LogFAQs > #954407985

Thanks for all the sidequest tips, everyone. Today's plan was to inch along the next bit of plot then go sidequesting, but the plot just kept going >_> I shall return to side stuff next time. And I haven't even seen a second Chocobo Forest yet, mnk.

So onto the eastern part of the Outer Continent, we get bad luck and have to fight through 3 Antlions (which are disproportionately tough considering the tiny amount of XP they give!) before getting the right hole. We sink into the quicksand and... are immediately captured by Kuja. Great plan everyone!!

Kuja insists on sending Zidane to fill a fetchquest for him- I try refusing him (my reasoning being that he can't kill Zidane if he needs his help), but the game of course railroads me into the first option anyway. False choices! Kuja can't go himself because there's an anti-magic barrier in effect, and I briefly consider not taking my mages but think better of it. They weren't greyed out on the selection screen, battles haven't been hard lately, and I didn't want to miss any good optional dialogue so I brought Vivi and Dagger with me. I may not have been thinking things through >_>

I soon come to regret this as we land on the Forgotten Continent (cool name). The path down is fine, though at one point the serious music is somewhat undercut by the chirpy chocobo theme lol. I am really coming to love Steiner's Magic Sword skills, too. We eventually arrive at Oeilvert (really nice looking screen on the outside), and sure enough, inside magic is banned. I really don't know what I was thinking. Thankfully I have both Steiner and Zidane, and my trusty Flee for the times when the mimic battles get too annoying. Still, it's really annoying to have to use items to heal (there really should be a potion between Hi and Elixir by this point).

Oeilvert is pretty fascinating. The structure itself is very fun, and the vibe here is both eerie and cool. It becomes clear that this is a place of stored records from the alien race that Garland and Kuja are presumably a part of. We learn bits about the Invincible, the decline of the alien home planet Terra, and the quiet hints that Zidane isn't originally from Gaia have now become blaring airhorns, though nobody has noticed it yet. There's a lot still to be pieced together here (I really wish I'd screenshot all the stuff so I could think it over later), but the most fascinating thing has to be an image showing two planets being laid on top of each other. Is this a Merged World situation?! I suppose these records have to be on Gaia for a reason. I am very glad that this 'throwback' FF goes heavy on the alien/space stuff, sci-fi (or sci-fantasy if you want) after all has always been baked into the DNA of this series!

There's too much to process here right now for both myself and our heroes, so we head to collect our item. A boss stops us (the first mandatory boss fight since Amarant!), and we have to fight Ark. Good design on this thing. Ark is fond of casting a spell that reduces HP to 1, then using a physical attack to swipe everyone a little. This is a pretty long battle for me, as with Zidane focused on stealing, Steiner is the only one who is dealing damage. The attack that reduces his HP to 1 actually works pretty well, as I can then use Minus Strike for quite a lot of damage. Vivi and Dagger are on healing item duty of course, and some ways into this fight I wonder if I should just go back to an old save and bring some others with me. No need though, because we eventually take Ark down and get a Holy Lance to boot. Phew!

We then cut back to the palace/prison and get to control Cid! Woo! There's a 10 minute timer here which I foolishly do not realise comes into effect right away (I'm busy in the menus equipping some new gear for a few mins >_>). Cid has a pretty annoying minigame of Red Light/Green Light, which takes me embarrassingly long to succeed in. Thankfully the weight puzzle is very easy and I get to the key with a minute to spare. It's time for one of my favourite RPG mechanics- split parties! I love being forced to use every character in games, I hate leaving some on the bench. Weirdly Eiko is defaulted to lead here, I wonder what the priority list is.

The B team now has another full dungeon ahead of us: the Desert Palace. This place reminds me so much of FF8. IDK if it's the camera angles, the art design or the 'struggle to find the right spot to be in to click on the correct piece of background environment' stuff, but it feels like it's straight out of that game. The music is weird here, a delicate piano over the bass line from Kuja's theme, it doesn't really go together for me and the track just doesn't really go anywhere. A rare miss! Kuja's theme itself reminds me both of Shinra (probably intentional) and Tyrano Lair from Chrono Trigger (maybe not intentional).

As it turns out, Freya, Eiko, Quina and Amarant make a pretty good team for this area. The enemies loove to cause status effects, but between Eiko's white mage stuff, some healing abilities from all 4 characters, and beefy physical hits from 3 of them, we overcome any obstacle pretty well. There's some cool looking enemies, and it's nice to see Coeurls again (they have a different name but that's definitely what they are). I overthink the puzzles here quite a bit, the answer is usually just to light all the candles and there's a candle somewhere that I just didn't see. This place really does look very nice, I wonder how it got here. Kuja probably wasn't the original owner, right? Hm.

We get all the way to the top and the candle simply fails to light. I briefly get worried that Eiko is too short to trigger the '!' icon and I'd have to do it again, but some backtracking reveals a single candle I'd missed earlier on. Our reward is a very gentle boss fight. Partially because we picked up all the Bloodstones so its buffs don't trigger (not sure how you could miss them, they all seemed to trigger naturally on the way up), but mostly because we have no means to steal, and therefore no reason not to pound this thing into dust ASAP.

The boss goes down before I can write down its name, and Zidane and co return to Kuja around the same time. Kuja's deception is pretty weak here, he winds up kidnapping Eiko (unless I missed it he does not in fact get the item we got for him) but we're hot on his tail as he heads to the Lost Continent. For a minute I thought Cid actually got squished. Despite his words, Kuja is pretty pathetic at this point. He doesn't seem to have such a grand plan in mind, and everything he attempts here goes wrong. The black mages are beginning to doubt themselves and have no loyalty to him really, and heck, he doesn't even get Eiko himself, it's Zorn and Thorn who do that! At this point I think it's pretty unlikely that Kuja will last til endgame, it looks like he really didn't have a plan B after Garland showed up to mess with his plans.

That's all for today, though I will note the interesting little subplot brewing between the Moogles. They're becoming pretty suspicious of Artemicion (just realising how weird a name that is for a Moogle, though so is Stiltzkin). I wonder how that will go. Fun stuff today!

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Slowly becoming a Final Fantasy aficionado.
Currently playing: Final Fantasy IX!