IMHO, you can just throw 9 in the fire. It starts off great, but it ends up being the
worst. Final Fantasy. Ever.
10 on the other hand is one of my favs. 3rd favorite (beaten by 8 and 7 respectively)
It’s not just you. I used Lulu’s path with his sphere grid, but his spell strength never caught up with the monster’s stats, so eventually I just gave up on him. I think whatever path you choose, he’ll just be a less competent version of one of the other characters.
I haven’t played either, but here’s my comments.
Too much dialouge in 9? I know that people complained about 7 having too much dialouge, but it didn’t bug me(I must be one of the few people who don’t hate the flashback in kalm)
Well, I’ve heard that people who love 8, tend to hate 9, and visa versa. Basically, that 9 was supposed to appeal to those FF gamers who were upset with the continuing “sci-fi” path the FF series was taking, which explains why it’s pretty fantasy-ish with the cystals making a return to center stage.
If you like the Job classes, you have to play 5 then. I rather enjoyed it, (mostly the atmosphere of it), but the job class is fairly extensive and well made.
Didn’t 4 do this as well? I seem to remember people leaving and coming back at certain events all throughout that game.
Yeah, it did, but at the time it was released in America, I don’t think there were any RPG’s released in America that didn’t have fixed classes. So it wasn’t such a big deal.
I hear that. I just got past the part where Tidus and Yuna kiss in the lake and I was about ready to get up and walk out of the room till she was done babbling, in slow motion. She talks so damn slow. And she has this whiny, pouty, voice thru the whole game. She is by far the most irritating character of any FF game. I am hoping to beat this game this weekend. I would say that this is by far the easiest game of the series. I have had no troubles at all in any of the boss fights.
Im telling ya, the constant “sensor on” skill ruined the battles in this game. Also, whats with the same fights over and over. Its like they take the same three monsters in an area and make you fight them over and over. They keep them in teh same formations and everything.
Its kinda wierd how Tidus looks like a white teenager during gameplay, but when it cuts to FMV he looks japanese.
Stinkpalm:
FFIX has a very Victorian motif, while FFX is the Spanish Inquisition if all the Spaniards were dead. FFX is superior in plot, graphics, design, game play, enjoyment, and I think I even bought it cheaper at the time too. That said, I’d recommend playing FFIX. Why? Two words: Chocobo Racing. … I still tense up like a 'Nam vet whenever I go outside and a bird swoops overhead. 
And why’d you skip FFIV? That’s one of the best in the series. Especially if you ever suspected those moon landings were fake. Why, Armstrong never even ran into a Pudding for crying out loud.
SolGrundy:
While that was a superb game, it pales to its big cousin, Xenogears. Even FFX gives it a run for its money. But hey, you know its quality Squaresoft when the game shows you how the Church is secretly trying to take over the world. God bless Squaresoft for doing its part to fight the Luminati. 
ultrafilter:
You had problems with the last boss in FFIX?! How? Did you decide the play the end of the game bound and gagged? (I mean, whatever works for ya…) 
But really, aside from the fact that he shows up outta nowhere (plotwise, which is why I’m not bothering with spoiler tags. I’m not running anything; it isn’t even allude to anywhere else in the game) and just kinda says “I’m bored, let’s fight”, the battle felt like it had been dropped from Final Fantasy Mystic Quest for being too easy.
Then again, I have a nasty habit of maxing out my characters in each game, so maybe my view is a little skewed…
Geshtal:
Ruining, either.
well, I’m not the BEST authority to speak on this because I’ve yet to play X, but I am at the very end of 9 and I say bleah.
It’s a bit cutesy & kiddish; I was willing to look past it when I started because, frankly, I was bored…but later it got kind of annoying. Vivi gets on my nerves, as does what’s-her-name-little-girl with the purple hair. Matter of fact, ALL the characters get on my nerves in some way or another…they all seem so impulsive and fussy! The battles…grr…sometimes I really wish I could turn OFF the random battle thing…but otherwise, they’re well done. Lots of skills/spells/eidolons to be gained, different strategies required for different monsters, impressive graphics for PSX on the special moves & such.
