Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]

[Lights on. Enters A STRANGE CREATURE.]

CREATURE
There are few who'd deny, at what I do I am the best,
For my talents are renowned far and wide.
Yet year after year, it's the same routine,
And I grow so weary of the taste of frogs.
And I, Quina, the Pumpkin Monarch,
Have grown so tired of the same old thing…

FROG CHORUS
<Croak-croak>

[Lights out; sounds of frog violence.]

I. Into the Mist

Last time on Final Fantasy IX, Dagger drugged everyone and escaped with Steiner. Today, we pick up with everyone waking up in the wake of her misdeed.


Freya: "It must've been some sort of sleeping medicine."
Zidane: "It was sleeping weed."
Cid: "We've been had…"
Zidane: "I gave her some because she said she was having problems sleeping."
Freya: "I'm impressed. There's more to her than meets the eye."
Zidane: "Damn, what the heck is she thinking!? Maybe she's heading to Burmecia."
Cid: "Then you might still be able to catch up with her."
Zidane: "Vivi, wake up! We're going to Burmecia!"
[Vivi slowly starts stirring.]
Freya: "Let's head for the Gizamaluke's Grotto. Once we pass through the grotto, we will be in Burmecia."
Cid: "You can leave from the Dragon's Gate, located on the Base Level <gwok>."

This right here is probably the easiest bit of this scene to 'gotcha'. Specifically, Zidane's assumption that Dagger may be going to Burmecia is seemingly unfounded. Sure, she could be going to Burmecia, but why? Sure, Burmecia is under attack by (presumably) Alexandria, but does Queen Brahne lead troops from the front?

Of course, there's an explanation for it: Dagger just asked the group to let her come with them to Burmecia, and they refused. So Zidane is assuming, "she drugged us so she could head to Burmecia on her own." That's perfectly reasonable! It's also wrong. As we'll find out soon, Dagger is in fact heading to Alexandria. We'll get to that in a bit. Why the change of heart? Well, presumably Dagger wanted to go to Burmecia because the party was heading there and she thought she'd do the most good sticking by her allies, but since that's out of the question now, she might as well go directly to Alexandria to speak with her mother.

It's a little weird as a narrative development, but we'll talk about it more later. For now, we're heading out.


We can revisit the castle with some minor updated dialogue and head back into town to update our gear, and then we're headed towards Dragon's Gate through subway.


Lindblum really is on a whole other level, it's basically running on 19th century technology with soldiers cosplaying as Early Modern. We can deliver a letter to the moogle at the gate, updating us on Stiltzkin's travel; he's reached Burmecia ahead of us, where "it's raining, as expected." Sounds like Burmecia has a particularly rainy climate? And then we're out.


I think it's an interesting choice on the game's part to make its world and basic random encounters look like shit.

No, I'm not even being ironic! There's clearly something there. Here, compare a basic plains encounter from the previous game and a Dali region encounter from this game to the above screenshot:


Bright blue skies with trailing white clouds, lush green grassy ground, environmental features like mountains in the distance. Contrast this with the fight against that scorpion-tailed lizard thing above (called a Serpion): the sky is just a drab grey, which in turn lowers contrast and makes the green plain also look drab green, and the mist conceals the background landscape so there aren't even any visually interesting features in the distance, just a flat grey plain and an endless grey sky.

The Mist isn't just dangerous, it's miserable. It's a place without warmth or joy, just dreary nothing and monsters.

And that, in turn, makes every time we poke our heads above it feel like a breath of fresh air, whether that's in Dali or Lindblum. It's an interesting choice, but it's also bold, because it's not like there aren't trade-offs to making a common part of the game's experience feel so aesthetically soul-sucking. Which isn't helped by the fact that I'm having to play a FF game without Enc-None again and oh god, oh dear. So many random encounters. You can't step five feet without tripping over another monster.

Thankfully there's a solution to that. But in order to find it, we'll have to explore a little.


The first Dragon ability we unlocked for Freya, thanks to nabbing the Coral Ring in the Festival, is Lancer. When using it, she charges at an enemy with this incredibly sick animation of four dragon-winds following after her. Lancer deals HP damage and MP damage; the damage is higher than her base damage, lacks the delay of Jump, and is unaffected by row, which makes it a good option whenever we have MP to spare.

II. Who's Marsh? Qu's Marsh!

Now, even if we don't explore, it's very hard to miss the next destination even though it's actually optional, because it's smack in the middle of the path leading from Dragon's Gate to Gizamaluke's Grotto, and we had a whole scene with Dagger and the telescope where Zidane said "I should check out the marshlands hint hint." It's this swamp:


Here, we can see a kind of swampy terrain with, standing in the middle, a higher marsh with a house at the center. So of course, we walk in!


This area is the Qu's Marsh. I've actually seen the name Qu before; one of the Steals for the Zaghnol was the "Needle Fork," a weapon none of my characters can use but which is said to be used by "Qu warriors." That's promising.

It's also, as it happens, the location of Moggy and Mogster, the Tutorial Duo.


