Part 23: In Which We Grind Grand Dragons to Level 99
I hope you all had a great Christmas. I had quite a good one myself. Not for the gifts, but for the people, that's what it's about.And if you don't celebrate Christmas,
Now, that bell from last time might not have worked on the left-hand door, but it works on the right-hand door and leads us here:
he loves to put them in his mouth
yes i'm juvenile shut up
I should do this to someone, send them a completely unrelated letter when they get hitched. It's not like my friends wouldn't expect that from me.
If it hadn't gotten cut off, this would be that Moogle telling us that it's dangerous to go up this vine.
So this plateau is FF9's reference to FF1 and 2's Power Peninsulas. You can encounter Garudas and Grand Dragons here. You wouldn't normally encounter Garudas until some time on the fourth disc, and Grand Dragons only show up near a completely optional town.
Everyone knows you can cast Level 5 Death on them since they're Level 50, and that they give a shit-ton of EXP and Gil.
But fuck that, I don't even have Level 5 Death.
sorry guys the star ocean 2 lp is over thataway
... Couldn't you have given me this earlier?
(Actually no he couldn't, he flips that statue around and gets it from there)
You can run into Lamias here. They are pretty tough fuckers, and are the first instance of "FF4 Hardtype" enemies, in which it gets ATB turns like normal, but it also gets one free action for every action you input that doesn't occur while it is in the middle of an animation. But this exploit is best discussed when we deal with a certain secret boss.
The Holy Bell opens this door here.
And it spits us out here.
"Master Gizamaluke has gone mad. He's being controlled by some strange clowns."
this is Makakao's "noooooooo
" face
Gizamaluke can be really hard or really easy, depending on a number of factors.
Vanish is not one of them, even though Gizamaluke is a primarily-physically-attacking boss. Our Magic and Spirit scores are just not high enough yet for this to be useful, it barely lasts more than a turn.
But it looks pretty funny.
Finding the Magus Hat and learning Slow helps.
It gives you extra "surface area" to work with between his turns, and it even lasts for a reasonable amount of time.
However, he also counters all aggressive spells with Silent Voice, which hits often and silences its target. If you don't have the Silk Robe, you won't have Loudmouth, and Makakao will be essentially useless in this fight.
Another major factor is whether or not you know about using Tents in battle.
It fully heals its target, but has a chance to... well, you can read.
Darkness and Silence will persist throughout the battle, rendering this boss spell-less and with a dismal hit rate.
The last factor, of course, is whether or not you're trying to steal everything off of him. I was, and I did. The part where I got his 1/256 steal (An Ice Staff, or maybe a Thunder Rod, I think) on my first try probably had something to do with that.
Of course, if you don't steal it from him, then you're probably in for the long haul. Well, at least if you try 256 times and don't get it, you'll statistically have a 50% chance to get it in your next 256 attempts. Haha.
"Well I think he kinda died"
In other news,
for some reason, South Gate is one of my favorite songs in the game, after Zidane's Theme.
"Your belongings? Shouldn't you be rolling them around in a shopping cart? Get outta here, you bum."
fucking tsa asshole
I have a lot of, uh, "fun" stories about the TSA. It's one of the contributing factors as to why I hate airports so much and get incredibly antsy when I'm anywhere near them, but suffice to say I've had hundreds of dollars' worth of items stolen from me in those "bag checks," and have been called a Goddamn Sand Nigger to my face by a TSA agent, never mind that I'm not even of Middle Eastern descent, among various other offenses.
IS IT YOUR JOB TO CALL ME A GODDAMN SAND NIGGER
can't wait until someone posts in the let's talk about final fantasy! thread saying that you shouldn't play ff9 because there is a guard who is into bestiality in it and then when people call them on their bullshit try to excuse themselves because they only saw this one screenshot and didn't actually play the game
I'd like to say that someday, enough people will speak out against that pathetically useless (and illegal) institution loudly enough to get it shut down, but the second a power figure says "bombs" or "terr'ists" or "Amerr'can lives" you have folks pinned under your thumb. Words are powerful like that.
But folks seem to like this thread, and there are a handful goons in positions of influence, so on the off chance that one of them reads this and is down with it, by all means, preach it. I mean, I'm no truther or conspiracy theorist or fallacious slippery slope arguer or whatever other shit you might wanna call it, but I do know what I consider to be "okay" and what I consider to be "morally reprehensible," and I'm one of those people who is too stubborn to be moved by propaganda, but also maybe too stubborn for their own good, haha.
[ /PSA ]
"... dog."
(Fun trivia fact: humans in Suikoden eat dog, and non-human races give them shit for it. Ironically, Kobolds seem ignorant to it)
Oh
Oh boy, now he's calling himself Princess.
To dress up like a princess, no doubt.
"(But a girl and a man are in the way."
This chest is nicely hidden, and has a not-bad prize. An upgrade for Holly, it is the first of the long-range elemental racket-staff-type weapons.
Also not a bad time to give Huihui some of the stuff we've been digging up from Chocographs. Alert is always a useful skill, especially when it's on a character whose passives are kinda general-purpose so you pick and choose rather than with, say, Kilika, who you ALWAYS want certain skills on.
Well now that I'm graduated, I can be Jobless The White Dragon, because there are no jobs in Hawaii and I don't really want to go back to the continental US.
But I might. Maybe.
There's a treasure up there we can't get, either.
"I-Indeed."
"Welcome! I'm also new here. I've been working here for five months as the chief engineer of Bohden Gate."
"Hey! HEY! Get off your ass, José! What? Whaddya mean, that's not your name? Of course it is, You People are all named José! I knew hiring you for five cents a day was too good to be true!"
"I didn't know, because I was on the other side of the mountain."
"Wh-What I meant to say was that... Now that we are here, there must be things we can do to help the ones we love."
But we're not out of the woods yet.
You didn't think I'd just leave without showing you more charming shit, would you?
Okay, now you can go.