FF9's world just casually dropped these animal/human hybrids on you like they were the norm and I found that reasonably cool. They still had NPC names like "Fish Man" to suggest that the character you were playing as immediately looked and was like "oh WTF it's a fish man" and it worked fairly well, although Freya becoming a playable character led to me constantly questioning what the hell she was, and the lack of an explanation (other than the fact that Burmecians were rat people... and that was it) kind of bugged me.

P.S. The word is sapient, not sentient. All animals way below human intelligence are considered sentient. Animals of human intelligence are sapient, hence homo sapien.