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musings on Final Fantasy IX, and also things vaguely related to Final Fantasy IX
did you know Final Fantasy IX is available on the Switch?
i found out last week and i've been fuckall productive since then. it turns out replaying beloved old RPGs is delightful when you can just hit the "win" button to blast through battles that you just don't wanna deal with. 10/10 nostalgia experience, would play again.
rather than properly reviewing thisohmygodican'tbelieveit'ssooldi'mgettingold 19-year-old game, i'm just dumping a bunch of random thoughts here, loosely arranged, for anyone who also enjoys rolling around in blather about 19-year-old games.
(1) home
the main theme song of FF9 is titled "the place i'll return to someday," and in hindsight, it's amazing how apt that title is. just about every major character gets a homecoming in this game. zidane's visit to terra, vivi's visits to the Black Mage Village, and Garnet's return to Madain Sari are the three big ones, but even Freya's return to Burmecia after so many years away counts, though her character moments are too-quickly swallowed by the larger crisis at hand.
interestingly, Garnet's homecoming is the only one that doesn't provoke some sense of existential crisis. quite the opposite, actually—the sisterly vibe between her and Eiko surfaces almost immediately, and when you're standing by the eidolon wall it feels so cozy, and of course, this is the location where that beautiful "Ipsen's Line" scene plays out—the kind of sweet, romantic little vignette that can only happen when you're having a moment of reprieve. in some ways Garnet's got the most stable sense of self of any of them.
FF9 doesn't give off the vibe of a game trying to be deeply thematically coherent/resonant, unlike, say, FF10. it's a bundle of high-spirited fantasy adventure, charmingly delivered, and it's got some things to say about friendship and finding a place for yourself in a big confusing world gone to shit, but it's delivered lightly and erratically.
still, though, gosh i really loved all those homecomings. the bleak stark warm cozy steppe of Madain Sari. the Black Mage Village, before and after, in heartbreaking contrast. and even Terra—yeah, the game was jumping the shark at that point, but it was still eerie to see Zidane look around and think of that blue light he remembered from his childhood, and to sense the raw environmental tension from just being there—the headache he's getting from the light, the way his usually-silver tongue falls flat just trying to talk to these folks. three very different visions of "home."
(2) coherence
the previous bit makes me wonder, actually—people like to drag FF13 and FF15 for having incoherent plots, and, while i see what they're saying, FF9 also suffers from this affliction, and yet people seem to remember it immensely fondly, and rarely accuse it of being, well, a little batty.
i think FF9 gets away with its incoherence more easily because (1) the dialogue is read, not spoken, which i think makes it easier to click quickly through things that might be considered plot holes, or just kinda shrug and say "i must've missed something" if something doesn't entirely make sense, and (2) FF9 mostly keeps in sight the core mood it's going for—this is a Fun Fantasy Romp with a Charming Prat as the leading dude, so we're gonna have warm colors and soft moments and good vibes.
i suspect you can get away with a lot if you really nail a specific vibe/theme.
but you can also see that there was a pull in the other direction, as well—homecoming as a repeated theme isn't an accident, and while the whole idea of "memory" seems to come out of left field (Memoria is a fucking bizarre final dungeon given the vibe of the entire rest of the game), it's clearly foreshadowed by the whole Freya plotline. you can feel the warm-homey-feelings grating against some sort of grand thematic meditation on memory. i found FFXV fascinating partially because i could see all these hastily-stitched-together seams; i could see how many directions in which the development team wanted to pull this whole great sundering mess. i think FFIX has some hints of that too, but they smooth it over so well that you don't notice it so much.
this is a long-winded way of saying, wow, i'd love to be a fly on the wall of the production team for a big ole epic adventure game like this sometime. making 40hrs of storytelling cohere into something consistent must be exhausting and impossible and it's amazing it ever happens at all.
