>>12359001
lookin' good

>>12359001
My biggest gripes were that they locked the best weapons behind that awful chocobo mini-game, and all the missable summons. Also, by the time I got to the end I got kind of burnt out due to all the status related attacks and having to balance that.

>>12359009
yeah I definitely agree. changing the ribbon from being all status immunity to elemental and then having to use the magic stone allotments to move around different status immunities was really annoying. without a guide it would be just completely annoying.

I did not play much of that Chocobo mini game,and I guess now cheats are built into emulators I used a cheat to always improve steal rate and one to advance a bit with the Chocobo mini game. but you still had to dig up the actual treasure map thing which was extremely amazing. I was able to get the robe of lords and protect ring from scamming the points near the end of disc 3 when I realized how much side quest bullshit I had missed by not even understanding that mini game really.

big disappointment. it was much harder than just raising a gold Chocobo in FF7 since the stupid hot and cold game is RNG bullshit.

>>12359016
>cheating in hot&cold

Not everyone can have the intellect of Ulillillia

FF9 is mediocre. Its heart is in the right place and some of the story beats are cool, but it's a chore to actually play. The pacing is all over the place and everything just takes so fucking long to play out with the battle system. It's like an entire game of the Laguna sections from FF8.

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iToddlers BTFO

>>12359156
Laguna is the only decent part of 8

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>>12359173
Inaccurate opinion based on a half-forgotten memory. The Laguna sections objectively suck. Literally the only thing anybody can recall about them is The Man with the Machine Gun being a banger, and whilst it is, that does not excuse the actual "gameplay" part being tedious garbage consisting of endless battles against the same two enemies, timewasting and cutscenes full of "wacky" Reddit dialogue.

>>12359147
Anyone with a brain finds h&c to be unbearable liking it is a sign of being a lower life form.

>>12359156
yeah 1000 percent. I hated all the laguna cutaways in FF8 and would have enjoyed it a lot more without it.

I also cant stand games that mess with your party composition or force certain characters which I felt ff9 did too often.

>>12359147
its not that I cheated at the mini game just once everything opens up in disc 3 I was going to tackle the Chocobo side quests when I figured out I was going to need to spend several hours doing an RNG mini game I said fuck it and just got what I could with the max points. I missed doing the super boss and some other good things but I still managed to get get Pumice in the end game to use Ark.

in ff7 there its mostly skill other than some RNG for the breeding

>>12359001
Largely agree although I find Disc 1 to be the best part of the game. FF9 is a messy game but I have fond memories of it and when I replayed it around 2020 many of those memories were confirmed to give the same warmth they did 20 years before that. I'll replay it a few more times in my life. The ability system is really boring and not half as fun as materia and the appeal of kitting out characters with back stocked gear is great for when you're a teenager but not that appealing anymore.

>>12359016
I played the standard version of the game via psp emulation on my vita, so no cheats or speeding anything up for me. Had to take the full brunt force of the negatives. Still, I generally had a really good time outside of those gripes, I just wish I would have enjoyed the finale more as, like I said, I got so burnt out on status effects that I just watched the rest of the game on YouTube. It wasn't even difficult, I just wasn't having fun. Also, having Zidane be more or less forced into stealing the entire boss fights was not a great choice either, especially when you had really bad RNG like I did. Felt like you were always down an attacker until you finally got what you wanted, then you'd just melt the monster.

Still, characters and story was nice, they had some amazing pre-rendered background, a lot of monster variety, and the ending definitely left you feeling good. I just wish the lows weren't so darn low in that game cuz the highs are incredible.

>>12360307
yeah 100% steal is a cheat I used starting with that insane flute steal from a boss when you get Eiko. I went to turn it off once I get Master Thief and it made boss fights a slog again.

apparently in newer versions they have a FF button or speed modifier and steal rate modifier as "gameplay boosters" or something rather than calling them cheats. the two things really can not be stated enough as being massive QOL improvements for FF9.

I thought the end was decent though and fun overall just not one of the all time best final fantasy games for me

>>12359016
just noticed this spelling error. the RNG digging of Chocobo Hot and cold was extremely ANNOYING not amazing. but if I ever replay this, I will 100% the chocobo shit because I felt I was missing out on a lot and you also need to break it up into chucks throughout the game (which is as its intended I think) because its a tedious terrible grind.

