FINAL FANTASY IX'S BRILLIANT BITE-SIZED VIGNETTES

ATEs are the play within the play

- Wes Fenlon

Maybe Final Fantasy IX is my favourite game of all time because of my early exposure to – say this along with me in your most pretentiously flowery accent – the theatre.

Hoping their kid wouldn’t be the type to sit inside doing nothing but playing videogames, my parents often took me to our local theatre, where I saw professional actors perform everything from Shakespeare to Mamet long before I’d even heard of a Japanese RPG. By the time a friend loaned me his PlayStation and insisted I play Final Fantasy IX, I must’ve been psychically primed to love a game that begins with a crew of actor-thieves putting on a play called I Want To Be Your Canary before kidnapping the princess-in-distress and setting off on a world-spanning adventure.

Or maybe it was everything else that grabbed me: the whimsical music, the clever dialogue and slapstick comedy, the romance at the heart of it all. But the thing I most loved about Final Fantasy IX then, and still do 20 years later, is that even when your characters drop the act and flee the stage in the opening minutes, the play never really ends.

HIT YOUR MARKS 

For the next 40 hours or so, Final Fantasy IX sprinkles in these little moments called Active Time Events as you’re going on your journey. Each is a short cutscene, usually under a minute, that whisks your god’s eye view of the world away from the character you’re controlling to some other player in the story.