(2.5) an extended rant about terra
the "You're Not Alone!" sequence has always driven me nuts because it's so close to perfect.
see, zidane never seems like the kind of dude who cares overmuch where he's from. we hear him tell a story about going off to find home as a kid, and then he decided it didn't matter—the end! and so seeing him backtread on that lesson he learned as a kid, seeing him misstep so many years later just because he's arrived at Terra.. i mean, it's not impossible, the whole place is a bit of a shock, but i needed to see more of why this shook Zidane so much, particularly after all the pep talks he's given Vivi!
he also never seems like the kind of dude who "does everything on his own." kind of the opposite, really. when he's moping over Garnet being made queen, he spends his time getting drunk and begging to get back into Tantalus and being a huge PITA to Marcus and Blank. whenever someone wants to come along on the adventure, he generally defers to their judgment—he never tells Eiko or Vivi it's too dangerous, and he's fine with Garnet joining on their Desert Palace trip even though she's clearly shook as all hell, and so on.
so seeing Zidane so distraught over this, and seeing his friends rail on him for being such a loner, doesn't make sense. it almost makes sense—or at least, it would only take a couple more paragraphs in the script to make it make sense. you could have Zidane introspect a bit more on his origins—show us that he was putting up a bit of a front for Garnet, when he was saying it didn't matter. show us that he's a bit of a hypocrite—not hugely so, don't render him unlikeable, just show he's willing to extend more charity to Vivi than he is to himself. and bring out a bit more a self-sacrificial streak; show that he goes just a little too far for other people sometimes.
that's it! two paragraphs, and you'd set yourself up to make this scene down the line perfect.
and yet. even as-is, the scene is beautifully staged, the music lends an incredible energy, it's legitimately relieving to have your companions show up mid-battle to save your butt so many times, and you viscerally feel how weak you are without them. (this is a trick FF15 played with, years later, and everyone hated it, but fuck everyone i thought it was great.)
and there's also a sort of strange satisfaction in seeing such an unflappable character turned snippy, turned nasty (it legitimately makes me flinch to hear him call Eiko and Vivi a bunch of "brats")—it gives him a bit of an undercurrent that's not ordinarily visible (and, ha, yes, that's a trope i'm a sucker for).
but, ya know, does it really matter in the end? because i've literally been humming that damn song all damn day so i think they won, right
(3) more game writing stuff
there's a lot of spots in FF9's dialog where someone explicitly says, "you've changed." Zidane says it to Freya when she's all Serious about protecting Cleyra. Zidane says it about Vivi when he gets furious about Kuja. Marcus says it to Garnet at some point. Freya says it to Zidane right before the very last scene.
it's interesting because i would balk at writing a line like that into a short story or novel or whatever—it's too on-the-nose, too explicit, and can't you tell the character's changed, just by context, by their actions? likewise you probably wouldn't see that line in a screenplay for the Latest Hot Netflix Show; you'd want to convey it via the actor's expressions, the way folks' postures have changed, and so on.
that was actually what i found maddening when i took a screenwriting class in college. even though dialogue is often the first thing that comes to me when writing a story, even though my earliest drafts are often just pages and pages of dialogue, it drives me nuts when you can only write the dialogue. for the most part, in screenplays, even giving actors directions on expression / tone / etc is considered too heavy-handed; all you get is dialogue, and whatever the actors bring to their characters, and i was too much of a control freak to really trust actors :P
and with game writing you get even less than that! you get dialogue and, uh, a handful of sprite animations to pick from? good luck conveying what you need with that—it seems like an interesting challenge, and also means that you probably end up just spelling out more for the player.
but i also found the repetition a little soothing/nice, in its own way—it's not just some narrator telling you Vivi has changed, it's Zidane-the-pseudo-adoptive-older-brother-of-Vivi noticing that Vivi's changed, or Marcus-the-random-soft-spoken-stranger noticing that the princess has changed—and to notice someone's changed, you have to know them really well to begin with—it's a beautiful way to show how the cast is slowly pulling closer and closer together.
(this is one of the big advantages JRPGs have always had as a medium, i feel—really pulling you into the journey, and allowing you to experience all these small moments of character growth and interaction in an organic way, in a fashion that would be unbearable if it were, say, a 40hr movie rendition of the same thing.though i guess there are people out there watching Let's Plays and stuff so maybe i'm the weird one here... i started reading War and Peace a few weeks ago and have been thinking a lot about how it accomplishes a lot of the things i love about epic-length RPGs; remind me to write that post sometime)
ANYWAY, as a final passing thought: the ATEs ("little cutscenes showing what other characters are doing while you wander around the city") called my attention to something i hadn't noticed before—the interesting / subtle / dynamic ways in which FF games mess with cast-based storytelling. FFIX does a surprising number of party splits and reunions, and you don't actually get a lot of control over who you have in the party until the very end. that, combined with lots of scenes in which the party members split up and have quiet moments with just 1-2 characters, adds a lot of texture to the game, and deepens your investment in all of them(even though i kind of resent having to use Quina against that earth guardian qq). it reminded me of what FF13 would do just a few games later, and also some stuff i vaguely recall FF6 doing, and it would make an amusing blog post to research & write sometime. (it also reminded me a bit of Tenra Bansho Zero, an interesting Japanese pen 'n' paper RPG that explicitly calls out "don't split the party" as a bad rule of thumb, and has mechanics to actively encourage you to break up your party into smaller groups frequently, to do more interesting / dynamic character development scenes. spiffy.)
