Final Fantasy IX

Final Fantasy IX is a very problematic JRPG on all fronts save its presentation. Its story is marred by a lack of character development and some questionable narrative decisions, while the gameplay is structured in a way that encourages trial and error and gridding and the difficulty is all over the place, leading to some frustrating battles.

The story starts simple. Zidane is a sixteen-year-old boy – with a monkey tail – who works for a traveling group of thieves called the Tantalus. One day, he is tasked with kidnapping the princess of the kingdom of Alexandria, Garnet, but when he finally manages to catch her, Zidane discovers that Garnet actually wants to be kidnapped. She is afraid of her stepmother and intends to warn her uncle of the incoming danger.

Final Fantasy IX is marked by its light-hearted tone. Take, for example, the game’s first set-piece: the kidnapping of Princess Garnet. While Zidane is chasing her around the castle, Steiner, the captain of the palace guard, is trying to apprehend him and save the day. But, as Steiner searches for them in the castle, he discovers that his soldiers simply don’t care about what’s happening. He is in panic, due to the gravity of the situation, but one soldier is slacking off, two others are shirtless, one is regretting his life choices because he wanted to be a fantasy novelist, another is doing exercises, and there is one flirting with a female companion. The whole scene is pure comedy: it’s a serious situation in direct contrast to the lighter tone of everything around it. Steiner’s animations reinforce the absurdity of it all, as he continually jumps in revolt and keeps moving his arms in anger.

The captain sets the tone of the comedy in one of his first cutscenes, when he almost falls from a tower when trying to save Garnet, but then decides to jump off to catch the princess only to crash into another tower. Some of the villains’ personality also reflects this comedic approach. Take the jesters Zhorn and Thorn, for example, since one keeps repeating what the other has just said with different words: “Arise from thy eternal slumber,” Zhorn apocalyptically says, so Thorn can break the mood by completing with “Depart after thy endless wait.”

Final Fantasy IX is at its best when it’s being silly. Unfortunately, the more the story progresses, the more solemn it becomes. When it tries to be serious, nothing works. There’s a lot of bland exposition – with characters explaining their evil plans in boring detail – and some lines that are cringe-worthy in their pretentiousness: “You stand before the final dimension, and I am the darkness of eternity,” a villain says, to then complete his speech about “how all living things die” with this nonsensical line: “In a world of nothing, fear does not exist. This is the world that all life desires.” In other words, to the villain, a world with no living things is what life, of all things, desires.

The game’s main themes are the inevitability of death and the quest to find one’s purpose in life. Some magical attacks – summons, which are here called Eidolons – are portrayed as weapons of mass destruction, leaving the characters at a loss for words in the face of such sheer destruction. Death becomes a grandiose event, ruthless and cruel. Some of the secondary characters, however, like the young black mage Vivi, have to deal with a more intimate problem regarding death: death is tied to Vivi’s identity, making the character question the meaning of his life: is it defined by those that created him or forged by his own actions? Vivi is the soul of Final Fantasy IX precisely because his character arc revolves around those two themes since the beginning of the game, developing them gradually over time.

Therefore, although Zidane is treated as the game’s protagonist, he is far from being the most interesting member of his party. For the most part of the game, he’s just the usual “thief with a heart of gold”, with no signs of a narrative arc whatsoever. He is an unredeemable womanizer, which becomes the central motivation for some of his actions (“Maybe she’ll reward me with a kiss or two if I try hard enough,”) that adores bragging about his supposed accomplishments (“I’m popular with ALL the ladies in Lindblum,” he remarks to Vivi). The game treats his “womanizer” trait as a comical one, although the jokes surrounding it rarely land: that is, unless the player likes to laugh at scenes in which a male character puts his hands on the ass of his female companion “by accident”, making her angry. Zidane also values his friends and tries to help everyone around him because that is Zidane. During the middle act, there is also a romantic tension with Garnet that falls into cliché territory: the player begins to understand that Zidane talks too much about women but only when it doesn’t mean anything to him; when he is really in love, he’s left speechless.

