FINAL FANTASY IX

FF IX is a love letter to all the previous games in the series and I would whole-heartidly recommend it to everyone that is into JRPG's. The one flaw is that the game has a locked low framerate (usually only up to 30FPS) and the battles are on the slower side.

Final Fantasy IX is easily one of the very best games in the entire series, with my favorites being VI, VII, and IX. It is the last true "oldschool" main Final Fantasy game arguably. X is mostly oldschool, but it ditched the world map, so... Every character in IX is fantastic and quite memorable... except for Amarant. He's aight. Steiner and Vivi are a charming dynamic duo (complete with Chrono Trigger-esque dual techs). And Freya is best rat. The cinematics have aged incredibly well thanks to the stylized characters and environments, and the soundtrack is a banger as usual thanks to Uematsu's composing brilliance. It does the FF6 thing where you switch between parties at points in the story, until you eventually converge later and gather the entire party. My only complaint about the combat is that Trance (the limit break) tends to activate at the worst times possible. IE, in some random battle via some trash mob bonking you on the head at 99% trance with no control over it's activation or saving it once it's activated. It's useful otherwise. The PC version features an autosave system, but it is known to occasionally glitch out. Always choose LOAD and load a manual save, and not CONTINUE when loading. I would rely mostly on manual saves if I were you. The checkpoints before a boss is nice, though. Make sure to get the Moguri mod along side with this, it spruces up the prerendered backgrounds up quite nicely.

This is very important to me! GRACIAS!!!

... it's been during the past 25 years until I could finally say that Final Fantasy IX is not just my favorite FF game, but indeed my favorite game in the world. The cute looking characters are in exceptionally strong contrast to the dark themes of depression and genocide. Stereotypes are gleefully celebrated as much as they are turned on their heads. The world of FFIX opens up masterfully, and you want to explore every nook and cranny. The truly iconic characters in this game number in the hundreds. You will care for everyone, for the machines looking for their souls, for the ninja cooks in Alexandria, the pickle vendor in Lidbulm square. The story will make you laugh and cry. And I will never stop wondering how music that was created on the original PSX's sound machine can sound so infinitely orchestral. This is Nobuo Uematsu's absolute masterpiece and when I play nothing else on my piano until the day I die, I still haven't done it justice. Maybe this isn't the version of this game that you prefer, and I understand that. But a better version isn't coming along. A remake is now highly unlikely (and a "faithful remake" has always been an oxymoron). Getting my PSX version to run has proven impossible last year. And no mod ever – particularly one that inserts HD AI graphics – will ever truly improve this game in a meaningful way. So I vote for vanilla, because this particular vanilla still has all the flavors you can imagine.