Friday, August 9, 2019

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy IX (PlayStation, 2000, Square-Enix): Issue #047: Puzzles And Stuff


Even though this is another one of those “way later than it should have been” sessions, it's also one of those that kind of needed to come now.

When I left off last time, I was partway through Oeilvert, which was pretty much a big holographic planetarium and museum sort of thing that we had to get up and running again in order to retrieve something called the Gulug Stone for Kuja. What we learn from the experience is that there was this place called Terra that had experienced some sort of doomsday event that it's people were trying to recover from. There's also the implication that the planet the game takes place on is a parallel one to Terra.

Once we see the presentation, we're allowed to go get the stone we're here for and treated to a boss fight. I think part of the reason I had such a sense of deja vu last time is that this is about where I quit playing last time I made it very far in this game. This was in part because the game glitched on me a bit on the way to the boss fight. I'm not sure if the game glitched on me or I just got fed up with the boss because I was having trouble beating it. The boss is a flying machine of some kind, and this time I didn't have as much trouble with it.

What I did have trouble with is that I forgot how long it was going to be before the next save point. Once we beat the boss I just mentioned, Zidane and his party heads out and we cut back to Kuja's Desert Palace, where Kuja himself tells the others that he's going to kill them anyway because he's an asshole, as guys like him tend to be. It's been so long since I started this part of the game I forget why, but as luck would have it, Cid was out of his cage when the message got sent, so it's up to him to let Freya, Quina, Amarant and Dagger out before they get dumped into the lava.

That part of the game's a timed button-mashing puzzle where Cid has to sneak over to get a key set by a caged monster in order to stop the trap Kuja's set. I was never much good at those, but this time I got through it in one shot, though it did take me most of the six minutes the game gave me. The second part of this puzzle is easy in that there's a scale with four chess pawns by it. There's four choices of combinations of three that can be put on, but it's easy enough to figure out which one need to go on the scale, since it's the only one without the wooden piece.

Once the remaining playable characters are out, Cid tells them that he heard some Black Mages talking about the puzzle to get out of the castle, with the clue being that we need to turn them all on. It's kind of a Not What It Looks Like Theater thing, because they mean we've just gotta go lighting all the lamps we come to as we head for the doors. It's really not hard so much as it is tedious and long. Fortunately, the save point I was hoping for turns up in the library section. This is where I'll be leaving off for now, with the hope that I'll get back to doing the “work” part of these at a more reasonable time going forward. We'll see, though.

Either way, I'm hoping it won't be another five weeks before I post another one of these. Until then, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.

No comments:

Post a Comment