Wednesday, June 7, 2023

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy IX (PlayStation, 2000, Square-Enix): Issue #079: Delayed Excalibur

This is going to be a two-session post, at least.


It's been a good couple months since my last post in this series, and I apologise for that. As I'm sure I mentioned in a post I was at least hoping to have up prior to this one, it's been a rough month and a half, at least, and I haven't been up to even gaming much, let alone writing about it or anything else. I think I'm over whatever it is that was holding it back, though, so I should be back at it soon.


As far as the first session of this went, I did a little grinding, so that I had a little more than 50,000 gold and got Dagger her auto-revive ability from the Rebirth Ring and the Odin summon from the Dark Matter accessory I got last time. One thing I hadn't expected the summon to only need 30 ability points to learn.


Part of the reason I'm breaking this one up is because when I sat down to do all this, I'd intended to get the last thing I needed to move forward with the Excalibur side quest, but forgot what the last thing was and how much I might need to get it at the auction house until I'd had everything turned on and was running around a bit. Instead of coming to look first, I decided to do a bit of grinding, then come look, just to be sure of what I needed before I went ahead.


Roughly four months later, I finally got back to this, finally getting around to getting the Rat's Tail item. Between getting that and a second Thief's Glove at the auction house, it took a good chunk of my money. There was still enough left over that after I sold off the four things I needed to start this with, I had in the area of 56,000 gold, which I ground up to about 70k or so, because Caves of Narshe said the bidding war on the Magical Fingertips could go as high as 60k. Turns out, all I really needed was about 35. With that, it was time to take that last item to the guy in Daguerro who wanted it. When he got a look at what he wanted so badly, he came to a realization that a lot of folks my age could benefit from.


He begins by telling us that when he was younger, he was a hell of a blacksmith, but then his wife bought it and he gave it up because he was too down to carry on. He wanted to see the Magical Fingertips because they belonged to some super-famous blacksmith named Gogo, who was supposed to have been a real badass at the craft. As it turns out, though, the fingers he got were just as worn out as his own, which told him that this Gogo person was just a person like him. All this made him realize that he was just a normal guy too, and he needed to get on with his life since he was getting near the end. With that, he gave us the Excalibur, which has Steiner's last skill, or at least the last one I'll be getting, I think. I know there's something called the Excalibur II, but I would had to have gotten to this point in the game in like 40 hours or some ridiculous thing, which just isn't my thing.


The whole Gogo thing is another bit of references to previous games. In this case, Gogo was an optional character in Final Fantasy 6, who was a mimic that would join the party if they got rescued from one of the beasts in the second half of the game. Not exactly important to the overall story, but it does go along with other such things in this game, like a reference to Cloud from FF7 in Lindblum and having the story of Josef's sacrifice in FF2 be one of the puzzles early in the game


From here, though, I think I'm going to grind for the last bits of what I need for levels and new abilities before going to finish the game, or at least try to. Hopefully, that won't take me another six months.


Anyway, until next time, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.

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