Now, Steiner is marked by his righteousness. He keeps rejecting Zidane’s help, accusing him of being a thief, but by doing that he keeps making a fool of himself, as he is incapable of protecting Garnet alone. He thinks right and wrong is set in stone (“Anyone can tell right from wrong,” he tells an old villager, who laughs at him and responds that he’s “Still as green as a pickle,”) and so refuses to see the goodness in the princess’ kidnapper and the evil that lurks in his Queen’s heart. His binary worldview, then, ends up making him unable to prevent certain tragedies.

It is both Vivi and Garnet who arise as the most intricate characters in the game, as both have to deal with problems regarding identity. Vivi has to face the prospect that he was made with a single purpose in mind: that he was born not out of love, but in a cold strategic move. He’s supposed to be a tool, a weapon, but he has a gentle soul. His innocence, however, eventually gets destroyed as Vivi deals with prejudice, death, and loneliness. His people think that servitude is in their nature and that they were created for war. Vivi tries to make them understand that slavery, submission, and servitude are not natural conditions, but socially imposed by those in power; sometimes with force, sometimes with false promises.

Garnet’s narrative arc is summed up by her two names. Her name as a princess is Garnet, a precious red stone, and she must act like that as a princess: precious and beautiful, but still just an ornament. For the most part of the game, she questions her lack of agency but keeps blaming herself for it and for all the tragedies that happen around her. But there is a desire to be independent deep within her, to cut through the shackles of her political position and be an independent woman. And so, when she’s with her friends and can be herself, she names herself Dagger: she doesn’t want to be passive anymore; she wants action.

The rest of Zidane’s party is composed of mostly forgettable characters. Freya is forgotten by the story soon after her homeland gets attacked at the beginning of the game; Quina is the one-note comic relief that rarely works – she eats too much and that’s it –; Amarant is a one-note lone wolf and, finally, we have Eiko, who likes to picture herself as a part of a love triangle with Zidane and Garnet… although she is six years old.

Eiko is completely obsessed with Zidane. One of the first things she asks him is, “What foods do you like? What kind of Eidolons do you like? What type of Moogles do you like?” – and ends the interrogation with the most problematic question: “What type of girls do you like?” She even cooks for Zidane to impress him and gain his love and attention. Luckily, nobody takes her seriously, but… still. Why? One could say that she’s not human – therefore her age doesn’t exactly mean she’s a child – but the characters treat her like she’s one (“Watch your mouth, kid!” a knight barks at her), and she talks like she’s one (Stop laughing, you poop!”). She thinks she’s older and more mature than she actually is (“I’m not gonna cry! I’m a grown-up now, and crying won’t help one bit,” she says to Zidane) but the sight of a child feeling the need to say that to a sixteen-year-old boy for him to see her as a possible lover candidate only makes everything uncomfortable. Her character arc revolves around the fact that, despite her snobbish personality, she’s alone and wants someone to bond with, but I’m certain there were better ways to portray that than making Eiko want to become Zidane’s girlfriend. Because, in the end, Final Fantasy IX has a six-year-old character that daydreams about her platonic relationship with a sixteen-year-old boy. So, there’s that.

The antagonist, Kuja, is also for the most part unidimensional. He is the kind of villain that shows contempt over everyone, lies uncontrollably, has no honor, and dresses in a queer manner, being marked by the color purple. He’s a psychopath who feels no remorse after killing thousands of innocent lives, saying things like, “Spare me the lecture. Lives come and go all the time. What’s the big deal?” And then we have the final boss, which appears out of nowhere and then goes back to whatever it was the place that they came from. One could say that this boss is thematically consistent – representing death – but that doesn’t change the fact that their scene in the game has no kind of build-up to it. This boss ends up feeling very, very random, which is particularly problematic since they, after all, the final one.

