Yeah, I didn't like the supposed oldschool tribute big-head mode style of FF9 either...Amano gave some great designs and they all got morphed to fuck...Very disappointing. In the end, I recall pretty much every character having one ability that did 9999, so I'm not entirely sure what you meant by that...and I enjoyed that a lot more than the ridiculous 9999x24 attacks of some of the other FFs big attacks...But to me, FFIX was best with the character development, which they did wonderfully...Even a pretty much annoying character like Quina had his moments...