Does Yoshi P Hate FF9?

[Veritas-Ancora]

((Lore Spoilers))

Actual question. No rage baiting, please. Here we go.

Final Fantasy I, we got the hero and the villain.
Final Fantasy II, we got a lot of references like the Wild Rose.
Final Fantasy III, we got the Cloud of Darkness and Crystal Tower.
Final Fantasy IV, we got an entire expansion in Endwalker.
Final Fantasy V, we got the job system, Exdeath, and much more.
Final Fantasy VI, we are literally dripping with everything FF6.
Final Fantasy VII, we got limit breaks and Knights of the Round
Final Fantasy VIII, we got the Eden raids, Triple Triad, and Gunbreaker.

Final Fantasy IX, which the expansion was ready to go gungho, we got some vague suggestions of two cities, no main characters, no villains, no trance, no anything.

It genuinely feels like Yoshi P hates Final Fantasy IX. In the most recent patch, we had two names that were code for Beatrix (without calling her Beatrix, WHY) and 7.0 brought on a low-budget Steiner. There was no Dagger, no Eiko, no Brahne, no Zidane, no Kuja, no Garland, no anything. There was Ozma many years ago, I'll concede to that, but it was a throw-in boss unrelated to this expansion. This expansion's boss seems to be some dorky little kid who wants SCIENCE.

Maybe it's just the fact that I was SOOOO looking forward to one of my top favorite Final Fantasy games out there and it feels like the whole thing has fallen flat.

And yes people are going to try to argue "BuT iT's aN MmO tHe GaMe iS diFfeReNt" to which I say, hogwash. We literally used the Knights of the Round, Kefka, Exdeath, Zeromus, Prishe/Dark Lord, Chaos, and countless other bosses in this game, completely identical, and thrown in with tons of different ways to still make it Final Fantasy Disneyland and fully coherent with the plotlines.

I just don't understand why they're not showing the same love they've shown all the other games.

Where's the Final Fantasy 9 lore?

Please discuss.

[Cleretic]

On the contrary, I think the game is using Final Fantasy IX extremely specifically and deliberately. It's more than just scattered pieces of fanservice, more than just moments of 'we said Mt. Gulg, please clap'. Dawntrail is using Final Fantasy IX in a very deliberate and meaningful way.

Specifically, FFIX is being used to evoke an idyllic past that's been lost. They're using the fact that it's a beloved game with a very soft aesthetic and optimistic world as a storytelling element itself. The world of FFIX existed, complete with Alexandria, the Iifa Tree, and even Dali... but 'existed' is the key operator. It was four hundred years ago, and it's gone. We only see it in retrospect: in soon-to-be-deleted memories, in a theme park recreation, in a dilapidated, disused ruin. Final Fantasy IX's world is gone, it was in the past, and we're only seeing what the present has made of it, either through nostalgic recollections or deliberate manipulations.

This actually hits home especially hard in the newest patch, in the Underkeep: we're finally seeing the real Alexandria Castle, and it's filled with much more direct recreations of an older Final Fantasy than the game ever otherwise does: there are rooms that are exact recreations of screens in FFIX... but it's covered in dust, filled with boxes as a half-hearted storage room. The real Alexandria Castle you know existed... and has been forgotten, neglected. Meanwhile, Preservation make a twisted copy of their version of Beatrix, built not as a faithful recreation, but as a copy of how others saw her.

These are decisions made with love: it's framing FFIX's world as a place of beauty and a thing to mourn. Preservation's perversions of its memory are framed as a crime, as a thing to despise and be disgusted by. You would not do this out of hatred of the source material; you would only do this if you know, within your heart, that it is and should be loved.

If what you want is shallow references, then go fight Ozma in Mhach, or Cruise Chaser in Alexander. But Dawntrail is doing something deeper than that.

[Enkidoh]

That's the thing, FFIX ironically itself is just like FFXIV in that it was a deliberate love letter to everything that had come before it in the series, so a large amount of FFIX's story and setting were taken already from earlier FF games (such as Mount Gulg as you mentioned Cleretic was actually a dungeon from the very first FF game), so that leaves actually very little to directly take from when crafting fanservice references here in FFXIV.

