Thursday, July 14, 2011

Final Fantasy IX is too slow

That's right, it is.

If I were to be in charge of remaking the game, the primary thing I would change would be the speed of the game. I would speed up almost everything by at least 50%.

Battles are too slow. It's roughly ten seconds between the time you get the "OMG A BATTLE" swirly animation and when your ATB gauges start to fill up. That's unacceptably long. Battle animations take too long as well. Maybe I've been spoiled by the Disgaea series where you can flat out disable animations, but it seems like everything just takes too long. Gonna cast Cura? Well, you had better set aside a good amount of time for the character to step up to center stage and wave their scepter around a little bit, after which you get to watch a pretty, but unnecessarily lengthy, animation of swirly white stuff healing someone. It seems like I'll issue orders to all my characters, and by the time one of them has completed their orders the other three have filled up their battle gauges and are waiting for animations to complete before they do anything.

The world map is a bit better, but it would also be improved by some speed increases. The fun part of a game is rarely the "walk to the next area you need to be at" part. It would be nice to get there quicker.

It's not that the game is bad. In fact, I'm really enjoying it a lot. It's just that it always feels like things aren't happening fast enough. Maybe I should just go play some Half-Minute Hero and get my hyper-speed RPG fix.

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