We can talk to them and get a repeat of previous tutorials, or ask for directions, which just tells us to head north if we want to reach Burmecia. Of course, we won't be doing that until we've fully explored this place.

Qu's Marsh is built in a simple if at first mildly disorienting way: There's this band of solid ground around the central… Reeds? Tall grass? Stalks? The central vegetation, which is too thick to cross except at certain entrances. When we enter these, we move to a screen where Zidane is completely obscure and we only see the grass, and from there we must navigate to one of the two free spaces at the heart of the marsh. It looks like this:


And here, you can see that we've run into another Lickitung. Or is it the same as the one we saw before - the Head Chef at Alexandria Castle? They look identical, but as we'll soon see, all members of this species look very similar. When we approach them, all they say is "Hungry…" and "Frogs…" while pacing mournfully around this pond full of frogs. I guess they're not very skilled at catching them?

Next, we can find the central house of the marsh, where resides what seems to be the local chief.


Okay, so this is the Qu Clan: A race of gender-ambiguous (more on that later) weird creatures with giant tongues hanging out of their mouths. I jokingly referred to the first one we met as a Lickitung, but I'm genuinely curious how two roughly contemporary games landed on such an odd design. The answer might be the akaname, a Japanese youkai with an oversized tongue, though a quick look at artwork suggests the akaname's tongue is more of a serpentine, prehensile limb than the kind of flat "tongue cravat" that the Qu and Lickitung/Lickilicky have in common.

Given how wide and varied humanity is in FF9 (our current group is made up of a boy with a monkey tail, a full on anthro rat woman, and whatever the hell is going on with Vivi), the Qu aren't completely alien, but they're still noticeably weirder than most people we've encountered, and the game seems to deliberately emphasize this; not only do they live in the middle of a swamp and eat frogs, they also talk in a kind of Tarzan-speak, most notably dropping articles, suggesting they're a little foreign to common civilization.

For now, they don't have much to say. They live in the marsh and eat frogs, great.

Of course, there are encounters in the marsh.


The pink things above things are kind of fascinating, because they're obviously drawing from the appearance of real-life axolotls, but angrier and sleeker, most notably erect rather than sprawling limbs, like an axolotl that developed further along the dinosaurian path. They have water-based attacks. Also above, you can see Zidane's new twinblade, The Ogre, which does look real fancy. I wonder if there's a specific mechanical difference between daggers and twinblades? They're clearly two different kinds of weapons, but all I can use to tell them apart is attack rating and abilities. The Ogre teaches Soul Blade, which has a really cool name and inflicts the equipped weapon's status effect with a very high chance of success; that could be very useful going forward.

Now, it's entirely possible to miss the hints that the game has thrown at us (somewhat crudely) and just leave the marsh wondering what it was all about. But there is a very important thing here that we absolutely don't want to miss.

We're supposed to catch a frog and offer it to the hungry Qu. It's easy if you know you're supposed to do it - you just have to wait until a frog jumps on the shore and then interact with it.


Qu: "You got frog! Frogs very good! Mmm!"
Zidane: "Who the heck are you?"
Qu: "Me?"


And that's Quina, our next party member.

Quina talks in the same Tarzan-speak as the other Qu, and they're also… Hm. I'm not sure exactly if they're supposed to come across as childish. But there's definitely something there.

Zidane: "Quina, do you want this frog?"
Quina: [Excitedly] "Yes, yes!"
Zidane: "...Alright. Here."
Quina: "Yaaay!"
[Quina received a frog.]
Quina: "Mine, mine!"
[At this moment, the chief appears.]
Quale: "You pathetic, Quina. Can't even feed yourself."
[We move back to the interior of the Qu longhouse.]


Quale: "Can't master art of eating just chasing frogs, Quina."
Quina: "But, Master, frogs very good! Frogs here best! Better than Alexandria's."
Quale: "Quina, you in darkness. Need some light. World big place. Many many foods. Alexandria just one kingdom. You need go out more, eat other food."
Quina: "Go out into world…? Sound scary. Are there yummier frogs outside?"
Quale: "Of course! Many good frogs! All Qus love frogs best. Eating frogs is key to growth. Qu marshes exist all over the world. Go eat frogs in other marshes. I promise, you get much learning." [They turn to us.] "Traveler, please show Quina the world. Anywhere with food good."
Zidane: "You want me to take him with us?"


Aaaand pause.

Let's talk about that sentence for a moment. "You want me to take him with us?"

In this scene, that "him" is the only time Quina is referred to by a gendered pronoun. I asked the thread, and apparently the game uses "him" as the possessive, but "s/he" as the subject pronoun, though that latter doesn't feature in this scene.

This was immediately arresting to me, because I remember that when I played the game in French, Quina (FR "Kweena") used she/her pronouns exclusively. "Kweena" also sounds like "Queen" which even my childhood self knew the meaning of, and names ending in "-a" in French are traditionally feminine, and Quina is dressed in somewhat feminine garb, so that read seemed entirely natural at the time.

