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.

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.

This is the Age of Steam

Final Fantasy IX Playthrough
Playtime: 01:51-04:48

One thing that I really like about FF IX is that they brought back the concept of distinct classes. In VII you can use materia to kind of mold each character into whatever you want, but independent of that everyone is pretty much identical in battle. And magic actually matters. After a while in VII, with a couple of rare exceptions, you're usually just as effective just kind of pounding away with physical attacks with maybe the occasional summon thrown in. In IX, your mages actually have to cast spells on pretty much every turn if they're going to be effective. I like the ability system for the most part as well. While you can't really get as creative as with materia, it is kind of nice to not have to micromanage it as much, and since abilities are tied to items, it gives you incentive to horde as much equipment as possible, even if you might not actually get a stat increase from what you pick up. I like the synthesis system as well, another easily understandable but engaging game mechanic.

Five hours into the game, it's occurred to me that I've retained pretty much none of the game's plot points from the first time I played it. Every locale I've been to thus far, though, has had me saying "Oh yeah, I kinda remember this." From the first time I played it, I always though the game's environments--a combination of the painted backgrounds Square relied on in VII and VIII--along with some more advanced honest-to-goodness real-time rendered scenery (allowing the camera to shift)--were one of it's strongest points. Especially after having reached Lindblum, my second playthrough has confirmed that I knew what I was talking about, and I know that some of the cooler areas are still to come. I love the steampunk-esque veneer that's built over the world's medieval fantasy base, and the sprawling city of Lindblum, with it's air trams and city gates that open with big clock tower style gears, is a great display of this.

More to come.

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.