(4) final passing thoughts on set pieces & space
it's interesting to me, years after playing these games, that what i remember most clearly are the set pieces. in FFIX, it's the opening theater performance and (of course!) the swordfight minigame, as well as the Festival of the Hunt. in FF8, i vividly remember protecting the Garden from invasion: i remember all the crazy logistics and the thrill of arranging everything just so and punching dudes while swinging from ropes, hell yeah.
and it makes me curious about what it would be like, to try and pack a game more densely with these set pieces, make it where it's all glorious thrilling memorable sequences like that. because, disappointingly, i think some of FFIX's late-game dungeon design is rather flat—Ipsen's Castle is a cool concept, but has a confusing and uninspiring interior, Mount Gulug's forgettable, and so on. i guess you need to space the exciting moments out a bit, pacing-wise, and minigame-centric set pieces are always going to be risky (not everyone wants to repeat the swordfight minigame fifty times to impress the Queen), but when i look back to times i've put a JRPG down, it was rarely when i had to level up, or when it was hard, or whatever—it's when the game was starting to feel stale.
i'd also like to do an extended bit, sometime, on how RPG level design is so much about mediating movement through space in an emotive way (as opposed to the core functionality that e.g. platformer level design entails). the way you can feel the "bigness" of Treno just by the way you're forced to move through it, how Daguerro's quirky little levers and water-systems and such highlight the quirkiness of the whole institution, are two examples that spring to mind; there's plenty of others.
finally, the way that the first minute of this song just plays on loop the whole time you're equipping your party for the final battle is freaky as fuck, that is some A+ underappreciated sound design i never noticed before, bless you Nobuo Uematsu.
and yeah, that's a wrap. FFIX was really fun and joyous and tween-aged me had solid taste. god bless modern ports
i found out last week and i've been fuckall productive since then. it turns out replaying beloved old RPGs is delightful when you can just hit the "win" button to blast through battles that you just don't wanna deal with. 10/10 nostalgia experience, would play again.
rather than properly reviewing this
(1) home
the main theme song of FF9 is titled "the place i'll return to someday," and in hindsight, it's amazing how apt that title is. just about every major character gets a homecoming in this game. zidane's visit to terra, vivi's visits to the Black Mage Village, and Garnet's return to Madain Sari are the three big ones, but even Freya's return to Burmecia after so many years away counts, though her character moments are too-quickly swallowed by the larger crisis at hand.
interestingly, Garnet's homecoming is the only one that doesn't provoke some sense of existential crisis. quite the opposite, actually—the sisterly vibe between her and Eiko surfaces almost immediately, and when you're standing by the eidolon wall it feels so cozy, and of course, this is the location where that beautiful "Ipsen's Line" scene plays out—the kind of sweet, romantic little vignette that can only happen when you're having a moment of reprieve. in some ways Garnet's got the most stable sense of self of any of them.
FF9 doesn't give off the vibe of a game trying to be deeply thematically coherent/resonant, unlike, say, FF10. it's a bundle of high-spirited fantasy adventure, charmingly delivered, and it's got some things to say about friendship and finding a place for yourself in a big confusing world gone to shit, but it's delivered lightly and erratically.
still, though, gosh i really loved all those homecomings. the bleak stark warm cozy steppe of Madain Sari. the Black Mage Village, before and after, in heartbreaking contrast. and even Terra—yeah, the game was jumping the shark at that point, but it was still eerie to see Zidane look around and think of that blue light he remembered from his childhood, and to sense the raw environmental tension from just being there—the headache he's getting from the light, the way his usually-silver tongue falls flat just trying to talk to these folks. three very different visions of "home."
