Hey Duders,

Here is the latest Baby Deep Look! My usual Deep Look videos focus in on a cool gameplay mechanic or story element from a game I have played the heck out of, in the hopes that I can share what makes that mechanic so cool. This Baby Deep Look is just as deep as a normal video, but I focus on a mechanic or ability that is so small that the video is much shorter than usual. I aim to keep Baby Deep Looks around 5 minutes long. These videos should be small little observational nuggets that hopefully give you some useful insight into a game's design that you might not have noticed otherwise.

In this Baby Deep Look I continue my preparations for my Final Fantasy IX speed run in the Giantbomb Community Endurance Run. The GB Community Endurance Run is going to be raising money for Pencils of Promise, a charity that builds schools, trains teachers, and puts kids through school in developing nations, from April 10th through 12th.

In this video I show how to kill the Plant Brain boss at the end of the Evil Forest and how to get an Iron Sword as quickly as possible. Intentionally killing one of my characters returns as a key strategy to running through the game and that will only continue going forward. I also say goodbye to Blank in the most efficient way possible.

I think I'm going to condense a few of the next speed run tips into one longer video. Its going to take a bit more editing than I'm used to, but I think the video will be more useful and entertaining than the shorter ones I've been putting out for FFIX. So look forward to most of disc 1 soon!

Looking forward to it. Are you going for Excaliber II?

@shindig: That is the plan! I'll need it to beat the final boss if I go for the absolutely fastest strategy. I need to figure out what other things we might need to tack on as far as donation incentives go.

Wow. Good luck with that. I remember watching puwexil's GDQ run and the amount of notes he and Spike had to keep track of is maddening. So much prep must go into runs like that.

@shindig: Yeah, I'm taking notes off of their run and I already have pages more notes than I had for my FFVIII run. Because Excalibur 2 has a time pressure built in, I can't mess around like I did with my FFVIII run and know that everything will be fine. I have to stick to the script or else my run will go sideways.

I've already played FFIX through once and i'm going through the first disc for the 4th time now to make sure my times are good. I'm keeping up with the AGDQ run now, but I still need more practice.

At least I love FFIX. It makes the replaying a lot more enjoyable.

Yeah, I haven't been back to that game in so long but I remember winding up on Disc 3/4 super swiftly and then being completely schooled by a bunch of Grand Dragons at the 30 hour mark. That run of theirs was just so tight, efficient and lucky.

@shindig: The battles with Deathguise and Kuja were things of beauty. Those fights went just about as well as they could for those guys.

Honestly the most encouraging part of their run was how far under 12 hours they were despite all of the AGDQ fun stuff they included. Like entering names and reading sections without mashing through. I should have an even bigger cushion if I practice hard enough. I also have one more fun element to my run that I'll be announcing pretty soon!