Final Fantasy IX

Oh man. Just over a dozen years ago, I bought Final Fantasy IX. No, wait. It was a Christmas gift. I had not yet beaten either Final Fantasy VII or Final Fantasy VIII. Hell, I don't even think I'd beaten my very first Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy IV. I blame the easy distractions of childhood, I guess. In fact, I only made it about thirteen hours into this one, only scratching the surface of the story. As the years went by, I'd end up revisiting (and beating) every single Final Fantasy game I owned, jumping back in where I'd left off however many years before. But when I finally decided earlier this month to revisit Final Fantasy IX, I bucked my own trend and restarted the game from the very beginning. Four weeks and forty gaming hours later, I'm glad I made that decision. For whatever reason, I had never really enjoyed Final Fantasy IX the way I'd come to love many other games in the franchise, but by starting over from scratch I was able to experience the game I'd been putting off for a dozen years in its entirety. And I loved it!

The first five Final Fantasy games all took place in various medieval-like worlds full of dragons and wizards and knights and the like. It was only in the sixth installment - my own personal favorite - that the series took on a more science-fictional feel, keeping many of the same themes and gameplay elements but taking place in a world that was more steampunk than D&D. That trend continued in Final Fantasy VII, which included guns and machinery and amusement parks and urban decay and big corporations, and essentially took place in a world not unlike our own. Final Fantasy VIII even felt a bit futuristic, as did elements of Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. And although I've yet to play it, Final Fantasy XIII looks like it's nothing but flashy futuristic shit, environmentally speaking. So in a sense, although Final Fantasy originated as a very medieval series, the fact that Final Fantasy IX took place in such an environment was seen by many as a throwback to the original games. Indeed, this game felt like a coda to those early games, and has often been described as "the end of Final Fantasy as you know it." Maybe some of its charm was thus lost on me half of my lifetime ago. At any rate, I've really enjoyed spending the last month working on my mages, my thief, my knight, and my dragoon. And I think a large part of my enjoyment was based on the characters themselves.

For an ostensibly fantastical game, Final Fantasy IX was loaded with some very human moments. Camaraderie, friendship, and teamwork played bigger roles in this story than in many previous games I've played, and I haven't even touched on the deep characterization yet. There was Steiner, a Javert-like figure torn between his duty to protect the queen and a sneaking suspicion that his sworn enemies were actually his moral superiors; there was Vivi, a lost little orphan from a race feared and hated by most of the world, just trying to figure out where he belonged; there was Freya, who had been abandoned by her lover and who saw most of her friends and family slain by evil forces, but who persevered and wore on nonetheless. And at the center of it all was Zidane, initially a lady's man and a troublemaker who wound up believing that the most important thing in life was to help people who needed it. His budding romance with Garnet - unwilling princess of the realm, burdened by responsibilities she hasn't asked for - was among the most natural and humanlike relationship arcs I've seen in a video game.

Not everything about the game was brilliant; a few characters felt flat and underdeveloped, and the world in which the game took place was somewhat generic as far as Final Fantasy worlds go, but it was an impressive effort all the same. The difficulty curve was spot-on, as I never felt either extremely over-powered or hopelessly under-leveled, and the customization levels were just right, allowing me some flexibility when it came to strategy but often still forcing some very specific boundaries on my party.

This was the oldest game in my backlog by a number of years; I'm not certain, but I think it may have been the oldest game in my backlog ever since I began this blog three and a half years ago. It was also in all likelihood the third-most time-investive game remaining. I'm thrilled to finally be able to file this one under the "beaten" category and move on, but not even in an "I'm so glad that's over" type of way. Instead, it was more of a half-nostalgic enjoyable trip that took forty hours, but those still fell like forty hours well spent. I can only hope the remaining behemoths in my video game backlog - Final Fantasy XIII among them - are nearly as fun to play.