| Final Fantasy 9 Many veterans of the FF series found the two playstation versions a dissapointment mainly due to their favourite adventure getting transformed into an unfamiliar cyberpunk like style, the castles were to be replaced by locations such as reactors and labatorys, and it certainly seemed the days of Princesses, castles and black mages were a thing of the past, but then Sqaure replanted their medievil roots and came up with the ninth installment of their sucsessful but stupidly named RPG series. And a return to roots FF9 certainly is, this time its in the traditional medievil style complete with RPG favourites such as castles, knights, princesses and wizards, the mogs are even back and this time they are used as save-points and recovery-points to assist you along the way on your epic journey. And everything such as the way the characters talk and your surroundings all give it a medievil feeling which will certainly please the people who prefer the pre Playstation Final Fantasys. The story is simple at first but in normal FF style it becomes much more complicated as you progress, it starts with Zidane Tribal (you) and his band of theives getting hired to kidnap a Princess known as Garnet, but strangely the princess is pleased to get away from her mother, well wouldn't you be if your mother was attacking other kingdoms with magical weaponry? and then early on in the game she gets herself into trouble and just shows how much of a damsel in distress she really is, well I did tell you it was traditional, didn't I? anyway enough of the story. Again through out the four disks just like the other two PS Fantasys are glorious movie scenes which clevery just flash on with no loading times whatsoever, each one of these are once again masterpeices in their own right and are a real joy to watch. FF9 isn't slow to start with the battles at all, well in fact almost straight away you are thrown into a training battle with your boss Baku where even such simple things like your physical attacks bring out beautiful coulerd lighting effects from your opponent, and very soon you will get access to attack magic such as fire and ice when Vivi the black mage joins your party and I don't think I need to tell you how lovely these or any part of the game look. FF9 once again comes with a complete new abilitie system, where you must equip weapons and armour to learn new things but as long as you have the item you can use the abilities that are listed then once you learn all of them it allows you to unequip that item and replace it with a more powerful type complete with new stuff to learn, these skills fall into two catorgries action and support abilities, the action type are things such as magic while the support type must be equipped, to equip them you use magic stones which go down with the more you equip but fortunaly they increase as you go up in level, after FF8 complicated and time consuming system this proves to be much better. It also comes with a class system which makes each of your party members different from each other for example Zidane is a theif and ovbiously he can't use as much magic as Vivi the black mage so instead he relies on his physical attacks and his steal command to be victorius in combat. This is a cool addition and makes each of your warriors have their very own individiual fighting styles Page 2 |
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