Partridge Senpai's 2025 Beaten Games:
Previously:
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
* indicates a repeat
1~50
51.
Wave Race 64 (N64)
52.
Bakushou Jinsei 64: Mezase! Resort-ou (N64)
53.
Mother (Famicom)
54.
Famista 64 (N64)
55.
Weird and Unfortunate Things are Happening (PC)
56.
Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U)
57.
Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
58.
Wario Land: Shake it! (Wii) *
59.
Mario Party 8 (Wii) *
60.
Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure (Wii)
61.
SimCity 2000 (N64)
62.
Prototype (PS3)
63.
Prototype 2 (PS3)
64.
Final Fantasy X (PS2) *
65.
Final Fantasy X-2 (PS2)
66.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (PS2)
67.
Crackdown (Xbox 360)
68.
Crackdown 2 (Xbox 360)
69.
Alan Wake (Xbox 360) *
70.
Dead to Rights (Xbox)
71.
Medal of Honor (PS3)
72.
Mario Kart 8 (Wii U)
73.
Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii) *
74.
Mario Party 9 (Wii) *
75.
Dragon Ball Z: Budokai 2 (PS2)
76.
Splashdown (PS2)
77.
R4 Ridge Racer Type 4 (PS1)
78.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) *
79.
Star Fox (SNES)
80.
Kamen Rider: Battride War (PS3)
81.
Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (GC) *
82.
Final Fantasy VII: International Edition (PS1)
83.
Final Fantasy VIII (PS1)
84. Final Fantasy IX (PS1) *
Whereas Final Fantasy VII and VIII were games I had never finished, IX is actually a game I’d finished before. Granted, it was like some 15 or something years ago, but it’s a game I’ve never really lacked a feeling of closure for like I did with VII. Still, IX is a game I recall enjoying quite a lot, but I didn’t remember much in the way of specifics at all. Given just how many of my friends these days have played this game and love it to bits (especially the writing), this game quickly hopped to the front of my list once I finished FFVIII and loved that game’s story so much. Playing the Japanese version of the game on original hardware, it took me right around 50 hours to beat the game without doing terribly much side content at all (and this will be another very spoilery review, just for the record).
Final Fantasy IX follows Zidane. A part of the thieves’ band Tantalus, he’s a part of their latest job: A plot to kidnap the princess of Alexandria. However, this perfect kidnapping scheme goes terribly awry when Princess Garnet turns out to be planning her own escape that very same night. Winding up with Vivi the little black mage and the resolutely loyal knight Steiner, Tantalus barely survives their daring escape and winds up trapped in the giant, monster-infested forest outside Alexandria. Though they escape with their lives from both the caper and the forest, there’s a lot more in store for them in the wide, scary world of Gaia.
To not bury the lede too deeply here, I really did not care for the story of FFIX. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I didn’t like it at all, but this was easily one of the games in a long while that I’ve come closest to just dropping entirely midway through because I was just so bored. There are a lot of elements that lend to that, but the main thing behind it is that the story and its characters were just way too shallow to actually keep my attention. Mind you, that’s not to say the story has no themes at all or that the characters are completely superficial. The operative word in that complaint is that the characters are too shallow, as I found them to be far too shallow for the sheer length of the story being told.
For basically the whole first two discs, I was waiting and waiting and waiting (more than 30 hours) for any of our main characters to actually get any depth beyond the principle conflict that they’d entered the story with. Yes, I understand that this is a story both about identity as well as in finding hope despite all the darkness in the world, that the people you live life with and for are what give life meaning, but we take FAR too long to actually start making that point. The plot moves forward constantly, but the actual characters are standing still for SO much of this that I was constantly asking why I should care about these people or their problems beyond all the misery the game loves wading in with how dark the Alexandrian war of aggression gets. Even my friends I’ve talked to who love this game’s story will very readily admit that the pacing is dreadfully slow, but the bigger issue here is that the pacing is slow because the characters spend so little time in the first 2+ discs getting any depth to them at all.
For example, we get vignette after vignette about how Vivi is dealing with his own mortality and where he came from, but we get so little more than that from him that it’s difficult to really see him as a character so much as he is a stand-in for that theme itself. In terms of the narrative’s main themes, Vivi’s main job is to be a parallel for Zidane’s own conflict for when he eventually has to deal with his own mortality and existence as a construct made for someone else’s purpose. The main problem there, however, is that Zidane is such a competent, confident, untroubled character for basically the whole narrative up to that point (“that point” being near the end of disc 3) that I found it impossible to actually accept that he’d be this troubled by these revelations. He even has a whole speech earlier in the game talking about how he doesn’t even care where he came from anymore because his family are the crew of the Tantalus, and we’re never given any reason to assume he’s lying to us or himself in that speech. Zidane ends up being a pretty darn weak main character, but that isn’t so much the narrative’s main fault so much as it is the biggest symptom of an overall quite weak narrative.
