Final Fantasy Series

Links:

DK's Domain
Mario's Video Game Central

Final Fantasy 9 was released the last Final Fantasy game on PS1. The creators greatly explained it was going back to the roots of Final Fantasy games. It ressurected alot of the old art and character designs, created a medieval world, and put in technology, magic, and many cool looking monsters. The main character is a bandit named Zidane, who has a job to kidnap the Princess Garnet. After being kidnapped, the princess goes along with it because she was about to run away from home anyway. It's very hard to discuss the story without actually spoiling the game. The story has many characters including the Knight commander Steiner who serves as comic relief throughout the whimsical storyline of the game. The story has a power guage thats charged during battles, once it reaches a limit you can perform a transformation and get extra abilities and status improvements for the rest of that battle. This works particular good on bosses. The other thing is that abilities are learned by wearing equipment. For example, let's say you have a powerful sword which has a weak ability, but you have a moderate or weak sword that has a really good ability. You might want to bear with the weak sword, so you can learn the powerful ability. It provides alot of depth. You can also make new items using other items which have rare abilities. There is built into the game a card game you can play for fun. You can randomly talk with people and sometimes ask them if they want to battle. If you win, you can win lots of cards. I can truly say this game felt like a classic RPG with good humor and improvements. The story was really good throughout the game as you discovered the stories of you comrades and Zidane's, but during the end (last few hours) the game became really weird and took a turn for the worse (story-wise). The main bad guy essentially wanted to destroy the world for no good reason, I guess every Final Fantasy game needs a psycho final boss. Overall, Final Fantasy 9 is one of the greatest rpgs in our time and should be given its fair due of attention.

The first revolutionary Final Fantasy game in a while, it got rid of the whole going into the world map, travelling, and finding out what to do next in favor of a track-based story which lead you from one art to the next. In the beginning this was rather fresh and innovative, but as the game went on it became a chore. Some of the bosses were just ridiculously difficult with luck having alot to do with victory. The story during the mid-point of the game became really lame. It introduced some new things in the series. Now one can switch between all characters during battle at will which is kind of nice. However, now there is a really lame and boring grid system which you use to increase your character's stats. The grid was also used to teach abilities and magic. There is the ability to call Aeons (Summon Monsters) using the healer. Other than this, the game is not very well put together. The voice acting is annoying, the main character's voice is the most annoying. The story is not very well thought out. Dead people can float around until they are summons, so characters you defeated and killed come back as ghosts to fight you again, and again, etc. It's just plain weird. The game is really hard. RPG battles aren't as fun anymore. And once you beat the game you feel, you are glad you never have to play it again. However as many bad things I can say about it, its really ok, nothing better though. Basically, don't get this game, its cool in the beginning but becomes a chore.