Turns out, Quina appears to be using one of the gender-neutral Japanese pronouns that only sometimes today get translated as gender-neutral English pronouns, and where translators used to just grab whichever of "he," "she" or "it" they felt most like that day. If the EN translators went with "s/he" later on, that is actually kind of progressive for the time. Either way, it appears to me that Quina is gender-neutral in Japanese. For the time being and unless someone tells me that's extremely insensitive, I'm going to go with they/them, except when directly transcribing game dialogue which I will leave unedited.

So of course, we won't refuse a new party member; we agree to take Quina along. They ask Zidane if we will find yummier frogs outside the marshes, to which Zidane replies, "There is plenty of stuff in the world that tastes better than frogs," which amazes Quina.

As an extra side-note, in French, the clipped speech with dropped verbs and pronouns does not exist. Instead, the Qu, including Kweena, speak normally but add the onomatopeia "Miam!" (meaning "Yum!") at the end of every sentence.


So there it is. Our party is back to a full 4 people roster with the new addition of Quina, whom we've agreed to take on a tour of the world's various… Culinary traditions… And… Frog marches? Given that every party member so far has had some degree of pathos and tragedy, even good ol' comic relief Steiner, it's kind of a surprise that we run into one who is so far played entirely for comedy. We'll see where that takes us.

Before we can leave and test out Quina in battle, though, we've got one final thing to take care of. As we leave the longhouse, Vivi looks preoccupied, and Zidane asks him what's wrong. It turns out…

…

Okay, hol' up, Vivi, what the hell.

Vivi was raised by a Qu? This is so much. It pretty much puts the kibosh to the idea that Vivi might have had a natural line of descent from a black mage grandfather and puts "Vivi is an artificial being" back on the table - he must have been adopted by one of the Qu in infancy.

Unfortunately, we're not about to be getting any answers from chief Quale.


Quale: "What wrong? Something on my face?"
Vivi: "Um… Do you know a man named Quan?"
Quale: "!"
Quale: "...I not know that bigot!"
Vivi: "Grandpa Quan was a bit strange, but… How do you know him?"
Quale: "I-I no can answer."
Vivi: "Grandpa Quan looks exactly like you, Mr Quale…"
Quale: "Of course. We from same tribe."
Vivi: "....."
Zidane: "You really don't know him?"
Quale: "No! I not know this Quan!"
Zidane: [Doing a kind of disbelieving shrug] "Honestly…?" [No reply.] "That's too bad. Let's go, Vivi."
Vivi: "Okay…"
[They leave, but Vivi pauses to turn and look at Quale before finally leaving.]

God, poor Vivi. Quale transparently knows Grandpa Quan and has very strong opinions about him, unfortunately, they can't push him for answers. The phrase "that bigot" is definitely intriguing, though. Did Quan commit some crime against the Qu? Did he spurn his own people? Did he… Gasp… Refuse to partake in traditional frog eating? We'll find out more, eventually, I suppose.

Quina comes with only one ability, High Tide, which makes Trance faster and is taught by both their basic Fork and the Needle Fork we acquired off the big warthog. We load them up with more equipment, then go do some frog-catching.

With Quina in the party and approaching a frog pond, we can play a minigame where Quina catches frogs. These can either be male or female, and there is one yellow/gold frog, and we get points for catching them. It's not clear to me what the frog's gender or color does; after our first capture, Quale appears and tells Quina they have "come far along way of gourmand," and offer an item (a simple Ore). Quina thanks him and tells him they will train more. Presumably, the more frogs we catch, the more points we get, the better our rewards.

But there's more interesting stuff to tackle now.


As one might have guessed, in battle, Quina wields a giant fork. Their special abilities are "Eat" and "Blu Mag," clearly Blue Magic. They are our Blue Mage in this game. Variations on Blue Magic have a complex record across past games, varying from not worth bothering to convenient to game-breaking, so I'm curious how it will fare this time around.

Now, in the past, acquiring blue magic required being struck by the correct spell and surviving it, or in Quistis's case consuming rare items. Quina is… Different. And that's because of their second special command, Eat.

Put simply, in order to Eat an enemy, we must bring it below a specific HP threshold, then have Quina target them with Eat, at which point…


A circle of forks, knives and spoons surrounds the enemy. If they have too much HP left, we get the message, "I no can eat until it weaker!" If they have low enough HP? They instantly disappear. If they can teach Quina a blue magic spell, then we learn it. If not, we get the message, "It taste bad!" but they still disappear, meaning that Eat is not just how Quina learns blue magic, but also doubles as a way of finishing off weakened opponents. Pretty neat! Of course, some enemies can't be eaten at all, in which case we get the message, "It taste bad!"

These crabs, who haunt the mist-shrouded world map section of the marshes which surround the proper Qu's Marsh zone, teach Aqua Breath, so we now have a water-type spell to expand our elemental options (unlike in some previous games, Aqua Breath doesn't appear very powerful by default).

We now have our first Blue Magic spell, and that means we need to decide whether to take a bit of a break to hunt down various monsters and expand Quina's magical arsenal. And if so, how?

