What was Squaresoft thinking with the battle system in Final Fantasy IX?

Yeah the combat was very slow. Annoying cast members was the worst part though imo. I didn't really like any of them except Vivi and that female knight whose name I don't remember atm.
 
Reila said:
Well, FFIX isn't even an experimental title. It is a throwback to the early games in the series.
Click to expand...

The issue isn't that the battle gameplay is a throwback, it just wasn't good enough in my opinion. Visually the game harkens back to the earlier titles too, but was updated sufficiently to make it the best looking PS1 era FF. I can't say the same thing about the battle system, it felt more like a step-down than a step-back to me.
 
CentroXer said:
What a step back it is from Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII.
Click to expand...

6S8Ovu3.gif
 
Yeah the battle system was kinda bad but it still might be my favorite game ever.

Last FF that you could fly an airship in, and didn't someone find a hidden quest in this game just a couple of years ago? They don't make 'em like that no more.
 
The slow as hell battle system really nearly kills the game for me. I counted it, it takes about 8(!) seconds after you hit a battle before you finally can SEE the battle screen (then the infuriating camera movements start to further camoflage the horrible load times).

Square wanted to much for their next big title on the ps1. FF9 on PS2 with higher res graphics and fast load times probably would have become one of my all time favourites.
 
Well VIII is a hard act to follow, XV maybe the closest we'll ever get to that perfection.
 
Final Fantasy IX is the epitome of ff experience, but the battle system is indeed slow.

The day they release a remaster that allows fast forward, I will cry tears of joy. It's my favorite game of all time along with Ff Tactics.
 
Actually I like a lot of what OP critizes. They were making a classic FF battle system, with 4 character parties (huge plus) and more restrictive damage caps (to stop the characters from becoming too overpowered and better maintain a consistent difficulty). The summons are super quick compared to VIII and VII if you set them to short.

The real problem of the FFIX battle system are the load times (which they tried to hide with the slow battle opening, when still more data is loaded even after the characters appear). There is a reason why they limited the parties to 3 characters in VII and VIII, because otherwise the load times would have been even worse. And they are in IX.

So the problem is not the design but that the hardware couldn't keep up with their aims. Or that the designers were too stubborn to accept what they were working with. VII and VIII on the other hand work within the limitations and try completely new things.
 
The battle system was okay. I liked the skill system though. It made equipment selection more thoughtful than picking the best money can buy and being done with it. FFIX is still my favorite FF though because I don't think one since has managed to capture that feeling of traveling along the countryside and I think it has the most likeable characters.
 
FFIX's already slow battles get compounded when you throw skills like Auto-Potion into the mix. Which is a shame because there's a good chunk of the game where potions are cheap as dirt and the ability to shave 100 damage off of every attack against your characters is incredibly useful.
 
TheSlySoul said:
The battle system may have some issues, but nothing beats Draw as the worst PSX FF mechanics.
Click to expand...

I actually loved "drawing". It made me feel like some kind of magical vampire. It also gave me something to do to enemies beyond just killing them for EXP. Besides, most of my magic came from refinement anyway. But I ended up drawing anyway because I found it oddly relaxing. I'm probably in a small minority here lol
 
It truly is fucking dismal. It renders the game unplayable to me today, without any exaggeration.

You'll lose a couple hours of your life per play through waiting for the camera to pan or battles to load.

Don't get me wrong - game's great otherwise. Played through twice and loved it as a kid - except for the shitty final few acts, wow, not a fan of how the story unfolded at the end - but the slow ass battles are just such a slog. Can't bring myself to slog through it.
 
duckroll said:
Yeah I don't think it's worth comparing how broken systems can be if you put your mind to it. Pretty much any system which offers any options at all can be broken. I find it more worthwhile to just examine how interesting a system is in terms of what it offers the player, and how fun it is to mess with those options. FFIX has a very limited growth system compared to most FFs, that's where it fails to engage me. FFXIII also suffers from this problem significantly, and probably in a worse way. Crystarium was super boring, and the weapon customization system was totally brain dead.
Click to expand...

Ironically, I think Crystarium would have been great in a game with normal FF pacing (working like western MMO "specs") and FF9's growth would work far better in a chapter-based game that could have had hard crystal limits for most battles (maybe if it tied action abilities to the crystal system, too).
 
Dark_castle said:
I actually thought the boss battle theme was kinda weak. The regular battle theme far outshine the boss counterpart.

