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

[Lights on; an UNDERGROUND ROAD. VIVI enters. He looks around, amazed. Out of the shadows, a rumbling.]

VIVI
Ah–!

[The GARGANT enters.]

GARGANT
What do you think of my old home, little one? It was full of life, once.
Gargants coming and going, swapping stories of the places they'd been and the passengers they'd met.
For a long time now, I've considered myself the only one remaining. The last gargant.
But being in the Roo again... there's something in the air. A smell, or a warmth, or a presence perhaps?
Could it be, other gargants have made their way out into the wider world?
Yes, I will hold onto that hope. My kin, still alive, still out there, journeying beyond these lands.
But for me, I could never abandon the Fossil Roo. Not as long as passengers still need them.
I can tell you still have important work to do. I will be your companion as long as my old body still serves.
Let us enjoy the old Roos of this kingdom together a little longer.
[VIVI nods happily. Lights out.]

Last time, we acquired Ramuh's service, witnessed the devastation of Lindblum, got assigned a new mission — to go to the Outer Continent to investigate Kuja's origins — and paused just before engaging on that fateful trip. A trip slightly delayed by…

*haunted look into the distance*

So many rounds of Chocobo Hot N Cold.
I. Life Under Occupation

First though, we're doing a brief diversion into the rest of Lindblum, because it turns out we can actually visit the Theatre District now. Well, after a quick ATE called "The Third Jewel," in which two Alexandrian soldiers talk about loading supplies aboard the fleet (the navy, not the air fleet) and how the Lindblum soldiers are refusing to obey their orders. "Staying here is pointless now that we have the Falcon Claw," they say.

Now, why would Brahne load up supplies on her navy? Well, I can think of one main reason: To head to the Outer Continent. After all, no place remains to conquer on the Mist Continent.


The most amazingly petty part of the new occupation is that there's now a fare for riding the air cabs, which were previously free. Thankfully it starts "tomorrow" so we don't have to deal with it.


The Theatre District is just as grim as the Residential District, with destroyed buildings, soldiers patrolling the streets, despairing civilians, but here on top of it all we get a view of the purple-greyish sky, choked with smoke and dust. We learn that Queen Brahne plans to build a new opera house there, so it sounds like she's definitely planning to make her occupation permanent and remodel Lindblum in her image. Also, the Lindblum theatre house was lost along with the industrial district.

Notably, we have at least one Alexandrian soldier expressing doubts:

Alexandrian Soldier: "There was no need to take things this far. I pledged my loyalty to Queen Brahne in order to protect Alexandria. Not to kill people."

Brahne's pretense of fighting a war of self-defense has to be wearing thing at this point, considering the obvious superiority of her weapons and her multiple, unprovoked attacks on peaceful nations. At the same time, what are you gonna do about it? It's not clear how much she even needs her soldiers, as long as the black mages remain obedient and she can continue to summon eidolons.

Well, that's not quite true. The eidolons are WMDs capable of destroying cities. The black mages, especially with telepods, are an overwhelming combat force capable of moving in behind enemy lines and destroy both troop cohesion and infrastructure. But neither of them can actually occupy territory. The black mages lack enough initiative to implement complex orders like curfew or searching civilians, and the eidolons just drop and vanish immediately. Brahne still needs her conventional army to actually hold Lindblum, an army which she's mostly sidelined from the actual fighting. The social dynamics this leads to are going to be… Interesting.


We also find Lowell, the big theatre star, and a groupie fawning over him.

An Alexandrian groupie.

An Alexandrian soldier groupie.

This is incredible. This girl's country just waltzed into Lindblum, killed thousands, destroyed the theatre, and here she is fangirling over being next to her star crush.

Lowell actually asks Zidane if he's aware of any place with a theatre he could work for, and, since we read Ruby's letter complaining about the difficulty of finding good actors in Alexandria, we can point him to her!

Lowell: "Oh, buddy, is that right? I'm too big for a sleepy town like Alexandria, but that's okay. I'll share my talent with these uncultured people."
[He leaves]
Alexandrian Soldier: "Oh, don't go!"
Zidane: "Ruby and Lowell, huh? What a strange pairing of actors."

God. Not only did Alexandria conquer his town and blow up his theatre, we're now sending him to Alexandria to continue his career in front of the civilians of the nation that did it all. What a dick move.

Lowell's chauvinism is amusing, but the mention of Alexandria as a "sleepy town" and "uncultured" is really interesting and ties into a comment I've made before: That before they broke out all their new weapons (which we now know to have been provided by Kuja), Alexandria was smaller, military weaker, technologically less advanced, and just generally provincial. Nobody could possibly have expected them to take on a continental power like Lindblum.

…you know what this reminds me of all things? Ace Combat 7, which opens with Osea being the world power, an obvious America analogue that is larger, richer, more advanced than the nation of Erusea, with total military dominance brought about by their vastly superior air force… Until Erusea pulls out some surprise drone swarms, quickly overwhelms an overwhelmed a surprised Osea, and secures an advantage in the war by seizing their most important military assets.

"What if the villain was the underdog" is an odd dynamic in general; maybe we'll revisit this subject towards the end of the game.

We can visit the Tantalus hideout, where we find Bunce and Lucella, the two kids, waiting for "Uncle Baku" to come home soon. We loot the place and head out.

