For some reason, Final
Fantasy IX always makes me think a little bit of Christmas.
Actually, I shouldn’t say “for some reason”, because the
truth is I know perfectly well why IX puts
me in a Christmas frame of mind.
Set the Wayback Machine to late 2000. I had shipped out for basic training in the
Army on Halloween of that year. What
with one thing and another, I was in reception and fitness training for a
while, and didn’t get to basic training proper until the day before
Thanksgiving. I don’t know if they still
do, but at the time, the Army sent all Initial Entry Training (IET) soldiers
home for two weeks for the holidays. The
trip home is a short story all by itself, but one for another time.
This was right shortly after the PS2 launch, and I was
sorely tempted to buy one when I got home. But at that time, it was really never even a
possibility. One reason was that I
didn’t have quite enough money to justify it in addition to all the games I
bought while I was home, and my buying those games — a certain core few of them,
anyway — was never in question. Since
they were all PS1 games, there seemed no real necessity at the time for a
PS2. Another reason, far more practical,
was that there simply were no PS2s to be had.
That soon after launch, finding a PS2 in a store was a lot like finding
a Wii after that system’s launch some
six years later.
It was, in some ways, one of the best Christmas seasons of
my life. I felt as free from outside
responsibilities as I ever have, in a way.
Sure, basic training was a stressful environment, and there was no
question of my going back to it after my brief, two-week reprieve was up. But during those two weeks, I was liberated
more completely than I have ever been (and likely ever will be again) from
pretty much all the normal pressures and stresses of life, in the Army or
otherwise.
I can still remember all the games I bought in that shining
two-week stretch: Breath of Fire IV,
Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete
(about both of these, I will assuredly be writing at some later point), Mega Man X5, Mega Man Legends 2, RayCrisis:
Series Termination, Vampire Hunter D
(God knows why), and of course, Final
Fantasy IX. It was Lunar 2 and Final Fantasy IX that I had been most looking forward to. The rest were impulse buys, and mostly worth
it.
To this day, the songs “The Place I’ll Return to Someday”
and “Crossing Those Hills” from the soundtrack put me in mind of snowfall,
Christmas decorations, being with family.
The former, especially, has a nice medieval-ish feel to it.
Of course, there’s nothing especially Christmas-y about IX in itself, but because of this
association, every year when the holidays roll around, I get the itch to start
playing it again.
* * *
In those days, most of the Final Fantasy fans I knew came
into the series with Final Fantasy VII. I did, myself. The history of the series prior to that point
has always been a little murky to me. There
are names of characters, places, weapons, and spells which crop up throughout
the series, and which I know are significant, but which by the same token I
have no personal experience with. Aside
from Final Fantasy III, I haven’t
really made a series attempt at any of the older games, and even my run at III was the DS version. So even most of what I know is secondhand,
things I’ve heard about and read about – absorbed through some sort of strange
osmosis – rather than seen and done for myself.
Final Fantasy VII
and Final Fantasy VIII were pretty
radical departures from the accepted norms of the series (up to that point),
which had always leaned pretty heavily toward high fantasy. Final Fantasy
VI (Final Fantasy III
originally, here in the U.S.) was somewhat steampunk, but that was about
it. Yet Final Fantasy IX is a call back to those earlier times, what we in
the late 90s and early 2000s were calling “classic” or “old-school” (if you can
believe it!). But in the late 90s, Final Fantasy VII and VIII seemed worlds away from their immediate
predecessors. Today, of course, they
hardly seem so revolutionary, except in terms of technical presentation. But that’s hindsight for you. In its time, the look, feel, and themes of IX seemed like a deliberate call back
to yesteryear.
So Final Fantasy IX
is a kind of love-letter to the elder days of the series, name-dropping characters,
places, and items from times past. It
has a light-hearted streak in it, and while many of the human characters look appropriately
anime-styled, a number of non-human characters, like Freya, and Doctor Tot, and
maybe Amarant, look almost like something out of Brian Froud’s work. Even as the story is mainly serious, there’s
a certain sense of fun and whimsy, as if the underlying directive of the game’s
overall design was a question: “Wouldn’t it be neat if…?”
