Thanks to Scott Baird of ScreentRants.com for the inspiration!

11. THE DELAY

It’s telling that the most popular feature of the remastered version of Final Fantasy IX is the ability to fast-forward the game. There are plenty of dungeons in Final Fantasy IX that have no respect for the player’s time, but they pale in comparison to the slog that is the battle system.

The battles in Final Fantasy IX move at a snail’s pace on even the fastest settings.

This is exacerbated by the noticeable delay between selecting a command and the character actually performing the action. God help you if try to use the “Auto-Potion” command during battle, as you will have to wait for the slow animation to play out every time your character gets hit.

The Final Fantasy IX Remake needs to make fights fast & fluid, instead of boring & plodding.

The delay isn’t so much of a problem anymore, thanks to the fast-forward ability of the remastered version. When the game was first released, the load times seem excruciatingly long. This might have been frustrating to players who previously played the faster battle systems of Final Fantasy VII and VIII. It might be confusing as to what made Final Fantasy IX so slow since Final Fantasy X was much faster.

Final Fantasy IX pushed the Playstation’s capabilities to its limits, so perhaps this accounts for the speed. Yet, while the speed was slow, it gave me time to be deliberate and choose my moves wisely. This is one strength of a slower speed. Even Final Fantasy XV has an Wait Combat feature for players who desire the previous systems.

Yet, times have changed and most of us actually want the option of faster battle speeds. As much as we can cut this out of the Final Fantasy IX, I agree with Scott.