I have been enjoying FF9 quite a lot. It seems pretty similar to FFX in tone and quality of its characterization, and so it makes sense to me in some way I haven’t formulated (who knows if I will ever care to) why I hear almost as many people say that 9 is their favorite as do 10. It feels like it’s going to be a huge game! I am on disc 2, in the black mage forest. I often think that the ratio of cutscene to gameplay is too skewed in favor of cutscene/dialogs, but I do actually enjoy the story and the pacing of the drama is really varied so if it’s monotonous it never seems to be monotonous for very long. I really love how frequently they pull the party apart, it pushes you to play with characters you maybe wouldn’t and all the plot contrivances they come up with to make this happen are I think successful at being exciting or interesting.
I am playing this in a super high tech way too. I got the Moguri mod which comes with a bunch of quality of life enhancements to the middling PC steam port (it’s the worst of the available three PS1 FF ports I think), and includes AI upscaled backgrounds which are very nice.
But that’s not all of it. I’m playing on both my steam deck and my desktop, and transferring my save file between them using the weird propietary save transfer these PC ports have. I upload my save whenever I’m done on my deck and download it on my PC, then do the opposite when I wanna play on my deck again.
I’m living in the future that only Kojima seemed to find spectacular: I’m transfarring in the futuristic year of two-thousand and twenty-two!