I sorted out my issues with Final Fantasy IX. I settled for using the PSX emulator (which I hate so much) and managed to get it working well enough. It still has serious slowdown when entering a battle which I'm sure will get irritating by the end of the game and it is having trouble actually taking screenshots so this may be yet another game without screenshots. Sorry.
I'm gonna rant a little bit about emulators here, stick with me. Every emulator I've used outside of PSX emulators are simple. You download the emulator, it has its built in features, and then you use it to play ROMs. Simple. For some stupid reason, PSX emulators have to be unbearably complicated. If you just download the emulator, it tells you it's missing the BIOS. The freakin' BIOS! So how do you get that? You have to google search for the specific name of the BIOS and download that to put it into the emulator. Is that enough? No, of course not! It may come with a built in plug-in or two but in order to get any games actually working properly, you'll need to download special plug-ins and configure them to, in many cases, work with your specific game and hardware. There aren't really tutorials for any of this stuff so it's sort of a trial and error system where you try to find what works the best for you. Since all hardware works differently, there's no guarantee and no easy answer to find for your machine. It all just seems completely unnecessary when compared to something like SNESx9, the emulator I used for FF4-6. It worked fine out of the box and it also came with a ton of extra graphics plug-ins so you could try whichever ones you liked the best but it wasn't a requirement like it is for PSX emulators. I'm not sure why they are the way they are since later emulators like my PSP one don't work this way.
Oh well, whatever. Anyway, Final Fantasy IX. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with anything Final Fantasy and grasped every little tidbit about the series that I could. Not owning an NES, SNES or Playstation, that wasn't much but I tried. Final Fantasy IX was the one game that, somehow, I learned literally nothing about. Everyone debated between Final Fantasy VII or VIII but I never heard a darn thing about IX at any point. Years later, when I got my PS2, a friend lent me Tactics and IX to boost my then middling library of games. I utterly hated it.
"That stupid art-style with their big heads and cartoon faces! This was blasphemy compared to FFVIII!" Still, I gave it a chance but for whatever reason, when I realized weapons had individual abilities you had to learn, I just couldn't take it. I shut the game off after leaving the Evil Forest and never looked back.
Until now. I still know nothing about the game's storyline or anything. I somehow managed to stay completely ignorant about this game up to this point and that has got me extremely excited. You see, even though I hadn't played most of these Final Fantasy games, I knew about a vast majority of them. Aeris dying wasn't a surprise to me any more than Cecil going to the moon was. Kefka was an intimidating boss but I knew the major twist in FFVI would be the World of Ruin so it didn't have much of an effect on me. But IX is new territory. Anything can happen.
I'm about three hours into the game now and just passed the point where I originally left off after the Forest of Ruin. Honestly, I slap younger me in the face. After the dark and brooding VI, VII and VIII, IX is a breath of fresh air. The art style is still goofy but now I'm liking it, rather than turned off by it. It feels light-hearted and whimsical, not so heavy as the last several entries.
I haven't delved too deep into the gameplay yet, having basically been hand-guided through to this point but it seems fun. The characters all have their own unique abilities and attributes which I am very excited about after dealing with cookie-cutter characters all through VIII. The weapons seem logical which also takes me out of the game less than VIII's ridiculous arsenal. Overall, it just feels like it's going to be a fun game to dive into.
We'll see if tedium rears it's ugly head again but for the first time in a while, I'm really hopeful.
Game on!
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