I mentioned this in a previous post.
I'll have one save for grinding if I need to do that, and one for trying to just go ahead with finish the game. In fact, I even made one attempt at it the better part of a day before I sat down to write the first part of this.
Granted, it was at the tail end of a long day in general, and was at least half by mistake. I'd been dealing with power and Internet issues on and off that night, and was looking for something to keep myself busy while I was waiting for some of those issues to resolve. Due to the delay between playing and writing, I'd forgotten some of the details. I'm sure some of where I went wrong was having a bad party setup for it. I had Zidane, Quina, Vivi and Freya in the party and wound up getting my ass handed to me in the first fight of the boss rush.
Before we get to that, though, there's the cutscene leading up to it. It kind of reminded me of the one in FF4 leading up to the Giant of Bab-il where that Cid shows up with his airships crewed by pervious party members and allies, and the Dwarves come with their tanks. In this case, it's Regent Cid and his airships showing up, accompanied by Beatrix on the Red Rose, the Queen's airship from earlier in the game. I'm sure there's some details I'm forgetting from this first shop, but the one thing I do remember for sure is that it's pretty much confirmed that Steiner and Beatrix are a couple now, if it hadn't been before.
After the cutscene, the boss rush starts, and things went badly the first time. I had hoped I'd get a chance to change party members on account of my accidentally going in on that, but such was not the case. The first boss of the rush is the Nova Dragon. I thought I did pretty good for not having an optimum party, but I still wound up toasted. Since it didn't go well, I went on to other things and decided to check Caves of Narshe when I got a chance.
In the month or so between the first and second sessions of this, I'm sure I did check CoN for hints at least once. If I learned anything from it, it didn't stick until I managed to get around to actually playing. I knew I'd need to switch party members, so I took a minute to do that before going in again, taking advantage of being at Lindblum for the save points. I swapped out Quina and Freya for Steiner and Dagger so I had someone a little more tanky and a healer. Between Vivi's focus move and Steiner's Blizaga Sword doing 7000-8000 points of damage each attack, the Nova Dragon was surprisingly easy. I liked that it evaporated or dissolved when we beat it.
After the fight, the party teleports off the ship, and Garland has a psychic conversation with Zidane, explaining that they're in a place called Memoria, which was actively forming from the party's own memories. A little past the entrance, there's a more traditional looking save point where we can change party members or return to the ship if we want. I may need to, but since I'm planning on going forward from here, I made another new file to work from just in case I did something dumb in deciding to go on from here.
I'm just going to post this as is instead of adding to it later. At the rate this is going, I can't say how much longer it'll be between these things, and it's been too long already. We'll start the final dungeon next time.
Until next time, stay safe, have fun, keep gaming, and DFTBA.
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