The last Final Fantasy from the Playstation era, with it's prerendered backgrounds and Active Time Battle system in all it's glory. However, I found this to be one (if not the one) of the most annoying and frustrating Final Fantasy I have ever played, I will go back to that later. Anyway, I personally preferred VIII, but IX excels in a lot of things, from the setting, to backgrounds to the music, there's no denying how impressive they all were. The story was average, and I liked it better than VII, I didn't feel it picked up pace and often times (mostly during the beginning), it would drag and I would not be interested at all. As you progressed, there were some very good scenes, I really liked the one where the party cheers Zidane on and show him that they are a team. The love between Zidane and Dagger isn't as well done, it feels... contrived at times, since you know that they are going to be together, and there aren't many memorable moments between them. And then the ending!!! Whoa! It was just so badly paced, after spending up to an hour on the final bosses, I wanted to find out what happens afterwards, and you get this massive thirty min ending where most of the time is made up of just waiting for the next line of text to appear. It was very annoying in that you couldn't just press 'x' to get the next sentence up. I just wanted to know what happened to Zidane and Dagger and it's only until the last five mins (if that), where you're finally satisfied, after all the waiting. That said, the ending did kinda make up for it and will bring a smile to your face. Credits were nicely done too, with replays of the FMV throughout the game.
Onto the gameplay, one thing that was more noticeable to me was that there is a huge proportion of time where you cannot choose your own party members since the story dictates the splitting of them. So what happens? You are ended up having to readjust to the changes in each character's stats and abilities, and also level them all up (especially in certain parts of the game, where if you're underleveled, you're stuffed and the difficulty shoots up). It's until right at the end where your whole party eventually gets back together and you get to choose all your favourite character into a party of four. Furthermore, the battle system just annoys the hell out of me. It is very very slow paced, whereas in VII and VIII, your character performs the action instantaneously, here, you have to wait a few seconds (and a few seconds feels like a very long time when you're near death or just want to quickly finish a random encounter) before they actually perform it. It doesn't help that it's ATB in name only, it's really turn based, where speed only dictates the order of your characters, not the number of turns (e.g. if a character has double the speed of another, it doesn't mean the faster character will get two turns for every one of the slower character). Plus, enemies get in two turns (usually before you) every 'turn', to cater for the four member party (I would rather that enemies be more powerful). Yes, so most likely, you're going to have to sit through all these battle animations and take damage before you can even lay a finger on them.
You get used to that eventually, but it'll still frustrate you from time to time. It just feels so clunky compared to the previous games. A few times, if you put in all your command and then the monsters attack you before any of your party does anything, and you need to heal, guess what? The monsters are going to attack you twice more before you even get a chance, and by then, they're probably dead anyway. I guess it puts in a more strategic element rather than just mashing the 'Attack' command during normal encounters (but seriously, sitting through those animations are darn annoying!). Then there's the final bosses. A difficulty spike right there, out of the blue, more than likely, you're going to get yourself annihilated. The third final boss killed three of my party members with the opening spell, and the final boss gets three turns every round. What's more, it's got these super powerful attacks, a spell which inflicts bad status affects on all your party from a selection of all the status effects in the game AND follows that up with his most powerful attack. Most annoying and frustrating final boss battle right there. And no, my party was not underleveled, and no, I don't want my final bosses to be super easy, but the actions of this one feels like he's cheating. Oh, and he has enhancements on himself so you can't damage him as much as you normally would. Okay, now that I got the battle system out of the way, what's left? The music, it is good, very good. It's not just a few tracks are good, it's most of them. They suit the setting and what's happening very well, the battle theme ("Battle 1") is amazing, "Not Alone" was stunning, that scene will resonate with you just because of the music, and of course the theme, "Melodies of Life". This was the one aspect which I really liked.
The quality of the FMV's are the best out of the three (VII, VIII and IX), but somehow I felt that it was used more sparsely than the other two. It seemed to have been used for displaying the beautiful scenery, more than action sequences. Oh, that's right, I forgot to mention the ridiculous number of scenes the game has, or the length of it. I understand this is a JRPG and most of the fun comes from the story, but I think they went overboard for this one, way too many scenes ruin it and make it more boring. There's a prominent card minigame here just like VIII, but it's nowhere near as easy to get. It's more complicated and harder to understand, which should theoretically make it more interesting to master. I never played it except once to try it out, and then three more times as part of the storyline. The game never really seemed to have pushed the game to you like it did in VIII. So, after all the frustrating and annoyance (I literally wanted to chuck my controller onto the ground and throttle someone when I got annihilated by a random encounter in the last dungeon where they just spammed a really power spell twice in a row, with no chance for my characters to take any action), I still think it's a worthwhile game to play, if only to say that you've played it before.
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