Intro
I’ve recently achieved the platinum trophy for Final Fantasy IX using the remastered version available on PS4 & PS5. This means I’m three for three on the classic PlayStation Final Fantasy trilogy of 7, 8 and 9!
While I had a lot of fun doing it - as it’s one of my favourite games, it was a true labour of love - FF9’s trophy set is considerably more thorough than FF7 or FF8’s. You can see it on PSNProfiles here. Almost all of them require you to go out of your way to do something over and above just playing through the game: catch a golden frog; dig up all the Chocograph treasures; defeat Ozma, the game’s superboss; and of course, obtain Excalibur II by getting to the end of the game in less than 12 hours. Basically, if there’s a mini-game or sidequest available, there’ll usually be a trophy for it! I appreciate this level of detail as it inspired me to go out of my way to do absolutely everything.
But there are some trophies that were not well thought out, or are just a pain to obtain. More than a few are tied to areas that you can’t go back to, or events that only occur while you’re in one particular town at one specific point in the story. Miss your chance and you might have to start a new game! Here’s a short list of the ones that caused me the most trouble….
Hail to the King
“Jump rope 1000 times without tripping and obtain King of Jump Rope.”
If you’re familiar with FF9 at all, I’ll bet this one immediately sprang to mind! It’s not a question of just tapping the button to the rhythm, oh no… the rhythm changes every few hundred skips, so you’ve got to be on your toes. And 1000 skips will take you almost 10 minutes of solid concentration. Fail… even at 800 or 900… and you’ll have to start all over. No wonder that the recommended method for this trophy involves using the PS4’s Remote Play feature and an automation script running on your PC!
Found in the Shuffle
“Beat the Nero Brothers’ shuffling game nine times in a row.”
This one’s on the “missable” list, because you can only do it when you’re in Alexandria after the end of disc 2, and if you advance the story the opportunity vanishes. The task itself is a tough one, too: the Nero brothers (identical Tantalus minions) play a kind of shell game where they constantly swap positions and then ask Zidane to identify the correct brother. Of course, their moves get faster every time! And once again, the recommended method is… take advantage of modern technology to record your gameplay footage and play it back in slow-motion!
Movie Critic
“View 79 Active Time Events.”
Guess how many Active Time Events (or ATEs) there are in the game? Yep, 79! And some of them only trigger in very specific circumstances: fail to save a random NPC in Burmecia on disc 1? You can’t watch “The Rally” back in Lindblum on disc 3! Pay off Quina’s debt to the pickle lady? Too bad, now you can’t watch “Give Me My Money”, where Zidane forces Baku to repay the debt instead! Even going into the wrong room while exploring a town might lock you out of an ATE or two. To avoid having to start a new game, you’ll have to follow a guide to the letter.
Bloodlust
“Defeat 10000 enemies.”
So far all of the trophies I’ve listed have been challenging, but fair. These optional sidequests are there to be completed, after all. But Bloodlust is just badly designed: on a normal playthrough of FF9, you will typically defeat less than 1000 enemies altogether. Even grinding all of your party to level 99 won’t require defeating as many as 10,000! Whoever wrote the trophies for the remaster got the scale completely wrong here - conservative estimates put the total grind, under optimal conditions, at 15-20 hours. And that’s just mechanically encountering and defeating monsters over and over while doing literally nothing else. Did I mention that the encounter rate in the remaster is lower than in the PlayStation original?
Thankfully, my experience with jump rope came to the rescue: it’s possible to automate the grind to a large extent, with the help of Remote Play… and a rubber band to keep Zidane running in circles on the world map!
In short, FF9’s trophy list is an absolute nightmare for completionists, and the best way to go about it without having to play the game several times over is to find a trophy guide - like the excellent one by ARB1992 on PSNProfiles - and stick to it. That’s a shame because it takes a lot of the discovery out of the game: I always prefer to complete the story at my own pace and clear up any trophies I’ve missed later, but the sheer amount of missable achievements here makes that very hazardous. Still, I’m glad I did it - and yes, even after using less-than-legitimate methods for some of them, because it was fun to explore what the community had come up with to make it more bearable!
How would you have done? Have you scored the platinum for Final Fantasy IX yourself? Leave a comment below and let me know!