reminding everyone that you shouldn’t hurt your sparring partners.
You and your classmates are all SeeD candidates in Balamb Garden. SeeD’s are mercenaries for hire, and Squall and Seifer are on the precipice of testing to become full-fledged members. First, Quistis takes Squall on a mission to claim a Guardian Force, which will augment your abilities.
Final Fantasy VIII has really abandoned the fantasy aesthetic. The world is much more modern, with touches of magical or technological flair. Unlike Final Fantasy VII grimy aesthetic, this world is brighter and cleaner, more optimistic, which lines up nicely considering the main cast of characters are all a bunch of late teenagers hanging around their school.
As Squall and Seifer prepare for their mission, he’s joined by Zell to round out the team. The mission, secure the town square in Dollet, which is currently under occupation by the Galbadian Army. They do so, also uncovering a plot about the army securing an old radio tower, but Seifer, being rash, begins to disobey orders and runs off on his own. The next party member, Selphie, arrives and gives the order to evacuate. The team is chased by a mechanical spider thing, which can be felled, but stands back up fairly quickly. Once the team manages to hit the beach where the evacuation boats are being held, Quistis breaks out a gatling gun and blows the whole thing to smithereens. Badass.
Back at the Garden, Squall, Selphie, and Zell have passed the test and are now SeeDs. Seifer, having disobeyed orders, has failed. At the graduation party, a girl asks Squall to dance, then disappears.
The next day, the party is given a new mission. Go to Timber and provide assistance to an underground resistance group, the Timber Owls. Also Quistis has quit being an instructor, so she can come along too.
My first major qualm with Final Fantasy VIII is the characters. They’re all children, and act like it. Squall is edgy and emo, and most of his dialogue happens inside his head in parentheses. Most of his spoken dialogue is dismissive and rude. Zell is brash and goofy. He’s earnest, but he often comes across like a caricature, and is often sidelined. Selphie acts like a teenage girl, she’s a cheerleader and just wants everyone to do their best! She never really develops, despite her having a ton of potential. Quistis started the game with a bit of a romantic interest in Squall, which is wildly inappropriate, but thankfully that thread was quickly dropped and never spoken of again. She seems to be the party mom, providing a level-headed comment when the children just want to run in and start punching faces.
At the point in the story, the party falls over, and the story picks up with 3 new characters, Laguna, Kiros, and Ward. These are Galbadian Army soldiers as they live out events that happened over 17 years ago. These scenes feel like random, non-sequiters, but over time they set the stage and show reoccuring characters that become important in the present.
Upon arriving in Timber, the leader of the Forest Owls is Rinoa, the girl who danced with Squall at the graduation party. Their plan is to kidnap the Galbadian President, but their plot is foiled when the person on the train they hijacked turns out to be a body double. After that failure, a TV broadcast reveals that the president is making a sorceress the new ambassador. During the TV broadcast, Seifer bursts in and takes the president hostage, but the sorceress appears and takes Seifer away, seemingly willingly.
The next mission is to try to assassinate the sorceress, where the final main party member, Irving joins the group. He’s a sharpshooter, so the plan is to get him into position, and when the sorceress is having a parade, for Irving to snipe her. Flash forward a couple of hours of gameplay, Irving chokes. He falls into a pit of shakes and can’t take the shot. Squall talks Irving into taking the shot, but the sorceress blocks it with a magical field. Squall takes the fight directly to her, and fights her head on. He fights Seifer, who is protecting the sorceress, and while he defeats Seifer, he takes an ice bolt to the shoulder, and falls unconscious. Thus ends the first disc.
What follows is a winding plot of time travel, memory loss, body possession, leadership, and love. The story swaps between teenage love, to global politics, to being fired into space, and then crashing back to earth without really taking a moment to breathe. Certain plot threads seem like they’re going to be important, but are then just largely dropped. For example, using GFs is supposed to cause memory loss, which is why the main party don’t remember being together as children. But once that revelation is revealed, it never really comes back into play again. It provides context for some of the events that happened in disc 1, but memory loss didn’t really come back up again.
