Due to the age of this game, this review contains some spoilers. I tried to keep those spoilers as in check as I could.
I first played Final Fantasy IX twenty years ago as a teen. Like many games from that era, I ended up dropping it pretty quickly. Emulating games and having a seemingly unlimited number of JRPGs to play made it really easy to drop any game the second I got a little bored with them.
For the most part, I don’t think too much about those games I dropped from that time. As much as we all loved PS1 RPGs, that is an era of games that I have little desire to return to. The PS1 era was a time of incredible innovation and change for the gaming industry, but there were also a lot of growing pains that have become increasingly apparent to me as games have continued to evolve over the years.
But FF9 has been one of my few lingering regrets. The game has been consistently considered to be one of the best Final Fantasy games of all time. It is also some people’s favorite game ever period. With a remake of the game also on the way, it felt like it was time to finally try it again and rectify my past wrongs. And in the end, I was very happy that I did. This is a very cool RPG that hits all of the notes that you’d hope any Final Fantasy game would.
Playing it in 2025 is an interesting experience, though. There are design decisions and missing quality of life aspects that feel brutal to experience in 2025. I may not have even noticed some of these issues back in the day, but it’s tough to overlook them now. This review will attempt to look at FF9 from a first timers perspective in 2025. This means that this review could be viewed as inherently unfair in some respects, but I wanted to look at whether this game was worth playing in the modern day. Luckily, the answer is mostly yes, though I can’t help but complain a little bit about the journey as well.
Today, I Learned That A Generic Looking Black Mage Is The Second Greatest Final Fantasy Character Of All Time (Clive Is Still Bae, Sorry)
FF9 kicks off with a bang. The main character, Zidane, is looking to kidnap the princess of Alexandria, Garnet. He is doing this by using a big, epic play that his troop is putting on as a distraction. Only it turns out that the princess is more than happy to be kidnapped, as she had her own intentions of leaving anyway. The first few hours of the game are really fast-paced, and it feels somewhat inspired by FF7. It’s almost like an attempt to recreate the overall vibe of that famous opening. I don’t think it reaches those highs, but the opening sets the pace for most of the game. One of the biggest strengths of FF9 is the pacing, and I’d say it delivers almost the entire way through, despite maybe one or two blips in the back half of the game.
This could be viewed as one of the biggest advantages that the PS1 era has over the modern day, but I was shocked at how consistently plot revelations were happening throughout the roughly 40-hour journey. I kept expecting things to slow down, and they only did in a few spots. This is a product of some strong storytelling, but it also happens because there aren’t tons of side quests or general fluff there to slow you down either. FF9 has much more modest expectations about how much time it wants to take up over almost dang near any JRPG in the modern day, which lets them cook and keep things flowing throughout the game’s story.
More than anything, the story stays interesting because it tackles some really heavy and difficult themes. Most notably, the acceptance of death and how we choose to respond when we realize that death may be imminent for us. This is a point in life where it is easy to act more selfishly, and FF9 takes a really interesting look into that.
The big star of this theme is Vivi. Vivi is a kind child who looks like a generic black mage from older Final Fantasy games. It turns out there’s a reason for that, as he was actually “made,” as well as many other black mages, as war machines by the queen of Alexandria, Brahne. Vivi must first go through the revelation that he was “made” in this way and come to grips with that. He must then go through learning that his lifespan is expected to be roughly one year. It’s one of the most heartbreaking concepts I’ve seen in a video game. Watching the way Vivi and the game tackle this never stopped moving me. It could be argued that this is the best individual character arc in any Final Fantasy game ever. Every time Vivi was on the screen and dealing with his issues, I was fully engaged.
While no other character in FF9 reaches those highs, Vivi is not the only character that I enjoyed in FF9. I liked almost every character to some extent. Even characters that I didn’t love at first all eventually won me over by the end of the game . Almost every character in your party has an interesting story arc that makes them grow as characters over the course of the game, and it’s all pretty well executed. The writing is strong and makes all of these characters feel unique and defined as well. While I would love to see the voice acting that we’d get from a modern-day rendition of this game, all of these characters feel alive even without it.
The world of Gaia, where the game takes place, also feels incredibly alive. When I think about the PS1 era, I often cringe when I think about the graphics from this time. For obvious reasons, this is probably the only era of games where visuals arguably took a step back from the previous generation. Developers were adjusting to 3D graphics without the power to do even close to what we can do today or even a generation later. I came into this game expecting to not think about the graphics much at all, but I actually found myself wowed by them on many occasions. The character models are, of course, nothing special, but the pre-rendered backgrounds are absolutely tremendous. I was consistently in awe of the art direction here, and it enhanced each area that I was in. The FMV cutscenes are also top-tier. Even in the PS1 era, these are usually OK, but some of the cutscenes here could almost hold up to today’s standards. As you would expect, the music is all tremendous and more than worthy of the Final Fantasy name as well. FF9 came at the end of the PS1 era, and with all the experience they had with the console at this point, it seems like this game was the one where they truly had a grasp on the technology at their disposal.
