melodies of life.
Jan. 12th, 2010 06:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
samatethecookieSo, 6AM. I’ve defeated disc three of Final Fantasy IX.
I have not-so-coherent thoughts, but thoughts I wish to share nonetheless!
Spoilers, of course. Unless you don't care about the game/already played it, approach with caution.
(a) I have a love/hate liking towards Kuja. He’s cool in my book for now, but I’m not sure how I honestly feel about him at the end of it all. When I was, like, eleven or twelve years old and I was playing the game, I liked him a lot. I searched for fanart/fan fiction of him, wrote some of my own, et cetera. (Of course, I also thought he was straight. Boy, was I dense.) I never got to beat the game, and the discs were lost for awhile, so I basically went back to fangirling Sephiroth like the loyal FFVII fan I am.
When I played Dissidia, last year, I just HATED HIM SO MUCH. I don’t know if it’s his voice or his overall attitude in comparison to the other villains, but Kuja was annoying. Maybe it was his voice. (A lot of Kuja fans complained, but to me it’s so very … Kuja-ish, so flamboyant, that it drove me to dislike him every time he opened his mouth. I guess I liked him better when I had no idea what his voice sounded like?) Maybe it was the fact that I played Crisis Core, got fed up with * Genesis and just hate any villain that talks in theatre speak? Whichever it was, I didn't love Kuja anymore. We were done professionally.
Theeeen I replay Final Fantasy IX again, and Kuja goes back to being cool on my mental list of villains. He just is! He’s in a class of his own. He’s delightfully short tempered and manipulative. He insults everyone and everything--and when he compliments you, you know you’re in trouble. He ponders how he’s going to kill off the party--quickly or slowly--based on how much he loved them for advancing his plans. He learns about his fate and just GOES CRAZY and mindlessly destroys shit, because if he’s going down then everyone else is going with him. He’s afraid of dying without leaving his mark on the world and you can’t help but sympathize with him, even though you’d rather he turn his anxieties towards healthier means such as screaming into a pillow or talking to a therapist.
So, he’s cool again. That doesn’t mean he can rival Sephiroth, though. Only Kefka can rival with Sephiroth. There’s Sephiroth, Kefka, Kuja, and the first Garland purely for the nostalgic factor. The other Final Fantasy villains have to play catch-up with these guys.
* Also, Genesis totally copied off of Kuja. Whomever worked on Kuja's character must've had a hand in Genesis, because their love for poetic speeches are similar. This is why I wished Sephiroth went after Genesis as soon as he lost his marbles, only to be met with utter disappointment. The guy fucking taunted Sephiroth through poetry. You don't taunt Sephiroth with pretty words and live to talk about it; that's not how it works.
(b) You guys,
Vivi/Eiko OTP.
I mean, so are Zidane/Dagger, but oh my god, these kids are adorable together. I forgot why I shipped them until I replayed the game. She’s so sassy and energetic and he’s so thoughtful and easy to push around. I just love how she supposedly has this melodramatic crush on Zidane, yet Vivi is the guy she teases and pulls him along with her and guilts him into following her because she’s a lady and he’s a boy and they’re both kids. And I love how Vivi obviously has this crush on her because he fidgets with his hat and hands as a reaction whenever she yells at him and whenever he talks to her. He comforts her when she needed it, and she comforts him when he needs it. THEY ARE SO FUCKING CUTE.
The saddest thing of all is that they’re so young. And he’s a black mage. Neither of them are ever going to realize their potential with age, if we’re going with the canon ending.
(c) Which leads me to another point:
I already know Vivi’s going to Stop at the end of the game, but um. I never beat the game when I was younger, so I had no idea about it until nearly ten years later. Last year I innocently looked up information about Vivi on Wikipedia, and…yeah, that’s how I found out. I nearly cried. It just doesn’t seem fair to me because he’s barely even ten or eleven years old when it happens.
(d) The score is awesome; I can listen to it all the time. Perhaps it’s on the same level as FFVII. Even if you dislike IX, you can admit their music score is pretty.
(e) I reaaaally can’t stand the way these abilities work in this game. Not the levels, because those are easy to raise, but the abilities. I hate this system for one reason only: the characters need to acquire different abilities through different weapons; they basically train in fights until these abilities are mastered and you no longer need the weapons to have the abilities available to you. Once you mastered an ability, it's always there for your characters to use, with or without a specific weapon. The problem is you don’t know which weapon is going to give which character the abilities the characters need and what those abilities are until you buy them and attempt equipping them. It’s blind fate.
