@thatpinguino: Oh... oh dear...

@zombiepie: I'm pretty sure he would bring her back to life if he could. As for why is he creating Eldritch abominations, maybe he wouldn't have to do that if you wouldn't chase him all over the world trying to kill him.

I'd like to personally apologise for the pain I've caused. I put hard money down on the Pencils of Promise charity poll to stop FF XIII from winning over FF VII. That said I'd do it all over again. This blog is the best.

I remember by this point of the game it is almost a victory lap, this might be one of the last hurdle until much later. I think the march from beginning of disc 2 until the crater is either the hardest or second hardest part of the game, but I usually grind in Mideel.

Robot enemy, so lightning magic and its summon, along with your stronger summons and spells. Barrier and Mbarrier, haste and regen if you can. General rule when having trouble with boss is to go in with filled limit break and bust it out early so as you take damage you start gaining limit again. Not sure if Vincent is the man for the fight, this is a bum rush early on rather than a fight of attrition, even Tifa's limit might be a bit of a gamble. See how much damage against all you can stack then focus on busting one of its arm then decide if you want to go after the other arm and eat the damage or go straight for the core, use the time it takes you to kill one arm as a gauge. I think both arms are the same but the body is stronger than both. Might need to resort to grinding if having trouble killing even one arm.

There are some good items there so don't miss out, also steal from the next fight.

As for a general "good" jrpg, I honestly don't know what will fit the criteria. Digging through old catalog might not work since their system and story telling are just too arcane, Chrono Trigger might still be fine but you can watch that rather than play here already :p along with Persona 4, if P4 looks good then P3 is probably ok in terms of gameplay and at this point we are probably talking about P3FES which is a superior version of the main game, but the Answer chapter that comes with it is a way lesser game, yet story critical. FF9 is likely fine up to a point, FF6 maybe? I remember liking it just behind 7, it does have some weird leveling situation towards the end, FF4 is probably the most "direct" and to the point game, but I find it too simple and maybe even a bit boring also just mad grinding in that one.

On ZombiePie's advice, I purchased FFVIII. This is my first time playing it, I have no idea what I'm getting into, and I blame ZombiePie for any misfortune that falls upon me.

@atomicoldman: One of the greatest ideas for a JRPG protagonists ever.

@hassun: @wchigo: Cool beans, I finally beat Carry Armor for the first time! But here's the story about what happened next. I burned through the next few bits and didn't save my game on the submarine. When I went back down to the ocean floor in order to get the Huge Materia in the Red Submarine I noticed this giant green thing on the prowl.

I lasted thirty-two seconds.This meant that I had to replay about two hours all over again.

@zombiepie: I would shout at you why would you even get close to Emerald Weapon but I guess why would you know anything about Emerald Weapon? That being said, going near it without having saved in a while is...a questionable decision to say the least. Perhaps in the future if you happen to see some odd creature in the overworld, save before you touch it and get obliterated.

I'm actually surprised you lasted even 32 seconds.

Damn 32 seconds, that's pretty good. I thought it always gets first strike unless sneak attack(?), it usually opens up with at least one stomp and is usually enough to wipe your team at this stage of the game. I usually last around 10 to 15 sec and it is a disappointment for all involve...wait what are we talking about again?

Anyways make it a habit to save every time before you board the sub. There are some cool places to explore so spend some time down there before moving on. Just save often.

@kid_gloves: @mgalchemist: @mechamarshmallow: @bbalpert: @encephalon: @sparky_buzzsaw: @quarters: @soimadeanaccount: @dudeglove: @teddie: @theblue: @veektarius: @thatpinguino: @wchigo: @hassun: @mento

All of you were right, this was a colossal waste of time and completely not worth the headache...but I did it anyway. I regret my life choices.

@zombiepie: Your dedication to inanity is truly outstanding. I look forward to you putting several dozen hours into the jumprope and Chocobo minigames in FFIX.

@zombiepie: For what it's worth, you did this years faster than me.

Well, GG!

Why not do it as soon as you get Cloud back? Would have saved you the headache against Carry armor :p

Knights is op, but the game built some counter around it, there are times when you might not want to use it.

@zombiepie: Hey I did that too, in about one minute via cheat engine.

(Also if you do all the optional bosses I think you'll appreciate having Knights.)

@zombiepie: Grats! I was wondering why you said first time... then I read the rest of your post, lol!

As for your comment about Knights of the Round... let's have a look back on what I said around two blog posts ago. Ah, here we go!

For your sanity, I wouldn't really recommend you trying to get Knights of the Round, but I'd likely enjoy seeing you undertake that journey and also your reaction to the fruits of your labour.

Nice. Now go get Omnislash from the Golden Saucer arena. Chop chop.

You should NOT play Crisis Core. That game has damn boring grinding/side quests. Just watch an edited story mode of it on Youtube. Zack is just too great of a character.