There's basically three ways I can approach this: One is to just do random encounters until I've run into every configuration of monsters in this whole region and try to eat every single one until I have every blue magic the 'hard way.' The main reason I don't want to do that is because in the process I'll inevitably accidentally grind enough levels that I'll just crush the next dungeons. The other is to just stop the update here, post and ask the thread, but I just got Quina and I want to keep playing.

So I just looked it up. Easy! Why complicate our lives needlessly? I didn't try to catch every blue magic spell in the region, just to get a decent spread, and in the process I kept exploring to find other areas before the grotto. Here are a few samples:


The frog with the giant eyes teaches "Frog Drop," which deals damage based on how many frogs we've caught in the game so far, so it starts out very weak. The lizard-man thing is Vice, and it teaches Vanish, a simple buff that casts Vanish on one target (Vanish means you are immune to physical damage, but taking magic damage ends the buff). And that dragon-scorpion thing teaches…

…Mighty Guard.

Okay so maybe that's a little busted. Quina can't actually use Mighty Guard yet, because it costs 64 MP and they don't have that many, but damn. We'll be eyeing that beauty for later use.

The process of Eating enemies can be tricky. We need to bring enemies under 25% HP. Often, we risk overshooting it and killing the enemy outright (Zidane in particular often one-shots weak opponents). If we play overly cautiously by having Vivi whittle down the enemy with physical attacks, however, we risk taking too much time, and our characters aren't yet resilient enough to endure multiple rounds of attacks by enemies we deliberately leave alive. As for Quina themself, their fork damage has such a wide range that I suspect it's randomized in the same way Tactics' Flails and Handbags were. All in all, getting the knack for how to Eat enemies is a surprisingly tricky and technical exercise, and not without its risks.

Random thought: Qu's Marsh is the first inhabited place that's below the Mist. They seem to be doing fine, but at the same time, we didn't see a Qu village; merely small pockets within the reeds and a single house at the center. Given the name "Qu's Marsh," I assumed there were more Qus living there than just Quina and Quale, but it could have just been the two of them, using the swamps to hide themselves from mist-monsters? Alternatively, if there is in fact a thriving Qu community there, they probably use a combination of swamp-hiding and, you know, being the kind of motherfuckers who eat monsters rather than the other way around to stay safe. This has historical precedent: The Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina was historically home to colonies of people escaping slaveries who were effectively impossible to find within the marshes. They were hiding from (and fighting back against) slavers, rather than monsters, but one might say it's a distinction without a difference.

Now where to go next…

III. Ukulele de Chocobo

Right, the chocobo forest.

We are greeted by Mene, the moogle who is "master of this forest," and he introduces us to his friend, the chocobo Choco.


Zidane: "Hey, did a cute girl with long hair come by here?"
Mene: "No. But ugly girl came by here."
Zidane: "Oh… I guess she didn't come this way. Maybe she's headed towards Burmecia after all… I better get movin'."

If it later turns out that Dagger did come through Chocobo's Forest but Mene has chocobo standards so he thinks human girls are ugly and Zidane just didn't think to question it, I'm going to grab Zidane by his monkey tail and use him to bludgeon that moogle to death.

However, that's not the point here. Seeing that Zidane looks to be in a hurry, Mene offers to lend him Choco's aid.

Unfortunately Zidane senses that Choco doesn't trust him, and this is proven correct seconds later, when Choco straight up flees from the forest. Rude. This serves as our introduction to chocobo mechanics, which so far are refreshingly simple: You buy Gysahl greens, you head to the world map until you find chocobo tracks, and then you summon the chocobo. No need to fight random encounters or equip a materia or beat a minigame. It's so nice how simple it is. Mene tells us to head back to him once we find Choco so he can share a secret with us, and we're off.


Bam! Instant chocobo. And you know what that means?

That's right: It's time to check out the Final Fantasy IX chocobo riding theme.

It's a ukelele theme. I love it so much.

…

Omicron's Impromptu Chocobo Theme Ranking:

Final Fantasy VIII: Mods de Chocobo
Final Fantasy IX: Ukulele de Chocobo
Final Fantasy VII: Fiddle de Chocobo (racing theme)
Final Fantasy V: Mambo de Chocobo
Final Fantasy VI: Techno de Chocobo
Final Fantasy IV: Chocobo Chocobo
Final Fantasy III: Chocobos!
Final Fantasy II: Chocobo Theme
Final Fantasy VII: Cinco de Chocobo (Riding theme; I apologize to all you music heads but 5/4 provokes some kind of deep physical unease within my chest and brain)
(All NES/SNES versions are Pixel Remaster versions)

You can now all get angry at me in the replies.

Credit where credit is due: The game basically hands you a chocobo pretty much immediately after you start thinking "okay these random encounters are making exploration really annoying," instantly solving the problem. Sure, an encounter toggle would have been better, but whatever. Riding a chocobo is fun. Look at this sunset!


The chocobo crucially stays in place when we hop down, so we can just dismount near a location, enter it, leave, take the chocobo again and head to our next destination. We don't have to worry about heading back to chocobo's forest.

