Garnet from FFIX

[taekochan]

Princess Garnet, along with IX in general tend to get bashed. I always hate seeing Garnet bashing because it's usually people who are inconsiderate to what's actually happening in the game, or it's because they misunderstand her character.

Comments

FFIX

[nc1234567]

Final Fantasy IX is far from perfect. It's story is over cluttered and suffers from astoundingly poor pacing, it has an overabundance of random battles and load times, the Trance system is yet another failed attempt at a Limit Break mechanic that isn't somehow broken, it has antagonists with personalities and motives as two-dimensional as the NES FF antagonists, Zemus, Exdeath and Kefka, yet are exposed and hyped up to the degree of Sephiroth (the only exception to this is IX's Garland), and it thrusts Quina, Brahne and Kuja upon the players.

The story is a mess, pure and simple. But so were most early Final Fantasy games' plots during the NES and SNES, and we didn't hold it against them. Why judge IX's so severely, then? The answer is because this is after FFVII, which was very revolutionary and we're now at the point where an RPG's story is about as equally important as it's gameplay when determining it's overall quality. The genie's out of the bottle now, and there's no stuffing it back in. When a game has hundreds of pages' worth of dialogue and enough minutes of FMVs to fill a half-hour television slot, the narrative it spins has to be equally engrossing as the time a player spends running around and slaying monsters, or else it becomes a hindrance. In a game like Final Fantasy, the story is the payoff the player earns for slogging through all those dungeons and fighting all those random battles, and if the story with which he or she is rewarded isn't up to snuff, then the game does not succeed. IX's story really could have been better, and the entire experience suffers for it.

Final Fantasy IX is often tried to be justified by saying that it's a "cute children's story", as if that should brush aside any claims against it. This is not a children's fairy tale, by the way, already according to the age rating. This is Final Fantasy and the Finals are aimed at teenagers and young adults. (Though the blind praise could just be a really loud vocal minority. IX was one of the least selling post-VII games) It is full of empty and useless pathos replicas inserted there for the sake of pathos, and a good half of the FMVs are there only to be joyfully jerked off (I'm sure there are those who claim that IX is the "best" already because of the fact that there are summons in the FMVs), and the relevance of this in the narrative and common sense close their eyes.

Even if we consider it from the standpoint of a fairytale, then it fails here too. Kuja is not a fairytale character at all, and Garland destroys the illusion of the deliberate simplicity of the local plot, winding up new turns of an inexplicable and indistinct whirlwind of facts over and over again, which does not add up to anything integral.(Hello, FFI) All this stuff about Gaia and Terra does not fit into the fairytale-ness that could be referred to throughout the first two disks. And needless to say, the game’s attempt to look smart has completely failed.

And then there is the love story, as I've said in the first chapter, I am a big sucker for big romanced focused stories with a lot of charm and wholesomeness… and some lewdness. (I do read and watch a bunch of Ecchi Romance manga/anime) But IX's love story barely had any of that, and is really overhyped (to where even Vivi "stopping" took a back seat to it in the game's ending), with even the TV commercials and ads back then putting the most emphasis on Zidane and Garnet and the love song Melodies of Life playing in them. It was not deep and convincing.