Final Fantasy IX

[Lex]

I came here to post this and I'm like 6 days late lmao

 

[LooserGamer]

^ That's awesome

 

[Vivi_Carol]

just finished watching "Inside Final Fantasy IX" , absolutely amazing, my capacity is growing. I live for these videos.

 

[Ite]

I really love that they said that a major influence for them was The Dark Crystal. One of my top-3 all time movies and top-3 all time games, no coincidence!

 

[Strangelove]

https://sites.google.com/view/moguri-mod/

has this been posted before?

 

[Claymore]

Never heard of that before, but that looks pretty cool. It's a shame that the image has been brightened so considerably, but the payoff of the enhanced backgrounds is clear.

Been meaning to replay the game at some point, so this would be a nice way to do so.

 

[Gary Caelum]

I saw that a while ago while they were just experimenting with it.

It's quite impressive on the whole, but the quality it comes out with for the backgrounds is quite inconsistent. They use that picture of Conde Petie on the main page because that looks really good. But then quite a few other ones (look at the black mage village scenes) just look like a standard photoshop filter's been used.

I figure give it another 5 years and the tech will probably have improved to fix that. If they can get the whole thing looking as good as that Conde Petie shot, I'd be sold. Lol even though they can't technically sell it. Square Enix should hire them to release it officially.

 

[ForceStealer]

This is a pretty interesting read regarding strategy guides in general. But there is particular talk about IX's infamous guide: https://kotaku.com/how-final-fantasy-ixs-strategy-guide-turned-out-so-horr-1834809621

 

[Ite]

My brother paid good money for the FFIX guide. By the time I played the game four years after release, the website was down, so it was a book full of advertisements for the same 404 error.

 

[ForceStealer]

Fortunately I never had or even saw the FF9 guide. I've only heard tales of it's awfulness.

 

[Lex]

I still have that guide and I didn't have access to the internet. I remember going to my friend's house after school and he would let me use the internet and I used post-it notes lol. Terrible times.

 

[Lex]

Never mind, I didn't use post it notes. I used maths paper and sellotape. I keep all the guides on a shelf and decided to look at my FFIX one:

 

[ForceStealer]

Reminds me of the inside of all my Sega game boxes, packed with notebad paper with codes scribbled on them

But, of course, those are supplemental information to a book that was paid for to tell me those thing already.

 

[Tetsujin]

That PlayOnline shit was so dumb. The lack of foresight on that, dang. At least Square never tried that again after IX. Back in the day I was so annoyed because I was a kid with no internet.

 

[ForceStealer]

I just played IX without a guide LIKE A BAWSS

And by "like a bawss" I mean "like a kid who had to start the game over again in Gizamaluke's Grotto because I didn't know about synthesis shops and was utterly underpowered."

 

[Ite]

Gizamaluke! My first playthrough I had no Quina, no Rei's Wind, but I did have the Butterfly sword. I probably spent 15 hours grinding around that dang bell, with failed attempts at the boss every hour. I died SO MANY TIMES.

The strategy guide of course directed me to PlayOnline so many times I stopped referencing it long before Black Waltz 3.

 

[ForceStealer]

I had burned all my money on items and sold equipment to keep doing that, so when I discovered the Synth Shop, I rightfully decided it would be faster to start over than grind up the necessary funds to fix it, lol.

 

[Kuja9001]

I had burned all my money on items and sold equipment to keep doing that, so when I discovered the Synth Shop, I rightfully decided it would be faster to start over than grind up the necessary funds to fix it, lol.

I miss my first run, I knew nothing about the tent trick other than seeing my own team get hit with the bad status ailments lol. Did no chocobo hot and cold, so I had no good abilities.

 

[Lulcielid]

Patch 1.02 fixes long running music bug on PS4.
http://www.novacrystallis.com/2019/...sion-1-02-patch-fixes-long-running-music-bug/

 

[Makoeyes987]

I did a run awhile back where I got all possible items and treasure save Excalibur II, defeated Ozma, got Dragon Crest and Frog Drop powered up to deal 9999 damage, and get all characters their abilities.

At that point I resolved to not play FFIX for a long ass time

There are soooooo many missable items in this game. The most I think of any FF.

 

[Strangelove]

i never got the excalibur ii or defeated ozma (and probably a bunch of other stuff), do the boosters they added for the ports make those things easier? i think i have it on my ps4 atm so i might go and try to do that at some point

 

[Lex]

Been replaying this on the PS4 for the platinum trophy after playing through this port when it released on Steam.

I have some major criticisms that I remember from last time but I think they genuinely impact the experience in a negative way:

- The menus (in style) were obviously built for mobile so visually they're not great, but I think worse than that they don't operate in 60fps meaning they're really sluggish to move through. The ports of VII and VIII also had this problem.
- There is 8-directional movement. WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS. They took analogue support out of the game altogether! One of the best things about FFIX was how smooth the exploration gameplay was and it was down to having analogue movement.

Both of those things are downgrades from the Playstation original which is mad.

That said, the character models look great and I can't stress enough how good being able to turn off random battle is. Choosing when you want to fight improves the experience of all 3 PS1 FF titles for sure.

On my road to the platinum so far I've done all the worst trophies. I dedicated my first playthrough to the Excalibur II perfect game challenge (which is a breeze with no random encounters and speedup) which I completed a couple of days ago. I even managed to fit in getting all the chocographs and treasures before I picked the sword up!

I actually only turned on the game to see if I could do the 1000 jump rope challenge (there's a trophy for that) and kinda thought if I managed it I'd follow through with the rest of the trophies. I've done this twice before - once on PC when it released on steam, and once when I was 11 years old and it used to make me cry. After I was successful (1170ish jumps!) I decided to go ahead with the Ex2 challenge, and I didn't even load a fresh game so I actually started with a 40 minute disadvantage lmaoooooo. Speedup really makes it easy, I made the time back in no time.

Then I did the unique 100 tetra master NPC wins which was not as painful as I expected. Followed by the 10000 kills trophy which was the worst.

Now I just need a few odds and ends to get the platinum but it needs another playthrough because there's an obscure trophy for colour fortunes in Dali (which I no longer have access to) and another for the Benero brothers shuffle minigame which you have to get right 6 times in a row :/

But I'm nearly there! Put my time off work to good use lmaooooooooooo

 

[Ite]

I also just played this on PS4 this week for the first time, and I have roughly the same impression. Switching between walk and run in the config menu is heinous. But switching off “intro battle cam” is a qol improvement I was not expecting. I did mega speed and was able to get my buddy’s save file to a place where Desert Palace wouldn’t completely destroy him. That was about all I did.

 

[Scribe]

The 1000 jump rope thing made me Nope the platinum trophy for this game. I can't get passed 20

 

[Theozilla]

Is there some software reason why analogue movement was lost in the port from the PC/mobile version and/or couldn’t be restored?