| Another long put aside game has been completed; that's right, I finally picked up Final Fantasy IX again and beat the game just now. I was saved at the last save point in Pandemonium, so I was just before the start of the fourth disc. And from there, you basically just fight a few bosses, switch to disc 4, and then you can go to the end dungeon.
Speaking of which, Memoria took a long time to get through simply because of the sheer length of the battles. The normal enemies, though they only came one at a time, took a couple minutes each to bring down, and the minibosses took a good while also. Fortunately there was a fair number of save points, however, so I was able to keep myself going through the use of several Tents to restore MP spent on healing. (I was having to cast Curaga with Garnet at least once per fight it seemed like).
As for the end boss...it was really funky. I was expecting this big showdown with Kuja as the end battle, but no, he goes down fairly easily and then this Necron thing shows up. Now, is it just me, or did Necron look kind of similar to Safer Sephiroth from FFVII? Which, in turn, looks a lot like the last form of Kefka from FFVI. Seems like Square has this weird obsession with strangely angelic looking end bosses. Now I'm kind of wondering what the end boss of FFX looks like. But anyway, Necron just sort of showing up after Kuja's defeat was odd, since there was absolutely no mention of it anywhere else in the game, so far as I remember.
As for the fight itself, Necron actually provided a good challenge, unlike pretty much every other boss in the game. FFIX wasn't exactly a hard game for me -- it was quite easy for all but a couple fights. Of course, one of the main reasons it was so hard was that the the fight started off very, very badly. My party consisted of Zidane, Freya, Vivi, and Garnet. ... And guess what? Necron takes out Garnet, my healer, before I can get an attack off. And then it proceeded to completely trash the rest of my party because I had no healing spells. About the first ten minutes of the fight, it seemed like, were spent just trying to survive and get all four of my party members alive and without status effects. I absolutely loathe that attack of its that brings a character down to 1 HP because, of course, it then likes to use an attack immediately after that hits the whole party, instantly killing the character with 1 HP. That's what it did to Garnet straight off.
But I survived, and out of the fight came the longest Trance ever; Vivi went into Trance near the start of the fight and never came out of it until the fight was over. How? Because, for most of that time, he was either dead, stopped, or petrified, yet his Trance remained through it all. The one Focus move that I got off even stayed in effect through it all -- that's what I call good concentration, heh.
The main turning point of the battle, though, was when Zidane went into Trance. After that, it was all downhill. Grand Lethal doing 9999 damage per hit, plus Freya using Jump, plus Vivi doing two Flare spells per turn (still in Trance using Double Black), added up to a lot of damage very quick. And I had finally managed to get Garnet up and at full health, so she was casting Curaga every turn to keep everyone alive. I still had two more Trance attacks left with Zidane when Necron went down.
As for the ending -- don't worry, I won't spoil anything -- I thought it was neat how they mixed the CG backgrounds with the real time graphics for Zidane. I would've prefered it to all be CG, but I really hardly even noticed with all the action going on. It was done pretty well I think. And when it paused, the view circling around to show Zidane's look of "oh crap," and then the "thumph" sound as he hit...that was hilarious. The rest of the ending was also pretty good, though I kind of saw the "surprise" coming. Overall, I enjoyed it, and I think it ended the game very well. | |
