KING of Character Development? - Final Fantasy IX
42Final Fantasy IX... We finally come to the end of our Playstation 1 era of Final Fantasy games, if you ask me the centre of the golden age of Final Fantasy....
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00:00 - Number 9
01:40 - Starting Out
03:13 - In a Trance
04:08 -The Crew
06:12 - Active Time Events
06:54 - Too Many Thieves!
07:48 - Crossing those Hills
08:43 - Dagger?
10:19 - Customisation &
Support Abilities
11:43 - Antagonist in a Thong
13:19 - Tetra Master
15:29 - Summons
18:57 - Anti-Magic
20:14 - Terra
21:07 - You're Not Alone
22:22 - The Soundtrack
23:51 - Chocobos
24:35 - Endgame Super Bosses
25:32 - The Crystal
26:05 - Kuja
27:18 - Necron
28:25 - Top 5 Moments!
28:36 - 5 Kuja's Introduction.
29:02 - 4 Bahamut and Alexander
29:26 - 3 You're not Alone Moment
29:51 - 2 Black Waltz #3
30:32 - 1 The True Ending
31:07 - Vivi's Fate
32:45 - I don't Want You to End
33:17 - Bobby Corwen
34:24 - Closing Thoughts
After exploring more modern themes with 7 and 8, Final Fantasy IX takes us right back to medieval like classical fantasy and that's represented in the game's logo - a golden crystal that let's us know we're going back to the roots of Final Fantasy. Crystals are often at the core of a Final Fantasy story but less and less so over time, crystals were only subtle references in the story of the last two games.
FF9 for a lot of players is THE greatest Final Fantasy and it's easy to understand why, the world of Gaia is just oozing with charm and awesome characters. I know a few players who started Final Fantasy with number 9, I had one friend who just couldn't get into Final Fantasy, that is until they saw number 9 in action and after exploring Alexandria and playing a bit of it's ingame card game - Tetra Master, they ended up getting the game and loving it.
Without a shadow of a doubt, Final Fantasy IX's biggest strength is it's characters, main characters and side characters. Throughout this journey you're accompanied by just these amazing, lovable and sometimes relatable characters. And at no point are these characters forgotten about, they're always doing their own thing and they each have their own virtues and dilemmas, their own journeys of self discovery or identity.
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Getting to the opening for now, 9 Doesn't start with reactors being bombed or death battles, it's a much more sombre beginning starting in the Kingdom of Alexandria with unhappy princesses, a theatre ship full of thieves, and a humble Black Mage wandering the city streets. If you don't already recognise this iconic Black Mage - this is Vivi and this guy is my favourite character and he's a top tier Final Fantasy character, stick around and by the end I'll share why. Back to the streets, Alexandria is just so atmospheric and chill, you get to start exploring Alexandria straight away with Vivi. One of my favourite things to do in RPGs is just going around robbing people's homes of all their treasure and life savings, this Grandma doesn't really need this.
We're introduced to some optional minigames really early, the Tetra Master card game I'll cover in more detail later and Jump Rope Skipping, where you need to consecutively jump at a faster and faster pace for some cool rewards but it can get very frustrating very quickly with a simple slip up. What makes beginning in Alexandria so great is that you can spend litterally hours here just exploring and doing minigames.
During the theatre play "I Want to Be Your Canary," the airship of Thieves I mentioned earlier - they end up kidnapping a princess that turns out wants to be kidnapped in a kingdom corrupted. Which leads into a much larger overarching story, and the crap hits the fan with everyone's fates getting connected together and we end up crash landing into the nearby Evil forest, which is a very creative name for a forest. The EVIL Forest.
We're back to four person parties in combat and Limit breaks return too.*** This time they're called Trances - they're described as a surge of emotion where taking damage fills your trance bar, once full your character will automatically power up and transform for a few turns. Trances are pretty cool but problem is - you can't control when you activate the Trance so you get a lot of moments in combat where a character goes into Trance at the very end of a battle and it's completely wasted.
But the one saving grace of Trances is when a character is in a really emotional story situation they'll automatically trigger their trance. This is a really cool way of connecting storytelling with gameplay, letting you share a bit of empathy and feel a little bit of characters pain by controlling them in their trance form in combat. There's some already beautiful narrative moments - only enhanced by the use of this little Trance trick...
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