All in all, I wouldn’t go so far as to say don’t bother…but don’t finish; it’s the same throughout. Too much time, too little reward.
If it’s between FFIX and FFX, I personally reccommend FFX. While I personally didn’t feel it built up to the same cool crescendo as FFVI and FFVII (and, to a somewhat lesser degree, VIII), FFX ends far better than IX.
It’s interesting: FFIX has one of the best first ten hours of gameplay and story in the whole series, IMO–but it peaks at about the scene where Black Waltz 3 chases the airship through the gate to Lindblum, and I never felt like the story regained the same sense of mystery or urgency (it probably doesn’t help that the game’s “main” villain, Kuja, amounts to little more than a barely-dressed Sephiroth wannabe). The rest of the game isn’t bad, but the plot never really gels. At the end of the game, it’s really not even clear what the threat to the world is, or why it has to be stopped. And, as others have pointed out before me, Square pulled the last boss right out of their ass at the last minute, and it’s extremely easy–zero dramatic payoff. So, when all is said and done, even though I still like FFIX, I will readily admit that it’s probably the most disposable game in the series.
My feelings are a little more mixed in regards to FFX. I didn’t feel that it ended completely anticlimactically, like FFIX, but the last boss–about which I will reveal nothing–definitely didn’t “wow” me. If you can imagine the last fight from Chrono Trigger, only without the Lovecraftian overtones and the sense of dramatic payoff, that’s probably the best way I can describe FFX’s last boss without spoiling anything. I have to admit, I found myself getting frustrated with FFX’s story towards the end. Unlike IX, it came together okay… I just didn’t find it particularly interesting when it did. If you’ve played FFVI-VIII (and I have, many many many times), then FFX doesn’t really have much new to offer… well, that’s what I ultimately decided. YMMV. FFX’s story is basically “FFVIII meets Chrono Trigger” (without the time travel), and the characters are all very similar to those found in FFVIII–Tidus and Yuna’s whole relationship was basically Squall and Rinoa’s, with the volume turned down and the personality types reversed (i.e., the guy is the spunky go-getter, and the girl is the quiet introvert). For my money’s worth, I think the game would’ve been more interesting if you’d played as Braska, Auron, and Jecht.
So anyway, if it’s between those two, I’d go with FFX. It’s still a mixed bag, but it’s a slightly more interesting mix. And hey, there’s always Rikku… 
Or, if you actually never have played through FFIV, check around for a translated ROM of the Japanese “Hard” version (or you can e-mail me, and I can hook you up). What we got in the U.S., as “FFII,” was a heavily-censored translation of the watered-down version of the original game (for some reason, Square released an “Easy” and “Hard” version of FFIV in Japan). The fan translation has MUCH better dialogue, a richer story, and far more challenging gameplay than its official predecessor… and ultimately, I’d have to say it was much more interesting than either FFIX or X. Anyway, that’s my $.02!
Well I’ll admit they pulled the last boss out of their ass, the game towards the end made perfect sense to people who played and loved Final Fantasy I. It’s a little like Chrono Cross. You spend most of the game thinking it has nothing to do with anything, but at the end references to a previous game hit you like a punch to the gut.
UnuMondo
Err, that should read While I’d admit that they pulled the last boss out of their ass.
UnuMondo
I played and loved FF1. I got it the week it came out, back in July of 1990 (God, just saying that makes me feel old…). And sure, it was tres cool to see the four fiends make a return appearance… but that wasn’t the last boss. The last boss had nothing to do with FF1 or–as far as I know–anything else in the series. It was just some big ugly thing that quoted The Phantom Menace before you kicked its ass.