Though we still want to do that in order to learn Mene's big secret:

Chocobo Hot & Cold.


The rules are simple but the minigame doesn't translate very well into a screenshot format, so quite simply: We start with one minute on the counter. We press square to dig on random squares, Choco lets out a call whose intensity depends on proximity, we use it to narrow down the location of the item like traditional hot & cold games, and when we find it we have to dig rapidly to the appropriate depth, which nets us the item. We can repeat as many times as we can within the time window. We have to pay 60 gil for each attempt, but as long as we find anything, it pays off.

In addition, there's a sort of "loyalty program"; every item is worth points, and we can eventually spend points in Mene's shop to acquire rare items. This is a long ways off, though; we get about 2 points per hunt so far and the list looks like this:


Even a simple, cheap Ore would take forever to unlock at this rhythm, but I'm definitely keeping an eye on that "Robe of Lords" at the end.

The items are mostly basic status consumables, nothing much to write home about… At least to begin with. After a while, we find a unique item: a stone engraved with mysterious symbols. This grants us a whopping 20 points, which increases Choco's beak level, which means he can now find and dig up items deeper in the ground, including more valuable items.

But that's not all. When we show the stone to Mene, he tells us that the patterns form a picture. This is a chocograph. A Chocograph allows us to engage in Chocobo Hot & Cold outside Chocobo's Forest, on the world map, by looking at the picture, identifying its location on the map, and exploring there to find an item cache with Choco's beak.

…

I'm starting to think this minigame was designed in a lab to hit certain kinds of people for potentially lethal damage.


Following the picture and identifying the location on the world map leads us to a buried treasure chest that contains 2 Elixirs, 3 Hi-Potions, 4 Ethers, and 2 Germinas Boots.

Yeah I think this minigame has the potential to destroy my life.

For now, let's leave it behind and keep going with the plot. Well, no; before that, we're first checking out one last location on the map…


…huh. I hadn't expected us to be so close to the place where we last saw Tantalus. Where'd they go from there, then, if not back to Lindblum?

Aside from providing a clue as to Tantalus's path, there's only the one screen, but it's surprisingly useful; the spring can be used to regenerate all HP and MP for free, which helps a lot with hunting for Blue Magic. Additionally, while Tantalus looted the treasure chests, we can find an Ether…

…as well as the coffee Cinna dropped when Baku scared him and told him to get on with the job mid-preparation. So that was the purpose of that odd ATE: Not just to inform us of Tantalus's survival and whereabouts, but to hint as to where to find one of the three coffees (Mocha Coffee, specifically) needed for the old man's sidequest in Dali. Neat.

Alright.

It's time to head for our next dungeon.

Cut for image count.

IV. "I'm afraid we're gonna have to kill these guys, Vivi." "Damn."


It's not off to a great start.

Freya tries to stir the Burmecian soldiers, but in vain. They're already dead. As the rest of the group arrives after her, she turns to Zidane, demanding to know who the black mages are. Vivi stammers something, and Zidane tells him it's okay, he didn't do anything. Freya is obviously dubious, asking Vivi if they aren't "your-" before cutting herself off, remembering that the King could be in danger, and rushing on further into the grotto.

Ominous.

Zidane: "I sure hope Dagger didn't come here… Let's go."

The next room has a small guard outpost, where we can find a critically injured Burmecian soldier.


Zidane: "Hey, are you alright!?"
Burmecian Soldier: "...Black mages… Couldn't do anything."
Zidane: "We're here to help. We're on our way to Burmecia."
Burmecian Soldier: "Ugh… I'm done for. Take this bell, and… go to Burmecia…" [His head falls.] "The black mages… took our bells… The king's in… palace… Please protec…" [He slumps over, and speaks no more.]
Zidane: "Hey!!!" [No reply. Zidane stands up.] "I'll protect him. Don't worry."

This game is overall much more cartoony and light-hearted than the previous two, but it's still not afraid of having small moments of horror and tragedy, and character death. That ties directly into what Zidane said to Dagger last update: That there's a difference between the excitement of adventure and the horror war, that seeing people die should inspire not just sadness, but fear, that this is not something meant for the unprepared.

The dying guard handed us Gizamaluke Bell, which is a component of the dungeon's (very minor) puzzle. Some doors are marked with an icon of a bell: when we approach them, we can ring the bell, which opens the door, but destroys the bell. There's only one door ahead, so we have no choice but to break the bell to open it, which serves as the unspoken tutorial for how this dungeon works.

We head towards the next room, and in the process, run into our first random encounter.


We'll be seeing this trio of two bugs and a skeleton a lot. One thing I'm starting to feel about FF9 is that it has a lower diversity of encounter spreads?

We've touched upon this only briefly in FF7, but: FF encounters tend to be varied enough that you would be forgiven for assuming that they have a list of monsters for each region and just pair them randomly or with simple rules for who gets with who. So, say, if a particular region has Goblins, Flans and Bombs, you could get any number of Goblins, Flans, and Bombs in any assortment. But that's not how it works. Instead, each region's encounter table is loaded with pre-arranged sets. So for instance, a region could have: "Goblins x2, Flan x1," "Goblin x1, Flan x1, Bomb x1," and "Flan x2, Bomb x3." If that's the case, you will never encounter a fight with "only goblins," or with "only bombs." But generally each encounter table is long enough and filled with assortment that are random enough that I've rarely ever noticed the limitations.

