The Realm of Endless Rain

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
04:48-10:13

Maybe Burmecians just have different opinion on nice weather, but personally I think that if your homeland is known as the "Realm of Endless Rain", it's time to get a new homeland. I dunno, maybe Burmecians would all want to live in Seattle if they existed in real world America. On the way there, I stopped off in the swamp, I picked up Quina, probably the oddest character since VI since Gogo, except that you get Quina way earlier in the game in IX and seems like an actual main character and not an afterthought "bonus character." I really have no idea what drug-induced haze inspired he/she/it as a character. The Eat ability is one of the more annoying Blue Magic systems. Obviously E. Skill materia was a lot easier in VII where you just had to get hit with whatever ability it was. Here, it seems like the enemy has to be at a fairly low percentage for it to be successful. There's some pretty cool Blue Magic abilities in the game though, like Pumpkin Head, which was the first one I picked up, and which deals damage equal to whatever the difference between your current and max HP is. Steiner has the same thing in his Sword Art abilities only it's called Minus Strike. Kind of an interesting high risk/high reward thing.

The Trance system kind of annoys me as well. It takes much longer for your trance bar to fill up than your limit bar took to fill up in VII, which I don't necessarily think is a problem except that, unlike in VII, if you get someone's trance to full in a battle but then it doesn't get around to that character's turn again it doesn't carry over until the next battle. Seems kind of lame that you can spend all that time getting it filled and then not getting to use it (that sentence sounds vaguely dirty). I'm also completely confused by the "Trouble" status effect, which doesn't exist in any other Final Fantasy that I remember, is the only status effect that doesn't go away automatically after battle [update: this actually isn't true at all. I guess I was just lucky up until this point.] (remember back in the day when you actually had to be sure to carry around all the various status healing items?), and can only be healed with an "Anointment" and not a Remedy. Just a completely bizarre addition to the game in my opinion.

FF has had some pretty ridiculous costumes throughout it's history, but whatever the hell Kuja's wearing has to be right near the top. I think IX also has to represent the height of the ultra-effeminate male in FF. Sure it continued a big in X and XII with Tidus, Seymour (speaking of weird outfits...) and Vahn, but there you had Auron and his five o'clock shadow and Basch with the big-ass scar on his face to mitigate that somewhat. I'm glad that as you get to this point in the game though, you have an actual villain on screen, instead of just autonomous black mage puppets and the unsubstantiated hunch that Queen Brahne might be kind of up to something evil. I suppose you could say that in VII you don't see Sephiroth until you reach Kalm Town, and then only in flashback until you acutally encounter him for the first time on the boat leaving Junon Town. In VII though, I think there was enough sufficient dickishness from President Shinra and his lackys to provide enough conflict for the first few hours of the game. As I said in my first post, I think IX gets off to a bit too lackadaisical of a start.

I guess I complained a lot in this post, but I really am enjoying this playthrough. I've completely forgotten huge swaths of the game since the first time I played it, and I'm having fun rediscovering it. The environments are unquestionably one of the game's big strengths. I talked about Lindblum last time, and Burmecia is pretty spectacular as well, even if it does look like it'd be really depressing to live there. Moving on to Clerya next, which is one place that I do remember well and remember being a really cool concept for an RPG town.