Is Final Fantasy IX better than Final Fantasy VIII?

[RedPouch]

I've never played VIII. I refuse to play VII, VIII, and anything that looks super techy. If it doesn't have castles and swords and moogles and chocobos and crystals and pre-industrialized civilization, it's not FF to me.

I think that's a little narrow-minded, though. Granted [aside from the fact that VII and VIII do posses some of the things you just mentioned], I feel that games like FF IV, VI, and IX were a lot better than VII and VIII in many ways, I still don't think it's fair to completely discredit VII VIII for "book cover" reasons.

Just because VII and VIII were more futuristic-oriented, doesn't mean they weren't good. I will admit that VIII was even my second least favourite of the FF series [right under FF X], but I'd be lying if I said that it wasn't worth a play-through at all.

To address the topic directly: I thought IX was awesome, hell yes. It was much better than VIII in all honesty, I won't lie.

I said some, not all. VIII has a few FMVs showing big things doing minor stuff. For instance, I have a scratch on the short cutscene of the Lunatic Pandora moving to its spot for the Lunar Cry. This sequence is a 30 seconds sequence of the a giant metallic pillar moving over a circle. It takes 8 minutes for it to finish due to that damn scratch and its what made me aware of how silly and irrelevant a few of the FMVs are. VIII is filled with scenes that don't show the characters or even have decent music and are basically minor and just plain pointless events. Like all the sequences showing off what the Gardens look like from a few separate angles.

Most of IXs were reserved for the badass moments and even the more sceneic ones have this calming feel to them. IX does have a few pointless scenes as well, to be perfectly fair. Yet both games still have the overall best FMVs in the series.

Yet again, you speak the truth. However, even though it's good that Square has learned to "control themselves" in terms of going crazy with all the FMV's [and I'm only emphasizing this with the limitations of the PS1 in mind], I still think it's good that Square pushed the idea of doing FMV's that frequently out there at the time. Certainly, it showed that the developers were willing to push themselves with increasing the entertainment value for these games, thus giving them the experience they needed to create the games that succeeded VII and VIII. I think one could easily argue that if they had done IX right after VII [instead of the current VIII], then it would have turned out alarmingly bad.

It's all about doing something new, then learning how to incorporate it reasonably and proportionately into your future works. As an anime artist that's still learning, I can definitely relate [as can any creative works-developer].

Finally, I'm also going to credit Wolf Kanno for stating this opinion before I was able to:

IX definetly had a better soundtrack and easily the best FMV's in the entire series. In fact, most IX's FMVs were awesome whereas some of VIII's were a bit irrelevant and felt more like the programmers just showing off what they could do.

I have to strongly agree with this one as well. I felt that VIII's soundtrack as a whole seemed rather dry, and IX had a lot of wonderful-sounding tracks. The soundtrack for FF IX is definitely one of the better sound compilations of the FF series.