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So after reading the only review for this hack, I just HAD to try it out. FF9 is one of my favorites, but the battle speed has always been a major turnoff for me.

So I went into this expecting disappointment and regrets...

And guess what? This romhack does not override the battle speed slider. See, it only brings the ATB speed to be in line with FF7 and 8. Do you feel things are too fast with the speed setting at 50? You can lower it. Want things to be crazy fast? Raise it to 100.

The big mislead in the previous review was that this romhack somehow broke the speed controls and you were forever stuck with the new setting, when in fact it just modernized the speeds a bit. And, as I said earlier, you CAN change the speed, up and down, from the configuration menu.

The other issue that needs to be cleared up is NO, this romhack does not break your game if you play battles in Wait mode. Mechanics have not been touched, just a slight increase in speed. So even with "craaaazy fast" ATB speeds, the rule of Wait mode will still apply.

If things like Doom status are causing you grief, I say again, you can lower the ATB speed.

At the end of the day, I would say: yes, download this hack if you want a more fluid experience with FF9. I realize you could always play the PC version, but that can be a real space hog fully modded. And it doesn't look that much more amazing than the PSX version.

I (and most everyone else who has played FF9) definitely felt the same way the creator of this patch did about the ATB bar in FF9. It's so much slower than other FF's, and it does artificially lengthen gameplay quite a bit. When I saw this patch, I thought "THANK GOD", and decided to give it a try.

It works as advertised, but with a number of side effects that artificially increase the games difficulty in a very bad way. Firstly, this patch essentially acts as a sort of "fast-forward button" on everybody's ATB, including enemies. Since enemies do not have to scroll through menus to select their actions, this means that their basically instantaneous action selection enables almost everything in this game to be WAY faster than you with this patch (with the exceptions of preemptive attacks and when you get lucky and the enemies' ATB starts super low). When nasty encounters arise, this is a huge disadvantage.

Second, not only are the ATB affected by this fast forward, but so are the ticks for status effects. This means petrify and doom timers move at ridiculous speeds (which makes a number of fights centered around them nightmares-especially doom since there are no ways I'm aware of to immunize yourself from it), as well as the ticks for other status effects like poison/venom. If you do not clear these ASAP with this hack activated, you will die a pretty terrible death...very fast. This also basically makes all support magic other than auto-skills worthless as the faster ticks cause them to wear off EXTREMELY fast.

Finally, compounding all of the above mess, ATB does not pause for actions in battle while they are happening, which still happen at exactly the same speeds as normal. This means that if you have a character who just got slapped with doom, and another character executes a long-animation attack right afterwards (like, say, a swordtech), you can be assured your doomed character will be dead (or very close) by the end of that action thanks to this speedup. This is a massive problem in many parts of the game.

You can get around some of all this mess by exploiting the menu pauses in wait-mode, but you shouldn't have to resort to tricks like that to use something billed as an assist.

There are just too many unintended consequences of the way this patch is designed for me to recommend it to anyone (doubly so for anyone playing a hard-type hack).