Final Fantasy has gone down in video game history as one of the most beloved and longest-running franchises. It's accomplished this by putting out games that fans and critics alike love. Beyond the few sequels and remakes, the series created entirely new worlds for each game, a huge factor in why the series is considered one of the best RPGs ever.
Final Fantasy IX is one of the most beloved installments in the series. Many fans consider it their favorite and it's widely acknowledged as a classic. However, the argument can be made that is actually quite overrated, with fan nostalgia buoying it more than anything else.
10 Final Fantasy IX Is A Classic: It's The Last Installment Of The PS1 Era
The PS1 era of FF games brought the franchises to new heights. Taking advantage of the PlayStation's technical superiority over Nintendo's cartridge-based games, they changed the way RPG games were made and brought new popularity to the franchise. Final Fantasy IX was the last game of this era, and that gives it a special place in fans' hearts.
Final Fantasy IX closed out the PS1 years in an epic fashion. It was quite different from its predecessors on the PS1 and was a fitting capstone of the system's three-game run.
9 Final Fantasy IX Is Overrated: The World Building Is Lackluster
Final Fantasy games create new worlds for players to inhabit. Many times, these worlds are a key part of the story, with the best of them feeling like fully fleshed-out worlds. Final Fantasy IX's world was a massive exception to this. The game's world was a generic steampunk medieval setting that felt like a call back to FFVI and this hurt the game a lot.
While there are aspects of the game's world that are unique to it, the fact of the matter is that FFIX fails completely in just about every aspect of world-building. It's more of a charming, familiar setting than a living, breathing world.
8 Final Fantasy IX Is A Classic: It Was Hironobu Sakaguchi's Last Game At Square Enix
Final Fantasy is a franchise with a venerable legacy, and Hironobu Sakaguchi is a big part of that. Sakaguchi played a massive role in the game throughout its first nine installments, producing them and setting the tone for each one. He's a legend in the video game industry and his last FF was IX.
IX is a throwback to earlier games in the franchise in many ways and served as Sakaguchi's swan song on the franchise. He was moving on to Square Enix's movie division at the time and directed the company's first movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. That movie's failure was the death knell for his career at the company and he'd leave in 2003.
7 Final Fantasy IX Is Overrated: The Villains Aren't Memorable
FF games are known for their villains, some of which are more beloved than the characters that players spend the most time with. Villains like Kefka and Sephiroth are icons in the industry, setting a villainous standard. Final Fantasy IX has nothing that compares to them villains-wise. Kuja had potential but is a bland evildoer, Queen Brahne is generic, and the game's final boss Garland/Necron comes out of nowhere.
The lack of great villains hurts the game a lot. Interesting antagonists can make or break a game, so for a beloved game to have such forgettable villains is a tragedy. Compared to the series' past and future, it's quite disappointing.
6 Final Fantasy IX Is A Classic: It's A Throwback To The Classic Years Of The Franchise
Many of the game's drawbacks can be looked at as consequences of the fact that the game is a throwback. Sakaguchi and company wanted to make a game that paid homage to the earliest years of the franchise, moving away from the more modern sci-fi settings of VII and VIII before the move to the PS2. For older fans of the franchise, the game hits a sweet spot of nostalgia.
Many games series are so obsessed with moving forward that they leave behind their roots but FFIX found a way to pay homage to its past without being beholden to it. It played into its "end of an era" roots perfectly.
5 Final Fantasy IX Is Overrated: It Didn't Bring Any New Mechanics To The Series
One of the many problems with being a throwback is that Final Fantasy IX eschews a lot of gameplay innovations that made the series so much fun. The game adheres to the old job class system, even though it renders characters like Amarant and Quina superfluous, and the combat and leveling systems don't do anything innovative.
In fact, IX takes the Limit Break system and actively makes it worse, with the Trance system taking everything that made the Limit Breaks good and taking them away. It's a simplistic game, for better and worse.
4 Final Fantasy IX Is A Classic: It Has Some Great Secrets For Players To Find
FF games are enriched by their optional content. These challenges give players something to do once the main story is finished and add to the overall experience of the game. One of the greatest things about FFIX is the wealth of secrets in the game. These secrets reveal new facets to the game and its fans' enjoyment of it.
The devs took many different approaches to optional content in this game. It wasn't just secret weapons and items or hidden dungeons; they took into account where the player was in the game or how long they had been playing. For many players, this made up for the lack of innovation elsewhere.
3 Final Fantasy IX Is Overrated: Most Of The Characters Aren't Great
Final Fantasy has some beloved protagonists, but there's no doubt there are some problems with the franchise's approach. Final Fantasy IX puts most of these on display. The majority of the characters are broad archetypes and the main character Zidane is one of the franchise's worst. It often felt like the writers took the genre's cliches and fitted them whole cloth into the game.
While they all have their moments in the story, there's something so disappointing about the characters compared to the ones who came before and those who followed them. They were perfectly fine, but in an end of an era game, their blandness stands out.
2 Final Fantasy IX Is A Classic: Vivi Is One Of The Franchise's Best Characters
While most of Final Fantasy IX's cast is lackluster at best, Vivi stands out. The young Black Mage's story is the best part of the game, playing on the heartstrings of players expertly. It often feels like the writers of the game cared about Vivi more than any other character. While his status as a tragic living weapon trying to be human wasn't revolutionary, borrowing from FFVI's Terra and Celes, it still proved to be the most effective part of the story.
Vivi has since gone down as one of the greatest characters in the franchise's history. Even people with a low opinion of the game love him and he remains the most enduring part of the game's legacy.
1 Final Fantasy IX Is Overrated: The Story Goes Off The Rails
One of the best parts of the FF franchise is the stories. The best FF games have immersive stories that suck players in, thrilling them with highs and lows that make for memorable gameplay experiences. FFIX's story, on the other hand, is a boiler plate early FF style story, featuring a kingdom with an evil queen that the players must fight against.
The game has a third act twist that comes pretty much from nowhere, completely changing the game's entire conflict. While twists can sometimes save a game's cliche story and make it something special, FFIX's twist doesn't succeed in this respect at all. It's completely incongruent from the rest of the game and does nothing to make it a better story.