Editor’s note: This review was written by Shawn Honeycutt, a 27-year-old aspiring game designer enrolled in the Game Design Bachelor of Science program at Full Sail University. Shawn loves his school, the games they all play and doing things that help people, so he says it's a fun and natural choice to work on games. Shawn has lived all over the central and western United States. His home is considered Tucson, Ariz., but he’s currently in Miami, Okla. Shawn’s played videogames, written stories and invented games from early in his life to now (even in the middle of a boring job). His true goal is to create his own unique role-playing games for consoles of today and tomorrow.

The unequivocally splendorous story of Final Fantasy IX mixed with the slightly abstract characters during gameplay, their clarity during beautifully rendered full-motion video scenes, and the intricacies of the interaction between the story’s main characters and the world in which they live make this Final Fantasy a game to remember. Regardless of the number of times I have played this game, I always seem to find some new facet of it to interest and teach me. Since its introduction into the American market, thousands of people have owned and played Final Fantasy IX, including me.

The graphics during play are slightly abstract, showing only what the player needs to see and hiding certain “Easter egg” items from the player’s view. The FMV sequences, on the other hand, are highly detailed, showing beautiful scenery of a strange fantasy world with wonderfully designed citadels, glorious castles, and intricate and different landscapes. These visuals mixed with the addictive play of Final Fantasy IX and the beautiful musical notes fuse the old and new Final Fantasy.

I enjoyed the game mechanics because it was simple enough to introduce to a new gamer. The control scheme was kept to a few buttons, and the rest of the complexities of Final Fantasy IX were controlled by menus. A good menu design can often eliminate complex control schemes, or at least alleviate them. Square-Enix did wonderfully in my eyes with its simple “press X to say yes or O to say no” scheme.

The story, the best part of Final Fantasy IX, captivates with a joking crew of misfits and a well-to-do princess off on a grand and beautiful journey through not only their own colorful and curiously unique world, but another world that is in its last death throws. The main goal of the game is to defeat Kuja, who has decided that the world he was spawned to protect is not deserving and should instead be destroyed.

The heroes of the game, Zidane Tribal and Princess Garnet, pick up the will to fight to save their home, only to fall short many times. Still they press on, despite losses and pain. A true strength must be found to defeat Kuja and bring him to justice for the countless deaths and brutal attacks accredited to him. A group of eight heroes join the cast of heroes, and together they fight to save their world from Kuja.

Final Fantasy IX’s rising action and climax are some of the best parts of the storyline, and they require you to really think about how your actions — as a small group of people on the world — affect the whole world. Deep emotions drive each of the heroes onward to the final goal, but in the midst of that, an evolving world around them begins to awaken and fight back, taking the heroes’ lead. As kingdoms clash and crumble on this world, a new breath of life is blown into the storyline, and it only picks up from there. I love how this story still complies with Aristotle’s Three Act Structure, but it slightly draws out certain areas, giving the player slightly increasing action leading up to the climax.

I can honestly say that Final Fantasy IX left me wondering just how much further a game story could possibly go. The complexities and intermingling of the heroes and the rest of the world shows a depth of story that only adds to the flavor of the fantasy elements that permeate each scene. My favorite hero, for example, is Vivi, a small black mage who in earlier Final Fantasy games didn’t have a personality or voice. During this game, Vivi finds out a bit about his sorted past and how a freak accident gave him his personality and ideals. The hero also finds out that he’s not the only black mage to have taken the activating magic and turn into something other than what the original creator intended. This causes a change in the world, introducing a new village of black mages who refused the call of their demented creator into the world I’d been running around in for 40 hours.

When a character’s action or a plot element in turn gives the player something more to do with a game, this adds tremendously to the overall game experience. The multiple side stories that play throughout Final Fantasy IX add to the enlightenment of the hero as well as the player. This only gives the main story more power in the end to drive home the ideology that the story’s writers wanted to convey. I feel that this is an extremely important piece of the games that we see today, as most of them contain at least a few side stories to help their main stories’ focus.

I would definitely recommend any person who loves a long, well-thought out and beautifully crafted story to buy and play Final Fantasy IX for the PlayStation. If you like stories that blend the flavor of fantasy and mellow tones of synthetic musical notes, then you’ll enjoy Final Fantasy IX. Granted, this title is composed of most of the previous Final Fantasy games, but the blend is so perfect and the story so well-crafted that a gamer can enjoy it even through the familiarities of previous titles.