(Does that make sense? it's 6AM and I'm writing a lot of run-on sentences.)
(f) The Active Event Time whatever it’s called thing? Yeah. Good idea, but bad execution. I’d end up not being able to watch certain scenes just because I picked one instead of the other and I stupidly walked into an important scene that moves the story forward. It burns my ass because I wanted to see those scenes.
(g) Goddamn chocobos. I hate them in every game, I seriously do.
(h) In general, the gameplay and traveling is a more little irritating than usual (such as the goddamn airships and trying to control those, UGH), but the character development is amazing. My favorite development, relationship-wise, is between Zidane and Amarant, because neither one of them understand the other at all but Amarant grudgingly warms up to Zidane.
(i) Beatrix is one of the most interesting characters in the game, but on the third battle I was all, "DAMMIT, BITCH. JUST DIE. DIE DIE DIE. Stop making me sympathize with you and just DIE ALREADY."
(j) I sorta wish we saw more of Fratley. He appears once or twice, kicks ass, goes, "lol I don't remember you, Freya, kthnxbai", and we don't ever see him again until the end. And I feel bad for Freya because she spent five years searching for him and she was just so disappointed/heart-broken. :/
(k) I kinda feel weird for shipping Amarant/Freya because, um, their species just don't mix, I guess? I think they fit each other in an odd sorta way. That and Fratley/Freya is kind-of cute. It's not Fratley's fault that he suffers from amnesia and he's unaware of Freya's importance to him.
(l) Seriously, what the fuck is up with this game withholding all the goddamn ethers? Who came up with that bullshit idea?
I have not-so-coherent thoughts, but thoughts I wish to share nonetheless!
Spoilers, of course. Unless you don't care about the game/already played it, approach with caution.
(a) I have a love/hate liking towards Kuja. He’s cool in my book for now, but I’m not sure how I honestly feel about him at the end of it all. When I was, like, eleven or twelve years old and I was playing the game, I liked him a lot. I searched for fanart/fan fiction of him, wrote some of my own, et cetera. (Of course, I also thought he was straight. Boy, was I dense.) I never got to beat the game, and the discs were lost for awhile, so I basically went back to fangirling Sephiroth like the loyal FFVII fan I am.
When I played Dissidia, last year, I just HATED HIM SO MUCH. I don’t know if it’s his voice or his overall attitude in comparison to the other villains, but Kuja was annoying. Maybe it was his voice. (A lot of Kuja fans complained, but to me it’s so very … Kuja-ish, so flamboyant, that it drove me to dislike him every time he opened his mouth. I guess I liked him better when I had no idea what his voice sounded like?) Maybe it was the fact that I played Crisis Core, got fed up with * Genesis and just hate any villain that talks in theatre speak? Whichever it was, I didn't love Kuja anymore. We were done professionally.
Theeeen I replay Final Fantasy IX again, and Kuja goes back to being cool on my mental list of villains. He just is! He’s in a class of his own. He’s delightfully short tempered and manipulative. He insults everyone and everything--and when he compliments you, you know you’re in trouble. He ponders how he’s going to kill off the party--quickly or slowly--based on how much he loved them for advancing his plans. He learns about his fate and just GOES CRAZY and mindlessly destroys shit, because if he’s going down then everyone else is going with him. He’s afraid of dying without leaving his mark on the world and you can’t help but sympathize with him, even though you’d rather he turn his anxieties towards healthier means such as screaming into a pillow or talking to a therapist.
So, he’s cool again. That doesn’t mean he can rival Sephiroth, though. Only Kefka can rival with Sephiroth. There’s Sephiroth, Kefka, Kuja, and the first Garland purely for the nostalgic factor. The other Final Fantasy villains have to play catch-up with these guys.
* Also, Genesis totally copied off of Kuja. Whomever worked on Kuja's character must've had a hand in Genesis, because their love for poetic speeches are similar. This is why I wished Sephiroth went after Genesis as soon as he lost his marbles, only to be met with utter disappointment. The guy fucking taunted Sephiroth through poetry. You don't taunt Sephiroth with pretty words and live to talk about it; that's not how it works.
(b) You guys,
Vivi/Eiko OTP.
