Final Fantasy IX
Currently playing this and COD MW2, downloaded off the PS3 the moment I saw it without asking any questions, but I had it downloading for almost 16 hours due to crappy connection and wireless router being as useful as a bum hole on a elbow. This is one of my all time favourite games ever, alongside almost all of the Metal Gear games, Final Fantasy 8 and Final Fantasy 7. Now being in London for uni meant I bought along my PS3 to play games on, though I can’t play PS2 games I can still play PS1 games (beats me, the first generation PS3′s could my one can’t, the asstards- called Sony).
This game is more story line driven rather than you have level-up to get past this, the main theme of the story is about loyalty, finding your loyalty, finding yourself, character development, beautiful cutscenes (for a 10 year old game by the way!) and last but not least the amazing and astounding music scores written by the genius himself, Uematsu Nobuo. He wrote most of the music for the Final Fantasy franchise if not all the music and lets not forget he does all this in MIDI! The story goes where out leading lady Princess Garnet til Alexandros of the Kingdom of Alexandria (bare with me with all this fiction), wanted to run away because of her unhappy and controlled life in the Alexandria Castle. Our hero is one Zidane Tribal who together with his group the infamous band of thieves: Tantalus, was ordered by Regent Cid of Linblum to Kidnap the Princess so he can protect her. 1) Because Cid suspected that Garnet’s mother and the Queen of Alexandria was up to something fishy and 2) Cid is Garnet’s uncle so he cares for her anyway. So the Princess runs in to Zidane as Tantalus flies in to Alexandria to perform a play as a smokescreen to kidnap the Princess who ends up running away with them anyway (!) and uncovers a despicable truth about a man called Kuja who wants to control the world with his weapons and magic, who is ultimately controlling Brahne, Queen of Alexandria. Also along the way each character learns about where they come from and how it plays a part in the bigger story.
The gameplay is just how I always liked my FF’s, yes you have to wait to make a move but thats the great thing about it! You wait till the bar fills up (ATB in FF9) and then select commands to attack enemies, you get to use magic, weapons, and even summons need I mention you get awesome animations when summons come along! Though I feel the summons were a bit played out in FF8 where you wait till the bar fills up, then summon GF, then it has its own bar time bar to deplete and then it does a really long attack animation in which (if you had the ability to add extra power by hitting square repeatedly learned already by your GF) you have a dead arm by the time you’ve only dealt 235 damage to the enemy and you’d do that each time. In FF9 they took that all away, still had the summons albeit a little different in name and form, when you summon each eidolon the first time it will do a longer attack animation but other subsequent usage will only be a shortened version which I think is a big improvement. Not just because it saves time but also an arm.
Need I mention people back then thought Princess Garnet was such a little hottie? ‘HOT DANG! OPEN THAT BRA UP!’ I hear you cry out to the television in one of the cutscenes with her up close?
There is just so much WIN with this game.
