Today is a very special day. Final Fantasy IX was originally released in Japan on 7 July 2000, and that is the date I count as the true beginning of its life. Twenty-six years later, it still does not feel distant. It does not feel like an old game sealed behind glass. It feels available, inhabited, waiting. Square Enix’s own anniversary material continues to mark 7 July 2000 as the game’s origin point, and the official 25th-anniversary celebration treated IX with the tone it deserves: not as a product being briefly reactivated, but as a beloved world being revisited.
The title of this piece comes from “Crossing Those Hills,” also known officially in English as “Over the Hill,” the world map theme from Final Fantasy IX. The original Japanese title is あの丘を越えて, and it remains one of Nobuo Uematsu’s most quietly definitive compositions for the series. It is gentle, searching, pastoral, and full of forward motion without aggression. It does not simply say adventure. It says departure, homesickness, curiosity, and return. Uematsu composed IX’s music as part of the game’s return to a more medieval and storybook form of fantasy, and in a 25th-anniversary interview he discussed travelling through old European castles for inspiration, an image that feels almost too perfectly aligned with the game’s spirit.
For many people, Final Fantasy VII was the doorway, and that was true for me as well. VII was the shock of entry, the first unmistakable sense that this series was not simply another set of games but a whole language of memory, myth, sadness, beauty, scale and music. But IX was different. IX was not merely the first threshold. IX became the house. It became the one I lived in. It aligned with the geography of my own life so precisely that I still struggle to separate the game from the places where I encountered it.
I moved from Australia to Italy in the late 1990s, and the Italy I entered now feels almost impossibly suited to Final Fantasy IX. Montefiore dell’Aso, in Le Marche, is officially described as a small borgo of the Piceno, set on a hill between the Aso and Menocchia valleys, with a preserved historic centre, surviving defensive walls and ancient towers. That was not a vague European fantasy backdrop to me. That was childhood. Cobblestones, elevation, stone walls, old civic spaces, bells, doors, lanes, shadowed corners, the strange intimacy of a place that seemed to have existed long before you and would continue long after you. I grew up inside a setting that already felt like a Final Fantasy village before I had the words for it. Of course IX entered me deeply. The world around me had already prepared the room for it.
That is why IX became, for me, the true continent-crossing Final Fantasy. It belongs to Italy and Australia at once. I do remember playing it in Italy, or at least encountering it near the end of that period, but the bulk of my memories are from Australia, around 2000 and 2001, playing it on my PS one. There is something perfect about that smaller version of the PlayStation as the vessel for IX. The game itself is enormous in scope but intimate in feeling. Its kingdoms, continents and cosmic machinery are carried through little rooms, painted streets, small objects, lamps, inns, taverns, marshes, ladders, ticket booths, rooftops and village paths. It is epic, but it does not need to flatten the player with scale. It invites you into scale through detail.
I crossed that world, and to the best of my memory I reached the final battle with Necron. But I did not finish it then. I could not. Or, more truthfully, I did not want to. There are games one leaves because life interrupts, or because the difficulty spikes, or because the next thing arrives and attention moves elsewhere. IX was not like that. I stopped at the threshold because I did not have the heart to depart. Later, in 2003, I finished Final Fantasy X. I could do that. X is magnificent, but its structure prepares you for farewell. IX made farewell feel like an act of betrayal. I wanted one more town, one more conversation, one more screen transition, one more night in Treno, one more movement through Gargan Roo, one more pause in Qu’s Marsh, one more return to a place where even sadness seemed held inside beauty.
That is the quality that makes IX my favourite Final Fantasy. Its greatness is not only mechanical, structural or historical. Its greatness is emotional architecture. It builds spaces that feel lived in. Alexandria is not just a kingdom; it is theatre, childhood, duty, danger and pageantry. Lindblum is not just a hub; it is industry, warmth, height and motion. Dali is not just an early village; it is unease beneath pastoral calm. Treno is not just a nighttime city; it is class, secrecy, melancholy and magic under lamplight. Burmecia is grief in ruins. Cleyra is fragile beauty. Conde Petie is comedy and ritual. The Black Mage Village is one of the most tender places in the medium. IX’s world feels worth saving because it first feels worth inhabiting.
The cast remains one of the most complete ensembles ever placed in a role-playing game. Zidane is a great hero because he does not move through the story as a solemn instrument of destiny. He is generous, flawed, tactile, funny, flirtatious, brave, wounded and instinctively turned toward others. He gives the game motion and warmth. Garnet begins as title, ceremony and captivity, then becomes a person through flight, grief, silence and decision. Freya is one of the series’ most elegant figures of sorrow, carrying loss without becoming reduced to it. Quina is appetite, absurdity and wisdom in the same body. Eiko is loneliness pretending to be confidence. Amarant is isolation dragged into fellowship. Beatrix, though not a permanent party member, leaves a deep mark because IX understands the ache of misplaced loyalty. Kuja remains extraordinary because his theatricality is not decoration; it is terror, envy and mortality made flamboyant.
