Thursday, July 27, 2017

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy IX (PlayStation, 2000, Square-Enix): Issue #033: A Little Late Night Grinding

Since I needed to do a little anyway...

I figured I'd do a little level and AP grinding here, because I needed to get Amarant's abilities learned before I got to a place with a Synthesis Shop that might let me use some or all of the otherwise low-level weapons and armor I'm carrying for the party into better things. It gets tedious, but it's a necessary evil in games like this. It's boring enough to have to do, much less read about on a blog like this or watch in a Let's Play video. This is why most of the Let's Players I've watched on a regular basis tend to leave a lot of it out of their videos.

In this particular case, though, there is one thing kind of worth mentioning. As I would hope I mentioned before, there are friendly monsters that the party comes across from time to time in their journey. Generally, they'll ask for an item of some sort and reward the party with an Ability Point bonus, as well as a better item, in some cases. This time, I came across the friendly Nymph in a grassy area near the Iifa Tree. This time, she wanted some Ore, which I was happy to give up, since it's one of those items that's way more common than it really needs to be. In excange, the party gets 30 AP and an Emerald accessory.

This is something I might not have put up, but it did get me to thinking about something. See, something that had been more or less a trope in this series is that the main story involved searching for magical stones of one sort or another. It's something that held true for seven of the first nine games, including this one, with Final Fantasy II and Final Fantasy VIII as the only exceptions. In this entry, the magical stones are all precious and semi-precious stones that I'm pretty sure exist in the real world, as they tend to have the ability to bring out a Summoner's ability to call forth their mystical creatures, beings and entities. In many cases, they also have other mystical properties that the other characters can use.

I'm bringing all this up because the Emerald is one that starts getting into the mid-level ones for this sort of thing, and it doesn't have a summoned monster associated directly with it, nor does it have any skills or abilities for Dagger to use, even though she's supposed to be the main summoner and white mage in the game. I'll have to check my understanding of this at some point, but if I recall, I guess the Emerald does affect the way Eiko's Carbunkle summon works. I'm pretty sure there are three different spells it uses on the party, and which one of the three it actually uses depends on which of three of these gems she's got equipped.

I know the MacGuffin changed in the immediate successor to this game and never went back, but I really don't know what, exactly, it got changed to. I've seen a few streams and bits and pieces of Let's Plays of FF15, and I gotta say, it looks good enough that I may want to eventually try it.


Even if this didn't really amount to much, it was nice to have an excuse to talk about the series for a change, which is something I enjoy doing from time to time. Next time, I'll try to have the issue be about going back into the Iifa Tree and moving on with the plot, but there'll be more grinding first, even if nothing important happens. Until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA!

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