Emulator Hour: Final Fantasy IX - 1/2 (PSX)

Art by Catapulted Carcass

I played a lot of Final Fantasy IX over the holiday break.  Like 8 hours or so.  It was nice to put some real time into this game.  I'm about 20 hours deep and have just reached disc 3.  Disc 2 comes to an end in a satisfying way, and disc 3 has now set us up for what feels like a totally new story arc.  I like that.  It seems really well paced.

At first I thought FF IX was a little slow, and a little childish, but by this point in the story, I'm pretty invested. I really like the characters.  Vivi is earnest, Dagger is thoughtful.  I didn't like Zidane at first; he seemed like a generic hero-guy.  However, by the end of Disc 2, I can say that I like his character because despite his generic arrogant, ladies man personality, he has shown time and again that he really values friendship and teamwork.  He is consistently supportive and encouraging of the other characters.  I love it.  Because of this quality, I'm able to appreciate his constant hitting on Dagger who is constantly shutting him down.  It's effortless on her part.  I really hope they don't end up in in a relationship, I think that deep platonic love would be better.

The Major Criticism I have of the first half of this story is that sometimes plot elements are given a really superficial treatment which is disproportionate to their importance.  ***Spoilers***  At the end of the first disc, the Country of Burmecia is invaded an thoroughly routed.  This is a big deal, not just because of the loss of life and the huge political change, but because one of the  playable characters (Freya) is a knight of Burmecia, who is returning home, to utter ruin, after a long time away.  This is a really big deal, and it seems rushed.  It's treated as 'just another dungeon' more or less.  Maybe I notice this even more because Freya is my favorite character, but there just isn't enough time to digest how big of a deal this is. 

Part of the problem is that, up to this point, we have never seen Burmecia, we've only heard about it in conversations with Freya, and our first time seeing it, it has been destroyed by war.  Idunno, it just makes it almost easy to write off in an 'oh well' kind of a way. I don't like this. 

To make matters even worse, at the beginning of the second disc, the refugees from Burmecia have escaped to nearby Cleyra, a Giant Tree run by pacifist monks and protected by a huge sandstorm.  We are told that Cleyrans are Burmecians who broke away like a thousand years ago, and have remained protected by the sandstorm.  Sounds good, nice that some people are safe.  But after just a short stay in Freya, Queen Brahne (bad guy) invades, and destroys the ENTIRE THING in one attack.  It is unambiguously leveled completely, and every character we were just hanging out with is killed.  Like... the previous scene was all about Cleyra being a sanctuary, and boy wasn't that a close call for the Burmecian survivors, and now -- all dead.  thousand year old sanctuary, leveled.  Reclusive, pacifist monks, dead.  Welcome to Burmecia they have a rich history, now it's all gone.

But that's war, right?  That's vicious terrible facism, is that what we're supposed to get from this?  Maybe, but the tone of the game stays fairly light, regardless.  It just doesn't fit, for me, that such a terrible tragedy woudl happen in a generally light game.  And what really drives it home for me is that we are given approximately 5 seconds of time to mourn the loss.  Our heroes escape at the last second, and watch the tree get destroyed.  Then, we rejoin them, still in danger, and Freya is unresponsive, in grief.  But hey, snap out of it Freya, we gotta hide from the bad guys!   This doesn't even happen at the end of a disc, where the sort of 'act change' would have created a dramatic pause of some kind.  (incidentally, this change is managed veyr well at the end of disc 2, which is where I got hte 'dramatic pause' idea). 

And that's it.  Hundreds or thousands of people all destroyed in what amounts to an atomic blast.  An Entire Culture wiped off the face of the map.  Two, really, as Burmecia was taking refuge in Cleyra.  And we just get one small moment of silence from what might be the last survivor.  five seconds to mourn, and that's all you get.  Farewell Cleyra, we barely knew ye. 

That's not enough.  It relaly bugs me.  relalylaly.

I briefly considered putting the game down at that point.  It was just... bad.  Weak storytelling.  But, I stuck it through anyhow, and I've found that the further behind I leave this scene, the better I enjoy the game.  I've gotten an idea of the pacing and the level of depth, and the game hasn't done anything half as bad as that scene.   So now I've fallen into a good rhythm with the game, I think that the core of the story is the relationships between Dagger, Zidane and Vivi, and this is expressed, developed and renewed at every major plot point.  I'm fully expecting the second half of this game to pay off on this work its done in the first. 

Whew.  I had to get that out.  Believe it or not, I really am enjoying FFIX, but I really had to talk about this big hurdle I had to get over.