One of my favourite parts of JRPGs is exploring all the characters and the struggles they face. In Final Fantasy VIII, this is squarely Squall and Rinoa’s story, everyone else feels in service to that tale. Zell, Irving, Quistis, and Selphie don’t get the spotlight. It’s not like Final Fantasy VII where you get to explore Barrett’s history, or travel to Yuffie’s village and see why she is the way she is. And the love story between Squall and Rinoa feels shallow. Squall does NOTHING to earn Rinoa’s affection, he’s callous and unkind, and yet she throws herself at him, flirting and teasing him, trying to catch his attention. Until about halfway through disc 3 when he seems to turn on a dime. With Rinoa rendered unconcious, his inner monolgue is entirely focused on how much he misses her, how much he needs to hear her voice again. To me, it feels forced.
I do wonder how much I’ve missed. Like in the scene where Squall leaps out of a space shuttle as it hurtles back to Earth to catch an adrift Rinoa, a seemingly random ship appears in the black of space, and after clearing out a small monster infestation, you’re able to pilot it back to land. I know there are plenty of scenes that give texture to the side characters of the party, but I didn’t spend much time seeking out all the side quests.
The plot of Final Fantasy VIII, summarized
Gameplay Mechanics
When you first start the game, the only option you have in battle is to “Attack”. As you collect Guardian Forces, they’ll give you the options to use Magic, to summon them in battle, to use items, and to Draw. Each party member can have 4 commands, including attack, which means if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll need to leave one of the other commands off your party. Magic, is no longer innate or learned, and the MP bar is totally gone. Instead, Magic has become itemized. To stock up on Magic, you need to Draw it out of your opponents, and hoard up to 99 of each spell. Each character needs to draw their own spells, but they can swap their spells between each other, if one character needs to leave the party for any reason.
The GFs, in addition to giving you more actions, augment your stats, mainly by allowing you to junction one of your magic spells to a stat, increasing its power. The amount the stat is increased is directly related to how strong the spell is, and how many of those spells you have drawn. Life will boost your Max HP dramatically, but as you use the life spell, the Max HP will start to diminish. Some will even allow you to junction spells to augment your attacks and defence with different effects, It’s great when your basic attack also inflicts sleep, or when your main spell caster is totally immune to silence, or absorbs a rogue fire spell.
This system, is interesting in theory. In practise, it means I spend a dozen minutes in every battle checking for new magic and drawing so every character gets 99 of that spell. Then, because the junctions may need to move around depending on what situation we’re going into, it just means that I never really used my magics until the final bosses.
Many of the skills the GFs learn also augment your stats directly. One annoying on was HP +40%, because in some story segments you need to swap your characters frequently. But every time that skill moved on and off someone, it would leave them with their base HP. While it was satisfying hitting 9999 HP with a character, it was annoying when I moved that GF over to someone and then back, only for that character to just lose all that HP. It’s a super minor complaint, I was drowning in cure spells, but still. Just another aspect that I found annoying.
So all this talk about GFs and junctions affecting your stats, let’s talk about levels. As per usual, each character gains EXP and gains levels. But the levels don’t affect your stats all that much in the end, at least nowhere near the effect that the GFs give you. The enemies do scale to your party’s average level, meaning you could do a low-level run and be viable for the end-game. By keeping your level low, enemy levels are kept low, but you have the option to bolster your stats by junctions, allowing you to beat down weak enemies easily.
Speaking of stats, Final Fantasy VIII does away with most equipment. There’s no accessories, no armor, and only a handful of weapons per character that needs to be crafted. Call me boring, but I miss seeking out treasure chests in dungeons and getting cool new armor right before a boss.
You can use the Guardian Forces in battle as a summon, usually dealing out some very impressive damage, but there are a couple drawbacks to using them. First, your active time battle bar has to fill up so you can choose which GF to summon, then the GF’s HP covers your character’s HP, and another active time battle bar has to fill up. Once it has, the summon occurs, including a 30-second animation. Every single time. If you take damage while your GF is readying, your GF loses HP, and can potentially get knocked out. Make sure you stock up on the GF specific potions, as regular healing spells and items don’t affect your GFs. I stopped using GF summons pretty early on because I just didn’t want to watch that animation over and over again. At this point, I’m desperate for a skip animation button.
Another thing I’m desperate for, is for a menu of names that I can just pick from. When you are choosing your target during battle, a little pointer lets you select which character you want to target. The battle camera is quite dynamic, and it’s not uncommon for characters to become hidden behind enemies or even just the menu, so selecting which one you’re going to target with your cure spell can be a bit of a crap-shoot. What infuriates me is when a summon animation is ongoing, it pops up a menu of names to easily pick from. DO THAT, FOR ALL THE TARGETS!
