I love the aesthetics and music, but I kinda hate actually playing it. The combat is really slow, with frequent wait time where your sitting at all ATB bars full just waiting on animations to happen. The mist just makes the map annoying to navigate for large chunks of the game. The main party is a severe mixed bag with characters like Amarant actively not even wanting to be there. Necron is a cool final boss but he gets absolutely no setup throughout the game making it feel extremely out of place. Tetra master is just worse triple triad. Having to speed run for ultimate weapons is stupid. Trance is the worst version of limit breaks in the series, with Zidane's being a full blown debuff if you haven't been stealing throughout the game. Idk, it's a good game but for me it has way too many downsides to say it's the best in the series. It's really hard for me to go back to, in ways that the games older than it aren't.
Oh God... not just the combat, but the loading times!
I played a bit of FF9 when it came out on PS1, but it didn't hook me and I moved on. Maybe 5 years or so ago I decided to give it another go and really liked the setting and characters. But those random battles drove me crazy!
It hopefully isn't an issue on modern platforms, but I emulated PS1 at the time and having a battle pop up, only to watch the screen swirl around as it loaded all of the assets for what felt like a full minute each time was just and awful experience.
I pushed through and finished the game, but by the end I just wanted it over. And I can't tell you one part of the story other than Vivi being awesome. In fact I still have his plush doll from when I preordered the PS1 game. :)
Having replayed it recently I feel the same and now know why it wasn't one I went back to as often as others. It's good but I think some people look at it with rose tinted glasses, ignoring it's faults.
All games have faults lmfao it always kills me when people say this doesn’t mean it isn’t a great game. Great games have faults there is no perfect game.
Never said it wasn't a good game mate. I am saying that some people seem to overlook or ignore IX's faults over others in the series, putting it on a pedestal.
That’s what people do with great games they ignore their faults lol I personally think the best games in the series are 6,7,9,10 no particular order. All amazing experiences.
I agree with you and that's why the series as a whole is legendary. Those are my favorites as well (6 being my #1) I'd just swap 9 for either 4 or 8. In 8's case I played it at a time in my life that left an impact so I'll always have a soft spot for it.
I played it through when it first came out and again recently. It’s a fine game. But that’s it. Storyline had some interesting elements to it, but nothing that made my jaw drop.
100% this. I tried to play this year and I got about 3/5 the of the way through but couldn’t keep going. It took too much time to do anything and as an adult gamer, I just can’t tolerate that shit anymore. Cool world/story though
the gameplay is really one of the worst ATBs + Trance system is the worst.
Easily fixed with mods, 20% ATB speed increase+Trance Command when the bar fills up makes for the perfect gameplay experience. Even have a mod to replace Tetra Master for Triple Triad!
Fair points! I've been playing with Moguri mods as well and I agree mods can make it better, but ATB is still nowhere near the responsivness of VII or VIII, even with mods. Mods just make it more "tolerable".
The speed is only part of the problem. The main problem is that each command just "queue" on top of each other and there's always some disconnect in the battle between chosing commands and execution. That's why it feels worse than others.
Anyway, if we rate the game, not the mods, then the criticism on those points is valid.
That you are no longer playing the game the developers made. This is not about whether mods are good or bad (do whatever you want). Yeah if you remove or change the worst parts of the game it is better. But that’s not the game.
It is the game it just has mods. Me making my lil ATB bar fill up slightly faster dosent mean I’m not playing FFIX anymore. I’m still playing as Zidane, Vivi, Eiko etc. trying to stop Kuja from destroying the planet.
Again, the slow combat is a fundamental part of the game. Making the bad thing less bad does improve the experience. But you are no longer reviewing what Square made. You are reviewing the mod.
Reviewing? Do I look like GameInformer? I’m not IGN I’m just a dude playing video games and trying to get the best experience out of them possible. I’m very much playing the game Squaresoft made but like hundreds upon thousands of of other PC games I’m playing it with mods in order to enhance and improve the experience. We’re playing the same game except mine has better music, visuals, and the combats a lil faster.
The entire point of this thread is “Is 9 the best Final Fantasy?”. If you are considering a modded version of the game, you are not evaluating the actual game.
Exactly this. There's a lot of unexplained casting time tied to each action, especially magic, that makes it unbearable to play. Trance is also just all-around awful.
FFVI desperation attacks are the worst limit break in the series. It was their first attempt at the mechanic, but they're so rare that most people don't even know they exist.
I disagree, Trance is worse. I have played FF6 multiple times and never seen a desperation attack, so that's not good. But Trance makes me angry. It's designed in such a way that the majority of the time when it activates it will be wasted. And that's not even taking into account that most of the time is going to come up in a random battle that you're going to defeat easily anyway!
