Originally Posted by
BattleFranky69
I'd limit what percent of the story was solid to less than 50 myself, but if it was your first FF I can see how having nothing to compare it to could cloud one's judgment. The whole 'four crystals' thing took such a backseat and then just popped up a brand-new final boss we'd never heard about was possibly the weakest thing about it but by no means the only thing to dislike.
The card game was without a shadow of a doubt the single worst thing about it, absolutely unplayable. The rules literally did not work the way they were explained and winning was entirely randomly determined, no strategy whatsoever was even possible, let alone effective. It was the most grievous insult when Triple Triad from FFVIII worked so well. Instead of just tweaking that or just adding onto existing structure and rules, Tetra Master made any further notion of card-based gameplay untenable.
I think closer to half of the characters were likeable as opposed to your ratio but that's just me. Steiner was particularly insufferable early on and still for quite a while after. Same with Beatrix but she was worse because of how stupid fighting her was.
Fighting was a tad bit of a chore since without character customization available in other games (Materia system from FFVII, Junction system from FFVIII, and later on in the game, the Grid in FFX), each character was completely stuck in their job class and limited to their abilities in that way; it also wasn't challenging at all. Two attacks that can cause 9999 automatically are incredibly easy to obtain, not that anything merits spamming them. Plus having to use Zidane to steal from bosses to get unique items and the low success rate, forcing you to repeatedly keep the boss alive and let it pound on you while you wait for the last thing you can get from it to be successfully pilfered, is irritating and lowers the replay value (not that there's much to begin with).
Kuja was a fairly decent villain but you had to wait til practically the end of the game to figure out what his deal was which isn't the case with most of the other games. I'll admit, his scheme became a 'show, don't tell' moment better than most of the others but wasn't the best by any means. His theme was probably some of the best music in the game but per capita (I own both FFVII and FFVIII soundtrack albums), the amount of tracks on IX didn't even exceed the need to use more than one hand to count them for which ones were good enough to keep. Just by comparison the effort put into its soundtrack was abysmal and so many were just obvious repeats of the main theme with different instrumentation. I know that happens in the other games but it's not anywhere near as blatant, and not for nearly as many tracks. Plus they ripped off one from FFVII rather than coming up with a new one. What more proof do we need that they were being lazy?
The backgrounds did look good, I'm not going to dispute that particular point. I liked the FMV sequences too, and the character designs were admittedly good for the PSX era, and I appreciate that they took a different direction with them than previous entries which were more superdeformed in FFVII and more realistic humanoid but very stiff and rigid in appearance in FFVIII. But I've long said, the look of a game itself has very little to do with the overall quality.
The game also feels far more linear for far more of the game's length than any of the other games and separates the parties far too often so that even if you do have particular characters you like using, it's impossible to access them when you want and there become huge level gaps between them once it finally lets you have the freedom the airship provides. It's also difficult to get the 100% completion satisfaction if you're the sort who goes for that kind of thing, which I am, because at the time it was released, the strategy guide was abhorrently lacking in detail and so many of the sidequests are limited-time access only and backtracking to finish them is impossible. I know it's not a problem anymore now that the internet is everywhere but that stuck with me since I'm old enough for it to have been from my high school days when it first came out. The minigames were also lackluster from what I can recall. That whole Chocobo Hot and Cold thing was too random for my taste. Time limits in games and me do not mix well. And when luck outweighs actual skill in accomplishing an objective (the card game applies here as well), it's a waste of time for the most part.
In all, the bad far outweighed the good and if I ever do get around to giving it another go, the things I mentioned will have largely not changed. I get that it being the first foray into the series can color one's opinion, as can it not being one's first foray (I think for me it was the fifth or sixth one I played, not to mention other RPGs in general, especially ones from Squaresoft at the time like Xenogears), but I just can't see it through your eyes the way you do.
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