I hate to sound like a broken record about this, but the whole main cast is just far too shallow. Part of that is because most of them have incomplete character arcs if they have any at all, and the other part of it is that those who do have any kind of arc have that character development buried far too deep in the story for it to really matter. This narrative struggles really badly with setup and payoff in that way, as we hold our cards far too close to our chest because we want those later reveals to be that shocking when they happen. The only issue there is that, while those revelations are indeed shocking, they come off as totally arbitrary because they’ve been foreshadowed so poorly. What we’re left with is a very dull, slowly paced narrative, and that’s helped very little by just how one-note the story’s tone is.
FFIX overall has a pretty bad broader narrative problem of just being far too dark and miserable without any brighter spots in the narrative. This is a story that deals with a lot of really dark and serious topics (from existentialism to selfish wars of conquest and genocide). A very significant amount of our narrative is composed of seeing our main characters or the people around them struggle and suffer because of the psychological and mental anguish the story places them under. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a story being sad or dealing with serious topics, but FFIX’s biggest issue is that it dives so deep into the darkness of humanity yet so rarely actually comes up for air to relieve that.
Part of this is down to the version of the game I played (I have it on good authority that characters like Steiner and Quina are much more entertaining characters in the English version than I found them to be in the Japanese version), but the experience I had was the experience I had. More than just make for an unvaried and dull tone (overly utopian stories get as exhausting as overly dystopian ones, after all), it’s also a big reason why our characters end up being so shallow for so much of the story. The story is always rushing forward with our main plot so ferociously that it forgets to give us quieter moments where we can see our main characters just bounce off of each other a bit and let their hair down. More moments of quiet levity would’ve done a lot to help the narrative’s pacing, but it also would’ve given us more chances to see who our main characters actually are as people. By forgoing these sorts of scenes, I can’t help but feel that the authors of FFIX have, however unintentionally, hit the story with a double whammy of making it feel both pointlessly miserable and needlessly shallow, and that’s before we even get into how poorly it frankly handles a lot of these more serious topics it uses for its story.
Queen Brahne is the main antagonist of the first half or so of the game. Being Princess Garnet’s (adoptive) mother, Garnet is understandably very upset with just how brutal her mother is being when Alexandria invades one and then the other of its two neighbors on the Mist Continent. Queen Brahne is one of the most viscerally evil antagonists Final Fantasy had had in a game in a game up to this point. Sure, there have been plenty of villains who have wanted to rule the world or destroy the universe, but so few villains have ever come close to causing such gratuitous and graphic amounts of suffering. Sure, we say that Queen Brahne “changed” after her husband died, and we also point out that Kuja (another antagonist) gives her the tools to do all this, but we also make it very clear that she’s just doing this because she wants to. Mass death, occupation of formerly friendly countries, and even the attempted genocide of a neighboring kingdom, and you get to see a lot of that close up and personal.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with video games (or any media) trying to depict the horrors of war or the dark corners of the human experience, but my big problem with FFIX is that it ultimately uses these things so superficially. When Queen Brahne’s hubris finally does her in, all she can say to Garnet is that she should live her lives however she wants, because that’s how the queen herself lived hers. Brahne gets a giant, beautiful grave in the capital of Alexandria, and we even get generalized and specific confirmation that the people of Alexandria still remember her fondly despite how “weird” she got the past few years. FFIX creates such a despicable, monstrous person, and then has the nerve to treat her as if her biggest crime was being a crappy mom to Garnet.
Perhaps it’s because of just how close it hews to the real events we live in in 2025, but just how flippantly they use genocide as a disposable plot point left a really disgusting taste in my mouth. FFIX gets a lot of praise for how dark its story isn’t afraid to get, and frankly it doesn’t get nearly enough criticism for just how distastefully it does it. The authors of this story don’t seem to respect the sheer gravity of these story elements at all, and it makes for a really gross experience with just how little they actually have to say about these things when all is said and done. FFIX’s shallow characters end up giving it a lot of poorly written women, but this is easily where it hits the worst. This goes beyond mere boring, style over substance writing and straight into disgusting status quo propaganda, and that’s something I can’t find any room in my heart to forgive.