Interestingly, FFVI was the opposite. Regular battle theme was okay, but boss battle theme was amazing.
Click to expand...
Really? I find the regular battle theme okay at best. To each their own, I guess. I do agree that the FFVI boss theme is fantastic!
Clear said:
The issue isn't that the battle gameplay is a throwback, it just wasn't good enough in my opinion. Visually the game harkens back to the earlier titles too, but was updated sufficiently to make it the best looking PS1 era FF. I can't say the same thing about the battle system, it felt more like a step-down than a step-back to me.
Click to expand...
I agree about the battle system being a step-down compared to the two previous entries, but in most aspects I think IX was superior to VII and VIII.
 
badcrumble said:
A lot of FFIX's decisions - especially the way Trance works - are semi-sensible reactions to the way that the Limit Break systems worked in FF7/8 - Trance is set up to discourage people from the common tactic of hoarding Limit Breaks and spamming them on bosses for an effortless kill (something that was also a problem for FFX). But it ends up just being a weird feature that never quite finds its role in things.

The problem with FF9's ATB actually isn't that it's slow - though it is, and that's annoying early in the game - it's that it doesn't have a pause-timer function.

FF4 and 5 pause the timer anytime an action takes place, even normal attacks (you can see this by watching the ATB bar).

FFVI sped things up a tiny bit by not having the timer pause during regular attacks and simpler spell animations, and introduced something that's essentially an animation queue - if several inputs are bunched together, they'll just play out in sequence, not right when your command is entered.

The pause-timer function, in turn, allowed for more elaborate animations in FF7 and 8 - limit breaks and summons pause the ATB while they're playing out so they don't cause issues in the animation/turn queue.

FF9's problem is that the timer never pauses during any animation ever - so during longer battles or following any particularly long animation, you're still queuing up more turns (which further delay the animation queue, ad infinitum). This is why FF9 alone suffers from the problem of having your actual turns play out sometimes over 60 seconds after selecting an action, often when the action is no longer context-appropriate (hello, Heat status effect). This is also why auto-Regen is so overpowered in FF9: you keep regenerating every second even during immensely long summons, so simply deliberately slowing the battle by bringing in the longest animations possible will keep you at full health basically all of the time.

It's an objectively bad design decision and speeding up the ATB speed doesn't fix it.
Click to expand...

Damn, you gave voice to something I've always felt about FFIX but couldn't quite peg. Especially your example with the Heat status effect. I've lost characters too many times to this simply because they act well after I've input a command (so they incur the status effect before they act).

FFIX is a great game, but the encounter rate, slow loading battles, camera pans, and slow battles (even with ATB speed set to max) hurts my opinion of its gameplay significantly. Few things are worse in this series than having the entire party Auto-Potion, my goodness.

Then there's other smaller things like Amarant being a poor addition to the team, Dagger being useless for a good chunk of the game. the plot punching itself in the face on Disc 3, and some other stuff. Definitely better than 8, but too many things prevent it from being as good as FFVII and Tactics.
 
I didn't find the battle speed that slow when it released, at least not as much as some of you. I guess maybe being younger with more free time and fewer games to play I wasn't as pressured to get through it.
 
Yeah I did not care for FF9's battle system (or music, or characters, or setting). It's like it wanted to tone down some of the over-the-top customization and attacks of 7 and 8 with a return to classic style but failed on all fronts.
 
I actually liked the battle system and hated how cheap the other PSX titles felt. The main reason why the other ones never get any play. Honestly I think square has only now learnt how to make a battle system that's both deep and not cheap.
 
Espada said:
Damn, you gave voice to something I've always felt about FFIX but couldn't quite peg. Especially your example with the Heat status effect. I've lost characters too many times to this simply because they act well after I've input a command (so they incur the status effect before they act).

FFIX is a great game, but the encounter rate, slow loading battles, camera pans, and slow battles (even with ATB speed set to max) hurts my opinion of its gameplay significantly. Few things are worse in this series than having the entire party Auto-Potion, my goodness.

Then there's other smaller things like Amarant being a poor addition to the team, Dagger being useless for a good chunk of the game. the plot punching itself in the face on Disc 3, and some other stuff. Definitely better than 8, but too many things prevent it from being as good as FFVII and Tactics.
Click to expand...

The encounter rate in FFIX isn't actually that bad - people mostly cite the ice cavern for this without realizing that it's got an extra mechanic (which the game doesn't tell you about) - anytime you get hit by the blasts of icy air that come out of the walls intermittently, you get a battle *totally in addition to* the random battle counter, so you get, like, at least twice the battles.

During most of the rest of the game the encounter rate isn't nearly as bad as that.