But Vivi is the soul of the game. Vivi is innocence forced to contemplate existence. He is wonder placed beside dread. He asks the questions that make IX endure: What am I? Why was I made? How long do I have? What does it mean to live well when life is finite? He is small, hesitant, kind, frightened and brave in the deepest way. I do not think any other Final Fantasy character has stayed with me so completely. Vivi is not simply a mascot or a beloved design. He is one of the great figures in game storytelling because he turns the entire adventure inward. Through him, IX becomes not only a journey across kingdoms, but a meditation on the fact of being alive.
And beside Vivi, for me, is Steiner. If Vivi is the inward self, Steiner is the armoured self: earnest, overcommitted, rule-bound, loyal, ridiculous, honourable, frightened of disorder, desperate for a structure that can tell him what is right. I have always considered myself some mixture of Vivi and Steiner, and it remains beautiful to me that the game connects them so closely. At first they appear mismatched. One is a small artificial child confronting mortality; the other is a rigid knight trying to maintain a collapsing idea of duty. Yet together they become one of IX’s most moving pairings. Vivi softens Steiner. Steiner protects Vivi. Each gives the other a form of courage. Even Steiner’s full name, Adelbert Steiner, has always moved me a little because Adelbert sits so close to my own name. It feels like one of those private echoes a work can carry for a person across decades.
FFIX has influenced my own creative life more than I can fully measure. Its traces run through the Quantumyth: the shape of The Hero and The Mage, the idea that a journey is also a spiritual map, the belief that gentleness and cosmic stakes can coexist, the conviction that fantasy can console without becoming shallow. IX understands that softness is not weakness. It understands that humour does not cancel seriousness. It understands that a world can be charming, strange, funny and devastating at once. That is what I hope future Final Fantasy remembers. I respect the craft and ambition of XVI, but its proportions, severity and relentless seriousness place it far from the Final Fantasy that lives deepest in me. IX is rounded, theatrical, medieval, luminous, humane. It has sorrow, but sorrow does not consume its colour. It has death, but death does not erase its warmth.
Nobuo Uematsu’s music is inseparable from all of this. The score does not merely accompany the game; it preserves it. I can hear Treno and be transported back more quickly than any screenshot could manage. I can hear “Crossing Those Hills” and feel the old scale of the adventure open again: the path ahead, the soft pull of distance, the sensation of moving through a world that is both unknown and already beloved. I can hear “Melodies of Life” and understand why IX still feels unresolved inside me, not because it lacked closure, but because I never wanted closure from it. Its music is not background. It is memory arranged into melody.
There is also something moving about the current moment, because IX remains alive in public imagination. Square Enix’s official 25th-anniversary material included commemorative art, projects, merchandise, music releases and an exhibition in Tokyo titled Itsuka Kaeru Tokoro — “The Place I’ll Return to Someday.” That phrase remains central to the game’s hold on me, but for this reflection I keep returning to the hills: the hills of the world map, the hills of Le Marche, the hills between one home and another, the hills between childhood and fatherhood, the hills between Italy and Australia. IX is the game that crossed them with me.
There are remake rumours, of course, and I would be lying if I said I did not think about them. I want that return. I want it handled carefully, tenderly, intelligently. I do not need IX to be dragged into the dominant shape of modern AAA action. I want its soul preserved: the painterly storybook quality, the party, the towns, the jobs, the theatricality, the sadness, the humour, the sense of being welcomed into a place rather than simply pushed through content.
As I write this, I am looking out the window with my daughter in my arms, and I can hear Uematsu’s music in my ears and somewhere deeper than my ears. That is the new layer today. IX entered my life when I was moving between continents, between homes, between childhood and whatever came next. Now I stand in another life stage entirely, holding my daughter, thinking about the day I will show her this game. I will take her to Alexandria, Lindblum, Treno, Dali, Burmecia, Cleyra, the Black Mage Village and all the other places that shaped me. I will let her meet Vivi. I will let her see Steiner. I will let her hear the music. And when that happens, I will not only be introducing her to an old game. I will be taking her to one of the places that made me.
So today is not just an anniversary. It is a return. Final Fantasy IX is still my favourite Final Fantasy because it remains one of the rare works that feels like a home rather than a memory of one. It crossed continents with me. It met me in Italy and followed me back to Australia. It shaped my imagination, my writing, my sense of fantasy, my sense of solace, and perhaps even my understanding of what a hero can be. It is the place I’ll return to someday. It is also, in many ways, the place I never truly left.
Addendum — To Alex
To my friend Alex, who worked on it: thank you. Truly. I do not know whether anyone working on a game can ever fully know where it will land in another person’s life, or how long it will keep echoing there. But this one landed somewhere permanent. It became part of my inner geography. It became Italy, Australia, childhood, music, cobblestones, late nights, unfinished endings, future fatherhood and the promise of return. It became the hills between two homes. That is an extraordinary thing to have helped make.
Extras
