i would have enjoyed final fantasy 9 if the best word to describe the game wasn't VAPID. final fantasy 7&8 at least attempted to convey some interesting ideas and, at times, managed to do it rather well. then final fantasy 9 comes around and aims for an age demographic ten years behind the previous two games. the story is so flat and idiotic that it's really impossible to focus on any of the finer elements of the game. i tried playing final fantasy 9 again somewhat recently, to see if i missed something or if i was too hard on it the first time, and i couldn't get an hour into it. it's just a really fucking dumb game. i ended up throwing the controller down, instead spending the night drinking heavily and swearing loudly so the neighbors could hear.
whether or not final fantasy 7&8 are actually good games is open to debate, but at least they aspired to do greater things than the typical idiotic rpg. who the fuck makes a game about violent ecoterrorism and actually conveys it as a good thing?!? i don't fucking care how bad the translation is, or how stiff and unconvincing the characters are, that's an exceedingly brave thing to do. not a lot of people are hyper about final fantasy 8, but this was a game about a kid with social anxiety disorder and extreme introversion. i'm not saying it was done all that well, and squall is a rather obnoxious character most of the time, but this was a pretty excellent idea, especially conveying a significant percentage of squall's persona through what was effectively an interior monologue. lots of elements of final fantasy 8 were really deliberately backwards and it made for, if nothing else, a pretty unique experience with vivid, realistic characters.
final fantasy 9 aspired to do absolutely nothing except re-integrate the brand into a pre-teen audience. it's the reason why the series is absolute shit right now, because it removed any sort of obligation to make the games about something worthwhile, or to do anything against the grain with them. there were a lot of very interesting rpgs for the first playstation, but final fantasy 9 is like this enormous stick in the mud that refuses to do anything unique and just leeches off of prior games without developing a brain of its own. in the other final fantasy games, the FINAL FANTASY STANDARDS like chocobos and jawa-ripoff black mages and all that shit are just peripheral elements to give the games color and to tie the series together. in final fantasy 9, pretty much all they did was accumulate as many of those stupid, tired final fantasy standards as possible and do nothing else of merit in the game.