Wouldn’t it be neat if there was a whole city built
throughout the branches and trunk of an unfathomably massive tree? Wouldn’t it be neat if there was an
underground transit system between two cities that was basically a cart slung
from the body of a giant insect who simply walks along a track in the
ceiling? Wouldn’t it be neat if…?
And the world this all takes place in treats all the
oddities – the non-human people like Freya and Amarant, the odd, improbable
locations – purely as a matter of course.
The game never goes out of its way in the narrative to point out all
these weird, wonderful things. It just
puts them there, and you go through them, and you think, “Wow, that’s really
neat!” If anything, it heightens the
sense of wonder. You feel like you’re
discovering these things for yourself, instead of having them forced upon you,
or having them belabored, as if by a tour guide.
* * *
If Final Fantasy IX
takes its sense of light-hearted, free-wheeling adventure from the older
entries in the series, it gets its overall sense of structure and mechanics from
the newer entries still.
Like its immediate predecessors on the PS1, Final Fantasy IX features actively
rendered 3D character models on lush, detailed pre-rendered backgrounds. Battles are still turn-based, and still use
the ATB system originally developed back in the early 90s with Final Fantasy IV. However, the pace of IX is somewhat slow compared to its predecessors. Loading times are longer than they’ve ever
been, which is especially problematic when you’re heading into battles. Minor battles may wind up taking longer to
load (and to exit once you’re done) than they actually take to fight. The battles themselves seem to take longer as
well, compared to earlier games. The ATB
gauges fill slowly (at least, until you get your levels high enough), and the
battles are in some ways bigger. At the
very least, your own party is bigger – Final
Fantasy IX allows you to take four characters into battle, just like the “classic”
games it strives to remind you of so much – instead of just three like VII and VIII do.
Character advancement is also simpler than in previous
games. The gear you equip will have
various skills which you can activate.
If you keep a skill active long enough, you’ll learn it permanently,
even after discarding the equipment itself.
For those who felt hamstrung by the subtle complexities of Final Fantasy VIII’s junction system,
this is a breath of fresh air.
The characters themselves are reminiscent of Final Fantasy IV. Not in themselves, but in the way they are
presented. Each character essentially
adheres to one of the main jobs from the Job System, first introduced in Final Fantasy III. Zidane, our hero, is a Thief. Garnet is a White Mage and Summoner, with a
focus on her White Mage abilities (another character, encountered later, has
the same mix of abilities, but with the balance reversed). Vivi is a Black Mage. Steiner is a Knight or Paladin. Amarant is a Monk, while Freya is a
Dragoon.
This gives you a party of characters with their own unique
identities, both in terms of the story and in terms of game mechanics, which
was an unfortunate failing of VII and
VIII. While the games’ various systems allowed for
a lot of leeway in customization, they did so to the detriment of the
characters’ sense of identity beyond what could be expressed in the story
scenes proper. I personally like the
game mechanics and story to be a bit more solidly merged; I dislike the feeling
that the parts I’m watching and the parts I’m playing are largely divorced, so
I appreciate the way IX handles its
characters.
Ultimately, I’d argue that the game’s… stately pace is probably the only major failing with regards to mechanics
or structure. While in some ways the
overall design isn’t as ambitious as Final
Fantasy VII or VIII, and it does
wind up being fairly linear for most of its length, these are not necessarily
bad things in themselves. We tend to
think of them as bad in terms of Japanese RPG design, because many Japanese
RPGs are quite linear compared to many Western RPGs, and in PS1 era the problem
was especially bad. But it’s not a bad
design choice inherently, and sometimes these familiar elements can be
comforting.
* * *
Final Fantasy VII
started us off with a high-intensity bombing mission, throwing us right into
the action with barely a word of explanation or justification until the
excitement died down. Final Fantasy VIII gave us a CG cinema
scene montage that segued into an intense duel between the two rival characters
of the story, and gave us a nice, exciting battle not too long after.
Final Fantasy IX
begins with the Princess Garnet til Alexandros having a dream that may be a
memory from her childhood, when she was on a boat on a storm-tossed sea. Then the story steps sideways, and gives us
our hero, Zidane Tribal. He’s a thief, a
womanizer, and a wise-cracker. He also,
for some reason, has a monkey’s tail. It’s
important later, actually (kind of), but nobody comments on it. When you have rodent people running around;
and black mages with no faces except for their big, glowing eyes; and the king of
a neighboring country who’s been turned into a sort of insect creature (and
later on, a frog); and various other not-quite-human characters, a man with a
tail seems pretty mundane in context, even if it does appear to be prehensile.