Visual Presentation
This is where Final Fantasy VIII really shines. Unlike the blocky, polygonal overworld characters and more detailed battle sprites, Final Fantasy VIII uses the more detailed battle sprites in the overworld. The characters are much more realistically proportioned. The backgrounds are detailed, and when compared to Final Fantasy VII, it’s usually pretty apparent which aspects of the background you’re able to interact with.
Final Fantasy VIII also uses the Full Motion Video liberally, and often to great effect. I suspect back in 1999, the effects of the videos under the gameplay sprites would have been breathtaking. Even today, I found myself appreciating the videos and most of the visuals. The character sprites are often well detailed, but the faces can clip in a weird and funny way. Like in the below screenshot, Rinoa’s cheek and chin jut out in an awkward way.
Triple Triad
A major part of Final Fantasy VIII is a card game called Triple Triad. By pressing square against almost any character in the world, you can challenge them to a game of triple Triad. In Triple Triad, both players have a hand of 5 cards, and take turns placing one of those cards on a 3×3 grid. Each card has a number corresponding to the 4 adjacent directions. If you place a card next to another card, you compare the number on both cards, and whoever has the higher number wins. If the losing card flips belong to the opponent, the card flips over to the other colour. Once 9 cards have been played, whoever controls the most cards is the winner.
The only good thing about Triple Triad is that it’s over quick. It’s a brain-dead simple area control game that reeks of power creep. You can’t tactically master Triple Triad, you can only get stronger cards and wait for your opponent to make a stupid play and capitalize on their folly. Maybe it’s my board game snobbery showing up, but as a game, I don’t think Triple Triad is any more compelling than Tic-tac-toe.
When you win or lose in Triple Triad, the winner gets to steal a card from the loser, Yu-Gi-Oh style. You can also turn monsters from the random encounters into cards as well. Considering you only need 5 cards, you might wonder what you can do with the extra cards? Well, some of the GF abilities allow you to turn the cards into various items, or even turn cards directly into magic spells.
It’s this system that allows you to utterly break the early game. You can obtain Squalls ultimate weapon before the end of disc one, and if you feel like spending a couple of hours in Triple Triad, have a fully kitted out party before leaving for Timber.
You Have to Play it Right
Listen, I know that a lot of my complaints about Final Fantasy VIII have counterpoints. For all my complaining about drawing magic, I know you can play Triple Triad to grind out cards, refine the cards into items, which you can then refine into magic spells, eliminating the need to draw entirely. If you just spend 6 hours at the start of the game, you can set your junctions up for the majority of the rest of the game. Put in another few hours of tedium and you can even unlock Squall’s ultimate weapon before the end of disc one.
I know that earning and refining cards is the technically more efficient way to manage the junction system, but I rebel on following a guide THAT closely for a game I’m going to play the first time. Also, I chafe at the idea of spending so much time making the battles trivial. On some level, the challenge of the battles is the point of playing the game!
I did have a guide open for most of the playthrough that I would reference now and again when I couldn’t remember where to go next. But every now and then I’d find myself skipping whole paragraphs as the author laid out incredibly specific steps to managing certain side quests, which include losing specific cards to a certain character, seeking out specific members of a club and beating them at Triple Triad, and a few optional GFs. There’s also the bonus bosses, Omega Weapon, Ultima Weapon, and Bahamut. I didn’t chase any of these side quests because really, Final Fantasy VIII made me not care.
The one thing I appreciated having the guide open for, was for hinting at who to have in my party for certain scenes. Now and then throughout the game, certain characters will offer some small comments or have a bonus scene if they’re in your party. This feels most prevalent at Fishermen’s Horizion and choosing the right instruments has Rinoa and Squall share a pretty important scene. Choose wrong, and that scene simply passes you by.
I’m obviously not against having a guide on hand, but Final Fantasy VIII feels particularily bound to it. Without the expert advice readily available, you’ll find yourslef fighting against tedious systems. While they can be exploited for massive benefits, it’s fairly obtuse and time consuming if you don’t have a guide to follow.
Final Thoughts
I started to enjoy Final Fantasy VIII about halfway through Disc 3, when Squall stopped being an edgy jerk. And, it was about that point where I encountered an enemy with some really strong spells that took my basic attack from doing 800 per hit to nearly 3000. That allowed me to fly through the last chapters of the game.
