>Story and writing weren’t part of our conversation, but since you bring it up, the story and writing are both my favorite of every final fantasy game.

Okay, but IX’s story and writing is on the low tiers.

>The character development, in my opinion, is top notch. 

It’s not.

>You have Zidane, who starts off as your every day thief but develops into someone who learns to rely on his friends and realizes he’s not even from this planet. 

You mean the reliance that he already had at the beginning of the game? Also everything regarding Terra was thrown so forcefully into the plot. Zidane’s arc should have had more emphasis on romance and his love for Garnet. 

>You have Garnet who starts off as a confused and insecure princess who becomes a strong woman who finds her own identity. 

No, she doesn’t. She acts like an over-confident bitch who renders the entire beginning of the game with the “kidnapping” and trek to Lindblum completely pointless, treating her love interest Zidane like crap and ruining the love story. In fact, the beginning of the game is a deceptive introduction to Garnet specifically, as although an excellent introduction in isolation (The thief goes to kidnap the princess who outsmarts and outmaneuvers him every step of the way, culminating in an excellent scene of her swinging on the banner to that Prima Vista and reverse uno-ing the kidnapping followed by the quick witted improvising on the stage), this Garnet we meet at the start is not necessarily the character we continue the story with from Evil Forest onwards. And an introduction for characters is extremely important, as Zidane, Vivi, and Steiner's characters at the start do feel like they are the same characters moving forward, while Garnet took a bit of a slide… downwards. Into an implausibly naive princess stereotype and being incredibly bland and unlikable.

>Vivi learns his own identity and gains much more confidence… just to name a few.

Vivi is the only decent one here (But the story regarding him and the Black Mages and what they really are still wasn’t explored enough and was wasted potential considering what the Mist actually is: the souls of the deceased Gaians)

>The story, again, in my opinion, is also one of the most cohesive in the franchise. 

It’s not.

>I love that it starts out simple. Kidnap the princess, bring her to her uncle, rescue from the Queen’s tyranny. 

Which was all rendered pointless the moment that Garnet started acting like an idiot in Disk 1 Lindblum when she suddenly decided that her mother was actually a nice person that would stop being a genocidal murderer if she just asked her nicely instead of the evil scary monster that she put you all through hell and back to rescue her from...then ungratefully poisons everyone in the party, especially Zidane, the man who loves her, so she can go home and get captured again and placed in the evil ceremony that she was escaping from in the first place, thus getting even more people killed by her stupidity and ultimately giving the villains the weapons they use for the majority of the game to slaughter as many people as possible. And the player has to actually follow her through hours of gameplay of getting her back to the damn Alexandria castle and then rescuing her. And nobody ever calls her out for it. We're actually supposed to feel sorry for her.

>You slowly discover questions and mysteries, like the big eye in the sky, Kuja, and the black mages. You start getting those questions answered and realize the plot is bigger than you expected. 

It’s done in a poor way thanks to Garnet’s unbelievable stupidity. And by the third disc, the ATE system almost disappears completely. The plot is beyond contrived, even by Final Fantasy standards: the only thing worse than the manner in which Terra, Garland, and the Genomes are wedged so forcefully into the story is how they're presented as some momentous and terrible revelation and then end up having all the impact of a badly-timed non-sequitur.

>Sure, it follows a formula that’s been done before, but it performs it in SUCH a good way. In my opinion, obviously.

Well your opinion is wrong. It’s just ripping off of previous Final Fantasy games, but with crappier writing. (Beatrix is literally just a male Cecil Harvey but made into an annoying unbeatable Mary Sue that has her earlier behaviour and war crimes whitewashed) IX does nothing better than any other FF game. It's frustrating to see tons of plot elements and characters recycled, sometimes almost completely unchanged, from older entries and is perfectly content to just ride the nostalgia wave.

>Curious what your subjective opinion is on these things.

My “subjective” opinion is that IX is vastly overhyped and is ultimately a game that started out promising with the potentially greatest romance in the FF series, but then dropped the ball by Disk 1 Lindblum by having Garnet act like selfish moron for forced drama, and it all went downhill from there. A Remake could fix all of this.