Saturday, February 22, 2020

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy IX (PlayStation, 2000, Square-Enix): Issue #053: Zidane And The Castle On The Forgotten Continent


I guess I could have seen how this was going to end last time around.

Hoo-boy, this is really starting to bring back memories of Lufia and the Fortress of Doom. For reasons I'm not quite sure of, the game kept glitching out on me, and I wound up abandoning the Text Play right at the end because one of the glitches wound up wiping my save file. I'm starting to have similar problems here, now, too. I'll get to that later, though. I want to talk about what I actually managed to kind of accomplish first.

When I first started up, I was going to go into the town of Lindblum so I could upgrade weapons and armor and that sort of thing, but decided against it and went straight to Lady Hilda's meeting instead. She explained that Kuja used his time with her to do the whole overconfident bad guy thing and spill his whole plan to her. In the course of his rant, he went on about how he's essentially from another dimension, where the planet is called Terra instead of Gaia, and he's here because he's got some grand scheme to make himself more powerful, and Gaia has something to do with that. He also told her that there's a way to get from Gaia to Terra, probably on that Shimmering Island place we were pretty much just at. Unfortunately, we can't just go there and have done with all this. First we've gotta go to a place called the Forgotten Continent because there might be clues there. All we know about it comes from a guy called Ibsen, who tried to explore the place once a long time ago, and his notes say he saw a castle and that the coast is all inaccessably high cliffs, so we'll need an airship to get there.

Even though the Hilda Garde 2 is out of commission, we're still kind of in luck, because Regent Cid has pulled an idea for another new airship out of his ass, using the Blue Narcisis as parts. It'll take some time to get it going, but Cid's going to help his team with that, so it might not take so long to get that knocked out.

While all this is going on, Steiner and Tantalus have teamed up to go looking for Dagger, who seems to have gone missing. Just as Hilda finishes her explanation, Steiner returns to the meeting hall to explain that he can't find Dagger anywhere in Lindblum, even with help from Tantalus. Zidane figures out that maybe she's gone back to Alexandria for some reason. Turns out he's right, of course, but we find that out after Zidane and Baku have one of those encounters with Beatrix that makes me wonder how people in these games can keep missing one another as often as they do, given how few options they have to get past each other.

Beatrix gives Zidane Dagger's namesake gem, a garnet, and tells him that there's a special “resting place” that Dagger might be at. Given all that's happened, though, Beatrix hopes that Dagger isn't there because seeing Alexandria in runis might actually make her recovery take longer.

But, as it stands, Dagger's at this “resting place”, and she's recovered enough to tell Zidane that she knows the best thing she can do for her people just then is to continue on her journey with the party, in hopes that she'll figure out how to be the best leader she can by the time it's over. She then asks Zidane to hand over his dagger again. When he does, she takes it and gets a little distance between herself and Zidane, who runs after her, thinking she's going to off herself with it. Instead, we get one of those nicely-rendered cutscenes where Dagger cuts off about half her hair as a way of saying we're going to be dealing with a new her. Dagger lets the cut hair blow over the water, and then makes eye contact with Zidane for a second before heading back to him.

And then the game locked right the hell up on me. Crashed the system so hard I couldn't even do a soft reset. I'll have another go at this when I've got more time again, in hopes that I can actually get somewhere with it as is. If that doesn't work, I do have this little dealiebobber thing that's supposed to clean and repair minor scratches on CDs and DVDs. No guarantees there, either, though, because I'm not sure how effective the thing was when it was new, and I haven't tried to use it in ages, which I'm sure hasn't done it any favors.

So, that's kind of where we are now. I'll try to keep everybody posted on this as things move onwards. Until next time, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.

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