Bosses the same strength? In FF9 and I have played this game more then any other FF game and I have all but FF3. The bosses are much more powerful then your characters. If you don't spend the time to level up you can never get past the bosses.
Not true, Excalibur II proves that.
My point was that people claim customisable characters make the game easier. But the bosses in customisable FFs are much stronger so it doesn't really work like that.

The minigames are fun in FF9.
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Well that's your opinion fair enough. But so are other FFs and they are less pointless with it.
X is the exception to this where the minigames lead me to think Square were trying to experiment on us.

Well you have played FF8 a lot I bet right. Well in FF8 you have to do all but one of the sidequests before you got to disc 4. Once you got to disc four all the other sidequetst are cut off form you.
I'm not sure because I usually go for a disc 3 save, but I only know of the CC Quest that is neccessary to complete before disc 4. If you do that everything else is available. You can't do all the actual minigames, but the rewards are there still.

In FF9, 7, 6, 5, 4, 2, 1, and even 10 you can still do sidequests even when you get closer to the end of the game.
Excalibur II, Mognet(I think), Hippaul, swordfighting, must all be done before disc 4. That leaves chocobos and skipping.