I did a fair bit of running around for this one.
Got some new abilities for some chararacters I've been neglecting, I guess. Still got a long ways to go for some of that, though. The process got me to thinking about why I might have given up on previous attempts.
See, my play style tends to leave a handful of characters underleveled and lacking in skills. In the case of Final Fantasy 9 specifically, Amarant is most often at the top of the list, simply because he's the last party member to join, and I don't often use him. Steiner and Freya also tend to be on the list, in part because they're either out of the party for a siginificant part of the game or don't have much to do with the plot in spite of being favorite characters. We're stuck with Zidane in the party regardless of if we want him because he's the protagoinist, and as I think I've made clear over the course of all these games is that I tend to be a heavy magic user, so Vivi, Eiko and Dagger are all fairly well off, all things considered.
So I'm going to have to do some side quests to remedy the situation. The thing that kind of sucks about this is that my usual style of just running around until I come across these things isn't as effective as it is in older games, both within the Final Fantasy series and in other series as well. I'll confess a certain lack of familiarity with these games, and that kind of holds me back too.
What I did this time around was to go visit a few locations I hadn't been to in awhile. About the only place with much going on was the Black Mage Village. A few of the Mages who survived their trip with Kuja found their way back to the village, and they mostly say that they went back there because it was the only thing they could think to do and that the experience with Kuja didn't make them feel any better. There was not much going on at Conde Pettie, and none of it was worth mentioning.
I also went to Alexandria when I left Lindblum after last time. There wasn't much going on there aside from rebuilding. From there, I went to check on Cleyra and Burmecia. Burmecia is empty and I'd forgotten that Cleyra had been obliterated.
I wound up at the Desert Palace, which was also empty. I suspect part of the reason for all of this is that we've been expected to keep with the plot all this time, and be doing all the sidequests and whatnot as we go. That isn't quite how I do things, which means I'm kind of playing catch-up on a lot of things now. This is kind of what I was getting at before, in that I think I just got bored with having to do that the last few times I got even close to this far in the game and decided to do other things with my time instead. The good news is that now I know about sites like Caves of Narshe and the Final Fantasy Wiki to help me clean up at least some of this mess.
Hopefully, those resources will also help me find the plot again once I get to a better place to finish the game again. But that's for another time, because I've got other stuff I need to get taken care of. Big boy things that come with this whole adult thing I find myself doing now that I'm in my 40s, you see.
Anyway, until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.
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