We see Zidane plotting with his companions, part of a group called
Tantalus. They have a dastardly plan
to kidnap Princess Garnet, and then the story steps sideways again, and now we’re in the oversized
blue coat and big, pointy hat of Vivi, a black mage. He’s going to see a play titled “I Want to Be
Your Canary” (though he seems to have been sold forged tickets by a scalper). The play is a sort of faux-Shakespeare piece;
it’s being performed by a renowned theater group called Tantalus…
It sounds maybe like a recipe for drama, or madcap
hilarity, or maybe both. It settles for being amusing,
and being a deliberate start for a story that’s a slow burn most of the way
through. We find out that Tantalus’s
plan to kidnap the princess is actually a rescue attempt. Garnet’s mother has not been herself in
recent years, and she has taken to leveraging the weapons being sold to her by an
arms dealer named Kuja (who looks nothing at all like any other arms dealer the
world – ours or the world of Final
Fantasy IX – has ever known) to
invade neighboring countries and claim more territory for her kingdom of
Alexandria. Among her weapons are the
black mages, who seem to operate with one directive and one directive only: To
destroy.
And yet not all black mages can be bad. Vivi’s one of them, after all. And while Zidane is the protagonist, in a
major way, Vivi is the emotional center, the figurative heart of the
story. The other characters have led lives
that went more or less normally – even Zidane, really – but not Vivi.
Vivi was not born, but created. He is a black mage; in Final Fantasy IX, these are a separate race of beings which Alexandria
has recently begun to use. Like the rest
of these, Vivi was intended to be a weapon, but something went a bit off during
his manufacture, apparently. Instead of
being an engine of mindless destruction, he has a conscience. Where many other black mages you come across are
menacing with their completely obscured faces and large, glowing eyes, Vivi
seems simply innocent and a little naïve, childlike in a way.
Fairly early on, you run across a village of other black
mages who, like Vivi, are choosing to live their own lives. But they face a dilemma. After a period of time – no one knows how
long, and it seems to vary for everyone – a black mage simply… stops. They go limp, fall down, and no longer do or
say anything or respond to anything or anyone.
The black mages aren’t certain what this stopping is, exactly, but they worry
about it, and fear it. Vivi, traveling
with a band of much more normal people – for a given value of “normal” – begins
to understand what this stopping is all about.
More, he begins to understand, from what he has witnessed of the other
black mages, that although he has no way to know how much time is left before he
“stops”, too, all signs point to it being not very long.
But despite his youth, his inexperience, and his childlike nature,
Vivi does the thing which so many other characters, even the seemingly
happy-go-lucky Zidane himself, can hardly bring themselves to do with all their
experience of the world. Perhaps he can
do it simply because he is so childlike, because his experience of the world
has been so limited, and so filled with kind, caring people. He hopes.
In many ways, this hope is the theme of Final Fantasy IX. There's the usual stuff about saving the world from an outside menace that threatens to destroy it, and it's all interesting enough, and well done, but I'd prefer not to give much away, and it will lose a lot of its impact for being known ahead of time. The important point is this: To see
that life is still worth living – that it is still worth going grimly forward in
the face of danger, despair, horrible truths and pain and seemingly certain doom
– requires hope, but in the end, is worth it.
The hope will sustain you, if you let it, if you choose not to close
your heart to it. And that in the
darkest moments, the pain can be borne, and you can go on, because you are not
alone.
* * *
It was surprising to write those last few paragraphs,
because honestly, I hadn’t known this, or at any rate I hadn’t thought this,
about the game until I started writing about it. I find that this is sometimes the case. An idea may be nebulous and vague in my mind,
or completely unrealized, and remain that way until I start trying to put words
to it.
At any rate, I think that’s where I’ll leave this for the
time being. I’m not sure how much I’ve
said here that may be of any real use or import or significance, but I got here
by muddling through from beginning to end, mostly, the way I usually do, and I
think I ended it on the right note, however I got there.
Friendship and fellowship and hope.
I have a hard time thinking of a better way to celebrate the
upcoming holiday than these.
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