The Good
- the characters are really interesting, with varied personalities. I'm glad they aren't the stereotypical jrpg type of characters. The relationship between Steiner, Garnett, Zidane is really funny. Vivi and Freya kind of keep things a bit serious all the others actors a comic relief.
- Vivi, the one with the deep questions, questions about the universe and life, and his own existence. Eiko, the lonely girl whose entire tribe was killed, trying to win the affection of Zidane. Garnet, the righteous princess trying to make things right in the Kingdom.
- the mog letters are cute. The whole mog community and story revolving them is charming.
- out of all the pre-rendered backgrounds in the final Fantasy series, ff9 probably has the nicest ones.
- there's less travelling in the overworld which I am thankful for, because the amount of travelling and attempting to locate the next destination was very frustrating in final Fantasy 8. In this game, the locations are close by to each other in the overworld.
- out of all the final Fantasy games I've played, ff9 probably has the most simple battle and levelling system. I personally am fine with this, but the game can become really brain dead if your characters are overleveled.
- I like the way the game lets you use abilities. The way it has a quota for you to set, which allows you to prioritize which ability is useful for you in that part of the game. It's intuitive and simple to manage. It makes more sense then having to use an item every time you want to cure an ailment.
- some of the text response options are pretty hilarious and prompt some interesting animations.
- there is a lot of attention to humanity and personality in this game. You can really tell through the cutscenes that developers fired to give each character dialogue that fleshes out their traits. This allowed me to bond and relate with many of the characters throughout the game
- I like how the game lets you control different members of the party when exploring a city. It gives you I better look at the characters personality and their thoughts through monologues. The active time events help to expand the story as well when the party is separated.
- when's Zidane sees garnet in the in the special dress before she becomes Queen, he has nothing to say because her extra exalted and beautiful image makes him feel even smaller, and her even more unattainable. Their dynamic has always been kind of like Romeo and Juliet.
- there isn't any unnecessary repetitive titles after you get annihilator. The continued function lets you start off pretty much right before the difficult battle that you lost.
The Bad
- no indication of what items are inferior when you are trying to sell in the shop, which means you need to cross-check you're inventory and go through each item to make sure you do not sell the wrong one.
- not knowing which debuffs work on which enemies is really stupid. finding out whether something works or not becomes trial and error. Slow and silence and other tea boss like these are cool, but you never know which will work, meaning you'll be wasting MP to test. And most of the time it's better to just not use it and attack normally. Either this or you have to refer to a guide to see which will work, which sucks if you want to beat the game without any help. I think debuffs should still work on all enemies, but the potency of the debuff should bury depending on the type of enemy and the size of your party. For example, debuffs should be less effective against bosses. So instead of immunity, they will only have resistance. And this should be stated when a detect or scan ability is used. Anything in that removes the need for trial and error or referring to a guide is a positive thing for the game. Scan gives you some info, but it missed against most bosses.
- the boss in Ipsen castle only weak weapons did decent physical damage to him. It was mostly weak against magic spells, but I did not have vivi or quina in my party. My characters were dealing on average less than 100 damage against him per turn. So at this point I can either restart a save file, then go all the way back to the ship to change my party. Or sit back for a very long and boring fight, just dealing peanut damage and constantly healing. Not knowing what debuffs it was susceptible to did not help either. How is the player supposed to prepare for this boss fight, if they give no hints as to how you should set up your party beforehand. As a consequence, players have to waste their time to go into a trial battle just to see what is effective and what isn't.
- another boss that revolve around trial and error was the earth Guardian. Your party consists of only quina and Zidane. So having the correct Blue magic was imperative. After fighting him once it was clear I needed magic to counter his spells. The problem was I had no idea where his spell was and what he was immune to. So if you don't look at a guide, then the fight becomes a gruelling experience of trial and error. Either that or an extremely long and tedious exploration to find the correct Blue magic that you need. Even if you do go and collect a bunch of Blue magic, you still have to test each one to see which will work. There was no way I was going to spend hours to do this, so I looked up a guide and found that bad breath was the most effective, along with feather boots. This save me a lot of annoyance, but ultimately I had to refer to something outside of the game, which isn't natural. The game should give you better hints and direction as to what blue magic spells you need, and more information about the enemy, so that the player at least knows what they are looking for.
- how's the player supposed to know when they can eat using quina if we don't know how much HP they have left. Detect only shows you what item they are holding, not their HP. So the only way is to keep spamming eat, when you think the opponent is below quarter HP. Another annoying trial and error design. Scan works but what if garnet isn't in my party?
- it's a little annoying not being able to upgrade my equipment on characters who are not in the party. So if I buy something at the store the vivi is not in the party, then I need to wait until the next events to equip him. But by that time I may have forgotten. I guess it makes sense physically, it's realistic, but it negatively impacts the quality of life.
- not being able to reorganize magic in the menu is annoying because there are unnecessary gaps when you want to select magic in battle.
- I never got into the card game because it just felt so out of place. It's like I'm playing a turn-based battle system, then all of a sudden the game just throws me into a Microsoft Minesweeper game. The game play is too drastically different. For players who do enjoy these card games, then I think it's a positive thing for them, like a little bonus. I personally, I just couldn't get into the card game.
- in one part of the game you had to find kuja's hideout, which was in quicksand. I find the quicksand and there are four swirling pools of it. I go into the first pool in and I fight a monster. It's too strong and I get wiped out. Resets, and I go back and try another swirling pool of quicksand. Another monster, also just as strong, and I get wiped out. I looked everywhere else and no other place with quicksand. So I checked the forum to see where the hideout was, and it was there. Turns out its 1 of the four quicksand pools, and I just have to be lucky enough to guess the right one. How am I supposed to know that's this was where The hideout was, when both tries it was an enemy encounter? After two or three tries, common sense will tell me to look elsewhere as there is no difference in the quicksand animation. no way to discern that one of the quicksand pools had a hideout underneath it. Had I been lucky enough to get the right pool the first time, then great. But after two or three failed attempts, one would just search any other place. Which is a huge waste of time. Thank God I am playing the remake on switch, cuz I at least could avoid random encounters and speed up travel. If I couldn't, I would probably pull my hair out trying to look elsewhere for The hideout.
- not being able to select a dead character to give them a potion is inconvenient. Because sometimes I have eiko revive them the turn before, but I want to garnet to give them a potion. I can't because it won't let me select the red name, yet I know the character will be revived by the time the potion is used.
- not being able to return to certain locations after reaching memoria is frustrating, because I wanted to get certain blue magic spells to help me fight the boss, which was night against Nova dragon.
- the final boss, necron, is a huge RNG battle. Grand Cross deals practically every single debuff you can imagine with a chance that each can hit. I beat him mainly because I got lucky, and didn't get the terrible debuffs. All you can really do is try to equip resistances, and pray. I think the battle is too luck-based. However, if you have the Right moves and immunities, it doesn't really matter. But again, it's a huge problem on disc four, because even if you want to go back to the overworld to get the items and abilities that you need to fight necron, you can't, because many of the places are inaccessible. For example, I couldn't go back and gets the night spell for quina because all the areas with the enemies are blocked off. This made it very difficult for me to fight the bosses leading up to the finale. What I ended up doing to beat the final boss was just keep retrying until lock was in my favour, buy him not casting powerful spells. I only had some of the right abilities and equipment to fight him. I wouldn't know what to do if I had even worse equipments and abilities, because I didn't have a save that went all the way back before memoria.