Are You a Bad Enough Dude to Kidnap and/or Rescue the Princess?

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
Playtime: 00:00-01:51

I have to say that Final Fantasy IX doesn't really do as good a job selling itself in it's opening minutes as VII did. At the outset of VII, you weren't really sure who you were or what the hell you were doing, but within minutes you were jumping off a train and stabbing dudes in the face on the way to blowing up a reactor. In the opening moments of IX you get a compelling mystery as you see a cloaked figure on a raft violently tossing and turning in a storm on the sea. We cut away from this though, and join up with Zidane and his band of rogues, setting up their plot to kidnap the princess. This is as good a place as any for a fantasy story to start, but it's way too slow developing to serve as a way to draw the player in. Before we get to the actual kidnapping, we cut away for some brief misadventures with Vivi, who I really like as a character, but Vivi getting harassed by an ill-tempered "rat kid" trying to get into a concert isn't really the best way to keep me glued to the action in the first hour of the game.

The concert itself leads to a scene that evokes the beloved opera scene from VI, but that scene was roughly halfway through the game, once you had familiarized yourself with all the characters and the game's basic premise. VI started off a lot like VII did, by throwing you right into actual battles as you controlled a hypnotized Terra as she's led into Narshe to raise hell and steal the frozen esper. In IX, there are a few "battles" to familiarize yourself with the system, but they're either stage acting during the play or sparring amongst Zidane's crew. There's not much immediate conflict. VIII had kind of a similar problem, as, if I recall correctly, before you set off to find your first GF in that cave, you had to kind of wonder around the Garden for a while, but VIII at least at the fairly epic Liberi Fatali CGI at the beginning. Where I am now, 1:51 into the game, there's not really any sense of the larger story at all yet. Thus far, the plot points have been "Garnet gets kidnapped" and "Garnet gets rescued" and that's about it. I'm not saying that I found the first two hours totally unenjoyable, because I didn't, but I think it could've been set up better.

I do think the "Active Time Events," that you can activate with Select to watch a cutscene, were a pretty inspired idea. I like the idea of giving the player control over how much or how little of the minutia (didn't think I'd pull out a word like minutia, did you?) of everything that's going on with every character. I also really like IX's world map music. Doesn't quite have the sweeping movie score style epicness that VII's did, but it's nice. I just got out to the world map now after running out of the Evil Forest (not one of Square's most inspired place names) before it turned to stone. More to come.

Fuck it, I'm Just Gonna Beat It

Final Fantasy Playthrough
'Till the End

Yeah, I couldn't bring myself to be an absolute completionist on this. This had already taken forever, and I wanted to expedite this and get it out of the way, because I just purchased Final Fantasy IX off of the Playstation Store, which I think I'm going to blog about next. I think that'll probably prove more interesting, as I've never owned it before this, and only beaten it once on a friend's copy some years ago. I really only have very vague memories as to the specifics of the story and, well, most of the gameplay for that matter, so my writing on that will probably be a lot different than this, which was me playing a game that was old hat. As I started to say in the last post, I don't really think there's enough of a bridge to get you to where you can realistically fight Ruby and Emerald Weapon (which were tacked on for the American release of the game, which I'm sure is mostly to blame for this) from where you can beat Ultimate Weapon. The Ancient Forest gives you a few new high-level enemies to fight, but for the most part, if you're going to get everything you need for those two fights, like your Final Attack-Phoenix combination and maybe your W-Summon/Mime, it's really just a complete grind to do.

Being at around level 65 with a lot of good materia (no W-Summon, KotR, or Mime though), the final battles were a bit of a joke, though I managed to beat the game with something of a dramatic flair anyway, as immediately after Sephiroth used "Heartless Angel" to bring everyone to 1 HP, then used Omnislash to kill Sephiroth without having healed anyone in between. Poetic, I know. The game ends exactly where it began, which Aries's face surrounded in a field of stars, as she summons Holy to destroy Meteor. I kind of like that they ended it there and didn't feel the need to continue on with an extended coda, where there's like a "Where Are They Now??" segment for each of the main characters. In fact, were it not for Advent Children, however many years later, you can make the argument that the humans don't even survive the events of the ending. As Bugenhagen said when you took him to the City of the Ancients, it was going to be up to the planet as to whether or not humankind was going to be saved. The quick after-the-credits sequence with Red XIII leading his kids to see the wreckage of the old Shinra complex, now covered in thick plant-life could be interpreted as evidence that the planet said "You know what? You guys still suck, humans. It's the firey-tailed furries that shall inherit the earth!!" But then Square realized that "everybody's dead!" doesn't make for a lucrative sequel and went ahead and made Advent Children. A lot of people seem to be in love with it, and while it was kind of fun from a purely fan-service perspective, as a movie it didn't really do much for me. I haven't played any of the prequel stuff either. Maybe I will eventually, but for right now, as far as I'm concerned, Final Fantasy VII is still a self-contained thing.

Next up: Final Fantasy IX!