The entirety of Disc 4 is dedicated to the final dungeon, upon which entering, a bunch of your skills are sealed away. Everything but the basic attack option. As you defeat some optional bosses, you’ll unlock your abilities. I… skipped most of this, somewhat accidently. I was just wandering around the castle and then I just found the final chamber. I had only unlocked Magic, so, decided to give the final boss a go with a limitied skill set.
I did enjoy the final boss, Ultimecia. Starting the fight you’ll be given a random party. During the actual fight with her, she can make you randomly lose a whole stacks of your magic spells, which can poke holes in your character like Swiss cheese. If any characters fall, you have a small window of time to revive them, if you don’t, they’re “absorbed by time” and removed by the battle. During the final form, Squall lost Ultima, which was his attack junction, dropping his damage output from 4000 per hit back to 800. Then Ultimecia alternated between a spell that dropped everyone to 1hp, and a powerful AOE spell, keeping my characters on their toes.
Depending on which of the spells that get lost, this fight can be a cake walk, or a struggle. I enjoyed it, as it kept me on my toes and required me to pivot when certain spells got lost, but anyone who takes umbrage with its random nature is completely valid in calling this fight unfair. It took me 2 tries to beat her, as the first try I was unaware of any of her abilities and was caught a bit off guard.
I’ve often heard of Final Fantasy VII through Final Fantasy X as a “Golden Era” for Final Fantasy, but Final Fantasy VIII is the strange middle child of the PS1 era. It’s bold and confused, and often deeply irritating. It has sky-high ambition and the technical chops to back it up, yet it constantly feels at odds with itself. For every emotional high point like Squall finally thawing in Disc 3, the iconic space sequence, or the tense unpredictability of the final battle, there are at least three moments of head-scratching narrative whiplash, undercooked character arcs, or mechanical decisions designed to test the player’s patience.
The junction system turns magic into a hoarded resource rather than a tool of expression. The level-scaling and GF-centric progression make levelling feel meaningless. Plot threads like childhood amnesia via Guardian Forces appear with fanfare and then evaporate. Meanwhile, huge character beats are shoved aside to make room for the next bizarre twist involving sorceresses, time travel, or surprise field trips to space.
I can’t call the game soulless. At its heart is a coming-of-age story wrapped inside a love story wrapped inside a political thriller wrapped inside a time-compression fever dream. When it works, it really works. When it doesn’t, it leaves you wondering how such talented storytellers missed the mark so many times.
Final Fantasy VIII was ambitious, and it had gargantuan shoes to fill, following in the wake of Final Fantasy VII, so I can’t fault it for shooting for the moon. I know those who enjoy Final Fantasy VIIIreally enjoy it, but I’m not in that camp. Final Fantasy VIII didn’t just fail to win me over, but it actively pushed me away. I’m glad I’ve finished it, and I’m glad I never need to draw another spell again.
Unless that’s a mechanic in Final Fantasy IX. Gosh, I hope not.
For those of you keeping track, it’s been nearly 3 months since I reviewed Final Fantasy VII. I promise, I started Final Fantasy VIII immediately after, but I’ll be really honest. I found it to be so unfun that I struggle to play it. Every time I turn the game on to keep progressing, I get into a single battle, roll my eyes and shut it down again. So instead of progressing on the main story, today’s post is another adventure into one of the spin-off games, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy. Specifically Final Bar Line, the most entry in the series.
Theatrhythm is a rhythm game set to the music of the Final Fantasy universe. When you first launch the game, you’re given a key, and a carousel of the main line titles, along with a choice selection of some of the more popular spin-off games. Your key will unlock one game, along with a few chibi representations of party members from that specific title.
You’re tasked with building a party to take into each one of these rhythm game missions, and the characters are largely separated into different types. Attack type, defense type, support, summoner, and so on. As they go on missions, they level up and unlock new skills.
But wait, you might be asking. Why are you getting levels and skills in a rhythm game? That’s a great question, and one that is never really answered. Each game presents you with a linier path of songs, starting from the beginning of the game, and progressing through the major plot beats. Each level has various dots scrolling from left to right, and all you need to do when the dot hits the right side of the screen is press a button. Literally, any button will suffice. You can choose to use the shoulder buttons, the face buttons, d-pad, anything. If two buttons hit the right side bar at one time, you’ll need to hit two buttons. There’s also green lines, when make you hold a button for a while, and if that green line slants up or down, you’ll need to hold the joystick in that direction to satisfy the note. There’s also arrows mixed in with the buttons, asking you to press one of the joysticks in that direction.
