Ash
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 16, 2015
- Messages
- 6,226
FF9 was specifically the "nostalgia" game, with tons of references to prior games. Things like the four fiends from FF1, the classic Black Mages, the FF6-style cave dungeon, the auction house, the gay bishounen villain, Necron from nowhere (inspired by FF3); even the bass beat from the beginning of the battle theme is a reference.
You forgot mt. gulag too, being based on gulag in FF1 and featuring music based on the original composition. But consider this: all of that shit was begging to be iterated upon, having initially been seen on the fricken NES, and the end result is absolutely nothing like it really. Furthermore if you look closely enough, you can find many correlations in each:
...yet I don't think it matters, because the overall execution of everything is considerably different. Something that amazes me about this series is how ridiculously different yet somehow all alike they are.
No wonder Zidane and the princess end up together, they're the only people in the work who don't look like weirdo tumblr freaks.
This is a baffling quote right here. FF9 was made by a team of novices in Hawaii who hadn't worked on a final fantasy title before. The battle engine is built on a filthy house of lies. It straight up doesn't work, chugs along like shit, and they implemented a bunch of ugly hacks to trick the player into thinking it works like the previous games. Unlike the previous entries where turns would execute fairly in the order they are queued, in FF9 the enemies just blatantly cheat and get free turns according to a script. The result is the ATB system is mostly window dressing. It's really noticeable with long spell animations, since your ATB bars all fill up during the effect, you're likely to queue up a bunch of actions in a row only to watch the enemy get a free turn and decimate you after each of your moves. It's awful. It's a system that discourages speed and taking turns (which is intuitive as hell) and the best strategy is to just have one character attack while the others wait on standby to heal.
You a FF9 modder/hacker? If so, can you explain this unusual script, or point to the source you heard of it? And what is all this decimation you speak of? Combat is easy outside of some bossfights or attempting to beat on Grand Dragons on disc 1. If these probalems are present, ain't no player going to notice it. But I played FF9 with "FF9 Unleashed" hard type rom hack last year and still didn't notice any unusual behaviour, though said mod could have maybe fixed it, and I hadn't played it a decade before that.
Main issue I have with FF9 battle system is how darn slow battle speed is, and said easy difficulty. Would be the first thing I fix anyways.
Anyhow, these "novices" from Hawaii wut? It was in-house at Square surely. It's also a graphical powerhouse, being one of the best-looking games on the PS1. Hmm internet says it was developed in Hawaii, yet all the usual Squaresoft names are involved.
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