I don't wanna take away anything from people who have genuinely had this story speak to them. There are some genuinely very well constructed scenes in this that I'd never call someone foolish for being affected by. I just wish they actually had some meaningful amount of lead up instead of feeling like such ass-pulls. Regardless, especially playing the Japanese version that's got so much less comedy, going through such a mirthless and miserable story that's so slowly paced to boot is an exhausting experience to say the least. Even accounting for the slightly better handled tone in English, how people call this game very well written, let alone the best written Final Fantasy game, is honestly totally beyond me.
While I certainly didn’t like the story, the mechanics aren’t something I found a lot to love in either. They’re not the worst thing ever, but they’re also far from my favorite turn-based combat either. We’re back to a very standardized form of SquareSoft’s ATB system, and we’ve removed a ton of the customization that defined FFVII and VIII. Characters once again have weapons and several pieces of armor that affect their stats and elemental resistances, and the big new thing we’ve introduced is skills. Just about all pieces of equipment have 1~3 activateable or passive skills that they’ll grant the wearer. Beating enemies gets you both EXP to level up, and AP to help memorize skills. Have a piece of armor equipped long enough, and you’ll learn that skill permanently so you can equip it or use it whenever you want. It’s a neat system, but it’s so simple that it ends up being pretty ignoreable even if it is a clever way of dealing out your character-specific abilities over the course of such a long game.
The game’s bigger mechanical issues are its limit break replacement and its balancing. The new version of limit breaks, Trance, is easily one of the worst versions of said mechanic they’ve ever done. Where you could save limit breaks for as long as you wanted in FFVII and you could manipulate your crisis status in FFVIII to use your special moves as much as the situation safely called for, Trance simply activates when your bar fills up no matter what. This means it’s extremely difficult to actually use Trance in any strategic fashion because you have so little control over when it activates. The different ability enhancements each respective character gets upon entering Trance mode are certainly neat, but the sheer difficulty in using it for anything beyond accidentally bashing some random encounter’s head in far harder than you needed to make it pretty hard to get very excited about.
This is all on top of what is easily one of the most brutally balanced mainline Final Fantasy games SquareSoft ever made. Despite how little control you actually have over enhancing your characters’ power or changing your strategy beyond just grinding for more EXP or AP, this game is constantly pushing mean-spirited challenges at you. For one, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game so committed to keeping your white mage from you for as much time as it possibly can (as huge swaths of the first half+ of the game are done where the only healing you’ll have are what potions you can find along your adventure, and those quickly get very inadequate). Bosses are also so vicious, and they very frequently get baffling amounts of extra turns with stupefyingly powerful attacks. This gets increasingly true as you go through the game, but your sheer inability to actually defend from powerful status effects like zombie, virus, or instant death makes a lot of these boss fights feel far more frustrating than they are fun. This was a game where I ended up feeling like I just got adequately lucky to wind up winning the hardest fights rather than actually playing particularly smartly to outwit my opponent, and that does not make for a very satisfying experience with a game balanced this hard against the player.
Aesthetically, at least, the game is really excellent looking. I think this game ultimately has a weaker score than FFVII or especially FFVIII did, but it still has very nice music. The graphics, though, really flex that SquareSoft development prowess as it ever does, and it’s amazing that a PS1 game can look this incredible. The Dark Crystal inspiration of the game’s world and characters are almost as impressive as just how Dragon Ball-inspired they are (even down to Kuja’s whole character arc coming off as a really poor copy of Vegeta’s), and it makes for a beautiful and memorable world (despite how rough the game’s writing is and how slow/frustrating the gameplay can be, as this game is sadly not free of the PlayStation 1 Animation Disease that makes attack animations take far longer than they should).
Verdict: Not Recommended. I want to be clear that I don’t think this a bad game. It’s just one I can’t recommend in good conscience. I was so thoroughly bored with the poor story and slow gameplay that I nearly ended up dropping the game 30 hours in, and the only thing keeping me going was the knowledge of just how close to the end I likely was. This was ultimately the entry of mainline FF games on the PS1 that I enjoyed the least by a pretty significant margin. While FFVII also has a fairly dull story, the better pacing made it much less tedious to go through than FFIX despite the latter actually having a central theme (eventually). The gameplay may be pretty decent, but it’s still hardly something I could call exciting, and it’s certainly not something good enough that it carries the rest of the experience all on its own. Overall, much like I said with FFVII, while this may not be a bad game, I just don’t think it’s worth your time. If you’re going to spend 50+ hours playing old PS1 RPGs and your tastes are anything like mine, your time can be spent much better than this.
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
