>>718711517
I realized why the end of ff9 felt so rushed , it's the complete lack of any meaningful content outside the beaten path
There are many examples in final fantasy games where after clearing a certain point the world completely opens and many side quest events can occur , no matter how obscure there are always nooks and crannies to explore , and in most cases it's where some of the lesser developed characters in your party get to shine.
Take Gau from FF6 for instance , before the world of ruin the only thing that the player can identify is that he's a kid , he's somewhat of a scavenger living amongst the native wildlife of the Veldt and he likes picking up shiny objects , if it were just that for his entire character then people would call him severely underdeveloped , but in the World of Ruin you find out that the crazy old man you encounter in a house when the world was normal is actually Gau's father , what ensues is a montage of the almost all of the characters that you can obtain in the game helping Gau to look classy and distinguished , when they go to introduce him though he tells them that he has no son , that he had a dream where a demon child was ruined his life and he threw it over a waterfall , this infuriated Sabin but Gau told him to stop , that although the man thinks of him that way , he's thankful that his father is alive. Even though Gau is a minor character in the grand scheme of things he still gets development because of side content
In 9 there is none of that because of how linear the game is , the devs tried to remedy this by having you "choose" what cutscenes to see of a given character in a town but it's not a whole event made for them and could never fix how little we know of the characters like Amerant who gets like one scene with Freya and just ceases to exist narratively for the entire game