It's an artistically lovely game, too, and I really enjoy the writing. It's just mechanically broken in a few places.
 
It seems weird to complain about IX's gameplay of all the PS1 FF games. The horrible one on the PS1 is definitely FFVIII IMO.

Not a fan of IX's slow gameplay, but the system itself seemed just fine to me.
 
IX's battle system is completely borked, not only due to it being slow, but due to the absolutely ridiculous decision to make the ATB always count down no matter what was happening--long attack animations, loading whatever. It makes status spells like Protect and Mighty Guard completely useless because their time limit is always counting down so they hardly last any real turns.

It's a shame, because I think it's the only aspect of the game that prevents it from being the best of the three Playstation Final Fantasies. VII still sits at the top as the most well rounded of the three. And VIII brings up the rear, like always. Screw that game.
 
I wish FFIX got an expanded, fixed "International version" like FFX, X-2 and XII (not like VII and VIII's International versions). It could have been perfect.
 
DiipuSurotu said:
I wish FFIX got an expanded, fixed "International version" like FFX, X-2 and XII (not like VII and VIII's International versions). It could have been perfect.
Click to expand...

Well the next ''relaunch`` will be FF VIII, so maybe in 3 years more or less we will get that ultimate version of IX.
 
Clear said:
I agree with Duckroll about FFVIII being a far more interesting and experimental title than IX. Personally, I really enjoyed the micro-management aspect of its battle systems because ultimately what it allowed was for you to switch between distinct "modes" in battle.

For example, the least (obviously) interesting part was the "farm" mode where you'd enter a new area, meet a new enemy type and sytematically draw off as much magic as possible then move it to an appropriate stockpile to leverage a particular trait or ability.

The regular "fight" mode basically imvolved the player in making a decision as to whether they wished to fight using primarily physical or non-magic consuming abilities so as to conserve power, or whether to tactically expend magic (weakening their build in the process) for a quicker victory.

Finally there was what is probably best described as all-out "zerg" mode, which involved using purely the most powerful abilities to defeat enemies as fast as possible. Typically this would involve abusing Aura and Meltdown magic (2 of the most efficient spell types for raising most any stat) to keep the character in perpetual limit break mode.

This is a pretty cool system to me as it gives the player maximum control at all times, and was I feel super-rewarding especially once you'd spead your GF's smartly and had levelled them sufficiently to access the various "refine" abilities. This combined with the "zerg" mode would, for instance, allow Irvine to take out the end boss lightning fast with repeated volleys of LB'd pulse ammo, each shot hitting for max damage.

Coming from that experience, FFIX felt sadly dull and uninteresting to me, even disregarding the general sluggishness of the entire battle "clock" it was a real step down imho.

Add on top of that my preference for practically every other aspect of FFVIII over IX and its no suprise that the former title remains one of my favourite JRPG's ever, whilst IX I can't honestly say I even like, despite playing it through to completion at least twice. (JP and US import versions).
Click to expand...
Not sure how you got your tag, but I think this is well stated, and I'm not a big fan of FF8. I finished it, and the ending was totally satisfying, but I really didn't like much of the game after the scene in space. Anyway, it's always been a game I've thought about going back to, since I never really had the greatest grasp on the draw/junction system. It just seemed so tedious and vast. I just wanted to play some FF, and 8 (kinda like 12 and 13) veered way off-course. Some folks loved it, some didn't. I was somewhere in the middle.
 
Green Mamba said:
IX's battle system is completely borked, not only due to it being slow, but due to the absolutely ridiculous decision to make the ATB always count down no matter what was happening--long attack animations, loading whatever. It makes status spells like Protect and Mighty Guard completely useless because their time limit is always counting down so they hardly last any real turns.

It's a shame, because I think it's the only aspect of the game that prevents it from being the best of the three Playstation Final Fantasies. VII still sits at the top as the most well rounded of the three. And VIII brings up the rear, like always. Screw that game.
Click to expand...

Yep, exactly - I hadn't even thought about how it affects status effects but you're totally right.

FFIX, with FFX-2's version of the ATB, would be objectively lovely to play, though.
 
The camera pan at the start of every battle is the reason I couldn't play this game for more than two hours, even though I have played through every other major final fantasy title. It's just mind boggling how the development team kept that in the game and nobody went "wait a minute, that's <bad word>'ing annoying!". It's a shame, really.
 
badcrumble said:
A lot of FFIX's decisions - especially the way Trance works - are semi-sensible reactions to the way that the Limit Break systems worked in FF7/8 - Trance is set up to discourage people from the common tactic of hoarding Limit Breaks and spamming them on bosses for an effortless kill (something that was also a problem for FFX). But it ends up just being a weird feature that never quite finds its role in things.