That about wraps up the theatre district. It used to have an additional screen, but, well…


It wasn't until this specific screen, with the broken stairs and torn off pipe hanging over the void, that I quite realized the impact of the damaged and what people meant by saying the Industrial DIstrict was "destroyed."

Atomos ripped the entire district out of the walls of the city. Walls, houses, workshops, labourers; everything was either sucked into its maw, or was in the process thereof and just fell into a rain of rubble and bodies into the gap where the district used to be. Just, apocalyptic stuff.

Oh, and there's that painter who was preparing for a festival that, uh, probably won't be happening anytime soon. Let's check up on him…

Struggling Artist Michael: "Wh-What's she gonna do with my painting?"
Alexandrian Soldier: "Hmm… This is a nice painting. Such a sad picture, but it possesses strength."
Michael: "Yeah? You think so?"
[After talking to him again]
Michael: "I thought about attacking her from behind before, but… I changed my mind after she praised my painting! People who understand art are good people."

THEY CALL HIM THE LEGENDARY QUISLING. ZERO LOYALTY. ZERO SPINE. ZERO COMMITMENT. INSTANTLY FALLS ON HIS KNEES AT THE SLIGHTEST PRAISE FROM A GIRL.

And whomst among us-

Anyway. I take a trip up top to see if there's anything to do in the plateau around Lindblum, but I don't really find anything, so I head back in and, before I head out… There's just one last thing to check out.

Do you remember that soldier, who asked us if we knew a rebel group called the Vigilantes? Last time, I joked that literally overnight is a little short to set up a "rebel group," let alone one with a name, but that it was probably the Tantalus guys doing a ruckus. Well, that was wrong, and there's actually an immediate follow-up there if we look around a bit. Last time I said "No" because, well, later RPGs have trained me to assume that saying "yes" in these circumstances just leads to suddenly having to fight a random encounter out of nowhere or something, but FF9 usually doesn't play it that way. Instead, if we tell her that we do know the Vigilantes…

Alexandrian Soldier: "If their leader is a man named Justin… Please tell him this. Please tell him to stop what he's doing. Tell him Nicole said so."

Then, just one screen over…


Justin: "H-Hey! Don't talk to me! You'll blow my cover! I'm the leader of the Vigilantes!"
[Zidane implicitly conveys Nicole's words.]
Justin: "Is that so? That's what Nicole thinks…"
Justin: "But this is my cause. I can't turn away from it. This is what I believe in, no matter how much pain it may bring. I won't stop… I'm gonna fight for my cause! Even if I have to fight Nicole!"

And then we get back to Nicole…

Alexandrian Soldier: "Justin… You must stop…"

God, this game is so wearing its Shakespearian inspirations on its sleeve that it has a star-crossed "lovers on two opposite sides of a war doomed to fight one another because they believe in their cause more than in their love" plot going on in the background, absolutely outstanding. I hope we meet them again later.

With that said it's kind of hilarious that we just bump into Justin and he tells us we'll blow his cover and immediately announces himself to us as the leader of the Vigilantes. Dude, please, your Opsec, no Justin don't open that Signal chat room-

And with all this it's finally time to be on our way. We head back to the man at the fountain, who tells us the Regent is waiting at the Base Level, and as we leave, another cutscene plays…


Lindblum Soldier 1: "Why are they loading food instead of valuables onto the ship? I wonder if they're going to take them all the way back to Alexandria?"
Lindblum Soldier 2: "...Maybe they're going on a very long trip."
[An Alexandrian soldier appears.]
Alexandrian Soldier: "Stop that chatter and keep loading the ship!"
Lindblum Soldier 1: "Damn them! They think they can walk all over us!"
Lindblum Soldier 2: "We gotta stall more. Let's keep working."
Lindblum Soldier 1: "Alexandria rules this continent now. Where else can they go and conquer? What do they really want?"
Lindblum Soldier 2: "I don't know… But you know how greedy Queen Brahne is."

Interesting observation that they are loading food instead of valuables. The Lindblum Soldiers were fully expecting to see Alexandria loot all of Lindblum's riches and bring them back to the homeland. Given the distances involved, loading the ships with supplies instead doesn't make much sense… Unless you intend to set course to another continent to pursue your conquests. And it's not clear where; it could be the Outer Continent, that's the most obvious lead, but given that they're loading the ships with supplies and we're hoping to get over there in one afternoon's breezy jog through an underground tunnel, maybe they're setting their schedule on another, farther continent, and we'll get there and find out that they have already conquered the place. That would be a fun twist! But probably they'll be hot on our heels after we arrive on the Outer Continent.


Dagger: "Zidane… Do we really have to go to the Outer Continent…?"
Zidane: "Hey, what's up with you? You said you wanted to go."
Dagger: "What if…" [She looks down and away from him.] "What if something happens to you or Vivi…? I might not be okay on my own."
Zidane: [He rubs his hair.] "Are you worried about me?"
Dagger: [She turns around to him.] "What? Well, I mean, um… A princess needs her elite guards, you know…? I'd be stranded without you guys!"
Zidane: "Are you trying to flatter me by calling me your elite guard?"
[Dagger puts her hands on her hips and glares at him. Zidane takes a step closer.]
Zidane: "Sorry, I was only kidding. You'll be fine with me."