Near the end, however, both Zidane and Kuja gain a backstory that ties them to the main themes of the game, making them very much like Vivi, but it’s far too late for it to have any impact: they have little to add that Vivi hasn’t already said to that point in the story.

Going to the gameplay department, the combat system in Final Fantasy IX is a simple one, although not devoid of problems. At the battle screen, you have four characters to command that can act after their action gauge is completed. They can attack, defend, and use items and abilities/spells. The focus is not on buffs and debuffs and status changes, but on raw power. Maybe that’s because the game is too easy: save from boss fights, most enemies can be killed mindlessly with the attack option. Bosses, on the other hand, usually cheap their way out: they often use attacks that reduce a hero’s HP to 1, regardless of how high it was, or spells that can insta-kill a hero – sometimes the spell can hit or miss based on RNG, sometimes it will always hit someone with a specific level – and, sometimes, they spam a lot of powerful attacks that destroy your party before you can do anything to stop them.

To make battles a little unpredictable some enemies have reaction attacks that basically kill the hero that hit them with the wrong attack at the wrong time. Some reactions are understandable – hitting an enemy when they are hiding or shielded, for instance, can produce bad results – but there are others that are just frustrating in their arbitrariness – like being punished for hitting an enemy boss with its weakness. The difficulty, then, is all over the place: a dungeon is usually full of easy enemies, with an extremely irksome boss fight waiting at the end, with the monster abusing of cheap attacks to win. Other dungeons have common enemies that can insta-kill heroes, while their boss can be beaten with only the attack option. Properly balanced, Final Fantasy IX is not.

To make battles are a bit more frustrating, the enemy turn is usually hidden, and they can and will attack between the heroes’ turns. Therefore, this can become a common situation: the boss attacks a character, you select another one to cast a healing spell, but, before they are able to do it, the boss attacks again and kills the damaged hero, which makes the healing spell miss. Another frustrating aspect of battles is the so-called Trance ability. Each time a hero gets hit, their Trance gauge fills up and, when it becomes full, it transforms the hero into a more powerful version of themselves for a small period of time. The problem is that it activates automatically, which is often during normal battles when it’s not needed. This removes any kind of strategy from the Trance gauge and even makes it irritating: when it activates and deactivates the player has to watch a special animation, slowing down battles that are already very slow – in the remastered edition you can make them three times faster, although now it makes things too fast.

The game’s complexity lies in the preparations before the battle. Equipment now changes not only the character’s stats but it’s also responsible for giving them active and passive abilities. However, since these abilities are tied to the equipment until enough action points are learned, it’s a system prone to grinding: you keep killing enemies just to learn the ability so you can exchange that piece of equipment for a better one. The passive abilities you learn with equipment are the ones responsible for making status changes and effects a small part of battles, since most of them will make a hero immune to that sort of thing. With boss battles, you usually have to equip the right abilities to have a chance of winning, which means a little bit of trial and error is needed to know how the monster operates: after losing a couple of times, you can come back with the right team. This means, however, that it’s a system based on trial and error and restarts, which are far from being good, complex elements in any game. If Final Fantasy IX had allowed players to change abilities during battles, it would have saved them a lot of time.

Presentation-wise, Final Fantasy IX excels in all areas. It has a striking art direction, with its pre-rendered backgrounds that show the game’s steampunk world in all its glory: there are gears and intricate machinery inside houses, decorating train stations, and even powering airships, with camera angles that reinforce the scale of the environments. There are frequent – but sadly voiceless – cutscenes (FMVs) to depict the most action-heavy moments. And the soundtrack, composed by the series veteran Nobuo Uematsu, is mostly great. While “Roses of May” is a stellar piece of music, filled with pathos, and the battle themes never get old, some town themes are very forgettable, even when it comes to important locations such as Alexandria.

In the end, Final Fantasy IX is not a very good JRPG. It is plagued with flat characters and questionable narrative decisions and has a combat system that relies heavily on grinding and trial and error to work.

October 15, 2019.