>>12360283
yeah I agree on the equipment ability system. Also while initially I thought the equipment synthesis system would be awesome, I grew to hate it since you'd find out a few hours later you should have bought several duplicates of a useless item to get one awesome ability and now you can't get back to that town, or the inventory changed. and then you have literally hundreds of stupid weapons in your inventory because you never want to a sell ANYTHING since you never know if some ultimate weapon with game-changing ability required a missable knife in the previous disc or something

>>12360375
Oh yeah, you definitely need to play it in chunks. The game even encourages it, as Mene even tells you after obtaining a certain number of Chocographs that you won't be able to find any more for the time being. I, for one, appreciate when the game lets me go off the beaten path and just do other side shit for a bit, and that's something FF9 does pretty well for the most part. It's not completely open prior to Discs 3 and 4, of course, but the fact it often lets you explore and find some things to do aside from progressing the main quest is really nice.

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>>12359173
>Awww hell yeah! Time to finally explore this huge futuristic city!
>FUCKING FAINTS.

>>12360408
yeah a couple years ago I went to replay ff8 and just quit randomly in disc 2 when it went to another Laguna flashback. I couldn't stand it anymore and had well over 20 hours in the game. I usually never quit a game that far in but ff8 was just unbearable in that regard. it did a lot of things right

triple triad is way better than the retarded random hexadecimal shit in tetra master and the cards are actually valuable in FF8.

but thats why ff8 and ff9 seem more similar than ff7 which to me is very unique and still is to this day. ff8 and ff9 seem like two branches on a Y of the same types of concepts

>>12360367
If you're replaying, "100% steal" is totally okay.
You take out a lot of "risk vs reward" that makes the battles more interesting, but with stuff like 1% chance steal in only one encounter, for the only item in the game that teaches a mid-level ability? That's just silly. I could see maybe a 15% chance being tolerable.

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>>12360367
>>12360654
sup pussies
oh, you want this fairy flute?
how's a 1 in 256 chance of taking it from me sound?

>>12360367
Yeah, I think the game falls into that "flawed gem" territory. It's certainly good, but over time the more tedious aspects of it have started to really show. I have a feeling it's a lot easier to overlook those aspects as a kid, especially when it releases, but now it's a bit hard to excuse them. Still, I generally enjoyed my time with it. I spent ans absolute ton of time getting lost in the world and it wasn't till the very end that I finally got burnt out.

it also doesn't help that I'm not really a jrpg guy and have oddly specific taste when it comes to them. I like Pokemon rom hack. I like the various Mystery Dungeon titles (Shiren included), and I like Dungeon Crawlers akin to Etrian Odyssey. Anything else has a super hard time keeping my attention.

>>12360665
Yeesh, what a messy post. My lack of sleep is catching up with me.

>>12360661
I like them odds

>>12360367
>"gameplay boosters"
>QOL improvements

Every single re-release and remaster does this. You wanna know why? Modern gamers are offended by the concept of cheats. If you tell them that "max out all my stats and magic in FF8 at the press of a button" is a "cheat" instead of a "gameplay booster QOL improvement", guaranteed people will start throwing negative reviews.

That doesn't change the fact that they are cheats.

>>12361592
There are better ways to waste your time.

>>12362869
You get that flute at certain shops later anyway, and the only spell it teaches that you can't get through other means at that point of the game is Esuna, which is the same as just using a Remedy, so it is indeed a waste of time.

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It's a chore to play, tedious, slow. They tried to sell it as "for fans of the classic games" but nothing that made the classic games great was in it. No jobs to change (the crystal BS was pure micromanagement garbage), learning from weapons was rigid, stiff, boring. Classic story elements were at best implemented poorly, such as the fiends. On top of that it came with its own issues, like tons of missable crap and garbage minigames.

With all it's flaws, I like FF9 because of how well it caters to a player who wants to play dirty. You can grind on the dragons early and be effectively invincible for a good chunk of the game, and you can also use the blood sword with Marcus and Garnet to power-level Garnet and Eiko, and steamroll a good portion of the game. Then you can load up on abilities to make your people immune to most everything and easily curbstomp enemies and bosses outside of the hidden bosses.
Had fun replaying recently with cheats to get the gold chocobo early and explore around where you shouldn't be able to. Was disappointed by how locked down it got once you left the starting island, and how going anywhere would immediately lock you out of progressing forwards, but I had fun messing around until then.

>>12361620
The speed boost makes ATB games harder, assuming you have ATB set to active.
But you're on the money with the semantics game of "noo they're not cheats."

>>12363114
Only two cheats I think are 100% justified, anything to speed up the combat a bit as that's just a preference, and if theres a way to skip the AWFUL Chocobo mini-game. Playing hot and cold for several hours with RNG progression is not fun. It's not skillful. It was just an absolute misery and I wonder if I wouldn't have gotten burnt out by the end if I didn't suffer through the day and a half of playing that awful thing.

>>12359001
It was a fun return to form gameplay wise coming off 6-8 atb battles and whatever the fuck 8 was. It just felt like story and world wise they dumped out the drawer full of “that’s a neat idea, were out of time and money so let’s table that idea for the next game” and mushed it all together. And what the fuck were they thinking with Quina?