Smooth save, Dagger. Smooth save. We almost believed you might care about Zidane right there. Zidane asks Dagger how she feels about going to the Outer Continent, and she says she's made up her mind; she "doesn't want [her] mother to commit more atrocities." Which… I mean… It's a little late, but…

Yeah, no, she's right, Brahne is definitely planning to unleash eidolons on whoever she finds over on the next continent to pursue her conquest, so she has to be stopped regardless. The conquest of the entire Mist Continent could have been where Brahne stopped and began a reign of "enlightened" tyranny, but no, she's Napoleoning it. There are no breaks on the Alexandrian Doomtrain. Zidane promises to protect both her and Vivi, and the elevator reaches the bottom level.


Our party reunites with Vivi, who's been waiting for them down here with Cid, who left recently, and reappears just then; Oglop!Cid jumps onto the station from the track, revealing that he jammed a trolley between the station and the Serpent's Gate, which is going to keep the Alexandrians busy for a while and their eyes away from us.

Cid: "The excavation site is like a maze. Be careful not to get lost. And… take this with you!"
Zidane: "It's a rag."
Cid: "You big dope! It's not just a rag! <Gwok!> That is a national treasure of Lindblum! That is an ancient map of the entire world!"
Zidane: "Wow! Thanks!"
[Received World Map!]
Cid: "Now, go, before they find you! Zidane, Vivi. Please protect Princess Garnet."
Vivi: "Okay."
Dagger: "Uncle Cid…"
Cid: "<Gwok!> Don't worry about me. I'm stronger than I look! Now, go! They'll squeeze all the oglop oil out of my body if we're caught!"
Zidane: "Let's go, Dagger."

Okay, touching scene, horrifying imagery with that last Cid line, but hold up.

An ancient map of the entire world that is a national treasure of Lindblum?

Yeah, this is definitely sounding like the world used to be more interconnected (or, I guess, at least used to have some explorers sailing the seas), and this has completely collapsed in the Mist era (or perhaps before), leaving the Mist Continent totally isolated. We won't be getting a look at the map quite yet (it's in the inventory but we can only check its description and little bit of in-character writing), but between this and the fact that we know Lindblum to have terrestrial globes… It seems like knowledge of the outside world wasn't "lost" so much as… Decayed?

Like, people know the Outer Continent exists. They may know other continents do. But that knowledge is not useful because sea travel has completely stopped for at least decades; maps that are actually in use cover only the Mist Continent, Lindblum's world map is a museum piece and curiosity, the terrestrial globes Doctor Tot used to love are now just so much space-taking junk that he made an observatory out of a broken one that was lying around.

And we know the Mist Continent people, whether they're provincial Alexandrians or sophisticated Lindblumites, think of the inhabitants of other continents as mere "savages" or "barbarians." The Mist Continent people aren't just cut off from the world; they have entirely wrapped themselves up in an autarkic ideology in which the Mist Continent is the only place that matters so the other continents are only important insofar as once they have the right technology to establish contact again, they can bring their "enlightenment" to these benighted hordes.

Given how racial animus clearly played a part in the extermination of the ratfolk, this does not presage well for the outcomes of Brahne's invasion.


We get a brief ATE of the Alexandrians dealing with Cid blocking the trolley paths, notable mainly for 1) the officer in charge immediately suspecting Cid and sending some soldiers to arrest him, 2) one of the soldiers being sad because she wanted to go shopping because ha ha women in the military amirite.

II. Chocobo's Extraordinary Magical Journey


And we're back on the world map!

You know what that means. Advancing the plot? As if.

Let's go play some Chocobo Hot N Cold.


It's not going great.

As you can see above, I usually average one to two item finds by session. Those are, for the most part, consumables I could get anywhere else. The actual reward we're doing all this for are the Chocographs, of which there is only a limited number, and which each indicate a cache full of goodies that are actually worthwhile.

Here's the problem: The game rolls whether we'll get a chocograph each time we get an item with an increasing chance to find one. This chance starts at 1/16, then 1/14 after finding three items, then 1/9 after four items, then ⅕, ⅓ , and ½ for each one after that.

So I'm basically always rolling that dice at 1/16 or 1/14 chance. That doesn't make finding chocographs impossible, but it means it takes a lot of time. In one hour of play, I've only found one; you can see me unearthing the "Between Mountains" treasure sandwiched between those two screenshots of terrible failure above.

I've tried refining my searching technique, following some thread advice about doing less very close gridwork, but it's just not working. I spend most of my session time with the chocobo going "Kweeehhh!?", indicating close proximity, and then spending 30 seconds fruitlessly trying to find where in that area the item actually is. This is made difficult by the fact that the item isn't located based on where you stand, but where the chocobo's beak will hit; You are not trying to stand on the right square but rather to aim at the right point with a bird that can swivel a lot.

In frustration, I give up for about a week. When I come back, it is with determination to ignore the game as intended" and just go for the win: It's time to use save states.


Yeah, that trivializes the entire minigame.

Basically, as soon as you take your first peck, the game "locks in" where the treasure is. So then you can quicksave, spend a minute looking for the right point, then reload, head right there, and dig up the treasure with 55 seconds left on the counter, and rinse and repeat: You get a cumulative bonus as you get more and more items, but when you reach 8 Mene the Moogle stops you for fear of running out of business.