And that’s the entirety of the gameplay. But literally behind the rhythm game aspect, your party of characters is walking in the background from right to left, letting the scenery scroll by, and occasionally encountering monsters. Your party will automatically battle the baddies they encounter, and should they defeat them, they’ll just keep on walking to the left until the song ends. After a couple songs, you’re rewarded with another key, so you can unlock another game’s music, and if you manage to complete all the songs for a game, you’ll be able to add that games antagonist to your party, just for kicks.
To encourage you to build your party out a little bit, each song has a mission for you to accomplish, and most of them have to do with the party defeating a certain number of baddies, or using certain types of skills. It can be quite difficult to nearly impossible to defeat enough enemies when you first start the game, meaning you’ll likely need to return once your party has levelled up enough to lay the smack down on the enemies. That said, some characters synergize with each other incredibly well to really ratchet up the damage they’re able to output, making previously impossible challenges an utter breeze.
I find the RPG elements of Theatrhythm to be banal and superfluous. It literally does not matter how you build out your party, or if they fail to accomplish whatever the goal of the song is. The only thing that matters is that you hit enough notes to complete the song. I will concede that some of the characters trade defense for attack, and if you stack too many of those characters together, then missing just a handful of notes is enough to make you fail the song.
The rhythm game itself is simple and generally relaxing. The music of the Final Fantasy franchise is beautiful, and it’s actually been really lovely to revisit the past 7 games I’ve played in this way. The musical themes stirring up the memories of my adventures was more nostalgic that I originally expected. Some of the songs really ratchet up the difficulty, putting this game into the “easy to play, difficult to master” territory. Thankfully, each song has several difficulty levels, letting you push yourself on the easier songs, and pull back on the more devilish ones.
I use the term ‘master’, loosely. Theatrhythm is very forgiving, with generally wide range for accepting a button input, to the directional arrows just needing to be within the correct 90 degree arc. Add this to the dual stick and any button approach, and sometimes just spamming things at the right general direction is enough to get you through a difficult spot.
I was surprised at just how many songs were packed into this game. Every main title has at least 10 songs to deliver, and Final Fantasy XI shows up with a whopping 44 songs. With the DLC added, there’s over 400 songs to play through, although some of the most popular songs end up repeated and remixed several times (looking at you, Battle on the Big Bridge).
Theatrhythm ends up being a wonderful and charming celebration of Final Fantasy music, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Although the RPG elements are pointless, they do provide a fun little background for my daughter to watch while I focus on the dots flying across the screen.
If you’re being picky, you’ll start to notice that not all note tracks are particularly well-matched to each song. Some dots will fly by and ask for button presses off-beat, but it’s hard to really complain too much when all of the music is just so good. As a celebration of Final Fantasy’s 35th anniversary, Theatrhythm absolutely succeeds in being a big package of fan service to long-time fans. I don’t think the gameplay is engaging enough to make you want to sink hundreds of hours into it, nor will you be organizing multiplayer Theatrhythm parties any time soon, like you used to do with your favourite rhythm games. But if you’re a Final Fantasy fan, I think you’ll find yourself surprisingly touched when the themes of your favourite games come on, and the caricatures of the heroes you’ve spent dozens of hours with bob across the screen. Just don’t show up expecting deep, satisfying RPG gameplay, you won’t find it here.
If you ask “What is the best Final Fantasy game?”, or read any Final Fantasy games tier-list or top list, you’ll find Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII most often cited as the best Final Fantasy games every. Alongside those two, manywill cite Final Fantasy Tactics as their favourite game of all time, let alone of the Final Fantasy franchise. The cult following that adores Final Fantasy Tactics is strong and pervasive.
I originally played Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions on the PSP back in 2009. At that time, I was already a pretty big fan of Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance, the Gameboy Advance follow-up, so I figured I was in for a good time. Unbeknownst to me, is there are a couple point in the game where you are required to do a couple of battles back to back, with no opportunity to respec your team between those battles. One of those fights has the main character fighting all on his own. I stupidly only had one save file throughout the game, and soft locked my progress, as I had set Ramza into a weaker job temporarily so I could unlock a better job in a few fights. At that point I put the game down, and never came back.
