I was sitting at work bored today and was thinking about how I've rated games I've played, mainly Final Fantasy games. I started thinking of FF9, and if I could remember anything I didn't like about it. But it's just a more classic game compared to the other newer ones. And in it's own way it's a great game. But then I remembered the one thing I really don't like about it isn't anything in the game itself. But the strategy guide. First let me clarify one thing, I rarely use strategy guides. But I get them for major games, mainly to collect. The first time I play a game, I never use the guide. I like to play it through on my own. But then down the road when I feel the urge to play a great game again. It's fun to use a guide to try and do everything I didn't do before.

Back to FF9, this guide is pretty stupid. It was sort of a unique way of doing it, but now it's really not cool. For those who don't know what I mean, the guide has helpful info in it. But whenever it came to more detailed info about something or some secret, it just gives you a keyword. Then you were supposed to go to Playonline.com and put it in the get more info. They tried to combine the strategy guide and the internet together. But they must of not realized, that most gamers don't have a laptop sitting next to them while they play to lookup internet keywords. This was also about the time when third party companies couldn't do strategy guides anymore. So this is the only official one out there for FF9. But then a few years later I looked for this stuff on Playonline and they had redone it so you could access the info without keywords. But now the great thing is, that whole part of Playonline doesn't exist. So the guide is pretty much worthless. That's why internet gaming stuff sort of sucks. It can be cool at the time. But what if I want to play it a decade later or more, it won't exist. I guess Gamefaqs will always be the best way to go for FF9 info.

Final Fantasy IX seemed to come out instantly after FFVIII. Just one year later it was already out. This one was a great game, with a feel that was more fantasy like the older games in the series. An amazing story and one of the Nubuo Uematsu's finest soundtracks made this game a lot of fun. Surprisedly this is probably the one Final Fantasy game I haven't spent a lot of time on, something I plan to remedy.