The problem with FF9's ATB actually isn't that it's slow - though it is, and that's annoying early in the game - it's that it doesn't have a pause-timer function.

FF4 and 5 pause the timer anytime an action takes place, even normal attacks (you can see this by watching the ATB bar).

FFVI sped things up a tiny bit by not having the timer pause during regular attacks and simpler spell animations, and introduced something that's essentially an animation queue - if several inputs are bunched together, they'll just play out in sequence, not right when your command is entered.

The pause-timer function, in turn, allowed for more elaborate animations in FF7 and 8 - limit breaks and summons pause the ATB while they're playing out so they don't cause issues in the animation/turn queue.

FF9's problem is that the timer never pauses during any animation ever - so during longer battles or following any particularly long animation, you're still queuing up more turns (which further delay the animation queue, ad infinitum). This is why FF9 alone suffers from the problem of having your actual turns play out sometimes over 60 seconds after selecting an action, often when the action is no longer context-appropriate (hello, Heat status effect). This is also why auto-Regen is so overpowered in FF9: you keep regenerating every second even during immensely long summons, so simply deliberately slowing the battle by bringing in the longest animations possible will keep you at full health basically all of the time.

It's an objectively bad design decision and speeding up the ATB speed doesn't fix it.
Click to expand...

You summed up my issue with the game perfectly. I'm tired of it being praised to high heaven when people keep glossing over this problem. It's not something really ignorable, either. It becomes a huge problem in later battles, including the final boss fight. I played through the game twice, and the 2nd time I found myself wondering why the game ran like molasses compared to FFV in battles. It really felt like a huge step back to me.

Considering you spend a lot of times in RPGs in battles, this is just something I could not ignore. As for people saying FFVIII's Draw mechanics were worse... did you all just completely ignore the many, many refining options you had? Geez. Drawing is something you can get around, unlike FFIX's horrifically slow battle system.

It's a shame, too, as this game has one of my favorite bonus bosses of all time: Ozma. But even the Ozma fight can be really frustrating because actions can end up being queued up to insane delay times and that is one battle where you really need to react to things quickly.

Great game otherwise, but FFIX's battle system is objectively bad and I'm really tired of people glossing over it like it doesn't matter. It matters a lot.
 
ghibli99 said:
Not sure how you got your tag, but I think this is well stated, and I'm not a big fan of FF8. I finished it, and the ending was totally satisfying, but I really didn't like much of the game after the scene in space. Anyway, it's always been a game I've thought about going back to, since I never really had the greatest grasp on the draw/junction system. It just seemed so tedious and vast. I just wanted to play some FF, and 8 (kinda like 12 and 13) veered way off-course. Some folks loved it, some didn't. I was somewhere in the middle.
Click to expand...

I'd recommend giving it another look because the honest truth is I didn't really get into the game until my second playthrough. At some point it just clicked for me, and its been a favourite ever since.

Oh and for the record I have no earthly idea why I ended up with that tag either!
 
The Chocobo digging mini game was really good and so was the equipping ability system. I loved the combat system too but yes, nowadays you will realize how slow it is. Shame that there's no way to make it faster. I would most definitely replay it.
 
Haven't played 8 and 9 in years. How fast is 9's compared to 7's because I'm playing through 7 now and all I keep thinking is how f-ing slow the thing is.
 
Fusebox said:
You aren't playing the 50hz Aus/Euro edition are you?
Click to expand...

Me playing this version = zzzzz.

OP you ragged on the battle system too hard. It's not perfect but I don't think it's horse shit. Trance is meant to be stupid...nobody in the game world even understands what it does and how to use it.
 
They thought hmm how can we make a mediocre final fantasy after so many great ones and they came up with ffix.

It's not a very good game and one of the worst final Fantasy games.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Square Enix launches Final Fantasy IX 25th Anniversary "News" page.
News  2 3
135
7K
Hudo replied
FInal Fantasy IX Remake still the works, release maybe in 2026 according to NateTheHate
Rumor  2
53
3K
Oberstein replied
Final Fantasy VIII sold more than Final Fantasy IX back then and was a bigger event. Why is FFIX seen in a much better light currently?
2 3 4
163
7K
elbourreau replied
Final Fantasy IX-You are not alone, is the greatest set piece in any RPG
Opinion 
18
1K
Punished Miku replied
What do you think about recent Final Fantasy games?
2 3
123
5K
Salmon Snake replied
Top Bottom