>>12363241
Being able to marry Vivi and Quina off made her character worth it. The laugh I got off that one part of the game made me like the character well enough.

>>12363241
>And what the fuck were they thinking with Quina?
"Holy hell, every character in this game is depressing as fuck, we need a light-hearted main character to keep the game grounded in fantasy and not some dirge" would be my guess. Everyone else has a bad history, or goes through bad shit during the course of the game.
Zidane's life is totally fucked, Garnet has her world collapse, Steiner loses his reason to exist, Eiko is an orphan with a stunted childhood, Amarant is a cold blooded merc with no real future, Vivi is effectively alone and waiting to die, and Freya's species has been reduced below the point of possible re-population so she's one of the last ones, and she had a front row seat for it. Meanwhile Quina is mostly unaffected by everything and his companions show more concern about his home life than he does.

>>12359001
The only Macs I have are PPC ones running mostly OS9. Does the tool bar show on modern mac OS all the time? Can you not full screen the game?

I think it's really interesting how many times Final Fantasy returned to its roots and what it considered it's roots at the time of making.

FF5 was a return to NES trilogy, and that's easy to see when you play it. But FF9 which is a return to its roots advertised game is so different then any of the past FF games.

It's also strange how grind heavy 9 is compared to prior games. Square was normally really good with balancing encounter rate and enemy scaling but 9 is a return to a hardcore roots that never really existed in FF games? It's almost like Dragon Quest difficulty with a vague FF paint job.

>>12363348
7 and 8 have all the same depressing plot beats for the cast.

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Been waiting for time to replay 9 on my CRT setup. I have a pristine low hour 36XBR200 in my parents basement that I want to play it on but I gotta build up the gumption to get it out of my parents basement and then to my house, and finally up a flight of stairs.

My dad bought it new and he only watched 3 seasons worth of football on it before he replaced it with a super early plasma TV.

>>12363348
That’s exactly my problem. It’s so jarring and out of place. The whole game feels like everything is mismatched and ill-fitting but somehow they managed to create this character that actually feels like it isn’t supposed to be there in that context. She feels like they tacked her on at the end during a booze fueled bender and never bothered to check their work before sending to the publisher. The blue magic isn’t even good, she’s at best a mild burden to carry through the game while simultaneously destabilizing whatever immersion the player is able to achieve in an already chaotic scrapbook of a world.

>>12360661
You don't actually need the flute there and then. It can be bought 2 hubs later

>>12363389
Do notice the sloggish loading times in battle transistions and character going from idle animation to executing the command animation. You are better off just emulating the game and speeding it up.

>>12363463
The Qu clan and Quina are racist depictions of the Chinese. Take that as you will. And yes I can imagine the amount of booze that went into this game was immense. It's one of my favorites.

>>12359001
Starts off great and then becomes less so midway into Disc 2. FFIX suffered from the same issue as FFVIII where most of the continents were barren with a few points of interests scattered about, unlike FFVII that distributed things throughout its world more evenly. Part of me thinks this was due to the limitations of the PS1, especially since the games were placed on 4 discs with much of the prior content being restricted once you get to Disc 4 and given a plot device for it being the case.

>>12363463
>The blue magic isn’t even good
there's a couple bosses that you can neuter completely with magic hammer, and if you make sure they have the best spork they can get at all times they can deal some real damage with physicals too

>>12363781
+that frog attack does 9999 damage every time if you catch enough frogs.

>>12363463
>The blue magic isn’t even good
lol wut, it's super useful. Maybe not so much for damage unless you grind out Frog Drop (and then you have yet another guaranteed 9999 attack), but for support it has great utility. White Wind can heal through Reflect, Angel's Snack can cure most status ailments, and Mighty Guard buffs your entire party's defenses.

>>12359001
The world building and writing in this game is so bad.
>Mist continent has 3 kingdoms, only one of them has mass airship technology, and is the commerce hub of the known world, but is constantly under threat from Alexandria. Rat people still live in the stone age
>Treno, the city full of extremely rich aristocrats and nobles, with underground tunnels to every other major city-state is the only one not targeted for takeover and subjagation by Alexandria
>Naval tech is established, but no one knows about the 3 other continents existence except for black mages who somehow get there and then suddenly on disc 3 everyone knows about the lost summoner tribe and its legends
>a crystal to summon alexander was split across 4 nations even though 3 of them don't know what Eidolons are and the only one that does is on the continent no one knows exists, and all Alexander does is turn Alexandria into an Eidolon anyway
>dwarves say you have to get married and inscribe something on the Ilfa tree after. Entire plot point 20 minutes about the Ilfa tree being inaccesable because of an Eidolon barrier
>The Royal Kuja kidnapped is hidden inside a volcano on a continent no one knows exists, and that Kuja couldn't open without the Gulag stone
>All the black mages follow Kuja even though he admits to their face he is lying to them, and then you are supposed to be sympathetic to the black mages for willingly killing people for no reason
>At the end of the game there is a secret water city that everyone around the world can somehow access and has traveled to despite an airship that runs without mist being required to reach it and only one of those existing in the entire world

>>12364678
All good points. Lol yeah how was the queen of lindblum in my gulug without the gulug stone?
There is great worldbuilding in there, and a lot of it. But at the end of the day it's a silly escapist fantasy videogame, not a super serious allegory for reality with a point to prove, so sometimes the logic falls apart.