By the final item we have a 50% chance of finding the chocograph, and that's after the chance of finding it earlier; this basically guarantees we get one chocograph per run. We can get up to nine chocographs from this region, and then it runs out.

And that's where the second, more interesting part of the chocograph hunt begins.


"A city with high winds." This could be on another continent, but the lush grassy plains and grey mountains make me think this is still the Mist Continent. And which city do we know had winds? Cleyra, protected by its sandstorm.

So let's go on a little trip.


We go through Gizamaluke's Grotto, handing a Kupo Nut to Moguta on our way. While we're there, I decided that we've grown in power enough that it might be time to try the wildlife up top again…


Never mind, they have Actual Dragons that can one shot the entire party. I could try to optimize my party to win one of those fights like I did with the griffon and Tantarian, but I don't know if it would work and also I'm already working on something else, so let's move on.


Here, we can see the ruins of Cleyra — nothing more now than a hole in the ground.

…

There's a detail of worldbuilding I haven't brought up yet but I'd like to mention it because I think it might come up again. Do you see those structures radiating out of the ground around Cleyra? They kinda look like just rocky outcroppings, but as you can guess from their location, they're obviously roots. But this was drawn to our attention all the way back at the start of the game:


We were told to follow "the roots" to Gizamaluke's Cave. If you look past Qu's Marsh, you can see roots coming out of the ground, forming a broken but linear path towards the Grotto.

Those roots, large enough to be seen from the overworld map, are Cleyra's roots. This gigantic tree, tall enough to contain its own ecosystem and an entire city at its top, projects roots large enough and far enough to be seen all across the Mist Continent.

Just keep this in mind for later.

Using Cleyra as our beacon, we can orient ourselves from this city of "high winds" (which I'm pretty sure double as a pun; Cleyra is a ratfolk city, Freya is a dragoon, Dragoons have traditionally had the last name 'Highwind'; that joke was slightly cuter before the genocide), and find…


A treasure chest!

…wait, what do you mean, "strange smoke" appeared? Wait, no, I remember this from Elden Ring, don't be a teleport trap, don't send me to Celia Tunnels, please-


I…

What?

When did this turn into a Little Nemo in Slumberland skit, I-

A little planet floating in a starlit sky, small enough to run around, populated with cute critters, what is this, Sonic CD?

There are chocobos here. Several chocobos. A red one is playing the harp; a blue one is banging drums; the deep blue one is I think waving a fan? And I can't tell what the white one is doing. But among all these is a flat raised platform before a pond, and as we approach it…


FAT CHOCOBO!?

Broooo.

Technically Fat Chocobo was actually in VII and VIII; it was a rare form of the Choco/Mog Summon in VII and could be accessed through the Chocobo World minigame in VIII. But we never saw those, so for us this is the first time we've seen it since, uh, IV? This game really is using every part of the Final Fantasy buffalo.

…remember when I speculated way, way back then that Fat Chocobo was some kind of Chocobo God worshipped by the dwarves? Well… Fat Chocobo greets us, or rather greets Choco (we are not featured in this dream) with a merry hand wave, and then talks to him, saying:

Fat Chocobo: "Those who come here seek companions and a home… Choco… You seek a quiet life with other chocobos. …Am I right?"
Choco: "Kweeeh!"
Fat Chocobo: "Wanderer… We await your return…" [It spreads its wings, and light rains down on Choco. Choco turns light blue.] "Choco, you now have the ability to cross rivers! You can only get to the lagoon through a beach. The road is long, but you have taken your first step…"
[The dream ends.]


…this was not the way I was expecting to receive chocobo travel upgrades in this game. Wow. That was trippy.

Notably we sidestep the whole Chocobo Eugenics angle, which is probably for the better, and we get to keep one chocobo, our friend choco, through those upgrades, which is neat?

And now that Choco is light blue, he can cross reefs. This is essentially the same mechanic as the Tiny Bronco in VII, except, due to the general washed out desaturation of IX's Mist Continent, it is really annoying to tell the line between shore and sea; the shore is a mildly lighter shade of blue but not enough to tell and not continuously run into the deep sea wall. But with enough trial and error, we eventually locate two islands with treasure!


This was a lot more fun than the digging minigame. You can easily look up the exact location of each chocograph but I would advise against it; finding out is half the fun. The only issue is that the game doesn't tell you "this is a Mist Continent location you can access right now" vs "this is a Mist Continent location you won't get back to until later in the game", which can leave you running in circles for a while.

III. Into the Deep

But for the time being, it's time to park Choco near the Qu Marsh and head back to our good friend Quina's home. Of course, after such light entertainment, it's a bit of a tonal whiplash to return to where we met Quina in the first place knowing of their untimely demise at Cleyra. It behooves us take a moment to compose ourselves, and ready ourselves to announce the grim news to Quale—


QUINA'S ALIVE!?

…okay I can only play-act surprise so much. Of course, Quina is alive. The Qu Marsh is a mandatory location to get to our next story beat, so presumably if we hadn't recruited them the first time they were available this is where they would become a mandatory party member. Quina also seems to think more time has passed than the game has been implying:

Zidane: "Quina! You're safe!"
Quina: "Long time no see, Zidane. Much trouble, coming back from Cleyra alone."
Zidane: "Do you know a way to the Outer Continent? I heard there was an entrance around here…"
Quina: "Outer Continent… Maybe I find more delicious frogs. Sounds interesting. I help you, and I eat more frogs. I come with you."
[Quina joins the party.]