Also, something for people that have beaten the game multiple times and have gone on dates with tifa in one run and with someone else on another. Did you guys ever notice the difference in the scene under the highwind at the northern cave near the end? Where Cloud and Tifa spend the night together? It was right before the final dungeon exploration.

For starters, if you get the more romantically inclined scene, then when Tifa finds out that everyone was on the Highwind, she says "you were watching?!" and then falls to her knees. If it is the less romantically inclined scene, then she says "you were listening?" and just awkwardly scratches the back of one leg with her other foot.

Wooo! Final Fantasy IX! Will be a good one to read. And you should stick with other PSONE JRPG's. Maybe go with Chrono Cross next and just let it blow your mind. First ever video game OST I bought.

@zombiepie: Congratulations, you can now completely decimate everything in this game.

@zombiepie: I'm surprised you got that, considering how much you despised chocobo stuff. Then again, going through stuff that you actively dislike has kind of been your M.O. this whole time, so I suppose it's not that surprising.

@zombiepie: Well at least you got the full experience of the amounts of time and effort we put into the game as kids. At the time you only had so many games so putting in a silly amount of time into an arcane system to get the best summon was better than going outside when its hot.

@zombiepie: Fun fact: Had you had Knights of the Round for the Carry Armour battle, casting it once would have probably killed it. That's how OP that summon is.

@hassun: Casting it once will beat every story boss. Every single one.

@thatpinguino: Hah, didn't even know that. I thought it was just 95% of them or something.

Edit: No wait, Safer/Seraph Sephiroth should survive it shouldn't he?

Edit 2: Reading up on it, I guess it depends on a few factors whether he survives it or not.

@hassun: When I played FFVII the first time Kights of the Round killed every story boss in one shot and given how leveled up ZP is, I can't imagine he won't one shot everything else from here on out. My party was like 10-20 levels lower than ZPs when I finished the game last week and I had summons hitting for 9999.

@thatpinguino: It's a pretty intricate system:

You can also incredibly cheese the game by allowing your party to have Mimic and just constantly spam Knights over and over again. Granted it takes about 3 hours to complete a turn but your almost guaranteed to kill everything but Weapons after one or two mimics.

@zirilius: Yeah there are a lot of gimmicks you can pull off with mime.

@roninenix: Yes there are two different scenes I believe. If I recall correctly in one of the interview regarding the game the original intimate version of the scene is suppose to imply they had sex...which makes the "you were watching" line kind of creepy :p or maybe they added that after, who knows!

As for the Knights and the game's specific mechanic against it, besides BS and SS respond to the previous fight, Emerald and Ruby also tend to counter Knights with aire tam and ultima. So yea the fight against BS and SS is probably easier if you don't use Knights against Jenova Synthesis and is not at level 99.

I'd love to see this kind of highly analytic rage directed at FF8.

It will be interesting to see how FFIX has held up for someone who is coming to it fresh. In a way, it's the last FF of that era and essentially the culmination of lessons learned (or not) from previous titles. Starting from FFX, production values way up and game feels more coherent with less weird/memorable quirks that maybe made it bit more bland (hence, FFX-2 comes to the rescue with a power of J-POP).

@gstats: Oh boy do I have good news for you! ZP and I already did a full series on FFVIII. Here's a blog post with links to all of ZP's articles. And here's a link to a three hour podcast where we discuss FFVIII in excruciating detail. FFVIII was what started all of this gangster shit in the first place.

Wow, so you started the series with the 2 most mindlessly obscure stories. Haha. You should try FF9 to calm you down afterwards.

@gstats: That's the plan! This has all been a long scheme on my part to get more people to play FFIX. We should have an FFIX podcast of some kind up in the next month or two.

@thatpinguino: Now FFIX is a game I can get behind. Will @zombiepie accomplish the impossible: Be the first person ever to understand the rules to Tetra Master!?

Time to impress those nobles.

Knee jerk reaction to that ending! Go!

I don't know what happened with me and FF9, I remember having a good time with it, I also remember for a time it was pretty high in my favorite game list, but for some reason only a handful of the bits and pieces that I remember are impressive, and it just sort of fade away. I think it is technically superior, but not memorable except for a few selected plot points.

@thatpinguino and I both got the more "romantic" scene between Tifa and Cloud. I feel confident in saying that they did more than just sleep on a rock next to the Highwind.

Mistakes were made.... I look forward to viewing a story that is coherent and mostly makes sense in the form of Final Fantasy IX.

It bears repeating that after IX I'm playing Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster.

It's better than VIII because at least it didn't feel like an LSD induced fever dream. It provided a climax to the ultimate conceit of the story and did so in a visually interesting manner. Cid also swore which is kind of awesome.

That post-credit stinger though...I can see why they retconned that. You can't build a multi-media cash generating franchise if ALL OF HUMANITY IS DEAD.

"EVERYTHING IN THE CRATER!"