The Beautiful & Baffling Designs of Final Fantasy 9 | Design Delve

My two thoughts: First - the big party split immediately preceding Terra does turn out not to make all four groups playable. But since the player doesn't *know* this beforehand, and the player gets a chance to prepare before committing to the four-shrine mission, the prospect should serve as a warning to the player to get the whole team equipped and levelled up first! Second - FF9 *doesn't* actually require significant grinding to keep party members caught up on levels if the player rotates their lowest-levelled PCs into the active party regularly. The numbers are scaled such that lower-levelled characters catch up quickly when getting xp from encounters above their paygrade, and the stats on higher-powered equipment can help them fight above their level; conversely, the highest-level characters get less benefit out of those same encounters. Getting that higher-level equipment to hand around is a bit more of a trick, but one that FF9 does provide answers to if the player engages with all of its systems -- especially stealing items and using the synthesis shop, but also a fair amount of passing equipment back and forth between characters that share ability to equip certain types, and abilities like Quina's Millionaire support. Okay, maybe a *little* grinding, but when that gets broken down into smaller goals like learning new abilities for various characters it becomes a more interesting and approachable bit of gameplay than "just go kill monsters 'til you're strong enough"

JRPGs until fairly recently were a popular, but incredibly sweaty genre where it was expected that a large proportion of the players would end up grinding for far longer than they had to in order to see all the content, whether that be an optional superboss or just what was at the end of each weapon upgrade tree. Personally no exp share between party members is a real pet hate because it’s just sheer padding. It doesn’t have to be 1:1, see Persona 5 and a host of other games that give a proportion of EXP to members not in combat but P5R for instance took me about 150 hours, partially because I got everyone to near the level cap. If I needed to do that individually it would’ve taken at least twice as long and I would’ve noped out of doing it, keeping to the same 4 people which would really undermine the narrative. See also every Fire Emblem game for “well these are my strongest guys so they’re the ones I’ll use forever now.” thinking.

Jay, this one nearly killed me. XP sharing was in the first Pokémon, and I agree: it is a concession that leveling up multiple Pokémon, especially new ones, is a chore. But leveling Pokémon is also the point of the game. XP sharing is a great example of why convenience can be detrimental. It was an item to find, then one you were given, then just a feature in the game. As the game has increased convenience, it has also devalued a lot of its gameplay, and people complain about modern Pokémon all the time. I see a link here, and it's frustrating to think that you, as a designer speaking on design concepts, seem to ignore to it. When you devalue your primary gameplay loops, you have to resort to novelty to pad them, and I would argue Pokémon and XP Share are fantastic examples of this. Once leveling your Pokémon is established to be a chore, what do you replace it with in a game about leveling your Pokémon? This ties into your larger view that narrative is primary and gameplay is subservient, and thus any gameplay that interferes with narrative must be carefully and tightly managed. XP Share must be given away because leveling Pokémon is preventing narrative progress. But that does assume the story is more important than the Pokémon battles.

I think it is an age thing. Back when I first bought FF9 on the PS1, I probably played two or three different games per year and I don't think I ever considered not spending the time to keep my characters on level parity because...what the hell else did I have to do with my freetime? :) But, yeah, I would have thrown my PC out the window if I lost an hour like that. Glad you enjoyed the game otherwise. Best soundtrack of the FFs too for me (obviously including You're Not Alone, that Anime-moment banger).

I'd argue that the game does teach you to level separate parties during the party split when you send half the party during the Oeilvert/Dessert Palace split. 4 members go to Oeilvert, the other 4 stay and go through the Dessert Palace. in both only 1 member is fixed in each, Zidane for Oeilvert and Eiko for Dessert Palace, and the rest you have to pick.