What's Wrong With This Game?

[Flying Arrow]

Slow and boring battle system.

This, plus a bafflingly cluttered and poorly-told story that starts out enjoyable and ends up a complete and utter mess. This is, of course, purely subjective, but I find the adventure begins to stutter and becomes less interesting once the party leaves the Mist Continent. Everything from the world design to the scenarios starts to grate on me (although I liked the interspersed bits with Steiner and Tantalus, if I'm remembering the chronology correctly, and the Vivi plot is among the best ever conceived for an RPG). The Iifa Tree sequence is pretty thrilling, but again, it drops off again after that and the Terra to the ending section feels kind of tacked-on and lifeless.

However!, Squaresoft being the master of presentation and direction still manages to make it a pretty good, moderately-compelling game (although arguably the weakest of the PS1 trilogy as a top-to-bottom package). I've played IX more times than games I've owned for just as long or longer that I consider to be better.