Queen's Blood (Final Fantasy Thread)

[Skummy]

I'm in the end-game of FFIX, and there is shit I had no memory of, to the point that I don't think I ever knew about it first time around.

So...once you get to Chocobo Paradise, and then find every hidden treasure on the world map with Choco, and then Choco decides to come and stay with you instead of in Paradise, if you go back and challenge Fat Chocobo to a game of cards, he'll tell you to go and visit every beach in the world. You then have to go and set foot - not on a Chocobo - on every beach on the world map, and press Circle, a button which doesn't mean "interact with" in any other context for the rest of the game, and it makes a noise. Once you've done that for all 21 beaches, you can heal your entire party just by going to the beach. An insane sequence of events.

There's also another side-quest I missed, as apparently did almost everyone because it doesn't make any sense, of the identical Tantalus guys running out of the theatre and saying that they can't find a member of their family. You have to go back to them after each boss fight in Memoria, despite nothing indicating that these two things are in any way connected.

Just really ridiculous stuff all round. Nothing quite as bad as some of FF8's secrets that are utterly impossible to figure out without a strategy guide, but some serious nonsense all the same.

[probablyoliver]

As far as I remember, the Tantalus brothers sidequest only got discovered 4/5 years ago, 15 years after the game came out, because it literally isn't referenced anywhere outside of that one room in a city you've had no reason to visit since midway through disc 2. Absolute madness.

[Skummy]

thing is, I had been back there and seen the first two brothers run out and say somebody was missing, because going back to old towns after a disc change/major plot point feels worthwhile even though it usually isn't. There is absolutely no indication that you would go back there after every boss/story point in Memoria, because why would you connect those two things?

[jrhodes]

3 hours ago, Skummy said:

I'm in the end-game of FFIX, and there is shit I had no memory of, to the point that I don't think I ever knew about it first time around.

So...once you get to Chocobo Paradise, and then find every hidden treasure on the world map with Choco, and then Choco decides to come and stay with you instead of in Paradise, if you go back and challenge Fat Chocobo to a game of cards, he'll tell you to go and visit every beach in the world. You then have to go and set foot - not on a Chocobo - on every beach on the world map, and press Circle, a button which doesn't mean "interact with" in any other context for the rest of the game, and it makes a noise. Once you've done that for all 21 beaches, you can heal your entire party just by going to the beach. An insane sequence of events.

There's also another side-quest I missed, as apparently did almost everyone because it doesn't make any sense, of the identical Tantalus guys running out of the theatre and saying that they can't find a member of their family. You have to go back to them after each boss fight in Memoria, despite nothing indicating that these two things are in any way connected.

Just really ridiculous stuff all round. Nothing quite as bad as some of FF8's secrets that are utterly impossible to figure out without a strategy guide, but some serious nonsense all the same.

The FFIX official guide was the last one I ever purchased. It didn't tell you a lot of the secret stuff, it just clickbaited you into going to the official website. Next to useless if you didn't have internet access.

I actually checked that guide out recently and the pages that it sends you to don't work any more.

[Skummy]

there's some stuff that's definitely better for the remaster - every old guide I've read says that there's no "!" or "?" icon to indicate where you can find Hades, so he's basically just hiding behind a rock with zero indication that you even might be able to find him, whereas in the remaster you at least get the "!" pop up.

Similarly, there's a "card" icon that wasn't there in the original, to tell you when an NPC is someone you can play cards against. There are random spots in Memoria where, if you try and interact normally/talk to them, Zidane just shrugs, but if you challenge them to a game of cards, they reveal themselves as the ghost of a card master. Without that card icon, why would you ever think to challenge a random blank spot on the map to cards?

[Benji]

9 hours ago, Skummy said:

There's also another side-quest I missed, as apparently did almost everyone because it doesn't make any sense, of the identical Tantalus guys running out of the theatre and saying that they can't find a member of their family. You have to go back to them after each boss fight in Memoria, despite nothing indicating that these two things are in any way connected.

As did basically everyone. It was always in the game but it only became "common" knowledge a few years back.

[Captain Kirk]

Ever Crisis just released, looking forward to trying it out.

[Skummy]

I finished IX last night, about as completely as possible.

I defeated Ozma and Quale, got level 99 on Choco's beak, Treasure Hunter Rank S, and every ultimate weapon apart from Freya's and Excalibur II, because fuck that. I gave up getting all of the cards, because I missed one that you can't get on Disc 4, so ended up with something like 96 or 97.

Key to beating Ozma for me was realising that I didn't need to use Dagger's turns to heal, because everyone had Auto-Regen equipped, and by the time the animation for summoning Ark was done, everyone was back to full HP anyway. That and a lot of luck, basically.