Active Time Battles? More Like SLOW Time Battles, MIRITE!!!
I was very pleased that FF9 held up in so many capacities with its story, characters, and even visuals. Unfortunately, I can’t say that about the gameplay. I think a big part of this is that FF9 feels like it was likely behind the times even when it came out.
FF9 features an active turn based system, as was common in that era of Final Fantasy. This means that each character has a bar that slowly refills, and once it does, you can select an attack. If you don’t act, time continues to move, and enemies can continue to attack you. This was made to add urgency to battles and give them an action sort of appeal while still retaining all the standard turn-based mechanics.
The first thing I ended up noticing about this is that the bar fills for each character incredibly slowly, especially in the early going. It’s not uncommon to be stuck waiting for five seconds or more while all the characters just wait for their bar to fill up. There is also a pretty odd feeling delay after you input attacks. I was constantly inputting attacks and then waiting a strangely long amount of time for the attack to actually happen. Attack animations additionally feel unnecessarily long. There were a few battles where I happened to select an attack for someone, and then actually forgot what I had selected, because the attack didn’t happen for well over a minute from when I initially selected it due to all the delays and long animations, and I had already picked other attacks for other people by that point.
Not only does the combat in FF9 feel pretty slow, but it also feels extremely generic and limiting. You gain new abilities, both passive buffs and direct attacks, by equipping new items. You can gain the abilities permanently after using them in battles a certain number of times. For a lot of the early game in particular, I felt like I had shockingly low amounts of moves to use and, thus, very little strategic flexibility in any given battle. The early portions of the game stick you with some very weird party combinations, too. There’s some decent sized stretches in the early going where I didn’t have a healer and had to stick almost exclusively with mediocre items for healing.
This system also leads to an annoying amount of grinding. If you are just playing through the game without grinding, odds are you will not unlock all the abilities from many pieces of equipment by the time you find new gear. Obviously, the main solution to this is to grind. I actually got by for most of the game without grinding, and just dealt with not having some abilities, but there is a pretty massive difficulty spike near the end of the game that forced me to go back and grind anyway, so it probably makes a lot more sense to do it as you go rather than waiting until the end of the game like me. This isn’t the first PS1 RPG I’ve played with a stark difficulty spike at the end of the game, but just because it was standard practice at the time didn’t make it any less annoying for me.
I think what annoyed me in particular about some of the end game bosses is that many of them really require specific passive or active moves in order to fight them most effectively. There is one late game boss who counters all physical attacks, for example. For some of these fights, it felt like I had to fight them first to see what kind of crap they would throw at me and then adjust my moves from there to fight it most effectively. I was able to get through most of the game with a certain setup without too many issues, and it was annoying to have to use a more trial and error approach in the end game.
I know there are people out there who love the grind. I do enjoy that feeling of seeing the numbers go up, but I personally rarely enjoy battle systems that are seemingly built around this exclusively. I thought FF9 leaned into grinding way more than strategy, and that made the grinding a lot less fun for me, especially with the slowness of the battle system. I will say that the HD remaster has an option to speed battles up, but it makes the fights go too fast, which leads to other problems. I just wanted a happy medium, damn it!
Outside of the battle system, a lot of my problems with FF9 are mostly byproducts of that era of gaming. The environments can occasionally be really confusing to navigate. The lack of objective markers or even a description of what to do next make it so that if you take a few days off from the game, there can be an annoying re-orientation period (I tried really hard to leave off in spots where it would be really easy to pick it up the next time I played, but this took some real effort). The world map is also really weird and clunky. The camera controls, in particular, are painfully slow. This is all stuff that was just the way things were back then, but dealing with it in 2025 isn’t always a lot of fun.
That Was Fun, But I Think I’m Good On PS1 Experiences For A Few Years
Despite those complaints, FF9 still excels in the ways that matter most. The story, characters, world, and music are all good enough to capture you even if the gameplay isn’t as good as I would have hoped. There are many rumors about an FF9 remake coming in the next year or two. I personally can’t wait to experience this again but with more modern sensibilities.
I do not think FF9 would have been one of my absolute all-time favorites if I played it all the way through all those years ago when I first tried it. I think there are enough flaws with the battle system in particular that put it steps below plenty of its competition at the time. But everything else is strong enough that it probably would have been a 9/10 or so for me.
Experiencing this for the first time in full in 2025 means I have some other complaints that wouldn’t have been fair or even particularly noticeable in the year 2000. But I did play the game in 2025, and thus, my more modern score is a little lower than that 9/10. Regardless, I’m happy to have finally experienced this game in full. There is a special story here and some incredible moments that I will carry with me for a long time to come.
Score: 8.0/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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