Part 72: Parallel Park the Airship
awwww yeah
Daguerreo is the entirely-optional city with pretty chill music.
It also has numerous official arrangements.
Received Capricorn!
"who the fuck are you"
These levers seem to have limited use.
You can bring this guy down,
or you can lift him up to the middle position,
but unless you jam this pipe into the hole, you won't be able to do much more than that.
With that done, you can take the lift up to the top and talk to the weaponsmith. Otherwise, he'll just complain about the lift and won't sell you anything.
"I've asked to be buried with my favorite book."
This sounds like my kinda place. Subtropical yet cool, watery and humid, full of books, basically impossible to get to, and you can just crash whenevs'.
This activates the big Leviathan mural, which allows you to turn Ores into Aquamarines (thereby increasing Leviathan's strength) for a price.
"Because it's in our nature to pursue the truth. They wanna know more about the moons. That's all."
"No! It's all about aesthetics. People are simply drawn by the beauty of the moons. That's why they're studying them."
You can choose to agree with either. They have three topics of arguments--the moons, why Cornelia had to die in I Want to be Your Canary, and whether nations are a political construct or a social one
--
and if you fully side with either one on all three topics, you'll get a strong card for free. The shopkeeper gives you Meteor, and I think the guy gives you either Flare or Holy. Either way, it's just an easy way to get one.
I think you can repeat this process on Disc 4 to get the other card, but it's unnecessary even if you're trying to collect all the cards.
Well I guess of all people, Zebolt would be the one to be able to make it here, but I mean isn't he supposed to be maintaining my airship
"'... Bell Echoes'
'Beyond the Mist'
'Mist Engine Illustrated'
'The Eidolon and I'
'Gaia'
'Book of Magic'"
Then he moves out of your way so you can get to this ladder. I think you can bypass him with the analog clipping trick, but what a pain in the ass.
"I have just mastered the Namingway Technique!
Now let me rename one of you."
the best names you yourselves have never used before
Just tons of pointless worldbuilding here. I like it.
"I'm a treasure hunter myself, and a famous one, too.
Just because I'm famous doesn't mean I'm gonna tell you my name.
Almost all treasure hunters are assigned ranks. I, of course, have attained the highest rank.
Let's see. Your treasure hunter rank is..."
Ah well, we couldn't make Rank S before we got here the first time.
This Synthesist is the most important one in the entire game.
Actually, I think you can synthesize one here. I just can't AFFORD both it, and the Thief Gloves.
Upon further examination, I'm pretty sure I just bought one and equipped it to Kilika before taking this picture.
Also, I know I'm easily entertained, but seriously. I just loooooooove the colors used in the eidolon stones. The 90s and early 2000s were truly the age of rich colors. All we get these days are "fantastic" oversaturated pastels and "realistic" burned gray-browns.
TO THE GRIND CAVE
man fuck you
Gimme Cat tries to mimic the friendly monsters and steal a limited commodity off of you (there are only something like two or three Diamonds in the game), but he doesn't have the friendly monster music. If you attack him, he starts blasting you with Comet, but I think you might be able to kill him with a 9999 attack. I dunno, he might have 10,000 HP.
Anyway, he gives you 5000 gil, the second-highest amount from non-boss monsters in the game. I think you also get 1 EXP and some crappy AP for it.
Huihui is still missing something...
... oh how disappointing
COMET COUNTER
jesus i'm broke
"They make up one Chocograph now, kupo!
Take a look at what it says on the back. Go treasure hunting, kupo!"
This is the Chocograph that you need a bunch of Pieces to make.
SURPRISE THIS ISN'T THE PLACE AT ALL
Yeah the Ocean Chocographs fuckin' suck.
"You can take off and land in any forest.
You now have all the necessary abilities to reach your homeland...!"
Okay, let's try this shit out.
Not bad at all.
The idea now is to find this dark spot marked on the ground. It moves, however, between a spot on the Mist Continent, a peninsula on the Outer Continent, an island in the Salvage Archipelago, a spot on the Forgotten Continent, and a place in the middle of the ocean. There are hints toward these locations if you examine the Chocograph Pieces in the Key Items menu.
Once you find Chocobo's Air Garden once, it'll be marked and actively tracked on your map permanently even though it moves around. Sometimes it pulls a Dick Move like the Mana Fortress from Secret of Mana and will move right before you bring up the Chocobo menu to use a Dead Pepper.
The Chocobo's Air Garden name is possibly a reference to the Mysidia Sky Garden stage from Chocobo Racing.
This place is the shittiest place to go Chocograph Hunting in (whereas Chocobo's Lagoon is my favorite) because there are two islands on which items might be buried on, and it takes around eight seconds to move between them, plus at least another six or seven to confirm that the current treasure isn't on the island you're currently on.
Even with my awesome skills, I barely managed to pull out a bonus point victory at 0:00.
Anyway, it gives us a bunch of treasures to look for.
Fairy Island my ass.
The real name of this location, if you open your menu, is Vile Island. Appropriately so, it's where you encounter the infamous Yan enemies.
But that's a story for another day.
Having found the Ragnarok sword, we can now teach Huihui some of Beatrix's Seiken/Holy Sword techniques. I think this one gives us Shock right off the bat, which sounds cool in practice and people are always like "yeah Shock makes Huihui's Trance useless, it gives him a guaranteed-9999 attack!" But when you realize that it costs 46MP, and that at Level 99, Huihui will have somewhere around just barely over 250MP, and that for just 5MP or so for every attack (with MP Attack) he can be doing a guaranteed 5000-6000+ with normal hits, it loses its luster.
You also get a second Pumice Piece from Chocograph treasures. This can be used to synthesize a Pumice in the secret synthesis shop in the final dungeon.
Apparently there's an issue with the player's version of Thunder Slash that automatically sets its accuracy to 0, I dunno.
NEXT TIME
what the fuck is an eidolon cave