Very little fanfare this time around. But also, the way things played out is that we teleported away from Cleyra just before the explosion, then spent "half an hour" getting to Dagger, then getting out of the castle, took the gargant, got into a trolley crash, landed at Pinnacle Rocks, and from there headed straight to Lindblum, spent maybe an afternoon there to meet with Cid, get our new objective and leave immediately. So we've been without Quina for… At least 24 hours, at most a week, and that's being generous. At least if we believe the game's implicit timeline, which is cracked.


Visiting Quale doesn't get us any Quina-relevant dialogue, but he gives us some pointers to the excavation site being "around this area" and "hidden in the brush," while being weird and cryptic about it, and tells us that "Quina might know." Now, Quina doesn't, we just asked them, but if we just head off-screen to the right of Quale's house…


Zidane: "Quina! Where are you going!?"
Quina: "I smell! I smell frogs!"
Zidane: "No, we have to look for the entrance to the Outer Continent!"
Quina: "I smell frog this way!"
Zidane: "Hey, Quina! Hold on! Darn it…"


And thus does Quina lead us to a suspicious looking site with a huge stone entrance leading underground. They try to chase after the frog, but fail to catch it and return dejected, only for Zidane to realize they just found the entrance to the excavation site. Our way forward is open!


"Fossil Roo" is such a weird name, and I'm pretty sure the earlier suggestions by the thread that "Roo" was meant to be "Rue," using a French word for "street" to instead refer to "underground roads meant for traveling." So this is the Rue Fossile, as opposed to the Rue Gargant. Of course, our last 'Roo' had a gargant, so maybe this one will as well?

However, such idle thoughts are quickly sidetracked as we advance down the tunnel and put this not at all suspicious iron grate between our backs and the sole exit to the Roo (if we examine the grate, Zidane thinks there's something, but it's too dark to see).


what the fuck is that thing lmao

OH GOD IT'S CHASING AFTER US


The game then gives us a classic death trap fortress deal, Sen's Fortress style, with axes swinging side to side across a bridge, only this time there is a giant death robot running after us if we either aren't quick enough or get caught and knocked back by the axes, triggering a fight.


The mech doesn't fuck around, immediately opening with Death on Dagger, which… Whiffs. I hit him with Zidane's new twinblade, but between robot resistances and the back attack reversing the front order, Zidane only deals middling damage. This could be–


…never mind, it gets one-shot by Thundara. Let's book it.


The robot catching us is always a back attack. The reference is clear: We are doing the Final Fantasy VIII Dolet sequence, escaping from the Black Widow mech. Like then, we can move quickly and correctly to avoid encounters with the mech, but if we are caught, we can only temporarily defeat it. Once we do, the robot just lies around in a heap… For a few seconds, after which it puts itself together and resumes the chase.

Eventually, we reach a hole in the bridge; Zidane with his agility is able to simply leap over, while the robot gets knocked around by an axe and goes spinning towards the hall, where it falls to its presumed demise. Exeunt robot.

…

I appreciate the callback, but this is a much weaker sequence than the Black Widow. Armodullahan, as is its name, has a visually muddled design: It's a "chariot" whose front is half of a clawed monster (as opposed to being pulled by a horse), with the chariot component being "ridden" by a headless mechanical robot with a "lance" as one arm and a shield as the other, but headless (and also fused to the chariot component). This does not render well visually at all. Also, the Armodullahan has about 800 HP and a weakness to lightning, so each individual encounter is trivial, unlike the Black Widow which was a beast, but you can't kill it enough to overload its self-repair like you could the Black Widow, it just repeats indefinitely. It's overall less memorable and interesting.

In any case, with that thing out of the way, it's time to move on.


Everyone manages to collide into one another while escaping the thing, leading to a comedy skit of and Zidane sighing that was a close call. Not much of much all considered, except, hey, did you notice?

Once again, Zidane was dead last of the party. And of course, we know he's the fastest of the bunch, but also, this exact scenario played out in Evil Forest when the whole group was pursued by monsters and Zidane almost certainly slowed down on purpose so that if the monsters caught up to anyone it'd be him rather than them, and then Blank did it again.

This time it is comparatively extremely underplayed, really only noticeable if you're looking very closely and remembering that beat from twenty hours ago: Zidane is still doing the same thing of looking out for the party by being the last man behind if some monster is on their heels.

Then, a voice sounds from off-screen.

Cut for image count.

IV. "Our best developers spend months designing this boss's assets." "You mean their boss mechanics?" "Those too."

Voice: "Geez… That didn't do much good."
Zidane: "Who's there!?"
[Lani appears from the stairs.]


