Final Fantasy IX Part #38

Part 38: SAT Test

"i suppose we'll just have to cut out our indonesian boy orgies"

Then this huge guy on the left shows up and gets through without saying a word.

"Yes well I didn't hire you to be a bitch either so listen up"

"The first is to retrieve the pendant, a national treasure, from Princess Garnet.
The other is to assassinate the black mage traveling with them."
"I don't know what happened between you and princess, but what should I do if I meet with resistance?"
"Just get the pendant back from that wretched girl!"

Uh oh.

•••

Oh don't you go having a schizophrenic breakdown on me. I swear if we go into a teal-tinted version of Alexandria, I'll--

Oh okay good

--were you fucking staring at me the whole time what

"Uhh back in Alexandria I would think that would be pretty obvs but I guess not"

"Or dead"
"Shut up Makakao"

"Whoa hey what don't tell me you were staring at me while I was knocked out too"

"True, you were not the one who caused the destruction.
But I must ask you... what will you do now?"

"I will hide 5 manifestations of myself in this forest.
Each one will carry a piece of the 'Hero's Story.'
If you put the story together to my satisfaction, I shall become your Eidolon."

So the idea here is to walk around the forest and find Ramuh in five different places.

The last one is back where you started.

It won't be there the first time, but FF9 doesn't have very big dungeons, so this doesn't qualify for a Dick Move.

I think that's one of my favorite parts of FF9's structural design, actually. It had a vast and reaching world and all these crazy dungeons for you to explore, but their size was illusionary and only seemed big due to a lack of knowing what to do to proceed--just like a real adventure. I think its largest dungeon is something like ten screens long, and every screen looks distinctively different, but similar enough to be convincingly interconnected. Almost every screen has treasure to get, and unless you're very unlucky or run in circles for hours, you won't have more than, say, fifteen encounters at most, even in the ten-screen dungeon; that's three per screen on average, and hardly a high encounter rate.

It's a million times more engaging than a shiny corridor that takes half an hour to run from one side to the other in FF13, and a billion times more engaging than twenty sprawling, identical fields and dungeon rooms in FF12. The only "I don't know what to do" puzzle in FF12 was the one where you have to cast a summon, and that's fucking retarded because 1) summons were stupid and useless, 2) you never had to do this before--not even when you got the summon, y'know, just maybe hint that it might be a mechanic later in the game--and never had to do it again, and 3) the "hint," courtesy of Alexander O. Smith, was so retardedly-worded that it took a certain level of critical thinking that I have a hard time with (similar to the Hint 1: Round / Hint 2: Bright / Hint 3: Sky / Answer: Sun puzzle in Tales of Vesperia).

The weird part is that I can do visual and other non-word puzzles with thousands of different permutations in a snap. Always been this way, but I guess that's just a mystery of the brain.

So the idea now is to put the stories together in a sensible sequence. The story itself is from FF2 and deals with Josef, a temporary party member. The correct order is Beginning-Cooperation-Silence-Human/Hero, but ironically considering how much I read and write all the time, I have a really hard time sequencing stories for whatever reason, too, especially if they have unnecessary bits.

You have to choose between Human and Hero. I chose Human.

Maybe it's a bit of a silly thing to believe, but while the choice makes no difference in the game, I think it's a reflection of the player themselves. Someone with their head in the clouds will choose Hero, while an older and more rational player would choose Human.

I think the same thing of Mother 3's ending, too. "A Good Person" sorts of people will see it as a story of redemption and a world reborn, even if you have to imagine it. "A Bad Person" sorts of people will see it as a nihilistic and inevitable ending, and that the blank screen at the end means that everyone died and it's just trying to make you feel better.

"Eidolon, mother always talked about those, too. Is that anything like a gimp? Because I don't know if I'd like that"

You get the Peridot add-on stone for your troubles. It teaches the Ramuh summon, and having Peridots in your inventory contributes to the summon strength by adding +1 base strength to the formula per stone, potentially giving you access to a target-all spell that is more powerful than anything Makakao will ever learn (barring single-target battles with Reflect).

This is basically how I feel about a lot of standardized tests. They're subjective games cooked up by a bunch of self-important assholes.

My sister recently had to take the COMPASS test--no idea why, I never did--and she got a lot of official practice material. Now, I'm kind of self-important at times so I thought, Hey, why the fuck not, I bet I could whip this fuckin' practice shit!

I took a look at the first page: syntax and structure. Shit, right up my alley; English mechanics 101, that. That is pretty much part of my mana, it is a realm in which I have significant power.

The answers, though, were nothing like what I would've submitted as the proper corrections. In fact, a lot of their answers were not only completely incorrect--I mean like commas where they definitely shouldn't be and word order you'd expect from ESL--but the incorrect answers were the only choices and there was no "all answers are wrong" option.

If I ever meet someone who helps design these tests, I will personally kick their ass, specifically in the sort of kick-them-some-more-once-they're-down fashion where they lose teeth so they never forget that they're horrible people. Nobody who is that wrong should be setting the gold standard for what is considered logically correct. No fucking wonder two thirds of our high school graduates aren't even clever enough to be in the goddamn military, never even learn to think for ourselves 'cause someone else is telling us we should only process information the way they do.