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While FFVIII was being developed, Sakaguchi assembled a new development team consisting of relatively inexperienced developers to create a game that he wanted to be a love letter to the franchise. A game that would take the best of all the previous games and put it all into one game.
This new team consisted of producer Shinji Hashimoto (Former marketing manager who later on went to produce games developed by this new team, nowadays commonly known as the "Kingdom Hearts Team") and animator Tatsuya Kando (Now known as lead animator of the KH series and creator of "The World Ends With You") among others. FFVI co-director Hiroyuki Ito directed the game and Sakaguchi wrote the story. The result was Final Fantasy IX, a game that has a very passionate fanbase despite its relatively low popularity. Let's look into it shall we? :
The Story:
This game tells the story of a group of thieves that is hired to kidnap a princess. Little do they know that the princess actually wants to get abducted and tries to sneak onto their airship. After escaping her castle, the princess and the thieves start a journey that leads to many adventures that will change them and the world. The story in this game is absolutely fantastic. The themes of love, prejudice, life and purpose are handled masterfully, mainly because of the wonderful characters that manage to be everything that's needed: complex, funny, sympathetic and tragic. The game is also full of big homages and neat easter eggs that reference various games in the series. There's even one part of the story that's clearly a reimagining of part of FFI's story. This is an FF game that loves the series it belongs to.
Overall it's a fantastic story with wonderful characters.
10/10
The Gameplay:
This game brings back the FFIV formula where each character has a single and permanent job according to his/her character. I'm not exactly the biggest fan of this formula, but it's a lot better here since the difficulty is higher than that of VII and VIII, so the lack of control over character growth doesn't bother me. The equipment possibilities have also returned to the FFVI way, so now you have more ways of equipping your character.
First, the good: The only new mechanic is the method of learning abilities. Each piece of equipment has up to three abilities that can be used while the item is equipped. Every ability can be learned by gaining ability points. After that, it can be used without the corresponding item. This mechanic applies to all abilities: spells, supporting abilities, knight techniques etc.
It's a very good system that rewards the player that puts work into the game.
Now, the bad: This game has some frustrating non-optional minigames that can bog down the experience. I didn't mind the card minigame in FFVIII because it was optional, but here there is a moment where you're forced to win two card game matches before moving on with the story. It's not that the card game is outright bad, it's just unnecessary and doesn't add anything to the game. The opponents are quite strong and can take a while to beat. I wasn't having fun. I just wanted to move on to the actual story and JRPG gameplay. The biggest gripe I have, though, is with a timed "Red Light, Green Light" style minigame that is terribly programmed and is one of those things that you just keep trying over and over until you luck out and win.
Another problem I have is with the random encounters. I tolerated them in the NES era, but after that, Square created items or abilities that would allow us to reduce or prevent random encounters to ease the frustration. However, here we have nothing of the sort. This wouldn't be so bad if the random encounters had a reasonable frequency like in VII and VIII, but they raised it back to the same frequency from the classics. This game came out in 2000, five years after Chrono Trigger showed the world that random encounters are not the only way to go in JRPGS. The frustration of entering a battle while trying to explore can become a big annoyance.
Despite the problems though, the gameplay is still great.
8/10
The Music:
After the disappointing soundtrack from the last game, Uematsu recaptures the magic of FF music to create another masterpiece. This soundtrack has everything: It's emotional, catchy, epic and triumphant. To keep the celebratory aspect of the game, Uematsu also brought back old tunes from previous games with great remixes. The main vocal theme is also a huge improvement over the previous one. It's sweet and punctuates the themes of the story.
10/10
The Graphics:
Like the other PSX games, FFIX uses FMVs and pre-rendered backgrounds to create a beautiful looking game. The animations and gameplay models are also stellar and push the PSX to its limits.
FFIX also marks the return of Yoshitaka Amano to character and monster designing, which gives the characters a classic fantasy look that resembles the first 4 games.
10/10
Final Fantasy IX is a game that falls just short of perfection, but it suceeds brilliantly in being a love letter to the franchise and its most devoted fans thanks to a fantastic story, great gameplay and wonderful music.
Final Grade: 9.5/10
Next time we enter the PS2 era with Final Fantasy X, the game everybody loves and i...well...don't. See you then ;)