I didn't remember the ending at all, only that Necron shows up. Ending thoughts:

Spoiler

So, it's some time later, but presumably no more than a year or so - I've seen people online say ten years, but there's no way, as nobody has aged; Eiko is still a child, Puck is still a child. Puck I guess you could argue that his species age differently, but we know that Eiko's people age at the same rate as humans because Dagger is one, and she celebrated her 16th birthday at the start of the game.

So....Vivi has kids. Obviously not kids kids, but he's not around any more, and he has young versions of himself that came from somewhere. So new black mages are being created, but they're not just puppets any more? But how, given that there's no more Mist? 

I guess my head-canon for it is maybe that the Genomes being in the Black Mage Village played a part in it, that they were able to help the Black Mages create new copies of themselves, in return for the realisation Vivi gave them that even being created and not having souls didn't prevent them from living a meaningful life and experiencing memories - and the lesson of Memoria was that memories are effectively the collective essence of souls anyway. So perhaps Vivi's memories/soul were able to be built into new prototypes, or the new prototypes were used to capture some of the souls released from Terra, and the Mages and Genomes modelled them on Vivi because he was the one who gave them hope for the future? Some kind of mess of those ideas, anyway.

I was in my early teens when the game first came out, so never really registered the themes behind the story, and one thing I've found rewarding in going back and replaying Final Fantasy games is recognising how the themes are more important, especially in the final act, when it tends to all get a bit abstract. Necron coming along out of nowhere with no real foreshadowing is still weird (though feels fittingly like a throwback to end bosses of previous FFs, as I've always interpreted IX as a love letter to the first 4 games, and a bit of a goodbye to "traditional" Final Fantasy before the series started moving in different directions), but the meaning of Necron was a lot clearer to me this time. It was explained to me as a kid that he was kind of a manifestation of death, but that's not quite right - he's death, but also the fear of death, and this very nihilistic view that if death and the fear of death are baked into life, then the only way to destroy that fear is to destroy life itself.

The whole game is about finding one's sense of self, and about accepting one's own mortality - in many ways I see Vivi as the main character, even if he's not the main playable character, as it's through his acceptance of his self that the whole game really unfolds, which then has echoes in Zidane discovering he has similar origins, as does Kuja, and with Dagger realising that she's not who she thinks she is either, so the role she's been playing isn't, as she believed, her birthright, but something given to her. 

Vivi and Zidane both, as the heroes, accept their mortality, but accept the need to live life truly within the time allotted to them, while Kuja cannot accept that he can die, or that the world can exist without him. On top of that, both Zidane and Dagger learn that they have a purpose in life beyond the role that has been kind of allotted to them - Zidane as a hero who cares about things bigger than himself, and Dagger as something more than what tradition has laid out for her; although she ultimately accepts her role as Queen, she symbolically loses the royal necklace as she rushes to meet Zidane, and chooses him over it. 

Similarly, Vivi, as the heart of the story, is a child, and experiences the world through something like a child's eyes - inquisitive, and eager to learn and to understand his place in the world. That's what sets him apart from the other Black Mages, who are born fully grown, and aside from a select few lack that period of development. Zidane was created as a child, while Kuja wasn't - Kuja, created as an adult, never experienced the world in that way, and that's what makes his experience of it different from Zidane's.

 

The closing monologue, which I had no memory of, was lovely. Realising that it was Vivi leaving a message for Zidane made me sad, as he believed that Zidane hadn't made it out of the Iifa Tree, and he just wanted to tell him everything he was thankful to him for. Then, as the letter signs off, and you realise that it's Vivi that's died, that's just heartbreaking, even though the inevitability of his death is the central facet of the character, it still really hit me. And while you see his "kids" celebrating at Zidane and Garnet's reunion, that carries with it the realisation that Vivi never knew that Zidane had survived after all.

Just lovely stuff. And an ending I probably never appreciated as a kid (it obviously didn't stick with me, as I had n memory of it), but adore now. Vivi's closing monologue, coming off the back of Necron's villain speech, and Memoria before that, made the final act a lot clearer and on message to me than I ever would have realised it was as a kid. 

 

[Ruki]

It's been years since I played 9 (whenever it came out on Steam), I mostly forgot that ending so I had to go watch it again. Teared up watching it. So damn good.

[gunnar hendershow]

I haven't played IX in close to 20 years so needless to say have very scarce memories of the ending at this point. I remember more confusion for what Necron was doing than anything else from when I did play through it, so appreciate those points added a bit more clarity to the whole thing.

I do vividly remember the many strange, impossible without word-of-mouth or strategy guides, side quests. I'm glad we've largely left those kind of things behind - I feel like they had their origin in 8-bit and 16-bit when the technology allowed you very little room to add in features to indicate you were near side quests. So weird lines of dialogue at best were what you were working with. By the PS1 they did have the ability to code something in, but often opted not to because people were just used to playing the old way. And with the ability to add even more in, they just went crazy by the time you're at FFIX.

[Benji]

Just a note - Necron isn't death, he's nothingness. There's a theory that he's an incarnation of The Void from FFV which similarly had a tree involved in a major part of the story and where The Void was the true villain.

