Final Fantasy IX - ATB Speed-Up

[Spooniest]

http://www.romhacking.net/hacks/1799/

This set of patches for Final Fantasy IX speeds up the ATB gauge, generally speeding up battles. The real catch, though, is that the attack animations give you plenty of time to think about what you're doing, too, so it's still manageable.

Just thought I'd share with y'all.

[Ayen]

Wish I saw this sooner. The ATBs were so slow I feel like I'm still waiting for them to finish.

[Neptunia]

ATB time has never bothered me, I set it to fastest it can go.

[NeoCracker]

I only find this a problem with the first disk of teh game, later on the ATB is not nearly so bad, but this would certainly help the early game slog.

[Mirage]

ATB time has never bothered me, I set it to fastest it can go.

At the fastest, it is still annoyingly slow.

In either case, it won't help much. The long attack and spell animations (and the loading of them) will let everyone in combat fill up their ATBs before the next person acts, effectively turning the game into a strict turn based system and not an ATB system at all. In fact, you lose more combat advantage the higher you set the ATB. You play the most efficiently at the lowest speed.

FF8 pulled off fast ATB and short loadings wonderfully. FF9 is just unberable when compared to FF8 in the combat department. They tried too hard to make the game look pretty, and the PS1 couldn't handle it. Doesn't matter if you play it on an emulator either, it's still slow because the emulator emulates the same slow processor of the PS1.