In Gizamaluke's Grotto, though? There aren't a lot of encounter types. And they recur a lot. "Hornet x2, Skeleton x1" is basically half of what we'll be fighting here, which gets both redundant and fairly difficult. The skeleton is an undead spellblade type who can use both Thunder magic and physical attack and is fairly standard (though being undead makes it immune to Quina's Eat), but serves as a tough meat in the Hornet sandwich; the Hornets themselves are dangerous because their Buzz ability causes such an infuriating buzz in a character's ears that it inflicts them with Berserk.


Here, you can see that fully half of my party, specifically my two mages, have been berserked. It's not just that this makes the battle tougher; it's that I'm trying to Eat the Hornets to check if they have any blue magic worth learning, and they keep inflicting Berserk on Quina before they have a chance to do it, while the battle drags on and on since I can't kill the enemy before I've had a chance to Eat them.

Gizamaluke's Grotto is going to be fairly painful as a result. But it gets worse as we enter the next room…


Yeah, hm, I don't think those black mage dolls are going to be throwing themselves in front of a mad construct for Vivi's sake. Whether it was specifically the airship dolls who were loaded with "ship crew" programming instead of "murderbot" programming, or whether it's just that these dolls had more time to have their programming completed, these black mages simply run around the place shouting "KILL!" and casting fiery spells to slay Burmecian soldiers.

And of course, who would be overseeing this operation but Zorn and Thorn.

Who are acting like they don't remember the guys who blew up all three of their Black Waltzes. Pull the other one, guys.

Zorn: "Who is that?"
Thorn: "That, I don't know."
Zorn: "I know I have seen him somewhere before."
Thorn: "Somewhere before? I have not seen him. I know."
Zorn: "I guess it's not important. Let's kill him."
Thorn: "Yes, kill him, shall we?"
[Two black mage dolls jump down, initiating battle.]


No hesitation in the face of Vivi this time, and so our boy has no choice: He must KILL.

These dolls are "Type A" units, and they fight by casting Fire, Thunder and Blizzard, dealing about 90 damage per hit, which is… Insufficient to be a threat. I play around a bit to see what can be stolen from them and whether they can be eaten (they, uh, can't). Hey, check out Aqua Breath and Quina's little victory dance!


Sick.

The Type As just aren't really a threat and are only really notable for their narrative significance. Once we've won, Zon and Thorn shout that we are "savage monsters" and run away in terror.


There is another Type A in the room, who drops the next Gizamaluke Bell when defeated, and then the dungeon reveals its central trick: There are three bell doors ahead of us, and we have only one bell.

It's basically the oldest and most annoying issue with dungeon design made into a puzzle: There's a path forward that takes us straight to the next plot beat and the exit, and there's a path that takes us through all the other stuff such as the dungeon's actual loot. If you do the "most correct" path you get enough bells to open the next door and the next until looping around to the exit, if you fuck up you miss out on some. Here, it should be obvious that the giant, centrally located door is "Here Dwells Plot," but which of the other two we should take instead is a crapshoot. The correct answer happens to be the upper left one. This path allows us to reach the upper bridge where Zorn and Thorn stood, where we can find another dying Burmecian soldier gifting us a bell.

Then we head to the lower right door, which takes us to a gallery above the next room, where we nearly all fucking die.


Remember how the Lamia has been a staple of the Final Fantasy monster roster between II and V?

It's finally come back in the 3D era. And this is this game's version of it.

This is a devastating blow to the lamiafucker community, which numbers some of my best and dear friends. Let us briefly shed a tear for them.

And yes, the FF9 Lamia does in fact still have Charm attacks.


…actually though now I am thinking about it beyond just a throwaway joke. I hadn't thought about it before but the Lamia was actually absent from VII and VIII. And now I'm wondering if the reason why wasn't because the Lamia has historically been one of the most overtly sexualized monsters in Final Fantasy (a series that has relatively chaste designs overall). FF7 and, to a larger extent, 8 both had some fairly sexualized models in Shiva (both) and Siren (the latter), but those are summons, which appear on screen only briefly. So maybe the series shied away from the Lamia for the first two 3D entries because they weren't sure about their kid-friendliness porting it into 3D models, then when they did it for IX, decided to deliberately make it more cartoonish and monster-y?

Well, the point is, the Lamia is extremely tough for a random encounter. How tough? Well…


That thing has a ton of HP, it hits hard, and it has Confuse as an effect. Confuse works the way it usually does: the affected character attacks (rather than "take any action at random) random units every turn. That's always problematic. But here it's worse. You see, the only item I have that I think might cure Confuse is the Remedy, and I'm not even sure it'll work. But there's a solution that always works on Confuse: Just use a normal attack on the character!

