Man, I loved final fantasy till FF9(too goofy, and the main character had a bleeding tail), then FF10 made it worse (character design, voice action and un-skippable cutscene wise) and FFX-2 killed the series and pissed on it's rotting corpse.
The reason why FF9 had beastial (animal-like) characters was that the World FF9 revolves in is Fa'Diel, the same world in Legend of Mana for the PSOne.