[Guitar Woman]

FF9 was so busy trying to be old school that it forgot to make anything else about it interesting at all, and in a lot of places it's less of a throwback and more of a copypaste job. This is most apparent in the idiotic stock characters taken almost entirely from 6 and 7, the absolute worst cases being Quina and Amarant, also known as Cait Sith and Vincent Valentine. I remember timrpgland referring to 9 as the "wannabe Final Fantasy," and I'd have to say that synopsis is pretty spot-on.

It also felt like Half Life: Final Fantasy edition, in that I was constantly being funneled towards my goal whether I liked it or not, sometimes without the reason for my epic treks being fully explained and me just going along with it because it's the only way to go. That's another thing, there weren't any sidequests to take on, wheras in 7 I literally lost myself in doing shit like getting all the final limit breaks and ultimate weapons, Chocobo breeding, general dungeon crawling, that sort of thing.

I admit that I really liked the idea of the plot and the game in general before playing it; 9 could have been great, one of the best Final Fantasies, and I have no idea how the developers fucked it up so badly. The soundtrack also had some pretty good stuff on it, and most or all of the pre rendered backgrounds were works of art.

And that's what I have to say about that.