This is one of the key themes of Final Fantasy IX, that it's not just a fear of death, but a fear of being forgotten. Zidane fears his friends will forget him and move on and so pushes them away (see "You Are Not Alone" scene), Kuja fears death so much he wants nobody to be remembered, Freya mourns being forgotten by Fratley, Vivi only has a short life and fears being forgotten in death, Steiner fears being forgotten and replaced by Beatrix, Eiko fears she herself will forget her grandpa and Mog, and so on and so forth.

It's honestly the most terrifying thing about death, not the death itself, but your true death when all who knew you and knew of you are passed on and you die your "true death".

[Skummy]

On 09/09/2023 at 00:58, damhausen said:

I do vividly remember the many strange, impossible without word-of-mouth or strategy guides, side quests. I'm glad we've largely left those kind of things behind - I feel like they had their origin in 8-bit and 16-bit when the technology allowed you very little room to add in features to indicate you were near side quests. So weird lines of dialogue at best were what you were working with. By the PS1 they did have the ability to code something in, but often opted not to because people were just used to playing the old way. And with the ability to add even more in, they just went crazy by the time you're at FFIX.

It's funny, because "impossible without a strategy guide" side-quests is something I really associate with VIII, and one of the things that really put me off that game on first playthrough, whereas I just had no memory of them in IX. Maybe I didn't know about them first time around, more likely I'd just forgotten about them, and first time around just accepted that it's how it is now.

8 frustrated me because some of the secrets were like "talk to this arbitrary spot on the world map, followed by a different arbitrary spot", which there's no indication you'd even try to do, or cards where the only way to win them involved losing an unrelated card to a random NPC earlier in the game, and there's no way you could ever figure some of those out, whereas 7, which was my baseline for Final Fantasy games, had complex secrets, but all ones that felt like there was at least a chance you could figure them out through gameplay alone, without help. 

That no one figured out one of the sidequests in 9 for over a decade makes me think I should probably concede that it can be worse than 8 in some areas. 

On 09/09/2023 at 14:39, Benji said:

Just a note - Necron isn't death, he's nothingness. There's a theory that he's an incarnation of The Void from FFV which similarly had a tree involved in a major part of the story and where The Void was the true villain.

This is one of the key themes of Final Fantasy IX, that it's not just a fear of death, but a fear of being forgotten. Zidane fears his friends will forget him and move on and so pushes them away (see "You Are Not Alone" scene), Kuja fears death so much he wants nobody to be remembered, Freya mourns being forgotten by Fratley, Vivi only has a short life and fears being forgotten in death, Steiner fears being forgotten and replaced by Beatrix, Eiko fears she herself will forget her grandpa and Mog, and so on and so forth.

It's honestly the most terrifying thing about death, not the death itself, but your true death when all who knew you and knew of you are passed on and you die your "true death".

A very good point that I hadn't really thought of, especially with how it ties in the other characters' anxieties. That definitely makes Memoria more poignant and significant as well, that the continuation of memory is ultimately what the party continues to fight for. 

I love how part of Freya's ending showed that Fratley loves her, even though he doesn't remember their time together. It's shown as something bittersweet, but I found it very touching that he fell in love with her all over again.

[Benji]

Square Enix has a sale on Steam for the next few days for anyone interested.

[Captain Kirk]

Quite far in to Final Fantasy XVI and I am enjoying it, but I'm not entirely sure what the hell is actually going on? Did anyone else have that problem with the story?

[Bobfoc]

 

[Captain Kirk]

8 minutes ago, Bobfoc said:

 

Thanks Bob, not going to sleep now. 😂

[Ruki]

17 minutes ago, Bobfoc said:

 

This was sooooo good. I am hyped.

[GoGo Yubari]

I almost never preorder games but I think I'm going to have to with Rebirth.

26 minutes ago, Captain Kirk said:

Quite far in to Final Fantasy XVI and I am enjoying it, but I'm not entirely sure what the hell is actually going on? Did anyone else have that problem with the story?

I still haven't played the real game but going by the demo I got the sense that I'd be using that "press down on the pad and see reminders as to who the characters and the kingdoms and events being referenced are" feature a lot.

[Captain Kirk]

14 minutes ago, GoGo Yubari said:

I almost never preorder games but I think I'm going to have to with Rebirth.

I still haven't played the real game but going by the demo I got the sense that I'd be using that "press down on the pad and see reminders as to who the characters and the kingdoms and events being referenced are" feature a lot.

Still not sure who I’m actually fighting? Don’t get me wrong it’s a fun setting and game just doesn’t seem to make much sense.

[gunnar hendershow]

59 minutes ago, Bobfoc said:

 

So that really gives clarity to what was a lot of speculation about where we'd see and if everything would be included. And it looks like for the most part everything is going to feature in some way or another.