Lani: "I've been looking for you, Princess Garnet."
Zidane: "H-Have we met?"
Dagger: [She puts her hands on her hips and glares at him.] "(Quit flirting with her!)"
Zidane: "Yes, Ma'am."
Lani: "I'm Lani. I'm under orders by the queen to find you, Princess."
Dagger: "My mother? What does my mother want with me? I am not returning to Alexandria."
Lani: "I've got bad news for you, Princess. It's not you I'm after."
Dagger: "What do you mean?"
Lani: "The pendant. Does that sound familiar?"
Dagger: "!"
Lani: [She reaches out with her hand.] "Let's have it. It belongs to Queen Brahne."
Dagger: "...."
[Dagger steps back behind Zidane's shoulder.]
Lani: "Listen carefully, Princess. You escaped unscathed from the monster, but you're not gonna be so lucky with me. Hand over the pendant right this minute."
Zidane: "Are you the one that set this monster loose?"
Lani: "Retrieving the pendant far outweighs the safety of the princess."
Zidane: [He crosses his arms, staring at her.] "....What do you mean by that?"
Lani: "I mean exactly what I said. My orders don't include Princess Garnet's safe return."
Dagger: "What…? My mother would never order that."
Lani: "That's enough!" [She draws her axe.] "Give me the pendant! You're trying my patience!"
Zidane: "Hmph. What if we refuse?"
Lani: "Stubborn fools! Have it your way!"


Alright, so how's Lani as a boss fight?

Well, you can see in the above screenshot that she is dealing all of 54 damage to Dagger with her axe, so ironically that giant axe of hers she keeps waving about is the weakest part of her kit. She carries an Ether, the Gladius and the Coral Sword, so Zidane will be on steal duty but I'm not holding out huge hopes of getting that Coral Sword (third item slot curse, y'know). Oddly enough, Lani does something incredibly rare (but not unprecedented) for an antagonist:


She uses Scan. Specifically, she uses Scan on Dagger (which reveals Dagger has a weakness to Fire? This was briefly mentioned upthread but I don't recall the specifics). She seems to be pretty focused on Dagger, so I have Quina cast Auto-Life, an ability they learned all the way back in Cleyra from eating Carrion Worms, and which has a killer animation:


Hell yeah, angel wings.

You can see both Zidane and Vivi have yellow (let's call them "golden," that's cooler) ATB gauges; Vivi has fully learned Auto-Haste, so I slapped the Running Shoes on Zidane and now I have two Auto-Haste users. This will facilitate stealing, probably.


Turns out, I had good insight layering buffs on Dagger (she just cast Protect on herself). Lani only attacks Dagger. This whole "Dagger's survival is optional" deal? Lani took it to heart and decide to exclusively target Dagger until she's dead, probably so she can grab the pendant off her body and run off — after killing Vivi, her secondary target; if Dagger goes down, Lani immediately focuses on Vivi alone at the expense of anyone else.

What can I say, she's a girl with focus.

And speaking of focus, getting all these attacks on Dagger triggered her Trance. So what happens now?


Well, first off, it works like a normal Summon: We pick Ramuh and he delivers the punishment. Here's an interesting thing about FF9 summons, though:

They have shortened animations.

By which I don't mean that all animations are shorter than in previous games; in fact, they are quite long. However, after the first time we summoned Ramuh, then instead of the full light show with the old man appearing in the skies and everything, we just get the thunderbolt staff stabbing into the ground and exploding into lightning.

That's… Really interesting. And practical! FF7 and 8 summon animations were so long that I have heard old-timey advice on how to force-skip the sequence by opening the PSX disc shield and whatnot, and I myself have been liberally abusing the fast forward function of my emulator using them. But look! A baked-in way to make summons less of a pain to sit through! Incredible!

Dagger's Ramuh deals 536 damage to Lani, which doesn't seem meaningfully stronger than in her pre-Trance state, so the secret to the "Eidolon" command must rest somewhere else… And soon enough, it appears: Ramuh triggers a second time, outside of Dagger's turn.

Eidolon results in a random chance of any summon triggering again before the next turn at no MP cost. That's kinda cool and potentially really strong?

Unfortunately Lani has decided to stop playing nice.


Aera is meaner than Lani's axe. Water is even meaner than that, hitting the whole party for solid damage… And taking out Dagger. It turns out as long as Lani's AoE attack includes Dagger, it fits her "can only target Dagger" criteria. Damn. Luckily, I throw a Phoenix Down at our girl, who rises, surprisingly enough, with her Trance gauge still half-full and still in Trance; it's never come up before so I'd just assumed that KO ended Trance, but not so! Which means… Another rousing round of Ramuh!


Now, you might ask, "Omi, why are you spending a precious turn using a Phoenix Down on Dagger, when you cast Auto-Life as your first move this fight?" And the answer, dear reader, is that I forgot I did that. So.

Thankfully raising a character with a Phoenix Down still leaves their Auto-Life "charge" active, meaning Dagger does rise from the dead, at which point we stop pulling our punches and it's time for Bio spells.


1184 damage a pop, Vivi is still our MVP, the battle is quickly folded.

I've sort of glossed over it because it didn't fit nicely on my screenshots, but the game really went out on giving Lani a lot of personality. She has multiple combat taunts, some of which accompany specific mechanics, like "Give me the pendant and surrender!", "Why aren't you giving up?" or "What do you think you're doing!?", that last one specifically accompanying a counterattack against intruders getting in the way of her target by attacking her. She does backflips with every axe attack, has multiple spells, and has this whole mechanic focusing on targets in order of mission priorities. When we finally beat her, she withdraws finally admitting, "You're pretty good." So all in all, while Lani isn't a particularly challenging boss fight, the devs went really above and beyond in making… Sure… She…


…was a…


…memorable… opponent…


…with… personality.

