Wednesday, October 25, 2017

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy IX (PlayStation, 2000, Square-Enix): Issue #038: Two Kinds Of Broken

There's a character in the game who's going to be a little unwell for awhile.

There's also a character at my keyboard who's been a little unwell and may continue to be for awhile as well. The difference is that while we can talk about Princess Dagger's issues here, my own will hopefully be a little easier to solve.

With regard to the game, it turns out I didn't mess up as badly as I thought I had last time I did an issue of this, nearly a month ago now. We can have Zidane go looking around Lindblum Castle a bit, but ultimately, we're going to have to go talk to Regent Cid in the throne room to advance the plot. I did manage to talk to all the major characters I could find along the way, though I'm not sure how important that really is.

The most major development there is that we begin to see that Dagger has lost her ability to speak after all the shock and trauma she's been through lately, what with the recent passing of her mother and the essential nuking of Alexandria shortly after she took the throne. It's understandable, of course. All that would be enough to give just about anybody a serious case of PTSD. Dagger isn't really sure who to blame for all that's happened and winds up putting it on herself even though that's probably the worst place for it right now.

After I found Dagger by the telescope, I found the rest of the party in the conference room. They were all happy to see Zidane, of course, since he's the man of the hour. But, as is all to common in games like this, we've actually got to go up to the throne room to talk to the man. He says we need to go back down to the conference room to have a meeting about what to do.

In the course of this little meeting, it's decided that we need to go get Kuja and make him pay for basically screwing up the world. Naturally, this means we're going to need transportation, which is something we're lacking at the moment. After a mandatory Active Time Event where we see Dagger putting the blame on herself, Cid says he saw Kuja on the Hilda Garde 1, the steam-powered airship he made for his wife before she turned him into a bug and ran off, as they were escaping Alexandria, and there were conscious Black Mages onboard with him.

Everybody agrees that they need to do something fast, which will require an airship. The Hilda Garde 2 isn't ready yet, and Cid can't do anything to get things moving while he's stuck as the bugaboo his wife turned him into. The idea the party gets into its head is to try some old-tyme potion to turn him back to a human so he can work on it because it's not yet time to find Hilda. It would have been nice to have more than just Zidane in the party to gather the ingredients for the potion, but it's just him. We're told that we need Strange Potion, Beautiful Potion, and Unusual Potion. Cinna has one at the Tantalus base in the theater district; the second's hidden in the budding artist's workshop nearby; the third is owned by Alice the item shop owner.

Before we can gather it all, though, we run into our friends Kal and Wei, from Burmecia. They say that things may finally be beginning to look up for them and the remaning people of Burmecia. They're sad because so many have died since all this started, but Wei has had her babies, so they've got cause to be positive. And yes, that was babies, plural, because she had five. Not sure if that's common, but then again, Burmecians and Cleyrans are anthropomorphic rats, so it may be.

After making the potion for Cid, it turns out that it doesn't work, turning him from an Oglop to a frog rather than a normal man. Since this does not improve the situation any, the only thing to do is go another route and search for clues in other places.

This means taking the sailing ship that the gang horked from Alexandria and going to the Outer Continent to look for clues. The first place we're going is the Black Mage Village, as there may be a connection because of finding them on Kuja's airship. Getting to the Outer Continent wasn't that difficult a task, but finding my way to the village likely will be. So, I'll be leaving off on the shore I landed on for now, and will try to get back to it before so much time goes by.


Given all the weirdness going on in my personal life, plus the fact that life in our real world is imitating art in this game right now, we'll see what happens. Either way, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.

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