You're Not Alone.

When I think "fantasy", I think FFIX. It's the pinnacle of fantasy in the Final Fantasy franchise. The entire game from top to bottom is beautifully crafted, the soundtrack is absolutely fantastic and the story unforgettable. I'm a die hard fan of the franchise having played just about every release and owning all the mainline games, and this is where the franchise peaked. I know there are a lot of FFX/X-2 fans out there that would say otherwise but FFIX is where everything came together in perfect harmony and truly encapsulated what 'fantasy' is meant to be.

Overall it's quite good so far, this is my second mainline final fantasy game I've tried to tackle after finishing 6 this past year, it's a really nice JRPG, but its fairly frustrating without the FF9 Mod Manager. The sprites are upscaled but the backgrounds aren't, which is fairly annoying, the Moguri Mod improves this, and I also use settings to auto upload saves to the cloud (normally this is a manual process for some reason), you still have to go download it in the in game UI when switching between devices, but its not too painful.

I also would recommend mods to speed up the battle intro.

Other than that this is one of the few final fantasy games (along with 7 and 8) that have genuine pros compared to their original console versions. Specifically not having to juggle multiple iso files, or deal with the crazy long battle intro times on the PS1 version