Everyone with Vivi instantly one-shots every other team member.

This is the absolute wildest thing I found out in this fight. Even at max HP, if I have, like, Zidane try to whack Quina, he hits them for 700 damage and they instantly go down. So the only real way out of Confuse I got is "character dies, then is raised with a Phoenix Down or Phoenix Pinion," and I have a limited supply of those.

And while the Lamia's basic attack doesn't start all that threatening… She can use Might to self-buff and increase her strength.

It wouldn't be such a problem if I just dumped damage into her. You can see Quina do an insane 600 damage to her in the screenshot above (though that's at the very high end of their range), it wouldn't take that long. Of course… The Lamia can cast Cure on herself, which she does while my party is busy with Confused!

But that's not the real problem.

The real problem is I'm trying to eat the Lamia.

Which means I need to 1) avoid a party wipe, 2) keep Quina alive and free from Confuse so they can Eat, 3) all while weakening the Lamia to the point where Eat will actually work.

It's a stupid plan. Trying to raise characters faster than they can die fails, the Lamia immediately kills them again. Plus? I fail to account for what happens once Zidane and Quina, my last two characters, are both confused.

As usual, I find myself in this old, incredibly tiresome situation in which I have only Confused characters left, so I'm watching them take random action after random action and wait until either they kill the enemy, or they both die…

Or, miraculously, Quina attacks Zidane while dealing low enough damage that he survives, and then Quina instantly gets killed by the Lamia's next attack, which means I can have Zidane throw a Phoenix Down at them before he goes down again.


And there it is. Quina is standing at 5 HP, and it all goes down to one last move. Either the Lamia finishes them off with her next attack, or I can fire off Eat before that happens. Due to the ATB system, I have no idea which will occur first - even getting to pick Eat, the Lamia's action could resolve first.


ABSOLUTE VICTORY, Quina MVP, QUALE IN ABSOLUTE SHAMBLES. FROOOOOOOG!

The blue magic we learned here is LV3 Defense-less. It lowers the Defense of all enemies whose level is divisible by 3. At first glance, it's not very impressive, but…

Historically, the benefit you get in exchange for using LvX spells is that 1) they affect the whole screen, 2) bosses aren't immune to them. They get to bypass traditional buff immunities, to the point that LV5 Death can be used to instakill some bosses in some games, I believe. Which means LV3 Defense-less could be extremely useful against bosses with a level multiple of 3.

We'll see. For now, I'm mostly taking this as bragging rights. My stupid, stupid idea worked, and it only took me… most of my Phoenix Down supply.

Now let's grab some items along the gallery and head downstairs to the central bell room.


Mogmi: "Darling! Can you hear me!? Darling!!! Please say something!"
[The group enters.]
Zidane: "I didn't expect to see a moogle here. What's wrong?"
Mogmi: "My husband! He's inside the bell! He's trapped! Kupo!!"
Freya: "You poor thing…"
Mogmi: "We just held our wedding here. Then some scary clowns attacked us! I was so scared! Kupooo!!"
Zidane: "That bell is huge, I don't know if we can lift it."
Freya: "Hmm…"
Mogmi: "No, please!!! Huh?" [She seems to notice something, and approaches Vivi, sniffing him.]


What Mogmi realizes with sudden excitement is that Vivi is carrying a Kupo Nut, as you may recall from Lindblum, which is the favorite treat of moogles everywhere. She asks for it in a tone that is…

Honestly it's kind of reminiscent of an addict.

Mogmi: "Really!? Really!? Really!? Really!? Really!? C-Can I have it?"

After giving the moogle her Kupo Crack, she approaches the bell, whereupon…


Her husband knocks the bell over from the sheer force of his jump of joy.

Mogmi: "Darling!!!"
Husband: "Kupooo! I love Kupo Nuts!"
[He runs off-screen with the nut.]
Mogmi: "Darling! Where are you going!?" [She runs to the edge of the screen, pauses and turns back.] "U-Um, thank you! Darling!" [She leaves.]
Zidane: "What a crazy couple…"

Well. Let's leave the moogles a little time to get high together in peace and pursue our way. There was a Gizamaluke bell inside the giant bell, so we grab it and head through one of the two doors.


Turns out the two moogles were there, enjoying their Kupo Nut together in the quiet of a damp crypt. Mogmi thanks us for saving her husband, and acts as our Save Moogle; we can give her a letter in which Moodon, one of the Lindblum moogles, tells her about the Festival winner. Before we leave, the husband, Moguta, shows us a secret door behind a monster statue from which he draws the Holy Bell, which will likely open our final door.

Let's go, then. We pass through the second door of the main bell room…

V. Master of the Serpent Chamber

A Burmecian soldier is there, he, too, critically wounded.

But not by a black mage.

Freya: "Are you alright!?"
Burmecian Soldier: "Freya… Please be careful… Master Gizamaluke has gone mad. He's being controlled by some strange clowns."

Strange clowns? Being controlled? It looks like Zorn and Thorn have access to some kind of mind control magic on top of everything else. Whoever this "Master Gizamaluke" is, the Grotto is named after it, so he must be kind of a big deal.

