Thursday, February 6, 2020

TEXT PLAY: Final Fantasy IX (PlayStation, 2000, Square-Enix): Issue #051: Back to the Gulug, Part Two


This one's going to be a little shorter than the last part, but some things still do happen.

Most importantly is getting the well to work so we can move to the next lower level of the mine. Gotta pull the lever down three times in quick succession to make that happen. Exploring around from the save point I left off at last time, there are two Gaia Gear armors to be found, I believe, and two fixed-point battles that happen after certain triggers are met. I think I did them backwards because the one I did first is the one at the bottom of the well. There's also one that happens on some scaffolding on the way back to the save point when the party goes down the path to the right, and I think I would have missed that one had I not decided to go exploring that way. Both these battles are against pairs of Red Dragons, which are above average difficulty for this area, but not quite boss level.

The interesting thing that happened in the one I did first was that I actually got one of the more interesting status effects in the game off Steiner's flame sword to take effect on one of the dragons. In this case, it's kind of a callback to some of the status effects in Final Fantasy 6, where there was one that would freeze a character to death. In this case, it's one called Heat, which causes the character affected with it to burn to death with their next action. It made that particular fight a good deal easier. When it was finished, I figured I'd go back and save again, just to be safe.

From there, I decided to go check out the path to the right of the save point. It's a good thing I had the Add Status ability on Vivi, too, because I had him outfitted with equipment that would let him be healed by the kinds of attacks the dragons did and still have his Trance meter fill. The second battle with the Red Dragons would have gone way worse than it did otherwise, because the rest of the party got wiped out. The attack that did it made Vivi go into trance mode, which lets him do two spells per turn. I got really lucky because two high-level ice spells were enough to pretty much nuke the dragons. Vivi got a level up out of it because he was the only one left alive.

From there, it was back to the save point to revive everybody else, use a couple tents, and save the game. I'll at least try to finish off this area next time, but for now, it's time to stop because I'm at this way too late again. It's actually worse this time on account of my being on the mend from a nasty head cold. Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up for now.

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

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