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.

Less Pew, Pew, More Stab, Stab

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
10:13-18:58

Earlier, I praised FF9 for having distinct classes like the Final Fantasy I-VI (although even VI drifted away from this), instead of characters that were essentially identical until you started setting up their materia/junctioning/whatever, at which point you could basically make them into whatever you wanted. In IX, the character's class actually dictates how you can play them. You can't just mash Attack and have any kind of success if you don't have all melee characters in the party. The one problem with this, though, is that sometimes the story will dictate a certain combination of characters for your party which can be pretty annoying. Right now I'm going through the stuff on the Outer Continent (yeah, it's been a while since I've posted last), and for a pretty decent chunk of time my party has been Zidane/Vivi/Garnet/Eiko. Having two white mage/summoner class characters in the party at the same time is just goofy. It's fine for boss battles because you can have one heal or buff and the other summon on a given turn, but for random battles, summoning is usually just overkill and a waste of MP and time (luckily the summoning cinematics are pretty short in the this game), and if you don't have to heal you end up basically wasting a turn doing something like 68 damage hitting the giant troll with your little mage staff. Kind of makes battles drag on for unnecessarily long.

I had vague memories of going into the Iifa Tree from the first playthrough--mostly the screen just before the boss battle where there's like a cascading waterfall of mako... wait this isn't FF7, but it's basically still mako, isn't it? It's green glowly life-essence type stuff. I completely forgot about that boss battle though. I actually died once against him because it took me like three castings of it to realize that casting Fire triggers a counter attack that rapes you. When you cast it, a message comes up that says something like "The fire has started." Before he actually uses the counter-attack it's not really apparent whether that's good or bad. I'm still not quite sure what it's supposed to be, other than some really pissed off tree creature producing mist inside of a giant regular tree. I also forgot about completely absurd Armarant looks. When you go into the one-on-one battle between him and Zidane is pretty much the only time you get a clear shot of his face. Otherwise, he just kind of looks like a giant red mass with a body attached to it.