The Opening of ‘Final Fantasy IX' Is a Love Letter to Fantasy Itself

Gizmodo

a day ago

Final Fantasy games are known for their big, bombastic openings. Final Fantasy VII's legendary bombing mission, the brainwashed Terra being sent through the snowy paths into Narshe in Final Fantasy VI, the destruction of Zanarkand in Final Fantasy X—these are grand set pieces with high stakes, introducing threats and conflicts central to their epic narratives. They are big and loud, meant to immediately hook you into a journey that will last dozens upon dozens (upon dozens) of hours.
They're all iconic in their own rights, but there's only one Final Fantasy opening that I've played over and over growing up with the franchise and keep revisiting even if I don't actually carry on playing beyond it that much: Final Fantasy IX's theatrical, whimsical introduction to Alexandria.
Final Fantasy IX, which turns 25 today, opens in stark contrast to its PS1 predecessors. Already a major divergence in returning to the classic fantasy aesthetic that had defined much of Final Fantasy's earliest days—and had been, to much success, diverged from itself at that point in succession with VI, VII, and particularly VIII's leaning into more steampunk and modern sci-fi trappings—Final Fantasy IX opens in a far more subdued manner. We're steadily introduced to the various initial players in IX's party across three interwoven storylines, all threading around a special performance of a play called 'I Want to Be Your Canary,' held to celebrate the Alexandrian princess Garnet's birthday.
There's Vivi, a young boy new to the city but eager to see the sights and attend the play, only to find that the ticket he was sold is a fake. There's Captain of the Guard Steiner, tasked with ensuring the evening goes off without a hitch. There's Zidane and the crew of the Tantalus, masquerading as the theater troupe putting on the performance but secretly tasked with kidnapping Princess Garnet at the behest of a rival nation-state—and Garnet herself, who actually wants to be kidnapped so she can escape the control of her increasingly erratic mother, Queen Brahne, and see the world beyond Alexandria's walls.
Aside from its clever interwoven stories, what makes Final Fantasy IX's opening act stand out next to its contemporaries is how playful it is with the genre the series has returned to. This isn't Final Fantasy VII's daring act of eco-terrorism or Final Fantasy VIII's deliberate shattering of its initial school setting with the reality of conflict. That's not to say there aren't stakes that are real to the rest of the story's opening, of course—Garnet's concerns about her mother's behavior are for her potential to plunge the world into chaos, and the Tantalus troupe's mission has similar stakes where failure could lead to war between Alexandria and the neighboring city-state of Lindblum. But the opening is wrapped in a layer of metanarrative that is really about the idea of fantasy itself and what it means for Final Fantasy to have returned to this classical, medieval-inspired tradition.
Each of the characters we're introduced to throughout the opening act are longing for something bigger and beyond their current lots in life: Vivi wants community and friendship as he takes in the world, even if it means he gets hoodwinked a few times. Garnet, more than just out of worry for Queen Brahne's decline, wants to be free of the expectations placed upon her as a princess. Although he may not initially realize it until Garnet asks him to whisk her away, Zidane finds himself immediately enchanted by the princess he's been tasked with rescuing and the prospect of a life beyond his thievery. Even 'I Want to Be Your Canary' itself, a riff on Shakespearean classics, is about this kind of longing: a Romeo and Juliet-esque tale of star-crossed lovers, Cornelia and Marcus, whose love transcends their perspectives on either side of a conflict between warring kingdoms.
'I Want to Be Your Canary' itself even becomes mechanically important to this romantic view of fantasy. Much of the early battles you fight in Final Fantasy IX's opening are not, as they are in the other games, actual fights: they're presented, even beyond tutorialization, with a layer of artifice. The duels in the play, from Zidane and his Tantalus comrade Blank's famous minigame, to the portrayal of the play's fight scenes as otherwise classic Final Fantasy turn-based combat (including 'SFX' commands to cast magical spells that don't actually harm but dazzle the viewing audience), there's a layer of fantasy beneath the fantasy IX is already engaging with, a love letter to the romantic archetypes of the genre.
There's a sense of yearning throughout IX's opening—for the player returning to Final Fantasy's traditional aesthetics, for its characters and their desires to see beyond their current lives, and for the game itself to play with the wanderlust of it all. It remains as infectious now as it did 25 years ago, a call to adventure that doesn't open with the promise of world-ending calamities or huge evils to fight, but a simple desire to embrace that fantasy. And see, as IX's overworld theme asks us to consider, what's over that hill, and what's beyond the next horizon.
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