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FINAL FANTASY 9 PREVIEW
The final Playstation Final Fantasy game is going to be the best of the series thus far. The story in FFVIII had reached a high technological period in time. So you would expect the next one to be further in the future, right? Wrong. It is just the opposite. Everythig old is new again, black mages with over-sized hats return. Dragoons reappear with the magic crystals, and as usual a guy named Cid is back.
The story (spoiler-free) is like this: the ruler of the land of Lindblum, Regent Cid, is concerned about Queen Brahne of Alexandria. She has been attacking nearby towns for no good reason at all. Cid sends a group of thieves (one is the main character, Zidane) to kidnap the Queen's daughter to find out what the heck is going on. Ironically, the Queen's daughter, Princess Garnet, joins the band willingly, suspecting the queen is under some evil spell. When Garnet joins, she brings along her bodyguard, Adelbert Steiner. Some time in the game, the gang will include an innocent black mage by the name of Vivi Ornitier. Vivi hopes to find out why he is the only black mage that is not a slave of the Queen. Through most of the game, the gang is chased by the Queen's army of dark mages.
Now, instead of a three-person party (VII & VIII) you control a FOUR-person party, sometime controlling a lone character or a duo through a mini-game, or sidequest. By the end of the journey, you will have eight characters on your team. Your party can have any four of the eight (Except you can not switch ANYBODY for Zidane, the main character).
Each character has a specific job type (Zidane's a thief, Vivi's a black mage), so that means each character will gain their own unique abilities. There are two types of abilities: Action Abilities (anything that takes away enemy HP or restores your HP) and Support Abilities (raises your stats, protects you from physical and magic attacks, or makes your attack against an enemy more effective.
Characters learn new abilities depending on which weapon, armor, or accesory a character has equiped. For example, if Vivi equips a certain staff, he can use Fire and Osmose AND learn the attacks. If Vivi unequips the staff, he can't use the two magics if he didn't learn them. You gain Action Points (AP) after battle, you need AP to learn abilities. Green bars on your Abilities Screen show how much AP is needed before someone learns an ability.
Battle is more like FFVII than VIII. There are less timed button presses, and ,as usual, you can summon Guardian Monsters, Ifrit, Shiva, and Leviathan returns. Mp is back to replace "drawing" magic. Now, there are no Limit Breaks (ouch!), but there is a trance meter instead. If your character takes enough damage, they will fall into a trance, thus gaining a different set of abilities.
There are more improvements in gameplay. A hand over your character appears when a conversation with someone ends, showing you can move again. Exclamtion-point and question marks appear over items of interest. Walk around and you'll often enter Active Time Events, where there is a scene which all the characters are searching for a town. You can watch them or ignore them.
The graphics in this game is just incredible! Each super-deformed character model has a lot of personality (they actually turn their heads to someone talking to them). The hi-res backgrounds are as sharp as ever. Finally, the FMVs are great looking!
If you liked the classic Final Fantasies, or even if you don't, this game is the finest game on the Playstation (next to Vagrant Story). Period.