great game

User Rating: 9 | Final Fantasy IX PS
By firenic | Review Date:
Final fantasy IX is a great game overall. It is the first «recent» final fantasy to reintroduce the four characters battles and to bring back the class system per say. Every character has unique abilities (magic, stat-booster abilities,et.c) and consequently has unique weaknesses and strenghts. It brings a new aspect to battle gameplay (ff7 and ff8 don't adopt the class system, the characters are basically the same for everything but their limit attack), it forces the player to form class-equilibrated parties in order to face the baddies efficiently (while in ff8, boosting every character, that is naturally all-around, seems to be a good enough strategy to win most battles, regardless of what characters you integrate into your party). Also, in ff9, we can witness a comeback for what we could call chocobo activities, meaning that chocobos, just like in ff7, can help you find extremely useful items for character boosting. On the world map and in a mini-game, choco (your chocobo ally in this game) can help you find priceless treasures with previously found chocographs that mainly indicate( photographically speaking) the locations of treasures all over gaia.

In Final Fantasy 9, characters' interactions are always fun and dynamic. The fact of colliding completely different personnalities in the same team (yours) help to bring some quite interesting discussions and reactions between characters. This game's social interactions, as a result of what i said above, help to keep this ff exciting all along. Characters development is still (like in previous ffs) one of the best if not the best aspect of the game. The battle system (apart from the class system and the four-character- based battles) is basically the same as in the other «recent» final fantasies. The battle works with the ATB gauge, meaning that the battle are real-time battles (if you don't choose quickly enough your characters' commands the enemy can attack twice before you do, battling as fast as you can can help you win the battle, it's not based on turns where you can take all your time to attack without changing the course of the battle). But for fans of the turn by turn system there is still a possibly for you to enjoy battling enemies' as much as you did in turn based battle games ; by selecting the «wait» mode instead of the «active» mode in battle config. you can stop the battle time when selecting the battle command you want to chose for every character, the time you lose selecting your action for every character to take will not be lost in real-time. So you in the «wait» mode you can take all your time to select the desired action without advantaging the enemy. And one last thing, in the ATB system the speed stat of your characters affect your recover time, meaning the time that passes by between two chances of attacking, for one character, will be shortened if your character has a high speed stat.

The story is complete and leads you to start lots of quests and errands for the satisfaction of the player. The cinematographic scenes are exceptionnally well-made and bring to the game depth an incredibly beautiful esthetical aspect. The world map setting and music are still as original and sweet as in previous ffs. The game's pace seems a bit slower than in ff7 for example but doesn't handicap too much the pleasure that we have to play ff9. FF9 is a really interesting game, not as addictive as ff7, but with a little patience can become a great adventure to fulfill, and can bring fun and deep memories, unforgettable for the soul.

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