Until now! Final Fantasy Tactics recently got a new remaster in the form of the Ivalice Chronicles, with an updated UI, voice acting, auto save, multiple difficulty levels, fast-forward, better camera control, enhanced, smoothed out graphics, and the ability to return to the world map at any point (thank goodness). Unfortunately, I’m too cheap to buy new games, so I decided to load up my PSP emulator and start a play through of the 2007 remaster, The War of the Lions
Gameplay
If you’ve played an SRPG or “tactics” game before, things should be familiar to you. Final Fantasy Tactics puts you in control of a small squad of 4 – 5 units. These units face off against other squads of similiar size on a grid based battlefield, and through any tactical advantage you can muster (or via sheer overwhelming force), you hope to be the one left standing at the end of the day.
Each unit has a job, giving them special abilities to use during combat. Starting as a Squire or Chemist, most characters will just walk around the map and bop enemies on their heads. As you do that, that character will earn EXP to level up and get stronger, and JP, or Job Points, which they can use to learn new skills. As you level up a job, you’ll unlock new jobs. Some make sense, like getting to a level 2 Squire unlocks the Knight job. Knights can equip swords, shields, and heavy armor for beefy HP bonuses, and their abilities all focus around breaking your opponent’s equipment or skills. Chemists, on the other hand, level up to White and Black mages, which in turn unlock Summoners, Time Mages, Mystics, and the powerful Arithmetician.
When a character changes job, they gain the inherent abilities of the job they’re currently using, like the Knight being able to equip heavy armor, or the Archer being able to use bows. As you spend JP to learn skills, you can apply them to your character, even after their job has changed. Further to that, every character has two action ability slots. One is automatically used by the job you have, like Black Magic for a Black Mage. But that second action slot can be filled by any job that character has previously dabbled in. In my case, my Black Mage also has extensive experience as a white mage, giving them great offensive and defensive versatility.
Menus over menus
This system is wonderfully open, allowing you to mix and match jobs and skills to create units that feel truely unique and distinct from one another. You’ll mourn when a character goes down, suddenly feeling the loss of the abilities they were offering your team. You’ll struggle to decide if you should keep an extra character with items so they can use a phoenix down when your main healer falls, or, if you are willing to let go of the skill that increases your chance to hit in favour of being able to hold two swords at once. These trade-offs will have buried in the menus inbetween every battle, constantly tweaking your units to shore up and weaknesses that were discovered in the last battle.
The core gameplay loop of engaging in battles, earning JP, spending JP on skills, tweaking jobs and abilities, and then using those new skills in another battle, is utterly addicting. Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions has stolen a few hours of sleep from me as I push my bedtime into the wee hours of the morning, saying “Just one more battle. I’ve almost unlocked the Ninja, then I’ll go to sleep…”
The downsides of the battles, however, is that they can be long and unfair. More than once I’ve had my whole party wiped out by a random battle, only to reload a save, try again, and steam roll the competition. A well-timed block, the opponents choosing to pile onto your healer, or any number of other factors can cause a snowball effect that makes a map nearly impossible. One time my white mage missed reviving Ramza 4 times in a row (it had a 64% chance to hit), then he disappeared from the battlefield, triggering a game over.
Pictured above: Tactical Advantage
Reloading and bashing your head against a brick wall seems to be a core feature of Final Fantasy Tactics. There are a couple of battles near the end of chapter 3 that, even after grinding, took several attempts and a string of good luck to complete. There was one mission where you had to protect an AI controlled character, and literally before any of my characters had a chance to move, she was KO’d by the 3 opposing assassins. I ended up re-speccing my team to be thieves with high speed so they’d be able to move sooner, then just threw them into the line of fire and hoped the opposing AI opponents would take the bait.
In these situations, you’re almost railroaded into having a specific team composition or loadout. This feels like the anthesis of the open-ended team building that the entire game is built around. If you wanted Ramza to be a support character or a spell caster, there’s a boss battle that forces him into a one on one duel. Even if you’re prepared for the fight, the opponent will KO you in 2 hits, forcing you to change your character into one that is specifically built to counter that fight.
Some of these fights will teach you an imporant lesson in having multiple save slots, as there are several battles in the second half off the game that take place right after the other, and if you find yourself unable to progress, without having a backup save, you’ll be softlocked within that battle screen, as a failure will kick you back out to the title screen to either continue from a save, or, start a whole new game.
Story
The story of Final Fantasy Tactics is one of intrigue, plots, villainy, and backstabbing. Ramza is the youngest of a prestigious house, and after a series of unfortunate decisions by those in power, he is thrust into a world embroiled in war. The Black and White lions fight for power and control over the crown, while the church manipulates both sides from the shadows, hoping to capitalize on the chaos. There are dozens of characters, allegiances are ever shifting, and there’s an undercurrent of class struggle that’s particularly present in the first quarter of the game. Ramza, after seeing the callousness of the ruling class, takes a step back and instead fights for justice and peace.