And we've had plenty of FFIX references already (Zidane's outfit was long a Veteran Reward, a Vivi-equivelant along with a reference to Quan in the HW Hildibrand quests, FFIX music tracks in PvP Crystalline Conflict, the Prima Vista as the theatre ship that kick starts the Ivalice raids, the Festival of the Hunt being referenced in a Wanted target in a HW Battlecraft levequest etc etc), so it's only really in keeping with tradition.

[Cilia]

It's also worth noting that one of the central plot points about the back half of 7.0 and on is a direct reference to IX's central plot, that being efforts to defy death and live eternal instead of finding happiness in the time you're given. Death is part of life, and trying to defy death or redefine life to exclude it is a losing game one way or another.

Hell, Preservation's method of prolonging the existence of Alexandria is Terra's MO from IX almost point for point. Sphene is a different gemstone, but she shares that theme naming with Garnet. Gulool Ja and Otis have a similar dynamic to Vivi and Steiner. And so on and so forth.

[Fellgon]

A man who hates Final Fantasy cant work at squareenix.

[DarkMasamune]

If you're going that way, then Yoshi P must hate FFX since we only got Yojimbo and a few music notes in Stormblood that reminds me of it (althought I might have forgotten some things).

I agree with everyone else ; I actually feel like there are a lot of FFIX plot elements, callbacks and nods here and there. I was impressed with Solution Nine having a tons of little winks to the monsters, the trial was great, the music in both the dungeon and the trial were awesome.
Speaking of music, you got a tons of remixes from FFIX ; the Court Jesters is remixed for The Strayborough Deadwalk dungeon, the Tantalus' Theme is slow remixed for the hud in Solution Nine...

I actually believe they did a great job regarding FFIX.

[Cleretic]

If you're going that way, then Yoshi P must hate FFX since we only got Yojimbo and a few music notes in Stormblood that reminds me of it (althought I might have forgotten some things).

Off the top of my head you're missing Anima, Ixion, the Yuna outfit, and hrothgar being called the ronso on the First. There's also stuff like XIV's Bismarck fight having inspirations from the Sin fight, and Amaurot in Shadowbringers evoking Zanarkand in FFX, but at that point we're stretching to a point that the OP clearly doesn't really like or count.

In all honesty, it is kinda weird how little we've gotten from FFX in the 'shallow reference' fare, although I highly doubt it's a matter of any developer's personal tastes. I think it's just that FFX is kind of hard for XIV to reference because it's largely playing in a very different aesthetic space. You've actually gotta put in some serious work to make an FFX thing fit in to the FFXIV world, which makes it harder to do something like 'here's Evrae, please clap'.

Meanwhile XIII onwards are also pretty thin on the ground, but I think that's a different problem; XIV is already sharing enemy models and other assets with them, so it'd actually be too easy to do a shallow reference, it'd feel like laziness instead of fanservice.

[DarkMasamune]

Off the top of my head you're missing Anima, Ixion, the Yuna outfit, and hrothgar being called the ronso on the First. There's also stuff like XIV's Bismarck fight having inspirations from the Sin fight, and Amaurot in Shadowbringers evoking Zanarkand in FFX, but at that point we're stretching to a point that the OP clearly doesn't really like or count.

Oh you're right, wow, perhaps I should'nt post when I just woke up hahaha.

[SannaR]

There is the very Vivi coded Blm JSE they got in an earlier expansion. For Dawntrail we got a Zidane and Garnet minions. All of the tomestone gear this patch is a reference to an IX character with only Quina, and Echo not being represented. We can fight Ozma in Beldesian Arsenal where you can obtain it as a mount after beating it.

[PorxiesRCute]

This is such a bizarre thread. The setting of the second half of Dawntrail is basically FFIX with different names. Yes we have Dagger; it's Real Sphene. There's more FFIX in Dawntrail than there is FFI (Warrior of Light repurposed as Elidibus + Chaos in the Omega raids; that's literally it) or FFII ("wild rose" references which are in basically every FF game + the name "Pandaemonium" being used for a completely different location) in the entire game.

You're also forgetting about Vivi in the Heavensward Hildibrand quests.