And don’t get me started on Chrono Cross’s flaming-train-wreck-plowing-into-an-orphanage-on-adopt-a-baby-seal-day disaster of an “ending.” To this day, I long to meet Masato Kato, the writer of CC, and slug him one in the gut for letting a game with such a great buildup (and a awesome plot twist in the middle) devolve into such a limp, expository mishmash. Basically, he tried to stretch out the story of the vastly superior (plotwise) Radical Dreamers into a forty-hour game… and it just ended up crumbling into senseless crud in the last ten hours, starting with when you beat Lynx.
For anyone who’s played Chrono Cross, I highly suggest playing Radical Dreamers. It was recently translated into English (and ecellently so) by a group of dedicated fans; do a Google search for “Demiforce Radical Dreamers translation.” It basically amounts to the plot of CC, done much more concisely and effectively. Oh, and one of the main characters is a certain archmage you might remember encountering in Chrono Trigger… 
I highly disagree. The orphanage scene was moving. I’m a grown man, and that scene almost brings tears to my eyes. And I like CC over Radical Dreamers because of the graphics. No, not the “whoa, look how many rendered polygons!” graphics, but the beautiful art direction. The soundtrack was also superb.
The orphanage wasn’t the ending, anyway. After the orphanage there are still some things to be done before fighting Time Devourer.
UnuMondo
We have a misunderstanding here… and it’s completely my fault. I wasn’t referring to the scene with the burning orphange, believe it or not. In fact, in my opinion that’s the last truly great scene in the game (I especially love the kids’ drawings of the heroes from Chrono Trigger). It actually didn’t even occur to me that there was a burning orphange in the game when I was writing that previous post–all I was really trying to do was come up with a clever-sounding way to get across the point that the ending of Chrono Cross is a disaster of mind-melting proportions. In other words, it’s worse than “just” a train wreck (figuratively speaking); it’s more like a train wrecking into an orphange… etc. I guess it’s just a coincidence that I picked that particular way to say it… freakin’ bizarre.
Anyway, to be more specific: my problems with Chrono Cross’s last ten or so hours start at just about the exact moment you kill Lynx. The second that fight is over, the game suddenly shifts into “Xenogears Disc 2 Exposition Mode”–i.e., 90% of the plot information is delivered by people standing around TELLING it to you. The orphange scene is a brief, welcome respite, but in my opinion it’s all downhill from there. Here’s why…
First of all, the whole “villain switcharoo” the writers pull near the end of the game–the dragons taking Lynx’s place as the central threat–just doesn’t work for me. At all. At least Lynx was kind of interesting and cool (though they more or less forgot about him after you switched bodies, at least in terms of the immediate plot). I can’t help but feel that it’s pretty lame to replace an effective villain who’s been built up for most of the game with a bunch of generic dragons–and at what amounts to the middle of the third act of the story!
Besides, the whole thing about the dragons combining into the Time Devourer and the appearance of “Dinopolis” was essentially disposeable–none of it really had anything to do with Schala or Lavos, which is what the game ultimately decides it wants to focus on. The dragons were just kind of… there. I’ll grant you that they made for a pretty cool boss fight (awesome music, needless to say–Mitsuda rules), but the second it was finished the writers immediately say “Oops! That wasn’t the real threat to the multiverse! Come on down to the beach so we can tell you why the entire game was just an overglorified fan-fiction explaining what happened to Schala after the Ocean Palace collapsed in Chrono Trigger!”
And that’s just what happens–which means that none of that awesome foreshadowing earlier on in the game (Lynx calling Serge the “Chrono Trigger,” the entire “Time Crash” and “Chronopolis” scenes, etc.) ends up amounting to much of anything. Instead, the writers just have the kiddie Crono, Marle, and Lucca stand around and TELL you how and why Lynx was Serge’s father, and that Schala “heard Serge crying out through time” (uh-HUH…), and that Kid is Schala’s “clone-daughter,” and blah-blah-blah. Of course, NONE of this B.S. was even vaguely foreshadowed before that scene (except, to some degree, the Schala-Kid connection… which was done much better and more concisely in Radical Dreamers, anyway)! Talk about your hack writing jobs! It seriously comes off as if the writers themselves didn’t decide what the game was supposed to be about until they got to the last scene, and that their desperate brainstorming of ideas to give the whole story a point ended up as dialogue that the player is forced to sit through.
