Part 8: Sooooooooooo Stoned

let me stand over here passing the ball between four people for ten minutes

Now that we have our little army, it's time to go ruin the shit out of the local ecology.



"Pshhh... She's not even my type."
"Well, what is your type? Oh, let me guess, the kind with a dick"
"you shut up"


"how many times do i have to tell you he prefers the term 'african-alexandrian mage'"

Okay, time to set up our party.

We give Makakao the Leather Wrist and the Silk Shirt, which will teach him Blizzard and Thunder respectively. The variety of spells really doesn't matter this early in the game where nothing has a particular vulnerability to any specific element (though I do believe that some enemies in this area resist the Thunder element), but we're aiming to fill out everyone's library before this LP is over.


Huihui normally starts out with just a Broadsword, a Bronze Helm, and Bronze Armor. We upgrade his sword, which allows him to pick up Minus Strike, and give him the Bronze Gloves I found on the crashed Prima Vista.

If you go outside and talk to the Moogle, he has a letter for you.

Yes, an interesting stranger. This will totally not lead to a human trafficking operation bust sidequest later in the game.

Heading deeper into the forest...

... we come upon another ATE.


It is quite possibly the best ATE ever, and this band consists of five members, bringing our count of really fucking awesome NPCs up to 11.




Baku, of course, has to come in and ruin everything.

Back to our adventure...

On the third screen of the Evil Forest (the first being the first area you can encounter enemies in, the second being where you fight the scripted root monsters), there is a well-hidden area off to the side.


It is literally just there. No treasure, no special monsters, nothing. It serves no purpose whatsoever unless you're counting the number of "!" examination points you're getting (which you may want to do).


The next screen up is a rest area.


There is a healing spring here, but it only restores HP and MP and will not remove bad status effects.

It also triggers an unavoidable ATE, "Do As I Say, Not As I Do."



"Here, take this map. It's gonna be a long trip back to Lindblum..."



Anyway,

there is, as you may have noticed, a Save Moogle in that stump over there.


We have a letter from him that Makakao got quite a while ago.


why didn't you help her you useless shit

Continuing on a little further, when you reach the screen before the boss room, you get an ominous little FMV:





yes a giant red flower how very frightening


So here it is, the boss door.

But we're not going there just yet.


We're gonna stick around and fight some shit.


Steal some shit, gain some levels, get Blinded, the usual.


Hell, we'll even master a couple of abilities.

Now that Kilika has Beast Killer mastered, he'll still be able to equip and use the ability even if we remove his related equipment.


We also give Huihui the Moonstone so he'll start learning Beast Killer. It's useless to us at the moment, but -Killer skills are always great to have on account of them multiplying the damage you do to a specific enemy type by something like 1.25 or even 1.5x.

With our abilities properly learned, I distribute our equipment in order to prepare for the upcoming boss battle.

We give Huihui the Rubber Helm. It has 1 less Magic Defense than the Bronze Helm, but has the added benefit of reducing Thunder damage by 50%.

We do the same for Kilika, stealing the Silk Shirt (and its parallel 50% Thunder reduction) off of Makakao.

While Makakao might be our number-one damage-dealer at the moment, there are more important things to do before we start doing massive amounts of damage to things.

Okay, boss time:







FF9, for all its absolutely amazing good points, does have one weakness: while acceptably good, its boss battle theme is the weakest of all the PS1-Final Fantasies.


Its best damage attack is a party-targeting Thunder.


With as low as our Max HP is right now, this is bad news for Makakao since it'll two-shot him, but you can clearly see the difference that the 50% resistance makes.

Had we impressed 80-99 nobles in the swordfight sequence, Brahne would've given us another Silk Shirt that we could be using right now, but fuck that.

Long story short, we steal an Iron Helm from him, which will be a nice little upgrade for Huihui.

And in case you were wondering, no, you won't be able to bleed this boss's MP. It has almost 1500.


All of a sudden, this patchwork asshole shows up tryin' to steal my thunder.

Well,



we will be having none of that.






Suddenly,

a beast appears!




"you lazy midget"

Well, time to get moving.

And get movin' we do, to some rockin' escape music.


what the fuck are you doing Kilika don't look at them move your ass


yes exactly




As much as I'd like to show some screenshots for the Youtube-unable, it just wasn't in the cards this time.

I mean, sometimes you get screenshots of people making retarded faces, but other times, you just end up with

Blank's asscheeks.





prop 19 got a revote and it passed




actually it's your fault on account of killing that plant boss with your magic sword shit






actually none of this would've happened if that fat fuck of youtube proportions wouldn't have shot a medieval weapon of mass destruction at us




yeah we can sit in the tent and play d&d all day it'll be so fun

and then at night makakao will drink an entire case of zima and what the fuck are you stupid retarded we need to get your stomach pumped but we're in the middle of nowhere how the fuck are we gonna get your ass to a hospital you dumb fucking

(a variation of this actually happened on a The White Dragon camping trip once)


"The vicious monsters it spawns! The abnormalities it stirs in the mind and body!
Princess, we must leave this place at once."


"We're standing in a valley surrounded by tall cliffs.
And last I heard, North Gate and South Gate were sealed off."







NEXT TIME: bitches with husky voices