(2) coherence
the previous bit makes me wonder, actually—people like to drag FF13 and FF15 for having incoherent plots, and, while i see what they're saying, FF9 also suffers from this affliction, and yet people seem to remember it immensely fondly, and rarely accuse it of being, well, a little batty.
i think FF9 gets away with its incoherence more easily because (1) the dialogue is read, not spoken, which i think makes it easier to click quickly through things that might be considered plot holes, or just kinda shrug and say "i must've missed something" if something doesn't entirely make sense, and (2) FF9 mostly keeps in sight the core mood it's going for—this is a Fun Fantasy Romp with a Charming Prat as the leading dude, so we're gonna have warm colors and soft moments and good vibes.
i suspect you can get away with a lot if you really nail a specific vibe/theme.
but you can also see that there was a pull in the other direction, as well—homecoming as a repeated theme isn't an accident, and while the whole idea of "memory" seems to come out of left field (Memoria is a fucking bizarre final dungeon given the vibe of the entire rest of the game), it's clearly foreshadowed by the whole Freya plotline. you can feel the warm-homey-feelings grating against some sort of grand thematic meditation on memory. i found FFXV fascinating partially because i could see all these hastily-stitched-together seams; i could see how many directions in which the development team wanted to pull this whole great sundering mess. i think FFIX has some hints of that too, but they smooth it over so well that you don't notice it so much.
this is a long-winded way of saying, wow, i'd love to be a fly on the wall of the production team for a big ole epic adventure game like this sometime. making 40hrs of storytelling cohere into something consistent must be exhausting and impossible and it's amazing it ever happens at all.
(2.5) an extended rant about terra
the "You're Not Alone!" sequence has always driven me nuts because it's so close to perfect.
see, zidane never seems like the kind of dude who cares overmuch where he's from. we hear him tell a story about going off to find home as a kid, and then he decided it didn't matter—the end! and so seeing him backtread on that lesson he learned as a kid, seeing him misstep so many years later just because he's arrived at Terra.. i mean, it's not impossible, the whole place is a bit of a shock, but i needed to see more of why this shook Zidane so much, particularly after all the pep talks he's given Vivi!
he also never seems like the kind of dude who "does everything on his own." kind of the opposite, really. when he's moping over Garnet being made queen, he spends his time getting drunk and begging to get back into Tantalus and being a huge PITA to Marcus and Blank. whenever someone wants to come along on the adventure, he generally defers to their judgment—he never tells Eiko or Vivi it's too dangerous, and he's fine with Garnet joining on their Desert Palace trip even though she's clearly shook as all hell, and so on.
so seeing Zidane so distraught over this, and seeing his friends rail on him for being such a loner, doesn't make sense. it almost makes sense—or at least, it would only take a couple more paragraphs in the script to make it make sense. you could have Zidane introspect a bit more on his origins—show us that he was putting up a bit of a front for Garnet, when he was saying it didn't matter. show us that he's a bit of a hypocrite—not hugely so, don't render him unlikeable, just show he's willing to extend more charity to Vivi than he is to himself. and bring out a bit more a self-sacrificial streak; show that he goes just a little too far for other people sometimes.
that's it! two paragraphs, and you'd set yourself up to make this scene down the line perfect.
and yet. even as-is, the scene is beautifully staged, the music lends an incredible energy, it's legitimately relieving to have your companions show up mid-battle to save your butt so many times, and you viscerally feel how weak you are without them. (this is a trick FF15 played with, years later, and everyone hated it, but fuck everyone i thought it was great.)
and there's also a sort of strange satisfaction in seeing such an unflappable character turned snippy, turned nasty (it legitimately makes me flinch to hear him call Eiko and Vivi a bunch of "brats")—it gives him a bit of an undercurrent that's not ordinarily visible (and, ha, yes, that's a trope i'm a sucker for).
but, ya know, does it really matter in the end? because i've literally been humming that damn song all damn day so i think they won, right
(3) more game writing stuff
there's a lot of spots in FF9's dialog where someone explicitly says, "you've changed." Zidane says it to Freya when she's all Serious about protecting Cleyra. Zidane says it about Vivi when he gets furious about Kuja. Marcus says it to Garnet at some point. Freya says it to Zidane right before the very last scene.