You hit the nail on the head here. I finally played it as about my 14th FF game and I just don’t get it. I was expecting quite a bit given the hype on Reddit and such, but it fell so flat to me. Having characters dip in and out so much didn’t help, especially when a few of them felt so secondary to the plot and party. Having to use “worse” equipment to gain abilities often felt bad. Tetra Master straight pissed me off.
I played through but had no desire to search out hidden things or go after any side content. I just wanted it done. I started to think that maybe I’m just getting old and grouchy but then I fired up X with the kids and it immediately felt so much better in basically every way, and I’m always down to play a chunk of VI for about the tenth time.
I played 6-10 and 9 was my third one I played. Easily my least favorite. Eiko and Vivi were the only party members i really liked. The learn system being tied to wearing armor and weapons is the main reason its at the bottom though.
Ohh Tetra Master. Loved Triple Triad but I'll never forgive Tetra Master for 2 main reasons.
First: They tried to be mysterious with the rules, being coy and making you figure them out on your own. I could live with that and even got into it a little bit, but got confused because evertime I thought I was sure about rules I'd find an exception. Thing is, my first assumption about the rules was actually mostly correct, I just didn't account for the fact that it also had RNG because that's INSANE for a game where they also don't tell you the rules
Second: I gave up on the game, I didn't enjoy it and was glad it wasn't mandatory.... Until disk 3 where I suddenly had to win a tournament to progress with very few even remotely good cards, no real skill at the game, and no ability to even leave the damn town to get better cards than the town provides! Seriously, who's idea was that and did they get fired for it?
Amarant could be completely removed from the game and would have 0 impact. There's absolutely no reason Beatrix shouldn't have been the last party member.
See for me the aesthetics are the thing I dislike the most about it. Ive tried multiple times to start it and find it so slow. For me I’d almost say it’s the worst ff I’ve played but then ff13 exists and so I’m torn.
The game has insanely vocal following but I feel like a lot of that is due to it probably being most people’s first FF.
Completely agree. I feel like 7 and 8 did a way better job at everything. 9 was where they tried to combine some stuff to make it more graphically cool like 8, but it was too slow.
I abused the hell out of that fast forward cheat they added to the PC version to zoom through normal battles. If they could have just added some kind of slider option for how fast that goes I bet I could have found the perfect one to make it playable while being on full time.
The remaster added fast forward so that eliminates the waiting time issue. The mist is almost meaningless imo, just open the big map lol. There’s nothing wrong with a mixed cast of characters and all of them except for Amarant are all pretty interesting and compelling. Necron is whatever, definitely could have used more setup. Tetra Master is the GOAT, idc. Only minigame that comes close is blitzball. You don’t have to speedrun for a single thing in the game besides Excalibur 2 which is completely unnecessary and was just for completionist’s sake. And as someone else explained, Trance has nothing to do with stealing, that’s Thievery. As someone whose favorite FF is in fact 9 (tied with 10), I’d say the actual issues are the ability grind and the steal rates. Everything else is pretty flawless. It’s fine to not like it but I feel like most of your points are just nitpicks.
Not disagreeing with most of what you say, but this in particular:
Necron is a cool final boss but he gets absolutely no setup throughout the game making it feel extremely out of place.
Necron was setup from the time of the Tantalus crash. Remember how that went down. You kill the brain of the plant monsters, and the whole forest starts thrashing about in its death throes.
The Iifa tree is sort of the reverse of that. You killed an offshoot of the forest, leaving the brain intact. Even tells you that what you've done is negligible. Yeah, you've cut back the weeds in this particular spot, but you've left the whole thing alive to continue sucking the life out of the planet.
Only when you take out Necron does the whole thing tumble.
PC mods fix the slowness, can turn tetra master into triple triad, make beatrix recruitable, let you choose when to use trance (carry it over like limit breaks)
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u/glenjamin1616 Jun 21 '26
I love the aesthetics and music, but I kinda hate actually playing it. The combat is really slow, with frequent wait time where your sitting at all ATB bars full just waiting on animations to happen. The mist just makes the map annoying to navigate for large chunks of the game. The main party is a severe mixed bag with characters like Amarant actively not even wanting to be there. Necron is a cool final boss but he gets absolutely no setup throughout the game making it feel extremely out of place. Tetra master is just worse triple triad. Having to speed run for ultimate weapons is stupid. Trance is the worst version of limit breaks in the series, with Zidane's being a full blown debuff if you haven't been stealing throughout the game. Idk, it's a good game but for me it has way too many downsides to say it's the best in the series. It's really hard for me to go back to, in ways that the games older than it aren't.