CANUCK'S PROFILE

Big step my friend.

Congratulations, and tread carefully.

The horribleness of FFIX can be broken up in to the story and the battle system. Both are horrible, and both make up the more or less the entire game.

The battle system still uses amazingly long loading times to start, and still pans around and shows us the "awesome" 3D visuals for about 20 seconds before the battle can even start. The encounters are also quite high. So in the time it takes one battle in IX, you could have done about 2 or 3 in IV and been on your way seeing lots of progress. The reason the Active Battle System started being bad (with VII, but the graphics were seemingly amazing then) was because of the focus on graphics and the general slowness of it all. It's still fine in IV to VI because it's nice and fast paced.

The second is the story. All other stories that IX was referencing had a point. I'm going to directly reference toadpole's review to give an example. In IV Rydia needs to use fire to get through an area. In IX, Vivi also uses fire to get through an area. In IV, this scene can only be done after Rosa joins the party, because she's more sensitive. The scene allows for Rydia to learn a new spell, a new area to be unlocked and for characterization on the two characters parts. In IX, the scene allows people to go "DUDE THIS HAPPENED IN IV! AWESOME!" It's the party's first time there. There's no adding of characters. And the characterization conversation is actually worse than the one in IV (when stories weren't the most important thing in the world). Everything is just a reference with no real meaning. It's like watching Family Guy.

Now, also the card game was a giant step down from VIII's card game. The towns and the dungeons were horribly designed (VIII's were as well though). Those are minor things though.

The only pluses I can see are first the graphics. They were amazing. The music was really good as well (at least I loved the opening song quite a bit). It was also slick. It has the stylings of a blockbuster movie. I can see how liking a story is subjective, but I can't see how the battle system can be liked and how it wasn't a total pain to get through. Games like IX are the reason there was all those editorials about random battle systems being archaic and how they need to be done away with.

Now this is quite long, so it may seem to I overly care about this or something. But, it's just I like debating, and it's rare I have a strong opinion in gaming, and I do about Final Fantasy IX. So it was fun to write. I don't dislike the series (Tactics is probably my favorite game, and IV, V and VI are really amazing). I could also (with a lot of fun) write a similar thing about Star Ocean 2 or Lunar 2 and talk about why they were so amazing.

The end.

IX is horrible. Seriously. It's almost worse than VIII, and VIII was really bad.

Unless you're going by the first disc only, because that was passable if you ignored the battles.

It really seems Square is being a little too ambitious with the title(s).

I'll pick it up in 4 years time when ps3 and ff13 are cheap. I don't mind waiting.

So I gave in and paid the 2000 yen (20 bucks) for it today.



On the cover in small printing is has the epic line, "Destiny by sinner sought. Tragedy by power wrought"

This is the first Valkyrie Profile game that I've played. I've heard the first one was amazing, and haven't heard anything about the rest. Although, I remain skeptical since after the merge, Square Enix has taken a lot of series into the dirt.

This game is a strategy/RPG. I think that's unlike the others. It's battle system is a little different than most strategy/RPGs though. If you attack an enemy, you go into another screen where you both get a chance to attack. If one character has moved into a position where he can attack an enemy and waits, and then another character also moves into position and attacks the enemy, then both characters are in the other screen and are double teaming the enemy. This leads to the ability to do combos. Different characters have different ranges of their attack sphere.

So hypothetically, if you move your first character to attack an enemy, it's 1 on 1. Then for your next characters turn, if you go to the same enemy and attack, it's 2 on 1, and then the next character 3 on 1 etc.

It's split up into "players turn" and "enemies turn". No speed statistics.


In the first 20 minutes, there's been a lot of story and not much actual playing. Through the massive amounts of text, everything has had voice acting to accompany it. It really adds a great atmosphere to the game, and seems quite well done (the only other voice acting I've heard for a DS game was FFIV, and it's better than that in my opinion).

So all in all, it was worth it's price.

I'll play more later and post more impressions.

Oh, the story is about some war going on and being from a family impoverished because of woman Gods and all being hungry, so you join the war with your best friend and are in a squadron fighting demons and whatnot. Other stuff happens in the prologue that could be considered spoilers, and maybe people wouldn't want that.