it's interesting because i would balk at writing a line like that into a short story or novel or whatever—it's too on-the-nose, too explicit, and can't you tell the character's changed, just by context, by their actions? likewise you probably wouldn't see that line in a screenplay for the Latest Hot Netflix Show; you'd want to convey it via the actor's expressions, the way folks' postures have changed, and so on.
that was actually what i found maddening when i took a screenwriting class in college. even though dialogue is often the first thing that comes to me when writing a story, even though my earliest drafts are often just pages and pages of dialogue, it drives me nuts when you can only write the dialogue. for the most part, in screenplays, even giving actors directions on expression / tone / etc is considered too heavy-handed; all you get is dialogue, and whatever the actors bring to their characters, and i was too much of a control freak to really trust actors :P
and with game writing you get even less than that! you get dialogue and, uh, a handful of sprite animations to pick from? good luck conveying what you need with that—it seems like an interesting challenge, and also means that you probably end up just spelling out more for the player.
but i also found the repetition a little soothing/nice, in its own way—it's not just some narrator telling you Vivi has changed, it's Zidane-the-pseudo-adoptive-older-brother-of-Vivi noticing that Vivi's changed, or Marcus-the-random-soft-spoken-stranger noticing that the princess has changed—and to notice someone's changed, you have to know them really well to begin with—it's a beautiful way to show how the cast is slowly pulling closer and closer together.
(this is one of the big advantages JRPGs have always had as a medium, i feel—really pulling you into the journey, and allowing you to experience all these small moments of character growth and interaction in an organic way, in a fashion that would be unbearable if it were, say, a 40hr movie rendition of the same thing.
ANYWAY, as a final passing thought: the ATEs ("little cutscenes showing what other characters are doing while you wander around the city") called my attention to something i hadn't noticed before—the interesting / subtle / dynamic ways in which FF games mess with cast-based storytelling. FFIX does a surprising number of party splits and reunions, and you don't actually get a lot of control over who you have in the party until the very end. that, combined with lots of scenes in which the party members split up and have quiet moments with just 1-2 characters, adds a lot of texture to the game, and deepens your investment in all of them
(4) final passing thoughts on set pieces & space
it's interesting to me, years after playing these games, that what i remember most clearly are the set pieces. in FFIX, it's the opening theater performance and (of course!) the swordfight minigame, as well as the Festival of the Hunt. in FF8, i vividly remember protecting the Garden from invasion: i remember all the crazy logistics and the thrill of arranging everything just so and punching dudes while swinging from ropes, hell yeah.
and it makes me curious about what it would be like, to try and pack a game more densely with these set pieces, make it where it's all glorious thrilling memorable sequences like that. because, disappointingly, i think some of FFIX's late-game dungeon design is rather flat—Ipsen's Castle is a cool concept, but has a confusing and uninspiring interior, Mount Gulug's forgettable, and so on. i guess you need to space the exciting moments out a bit, pacing-wise, and minigame-centric set pieces are always going to be risky (not everyone wants to repeat the swordfight minigame fifty times to impress the Queen), but when i look back to times i've put a JRPG down, it was rarely when i had to level up, or when it was hard, or whatever—it's when the game was starting to feel stale.
i'd also like to do an extended bit, sometime, on how RPG level design is so much about mediating movement through space in an emotive way (as opposed to the core functionality that e.g. platformer level design entails). the way you can feel the "bigness" of Treno just by the way you're forced to move through it, how Daguerro's quirky little levers and water-systems and such highlight the quirkiness of the whole institution, are two examples that spring to mind; there's plenty of others.
finally, the way that the first minute of this song just plays on loop the whole time you're equipping your party for the final battle is freaky as fuck, that is some A+ underappreciated sound design i never noticed before, bless you Nobuo Uematsu.
and yeah, that's a wrap. FFIX was really fun and joyous and tween-aged me had solid taste. god bless modern ports
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The thing about "You're Not Alone" is--it's been a few years since I played, but wasn't part of the reason Zidane completely goddamn lost his shit that eh realized he had explicitly been sent to drag someone back home and then ruin everyone else's? My emotional-memory is that that's what breaks him: the idea that this guy, whose whole core is "you don't need a reason to help people," finding out that he was built for destruction and breaking in a different way than Kuja did? I mean, again, it's been a few years, but that's what I remember.