I’m going to start folding in Delita’s insults into my everyday vocabulary
The last act of the game devolves into a supernatural mystery of characters fighting over the Zodiac stones, which transform the holder into monsters of terrible power, which Ramza is quick to put down, and gets labelled as a heritc in the process. The story culminates with the kidnapping of Ramza’s sister to be the host for the resurrection of Ultima, which, again, Ramza is tasked with preventing the coming of the other worldly horror.
What’s interesting about the story of Final Fantasy Tactics, is that Ramza doesn’t come out a hero in the end. He does manage to save is sister and prevent the demons from ruling the world, but very few even know of their existence, and even less know of Ramza’s involvement with stopping the plot. Instead, after the credits, he and Alma take to the road to live out the rest of their lives in quiet peace.
Presentation
I played the PSP War of the Lions remake, which includes a number of upgrades from the original. The animated cutscenes are beautiful and have good voice acting. The localization mostly makes sense, with some really great dialogue that sets the tone for the game. The curses and insults mixed in with the complex political intrigue remind me of reading some really good fantasy novels, instead of the simple childlike dialogue that most JRPGs treat their players to.
Samantha is my mage, Turstin is my knight, but is my archer Alison or Ayleth?
The user interface, on the other hand, could use some work. In Final Fantasy Tactics, the order in which the units will take their next turn is vitally important. But to see the order of your turn, you need to back out of your action menu, press triangle, and select order list, where you’re given a list of names. Hopefully you’ve memorized the names of your units, but the opposing team is basically a guessing game. You can click on each of the names in red and see which one is going to move next, but it’s a pain to do. The character portraits do have a little indicator when you move the cursor over them, giving a rough indication of what order that character is going to go it, but it’s a right pain when you’re trying to figure out which spell to cast and if the charging time will run out before your target takes their next move.
While I generally really enjoy the isometric view of most Tactics games, the camera in Final Fantasy Tactics was constantly giving me trouble. Some maps play with elevation and will have your units fighting in a narrow alleyway. But this makes it impossible to see all the units. More than once I found myself spinning the map around and around, only catching glimpses of units hiding in the corners, and I had to hunt with the cursor to find them. Even worse would be when an enemy mage would start to cast a spell behind a wall that I couldn’t see who or where they were casting. I do like the 3D environments, they do create some interesting battlefields, but the implementation of them leaves much to be desired.
There’s a lot of action going on behind those walls
I spoke before about being buried in menus, and I wasn’t kidding. Every time you want to check on the equipment or abilities of your units, you’ll be going 4 menus deep. While I really loved the job system and customizing my characters, the menu system was clunky and unintuitive. Swapping between characters wasn’t always possible, sometimes you need to back out to the second layer of menus so you could drill down deeper on the next character. Even in the middle of combat, you’ll be selecting which of your action skills to use, then which action, then which target, and if you want to target the unit or the tile, filling the whole screen with cascading menus. This was less onerous, but it is ugly.
I will say that I’ve been looking at screenshots of The Ivalice Chronicles remake with some significant envy. The newest remaster looks pretty great, has full voice acting, the graphics and UI is cleaned up, and actually looks like they address all of my issues from War of the Lions
Final Thoughts
As with most of the Final Fantasy games I’ve been playing for the first time, I asked myself, “Is this worth playing in 2025?” For Final Fantasy Tactics, the answer is a resounding yes. The job system remains endlessly satisfying, so much so that I’d happily start a new run right now if Final Fantasy VIII weren’t already looming on my backlog. The War of the Lions remaster still holds up beautifully, thanks to its excellent writing and deep, rewarding mechanics. And if you have access to The Ivalice Chronicles remake, it looks to be the definitive way to experience this classic.
That said, Final Fantasy Tactics isn’t flawless. The clunky menus, uneven difficulty, and occasional cheap battles can test your patience. But even with its rough edges, it’s an easy game to recommend. I’m glad I finally returned to it after all these years, older, more patient, and better able to appreciate its ambition. If I’d played this as a teenager, I probably would have been obsessed. As it stands now, I can at least recognize Final Fantasy Tactics for what it is: a landmark in tactical RPG design that commands respect, even decades later.