Ahem.

…

What was in the water at ~2000 video game dev HQs, you did not have to spare the polygon count on giving this random miniboss the most considerable assets of any 3D Final Fantasy characters to date. This was wholly unnecessary.


In any case, battle over. Lani declares that she'll "let you guys go for now!" and then runs off — back the way we came, so we can be fairly sure we won't meet her again at the bottom of the mine for another boss fight, though I doubt this is the last we'll see of her.

And that leaves the way free for us to explore the excavation site!

IV. "Bear Witness To The Last And Only Civilization, Gargantua."


Turns out, this is a gargant road!

However, unlike Gargan Roo, it's been left completely unused for ages. And that means the pathing is kind of a mess, and the local gargant is untamed. We're going to have to be resourceful to use it to get across. As it so happens, there are flowers bulbs that appear to be its main source of food just lying around, so we can grab some and wave them in front of a tunnel entrance to attract the gargant, then Zidane uses his thief agility to hop on board!


This forms the basics of transportation within Fossil Roo: We get some place, find the next gargant spot, the flowers, and attract it to get us to the next spot. There are some complications, however. After passing from some old ruins, mostly reduced to rubble, we come upon a crossroads… And it turns out we're not alone!


The Treasure Hunter will be our companion of sorts through this dungeon. He advances through it in "real time," sort of, as we progress ourselves. The Treasure Hunter has no idea about the excavation site's connection to the Outer Continent, but he has heard it's full of treasures and has come here to collect, even though he's alone and the place is full of monsters. He explains that the tunnels are like a web, and even he doesn't know how far they go; the gargant is the only way to move throughout (which interestingly means he's figured out how to ride it himself and isn't afraid of doing so; for an unnamed extra this guy is pretty brave and resourceful). In order to control where the gargant goes, we need to operate switches like this one:


Zidane asks about the relationship between the switches and the gargant, and the treasure hunter explains that there's a water fountain; the switch controls where the water is pouring from. Gargants hate water, so this wards them off from particular tunnel branches, controlling their movement.

It's obvious that such an extensive system hasn't been put in place by the Treasure Hunter himself, he's just taking advantage of it. Which means, in turn, that…


I was half-joking the first time, but no: This literally is the Stag Stations from Hollow Knight. A giant network of tunnels with a giant scarab-like bug ferrying people to and fro between various stations. That's crazy. Since the entire place is abandoned and we're only interested in one destination, the Outer Continent, we will by necessity only explore a small part of this complex; but it's implicit that there are many more stations leading to various places of the Mist Continent, or the whole place wouldn't be a maze with multiple switches.

The game has yet to bring up any variants on its "Ancients," but it doesn't need to; it's increasingly clear that there were giant infrastructure works with a characteristic monumental architecture built by an ancient civilization, largely underground-dwelling, over which our modern civilization is built with very little awareness of its predecessors. Fascinating stuff.

Navigating the Fossil Roo to the exit is one thing. Navigating the Fossil Roo so we visit every screen and loot all available items is another, and requires us to be careful about action order.

Oh also Stiltzkin is alive.


I felt a little bad about forgetting to mention his "dying letter" at Pinnacle Rocks in which he said he wasn't going to make it, but, well, he's fine and he's here now. Like Quina.

Only ratfolks die in Final Fantasy IX.

We buy items from him, save at Mogki near him and pick up a letter from Kuppo (all these moogles blend together so I do not remember at all which one was Kuppo) who said he was bored and was going to hide himself in the cavern. This is a hint for later.

There are of course random encounters in these tunnels, fighting unholy abominations.

No, I mean literally, that thing is called Abomination:


It's certainly ugly enough to fit the bill. Mostly we just roll all over them. Scan says the enemies are lv 15; if this is the "intended" player level for this area we're about 6 levels over, which is odd because at no point did I purposefully grind except in the Marcus/Steiner/Dagger section and even then by just about two levels (and Dagger is still underleveled), so I don't know how I got so overpowered.

Maybe going forward I'll flee from all random encounters until the levels have evened out.

The Griffin we fought in Treno as a boss is also back as a normal encounter, so that's neat (what the hell are these birds doing underground though).


While traveling on the gargant, we get helpful visuals informing us of which switches are active and which path is open. There are multiple paths, each one connected to a different switch; the purpose is to find the correct arrangement of switches to explore dead ends for their loots, backtrack, then set the switch to the "right" path to progress.


The dungeon as a dungeon to traverse is interesting; the switches are a neat puzzle, there's good loot to find, but as a thing to talk about there's just not much to say for most of it. The Treasure Hunter acts as a shop when we meet him deeper in, then we go on, cross a waterfall, and find him again in the excavation room:


While never outright hostile, the Treasure Hunter makes it clear he doesn't want us here, this is his territory, and these are his treasures; Zidane may be a thief, but he's not here for archaeology so he doesn't contest the point. The Treasure Hunter does offer to let us dig around in exchange for a potion, calling us "buddy" if we agree; he's probably having trouble with the local wildlife.

