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Axe of the Blood God: The Final Fantasy IX Report Begins!
PODCAST | And we talk Divinity: Original Sin 2 as well!
Article
by
Kat Bailey,
09/22/2017.
Axe of the Blood God is our weekly RPG podcast hosted by Kat Bailey and Nadia Oxford. You can find the previous episodes here.
In this week's episode of Axe of the Blood God (download link here), we commence our in-depth discussion of a cult classic: Final Fantasy IX!
Final Fantasy IX launched on the PS4 earlier this week; and upon hearing that Nadia only ever played a few hours of it, I knew what our next report would be about. In the first part, we talk about its history, the intro, some of the characters, the ways that it differs from the other PSX Final Fantasy releases, and of course, Vivi!
Also in this episode: Mike talks about why Divinity: Original Sin 2 is rad. It's pretty rad! And of course we have all of our usual RPG news, letters, and perfect RPG teams. Join us!
Want to share your thoughts on RPGs? Email us at usgamer@usgamer.net. We may read your letter on the show! Keep those Perfect RPG Teams coming, folks!
Where to find us (Subscribe, rate, and review!)
Show Description
Kat and Nadia talk about Final Fantasy XV on the Switch, Monster Hunter World, and Nier: Automata's sales success, then jump into the main topic: Our first Final Fantasy IX report! (13:23). Then Mike joins us to talk about why you should be playing Divinity: Original Sin 2! (35:56) And of course we read your letters!
Music from Axe of the Blood God is courtesy of Lena Chappelle, who has also contributed the themes to Active Time Babble and Roleplayers' Realm. I also use music from the RPG Music Pack over at rpgmaker.net. Check it out!
This article may contain links to online retail stores. If you click on one and buy the product we may receive a small commission. For more information, go here.
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Comments 11
More ffix is always great.
Now if only SE could release a version that does those pre-rendered backgrounds justice.Edited September 2017 by Godots17thCup
Can't wait to listen! :D
Too bad it killed the mainstream viability of JRPGs for a while there.
It's not FFIX fault, entirely. But the game, sadly, is emblematic of the flaws that would wreck the genre for about a decade at least. The battle system is simple and intuitive, but it is SO SLOW. The camera swoops around and the enemies take their sweet time to take turns. It's all little things that add up to combat that drags and, to the mainstream gamer, feels "boring."
It's a PS1 problem, really. I've fallen in love, known betrayal and loss, then finally come to acceptance and peace in the time it takes for one of Legend of Dragoon's battles to get started. But by the time we reached FFIX, the allure of cinematic flourishes to combat had faded, and it became clear that this setup needed to be fixed.
But it was fixed in the wrong way. Instead of making the battles snappier (which can make a simplistic combat system still sing), most devs thought the answer would either be to make JRPG combat more complicated (like the fighting game elements in the Legia series, for example), or to move to a hybrid of real-time and turn-based action like the Tales games. These both "fixed" the issue of boring battles, but did so in a way that made the genre more niche and hardcore focused. It wasn't until...Person 4, maybe(?) that there was another traditional JRPG with crossover appeal and combat that didn't take its sweet time getting started.
Hopefully the PS4 version of FFIX and it's ability to speed up the battles will allow more people to discover this gem in a way that is more compatible with a modern audience. And then the lessons it taught, both good and bad, can help inspire the genre going forward.
Also Quina is FF Character of the year all years.Edited September 2017 by victorehunter
Chocobo Hot and Hold was annoying at first, but it did grow on me, as I got addicted to finding all those treasure pieces. Never found any useful equipment but an excuse to explore the best Overworld ever until Final Fantasy XV was pretty nice, and getting that golden Chocobo was pretty cool.
I can't play PSN FF9 right now anyway as I am still playing through Yakuza 0, and if I spend that $17, that's $17 I could use toward saving up for a Switch. Hope to hear about the reports next week, and Good Luck everyone. I hope I'll get a SNES classic but I doubt it!