I mean, so are Zidane/Dagger, but oh my god, these kids are adorable together. I forgot why I shipped them until I replayed the game. She’s so sassy and energetic and he’s so thoughtful and easy to push around. I just love how she supposedly has this melodramatic crush on Zidane, yet Vivi is the guy she teases and pulls him along with her and guilts him into following her because she’s a lady and he’s a boy and they’re both kids. And I love how Vivi obviously has this crush on her because he fidgets with his hat and hands as a reaction whenever she yells at him and whenever he talks to her. He comforts her when she needed it, and she comforts him when he needs it. THEY ARE SO FUCKING CUTE.
The saddest thing of all is that they’re so young. And he’s a black mage. Neither of them are ever going to realize their potential with age, if we’re going with the canon ending.
(c) Which leads me to another point:
I already know Vivi’s going to Stop at the end of the game, but um. I never beat the game when I was younger, so I had no idea about it until nearly ten years later. Last year I innocently looked up information about Vivi on Wikipedia, and…yeah, that’s how I found out. I nearly cried. It just doesn’t seem fair to me because he’s barely even ten or eleven years old when it happens.
(d) The score is awesome; I can listen to it all the time. Perhaps it’s on the same level as FFVII. Even if you dislike IX, you can admit their music score is pretty.
(e) I reaaaally can’t stand the way these abilities work in this game. Not the levels, because those are easy to raise, but the abilities. I hate this system for one reason only: the characters need to acquire different abilities through different weapons; they basically train in fights until these abilities are mastered and you no longer need the weapons to have the abilities available to you. Once you mastered an ability, it's always there for your characters to use, with or without a specific weapon. The problem is you don’t know which weapon is going to give which character the abilities the characters need and what those abilities are until you buy them and attempt equipping them. It’s blind fate.
(Does that make sense? it's 6AM and I'm writing a lot of run-on sentences.)
(f) The Active Event Time whatever it’s called thing? Yeah. Good idea, but bad execution. I’d end up not being able to watch certain scenes just because I picked one instead of the other and I stupidly walked into an important scene that moves the story forward. It burns my ass because I wanted to see those scenes.
(g) Goddamn chocobos. I hate them in every game, I seriously do.
(h) In general, the gameplay and traveling is a more little irritating than usual (such as the goddamn airships and trying to control those, UGH), but the character development is amazing. My favorite development, relationship-wise, is between Zidane and Amarant, because neither one of them understand the other at all but Amarant grudgingly warms up to Zidane.
(i) Beatrix is one of the most interesting characters in the game, but on the third battle I was all, "DAMMIT, BITCH. JUST DIE. DIE DIE DIE. Stop making me sympathize with you and just DIE ALREADY."
(j) I sorta wish we saw more of Fratley. He appears once or twice, kicks ass, goes, "lol I don't remember you, Freya, kthnxbai", and we don't ever see him again until the end. And I feel bad for Freya because she spent five years searching for him and she was just so disappointed/heart-broken. :/
(k) I kinda feel weird for shipping Amarant/Freya because, um, their species just don't mix, I guess? I think they fit each other in an odd sorta way. That and Fratley/Freya is kind-of cute. It's not Fratley's fault that he suffers from amnesia and he's unaware of Freya's importance to him.
(l) Seriously, what the fuck is up with this game withholding all the goddamn ethers? Who came up with that bullshit idea?
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 08:51 pm (UTC)I serously want to find the person who came up with that idea and shake my finger in their face and make them feel ashamed of themselves. >:[
no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 10:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 07:26 pm (UTC)I always got a bit sad when you get to that graveyard in the mage village. I think the idea of them just stopping is kind of creepy as well.
Great... now you've made me want to play FFIX again.
no subject
Date: 2010-01-12 08:45 pm (UTC)Genesis is ... he's not horrible, but he's not a convincing villain, either, at least to me. He's too annoying for me to take serious, and I didn't really care whether or not Zack saved him. I really wish they had a different villain for the game, because to me that was one of the only downsides about Crisis Core. :/ Because in my mind, there's only room for one poetic-speaking flamboyant villain and that's Kuja, not Genesis, because he does it better.
The graveyard in the mage village is depressing. I also hate visiting the village after all of the black mages go with Kuja. :(
PLAY IT IF YOU HAVE IT. XD I found the game at a store in Ohio... it really shocked me that they were selling it!