So then they send you into the weirdo-dimension where the Schala/Lavos Time Devourer (as opposed to the Dragon God TD) is, so you can “free Schala” by playing a song that–again–was never mentioned before the moment it became necessary to the plot, and has God knows what signifigance to anything. So you play the damn song, and your reward is yet MORE desperate, fumbling exposition (this time from Schala–who looks nothing like CT’s Schala, might I add), followed by a cookie-cutter “feel good” monologue about how all life has meaning, yadda yadda yadda. Then Serge wakes up back in El Nido–which, technically, should no longer even exist–as if the whole damn game was a dream. Oh, and then there’s some unspeakably cheesy FMV of “Schala” wandering around some contemporary city in OUR reality. The end.
Anyway, as you can no doubt tell, the whole thing stuck in my craw from the first moment I saw it, and has remained firmly lodged ever since. The sad part is, I really, really want to like Chrono Cross. As a game, it’s a very solid, fun experience–and as I mentioned earlier, a lot of the plot early on is fantastic. But that flaming nosedive of an ending just kills it for me… and the fact that it started out so good is what makes the ending that much harder for me to forgive. Sigh …That’s about all I can bring myself to say about the matter for right now.
I wonder, now that the topic has drifted over to Chrono cross, exaclty what was the deal with the “Time Crash” and the ruined square with the perpetually setting sun.
As I understand it, the Time Crash was a part of the future that Crono and co. fought to prevent during Chrono Trigger… the future in which Lavos awakened in the year 1999 to scour the planet. When Lavos was defeated, a new timeline formed–one in which Lavos never wiped out the advanced civilization that existed in 1999 (remember, Crono, Marle, and Lucca were from 1000 AD). Since the Day of Lavos never occurred in the “new” timeline, human civilization and technology eventually progressed to the point where a group of scientists involved in the study of time (based in a research center called Chronopolis) discovered a means of searching out and studying “lost,” or divergent, timelines.
Needless to say, these scientists were surprised to discover a timeline in which their own world had been all but destroyed by a massive extraterrestrial parasite. Curious about the nature of the parasite (and wanting to research its massive energy output), they managed to bring a piece of it from the “lost” timeline into their own. However, the act of bringing a part of Lavos (the Frozen Flame) from the long-lost past into their present created a window of opportunity for Lavos to return, and some kind of huge imbalance between the two timelines resulted. The “lost” timeline began to bleed through into the reality that had replaced it, forming the Time Crash in El Nido’s Dead Sea.
There’s more to the Time Crash than that (such as the Kingdom of Zeal’s Guru of Reason, Belthasar, and his involvement in the research at Chronopolis, after he arrived in that time through a warp created by the awakening of Lavos in year 12,000 BC, when it destroyed Zeal–as seen in CT), but that’s the simplest explantion as to why it exists. Everything is frozen in the Time Crash because, apparently, time itself has come to a screeching halt there until one of the two “competing” timelines becomes “dominant.” Anyway, that seems to be why Leena’s father, Miguel, was able to stay there for literally ten years without aging–time wasn’t passing for him. I forget exactly why, but beating him somehow resolves the conflict in space/time, and the “lost” timeline is forced back into nonexistence, restoring things in the area to the way they were before the TC. That’s why, when you return to the Dead Sea near the end of the game, Chronopolis is there.
Oh yeah, and the bell in that scene is Nadia’s bell–the very same one placed in Leene Square by King Guardia at the end of Chrono Trigger, in honor of Princess Nadia (aka Marle). I couldn’t believe how cool that was the first time I played the game.
Anyway, did any of that make sense?
I think it cleared it up a bit. It’s just has some really complicated science in it(and I like theorectical physics).
And the scene in Leene Square, IMHO, was one of the coolest(and saddest) scenes in the game.
I like Final Fantay X, but Kingdom Hearts is better.