As I think this, a massive reptilian figure emerges from a water pipe, too fast for me to capture, landing in the water with a huge splash. Everyone turns to it, rushes towards it…


Gizamaluke, master of the grotto.

Is he meant to be a sentient being who is made feral by madness, or was he always merely some kind of relatively intelligent but animalistic creature that commanded respect for its strength? Hard to tell.

Gizamaluke is a powerful foe with Water-type elemental attacks. Like the Black Waltzes, he appears to have two "phases"; at the second phase, his Water spell becomes screen-wide, which makes my life considerably harder. As before, we could be doing this relatively easily… if we tried to DPS race Gizamaluke, but he has three steal drops, one of which is the Ice Staff, and I haven't seen a new staff for Vivi since he joined the party, so I really, really want it…

…

Oh my god the game is using Zidane's Thief class as a difficulty slider.

If all you care about is getting the kill, the game is as easy as any other previous FF, you just buff and slap the boss around for raw damage until they cry uncle. But if you want all the steals, then your most powerful member (since Zidane's damage is the highest of the party due to early availability of good weapons and staying at the top of the level curve) is tied up for minimum four turns: one to use Detect, then one for each steal drop. That's assuming 100% success ensured by abusing save states, it's much more than that if you don't have access to a tool like that. Which means in order to get all the loot the player is making the game harder for themselves.

That is. Annoyingly clever.

Oh and Gizamaluke can inflict Silence on Vivi.

That's fine, we have an ample supply of Echo Screen… And some status effects of our own.


Zidane's Soul Blade plays out this sick animation and inflicts Darkness, The Ogre's innate status effect, to which the big snake is not immune. That significantly neuters his physical potential, though Water is still a problem. But Quina is here to cast Vanish on party members, which helps, and is also visually very funny:


I don't know if it's intentional or an oversight, but Vanish causes the character model to disappear, but not their weapon model, so you end up with a staff and twinblade just floating around in the air.

This is no sinecure, though. When Phase 2 hits, it hits hard.


Freya and Quina immediately go down, and Vivi isn't doing so great. Playing catch-up proves very difficult - we've lost Phoenix Downs on the Lamia fight, and Gizamaluke has an annoying tendency to knock down a character who just got up, and can continue casting screen-wide water.

I need to finish this by getting everyone up to the bare minimum of life and then hitting hard enough to take down the big gizzard instantly. Jump is too slow, Vivi's magic not powerful enough…


Despite all her rage, Freya is still just a rat in a cage.

This is the finishing blow, and Gizamaluke goes down into the water.


As we return to the dungeon, Freya contemplates the waters somberly.

Freya: "What happened to Master Gizamaluke…? We must hurry! His Majesty is in danger!"

And that… is where the scene cuts off.

We do not see our characters moving on to Burmecia; instead, the scene fades to black, and we open up somewhere else entirely.


Steiner is standing at the bottom of the South Gate (I have, frankly, completely lost track of which Gate was which and which ones led were at this point), carrying a suspiciously heavy bundle on a stick.

Headed into Alexandria, not Burmecia as Zidane assumed.

God.

These absolute goobers.

Not just Zidane. Not just Steiner. All of them. Even Dagger, who is currently probably in that bundle hoping she'll pass through customs unchecked.

From tragedy into comedy into tragedy into comedy again. What a game.

Well, we'll be leaving Steiner's adventures for next update. For now, I think that's been enough for today.

This was… interesting. Quina is definitely a fascinating addition to the party roster and I'm curious what the game does with them - judging from past games they could be easily relegated to a secondary party member with little story, but they'll at least have some kind of character arc, even if it's the extremely rudimentary one of a Vincent or a Cait Sith. Hopefully though, there'll be more to them! Plus, the Eat + Blue Magic combo is just mechanically interesting in a way that's changed the way I engage with random encounters and has actually caused me problems several times and made fights harder trying to fish for the Eat, which is ultimately beneficial by making the game more complex and engaging to play. I could easily see myself getting bored with it over time.

I'm not… Overjoyed by the return of early FF with no ability to turn off encounters. The Dali plateau was very short so it went like a breeze, but exploring the Lindblum region has us move between four different map locations: Lindblum, Chocobo's Forest, the Gate, and Gizamaluke's Grotto, and in the process of locating these areas I explored some empty map corners and the repeat random encounters got grating fast. The fact that the game introduces us to a chocobo so quickly is maybe a ray of hope that it might be aware of this issue and that we'll have more and easier vehicle access going forward so that we don't often deal with unwanted map encounters, but it could just be something they lucked into and don't carry forward.

Chocobo Hot & Cold is fun, though. I mean I got bored of the basic game quickly but then it introduced the chocograph and I felt myself going "oh… I'm in danger." Will it keep being fun? Who knows. And Gizamaluke's Grotto continues a trend of gorgeous dungeons that are thankfully short enough not to overstay their welcome.

Still having a very positive feeling about this one.

Thank you for reading.

Next Time: To Burmecia!