We can dig around for some minor items like Ore, mostly a waste of time (I'm told there's a rare item to find but it's purely RNG based and with a drop chance so small it's not worth bothering), the real goal here is this pile of loose rocks:


A little bit of digging and bam, we release Kuppo from his hiding place inside what looks like the maw of a fossilized T-Rex. Kickass.

We take a letter from him to deliver to Kupo (one 'p'), save, Tent, give the Treasure Hunter back his pickaxe, and it's on to the exit through the Room of Faces.


This room has a huge wall covered in ivy, with multiple fanged, moustached faces. I… want to take them as iconic artwork of the 'lost civilization', but what does that suggest about what they might have looked like? I don't think we've met anyone with those particular physical features so far, so they might be what they looked like or they might just be demons. The faces might spout water as we go under, knocking Zidane down into the water, but eventually we make our way across and to a lever, which we pull to activate the last switch - we're helpfully warned this will take us out of the tunnel network with no possibility of return, so after double checking we had everything, we trigger it and are on our way out.


And there we are: At the end of the tunnel.

…

When I reached Fossil Roo in this update, I thought, "damn, there goes the rest of my evening." But what I've found is that I mostly… Don't have anything to say? It's a perfectly fine dungeon! It's pretty, it's big, it has a neat gimmick, it feels much larger in-story than it is in-gameplay because of the way we're exploring small rooms connected by a gargantuan (hehe) network of roots using a cool bug to travel them, there's neat loot, the enemies aren't particularly interesting but that's by now par for the course for FF9 dungeons due to their sharply limited encounter rosters… But it's also hard to describe in an engaging way. There's a puzzle! The puzzle is neat! Alright, we're done here.

I do like the trick of putting the boss at the beginning of the dungeon and then making us fight the rest of it after her, is a neat inversion! In a game with more limited resources and tougher fights, this would create an interesting (though potentially frustrating) inverted problem where we have to do our best to beat the boss "cleanly" or risk being attrited to death by the dungeon after her, which is kind of the opposite of how dungeons usually go. Food for thought.

Setting-wise, the fact that the core room is full of fossils that have been excavated just enough to be out in the open but not dug out yet suggests that at least part of the complex was archaeologic in nature, and that the site fell out of use mid-exploitation. Could this mean that a swift cataclysm befell the Roo Builders…

The Gargans…

The Gargantuans.

That's our name for this game's ancient lost civilization. Could this mean the Gargantuans were in the process of exploring the prehistory of their world, expanding infrastructure network across the Mist Continent to connect their various cities, when some great disaster brought an end to them all, and the unfinished tunnels were left to slowly crumble until today they can only bring us to dead ends and a single path out to a new continent?

Or the whole thing was just one giant mining complex to extract mythril or whatever but that's a lot more boring. I like my "underground train network" theory better.

And so. Into the light.

V. Brave New World


No big cutscene this time. We arrive onto the Outer Continent with no fanfare other than the foreign landscape itself… And the fact that our map finally expanded into a World Map.


This is it.

Gaia, our planet.

Four Continents mark the map. Of these, the Mist Continent is the largest, and the greenest. This is very noticeable; the Mist Continent has sharp reliefs, well defined mountain ranges, vast green plains, deep dark forests, and almost no barren ground. We are on the Outer Continent, which does have some plains and forests, but is much more brown. There are two other continents we've never heard of, which must have been known to the pre-Mist people since they're on the map, but which we have no name for; one of them looks to be largely frozen other, and the other kind of a stretching string of mountain ranges and archipelagos.

It seems doubtful that any of these smaller, much more barren continents, with proportionally much more mountain per plain ratio, could field a force to match the Mist Continent's. But of course, we know Kuja has access to advanced technology. For all we know, there need only be one city of Esthar-type ultra-advanced Atlanteans to match Queen Brahne's forces. We will have to see.

For now, as we reach the end of this update, let's briefly just… Take a walk.


…

The game has succeeded in one of the more subtle yet important parts of its set-up.

After all these hours, it is genuinely strange to be walking around at sea level without the oppressive, choking presence of the Mist. This entire time, we've only had clear skies on plateaus, high above the Mist; visually this meant that whenever we were on a bright green plain under sunny blue skies, we would only have to pan the camera to the side to see a valley completely overcome with Mist to the point we couldn't see the floor, and the Mist itself almost looked like a sea. Whenever we were venturing in the lowlands with Choco, investigating coasts and islands, it was under the heavy weight of the Mist's blanket, drowning everything in shades of grey.

Here we are for the first time walking by the beach under a bright blue sky and a shining sun.

And it's all a desert.

What a contrast.


Our exploration of the Mist Continent proper will begin next update. My main destination will be this strange building on a bridge, but I'll be sure to check out any interesting-looking landmarks beforehand, doing a wide sweep of the area (finding chocobo tracks so we can avoid random encounters would be really nice, in particular).

However, before I leave, I want to come back briefly to one last thing.

Cast your mind back all the way to the beginning of this update — when I said that it was remarkable how a simple line about "following the roots" to Gizamaluke's Grotto served as foreshadowing of the immense size of Cleyra, whose roots could be seen all across the Mist Continent in a random spots way away from the Burmecia region, showing the sheer reach and size of this continent-tree.

Yeah?

Okay.


…

I'm going to guess the Outer Continent has a really, really big tree somewhere at its center.

Thank you for reading.

Next Time: Exploring the Outer Continent!