I'll do a better version later on.

1 Vivi Because he is the most mentally strong and toughest characters despite his age to ever grace a Final Fantasy title. Cute and adorable to boot, also deadly in battle.

2 Zidane Kind, supportive and a good leader and main lead to the game. Final Fantasy IX without this monkey-tailed blow would be a huge blow and just wouldn't be so great.

3 Eiko This poor lonely girl. She can be annoying at times and she sort of reminds me of Amy Rose from Sonic in a way, expect more intellgient and has a better reason to be clingly towards her idol Zidane than just basically liking him just because. A awesome White Mage also.

4 Dagger or Princess Garnet. Garnet isn't exactly original in the slightest, we've all seen the independent princess type but she's still a nice character and she's a nice White Mage and Summoner fighter. Just wished that she felt well less, dull.

5 Freya. I feel sexist rating the girls mostly so high but Freya is a nice fighter and dragooner warrior and dragooner's are always welcome within any FF game. Though she felt a little depressive at times and it sort of brought the game down at times. I feel like she's the FF IX version of AC Cloud. Brighten up a little bit Freya ? It's only a bloke.

6 Quina. Weird heshe type monster looking creature. Though he or she can be good comic relief at times and can be quite surpising and adds some brightness into what is, quite a dark and depressing Final Fantasy game. Also he's a huge game breaker if you have the bother to train him up and learn his Blue Magic.

7 Amarant. He's not really the best character in the world, though he can be good in battle. Though Beatrix in his place would of been so much better and would of made so much sense. I think they wanted to show a character that tried to fight Zidane's views on life and show to the player by him defeating Amarant that Zidane is right; but it's done it a shallow manner. You would have to look really deeply at Amarant and Zidane's character to notice it. It's not really shown to the player in a clear manner.

8 Stiener. A dickhead.