>>12363236
Here's how I dealt with it back when I first played the game:
>play Chocobo Hot & Cold for a while
>get annoyed with how hard it is
>leave and just never play it again
It's that simple, just don't play optional minigames that aren't fun.

>>12364753
How is Chocobo Hot and Cold hard? I can understand being frustrated for its RNG whether it decides to give you Chocograph or not but it's not difficult, just money and time consuming

>>12364808
NTA but the RNG isn't just the item yielded. The game itself is dishonest, hidden item locations are changed and shuffled as you play. All you do is wander around button-mashing until you get a reward.

>>12364824
Still beats whatever that FF8 shit was.

>>12364808
It's not hard in the sense that the gameplay is challenging, it's hard in the sense that it's not easy to get the desired result.

>>12364828
Never played FF8, but that must be an absurdly low bar.

>Filtered by Hot&Cold

Probably the same people with zero spatial awareness who can't into tank controls.

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>>12364943
The Chocobo forests in 8 are ridiculously cryptic, not fun, and you get very little out of doing them.

>>12363463
>The blue magic isn’t even good
its blue magic my dude
90% of it is ALWAYS garbage
the remaining 10% ranging from moderately useful utility spells, to literally game-breakingly busted 9999 bullshit

id agree wirth the rest of the assessment were it not for the fact that >>12363760 which makes it wrap back around into being dangerously based
nips are right. fuck dogeaters. maybe they were cool like 2000yrs ago or something, but that aint now

>>12364956
>nonsensical bot post
I have extreme low opinions of anyone NOT filtered by Chocobo Hot&Cold. Liking H&C is proof that you have absolutely no standards and will play literally anything, no matter how stupid, so long as there's some minor reward involved.

>>12361620
right I did think that terminology was strange when I bought the pixel remaster set. especially for EXP and Gil. those are straight up cheats. but I didnt know younger gamers lied to themselves like that, haha

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>>12365092
>minor reward
>MINOR

>>12363352
>12363352
I dunno I just leave it like that. this is on the second newest OS, Seqouia because I only have an m2 and the windows vista "glass" of the latest OS is a major resource hog and looks like shit. I doubt anything has changed though

probably some other options to change it but I like having the tool bar at the top since it lets me quickly access other save states and other options and keep and keep and eye on other stuff

now if the dock was showing that would be annoying AF

>>12363389
yikes that original psx resolution is hard to look at. I was playing it at 8x resolution which put it at like retina quality (over 2k) and it looked almost like a ps2 game to me

>>12363463
this is just bullshit Quina is one of the best characters and not just from a writing standpoint, blue magic is awesome

there is nothing like mighty guard and even FFX takes a step back because its much harder to use that on command as compared to FF5, 7 and 9 as blue magic on the fly. plus quina gets powerful earth and wind elemental magic, level 5 doom for 1 shooting grand dragons (like how in ff5 you 1 shotted the statues in castle bal basement to grind out the red mage dual cast ability)

quina was in my final party up until the last battle and I only took them out because I cheated an extra pumice piece to get Ark summon for Dagger from Hades since it was locked behind some retarded chocobo hot and cold shit.

I really liked this game as a kid and enjoyed most or all of the mini-games (maybe not the frog catching) but I understand why it's not appealling to most people either as a game or as an FF.
>>12364678
It's somehow worse than the world building in 7 where there was a giant coastal cannon built to defend against... Costa Del Sol?

>>12365274
Sister Ray was built to target Wutai as far as I know.

>>12365242
Exactly my point.

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>>12365414
I'm pretty sure that there are abilities you can only get through hot & cold rewards.
Want Ultima Weapon? Gotta do hot and cold.
I think it's a bullshit minigame after some 5-10 playthroughs.
Easy cheat: If you add the modern ports' 3x speed boost, the timer doesn't change for H&C, so you get 3x the time and can hit the limit of 8 items every round. After 4 reward points are doubled, and hitting 8 gives you a large reward. Still takes up an hour of the playthrough. This is something I am a-ok with cheating because it's just tedious busywork.