Why final fantasy 9 is the best

The PlayStation 2 was already out in the world and smoking up the streets with its Emotion Engine technology. It was plagued by incredibly long load times, and there were countable seconds between encountering an enemy, the battle screen loading up, and then the fight proper. Transitioning from area to area was an exercise in waiting. Paired with that, it was much more cartoony than Final Fantasy VII or Final Fantasy VIII , and definitely more lighthearted, and for whatever reason it receded into the depths of the minor entries in this long-running franchise.

Load times are reduced, there are quality of life improvements like a High Speed Mode and a Max Damage mode for cheating your way through the bumpier parts of the game, and in general the whole thing looks less like a muddy mess when you stretch it out to the dimensions of a modern television screen.

Final Fantasy IX is a game far, far ahead of its time when you consider the narrative plot threads, the way that narrative is communicated, and what the ultimate payoff for the world is. A princess runs away from her kingdom and is hunted by her evil mother who wants to sacrifice her in order to obtain weapons of mass destruction.

An automaton considers his nature as a constructed being. Final Fantasy 9 hit stores in Japan on July 7, - and it couldn't have been developed and released at a more difficult, transient time. That Final Fantasy 9 is so fondly remembered is something of a miracle. Internally, it was developed concurrently and partially in the same Honolulu office as the ill-fated Hollywood movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It was a wildly different game to its massively successful PlayStation predecessors - less realistic grit and more a cute, cartoon-like medieval fantasy.

Then there's that release date - a PlayStation game arriving in Japan four months after the PlayStation 2, on its release day it was almost inherently old news.

It doesn't help that it was announced alongside Final Fantasy 10 and 11 - with voice acting, super-realistic visuals and online connectivity in those games, FF9 looked archaic from the moment it was revealed. And yet it wasn't! Final Fantasy 9 is an incredible game, and one regularly voted as one of the best titles in the series. It feels as though it deserves to be invoked with the same hushed tones as reverence and Final Fantasy 6 and 7; it is among the most holy. To the true scholar, it is also plainly the best one.

I might be biased, though. Final Fantasy 9 turning twenty years old is a deeply personal anniversary to me, as the game marks my entry into the world of writing about video games, in a sense. That dragged me into the Final Fantasy community, and from there, at age 11, into content creation for fan sites.

I did this through college, through university, and, well - here I am. Still here. You can all thank or blame FF9. My personal perspective set aside, FF9 is indeed special for all those reasons listed above. It is often reductively described as a throwback game, a tribute to past Final Fantasy titles.

While it is absolutely packed with references and winks for fans, it is far more than that, however. It's a unique Final Fantasy with its own style and energy that hadn't quite been done before or since. Part of this is down to the game being made by a multicultural, international team of developers.

While of course Japanese-led, a huge amount of FF9's development, particularly its art, was undertaken in Hawaii, a US territory. The game's staff included Americans, French, Germans and more. Your email address will not be published.

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