I Call Upon the Heart of the Cards

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
18:58-30:38

I managed to win the Treno card tournament, which I don't believe I did on my first playthrough, which won me a Rebirth Ring. I mostly ignored the card game in general the first time through, but I'm actually having fun with it. I honestly don't know if it nets me any more prizes in the form of items, I haven't checked any FAQs regarding that. Maybe if I beat the "card guru" who lives in Lindblum I get something. I'm finding Quina hilarious this time through too. I don't really think I did the first time and I'm not really sure why. The way (s)he constantly seems to keep showing up randomly wherever you travel even though (s)he seemingly has only the most mild passing interest for what you're trying to accomplish is just gold. When Quina randomly shows up in Treno and then gets discovered washed up on the beach and presumed dead by Lindblum soldiers are two the funniest moments in the game so far.

In general, I like most of the characters, and lot of the inter-party banter that goes on, but the whole plot of the game, such as it is, just seems like kind of a mess. So much of it just kind of seems like a random confluence of events loosely pieced together. After heading back to Alexandria for Garnet's coronation, kind of a pivotal moment for the history of the country and for Zidane and Garnet as characters, and then as a party you just kind of up and decide that you want to go to Treno to enter a card tournament. Then you have to rush back from Treno because Kuja is attacking Alexandria, and all of a sudden, before we've really gotten to know much about Kuja--other than his kind of general dickishness--all of a sudden Garland interjects himself into the story with no real introduction. After you destroy the entity controlling the Iifa Tree, all the mist disappears from the world, and despite mist powering a bunch of the world's technology and despite it having existed for decades, no one seems to really be all that freaked out by it's sudden disappearance. The whole story seems to have sort of a haphazardness to it. The story of FF VII is really set from the same cloth in the sense that the gist of it is "you're the good guys, stop the bad guy from destroying the world," and while it has some asides thrown in with shenanigans involing mind control and false memories, the core of it is really only marginally more complex than IX's. VII's whole story seems to develop much more naturally, though, and seems to rely less on random coincidences to give everyone and everything a place in the story and tie everything together.

One other thing I kinda like, quickly, is the "chocograph" sidequests, where you can find items on the world map and dig 'em up with your chocobo. Unless you're really dying to skip the couple of random battles you'll run into walking to wherever you're going, riding chocobos is kind of pointless in most newer FFs. In FFVII they got around this by adding chocobo breeding/racing, but that just gets to be so much of a chore. This is a much simpler distraction.