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 begin 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 start at the beginning of FFIX and show off how to approach the very first battle in the game and how to speed up combat in general. I outline my general FFIX speed run tactics and show off some specific tricks to make the first battle as quick as possible.

Awesome!

I will be keeping an eye on this!

@cheappoison: Cool! I am going to try to make 2 of these videos a week leading up to the speed run since there are so many little tricks in FFIX and as such there is a lot to cover. The difference between it and FFVIII is so much bigger than I thought.

Interesting! Look forward to seeing more of FFIX.

@blomakrans: Honestly there are so many little tips that you need for FFIX that I have no idea where to stop. With FFVIII I felt like I had a few big tips that were off the beaten path, but FFIX just requires so many small subtle things that I could make hours of videos and still not cover everything.

I watched the speedrun of FFIX during one of the AGDQs or SGDQs and it was pretty interesting. Their run went quite well, but as I understand it, some of the late game fights can really wreck your time if you get bad RNG. I suppose it can't be all that bad since a "speed"run of FFIX takes about 9 hours anyway...

@sinusoidal: Yeah my first practice run got blown up by some of the final bosses in Memoria because of how specific your preparation has to be and how much rng there is. I screwed up some item purchases and that left me completely unable to beat one of the chaos guardians without backtracking a whole bunch. The last few battles involve a few bosses with party killing attacks that can be stacked together if you are really unlucky. The AGDQ guys lucked out on their Deathguise and Kuja fights and that let them breeze through the end of the game.

At least most of the messed up rng stuff is deep enough into the game that it doesn't impact an Excalibur II run. It would really suck if you couldn't get Excalibur II because of some bad dice rolls.

Man It's been so long since I saw the opening to IX. I totally forgot about Cinna, Marcus and Blank, I do remember now being surprised that none of them were named Biggs & Wedge in a Final Fantasy game I knew had a throwback angle.

Had no idea you could destroy your own party as a win condition in that first fight. Ha! Speedrunner like yourself always find interesting ways to break games.

@slag: I really enjoy the recurring appearances of the Tantalus guys and Beatrix. I think it adds to the world without stretching the game too much by making those characters permanent.

Also it turns out that killing yourself is a recurring theme to a bunch of the boss battles in the early goings of FFIX.