I never cared much for 9, or 8 for that matter. Its mostly because their plots didn't interest me that much, especially near their ends. I did like how 9 went back to the old fantasy roots with equipment and battling and I did like quite a few of the characters. IV was a great game, but X, VI and VII still rank up there as my all time favorites. I will say that VII's biggest downside was the shear amount of plot you could bypass without even being aware of it. Unless you were a hard core explorer going back and forth all over the place all the time you could skip large chunks of story line inadvertently because the game didn't give hints as to were to go for all the scenes.