Working as Intended

Another entry, another batch of Final Fantasy X completed~!

If you're here to see what happens next on Tidus and Friends Whimsical and Wacky Adventures Though the Land Where Nothing Makes Sense, then you'll be very disappoint by this entry and the next, as they're all about those ever constant and fun things in any good RPG: Sidequests! I'll see you chappies back for Part Seventeen (I think), and as for everyone else, let's jump in!

Note: This entry will may contain many examples of how much I suck at mini-games and sidequests.











If for some reason you weren't paying attention at the end of the last entry (naughty, naughty!) we've just unlocked the ability to travel around in the airship! And by 'travel' I mean select from a list of destinations, and then teleport there, as FFX doesn't have a World Map.

One of the many reasons I like it.




Two things to get out of the way before we leap into anything. Firstly, using the Search command to find ourselves some hidden away destinations! This basically just involves scrolling over the map and furiously hitting X until a location pops up. Most of them just contain treasures, but two of certain note are:

-Omega Ruins
-Baaj Temple

More on them later, my lovelies.




Second is using the in-game keypad thingy to input passwords, which unlock even more destinations.

Many of these are found on little Al Bhed signs throughout the world, and just lead to more shiny treasure.




Now that all that nonsense is out of the way, let's begin the Sidequest Showdown~

To the Calm Lands!




If we travel under the bridge Lulu said wasn't the way to Gagazet a few entries ago, we're led to...




An optional quest I logically could've done while passing through to Gagazet, but didn't because that bloody entry was long enough as it was. Hooray!




This where three ellipses and a question mark what?

Finish your words, dude!




Found some candy?

It's gonna be candy. I just know it.




..... Oh ;;




Yes, because given the track record this place holds, running in there with another summoner is the logical thing to do!




RUNNING!!




Holding the local D&D Appreciation meeting?




How? Did someone just roll the giant stone out the front door going "DON'T MIND ME GUYS IT'S ALL GOOD ROFL"





Aw, now I feel bad. The thief clearly went to a lot of trouble to save summoner's lives by stealing a fayth stone and sealing it away down here, no doubt going "THEY'LL NEVER FIND IT NOW!!!", only to discover that the fayth he took was entirely optional and didn't stop anyone in anyway.

Alas, poor stupid fayth thief, no-one will salute your pointless sacrifice!




Who? Wakka or the Thief?




One of the crazy mobs in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth is the ol' favorite of the series, the Magic Pot! Or Urn, technically. You have to attack the right eye on the pot (which is random) to get an item prize. Which is also random, but is generally something rather spiffy.

If you attack the wrong eye, it explodes and kills you. Whoopsie!




Even more running~!




SUDDENLY: A DEAD PERSON! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH




How many other doofy looking unsent summoners do you think there would be down here?




; ;




"THE COLOUR REDISH-PURPLE INDICATES THAT I AM EXTREMELY CHEESED OFF

ALSO A FIEND BUT MAINLY THE FIRST THING"




Why are you asking your cleavage that?




I know a reason to kick some unsent ass when I see one!




We don't get to fight Lady Ginnem herself here, but instead this flamboyant samurai aeon thing and it's AWWWWW cuuuuuuuuuuuute widdle doggy!! Who's a good boy? WHO'S A GOOD BOY~??

Ahem. Uh... Anyway, Flamboyant Samurai only has 30,000 HP, so he's a piece of piss to kill, really. Even if you come down here before you go to Gagazet.




Yeah, sorry about that. I should've come here earlier, before all the shocking events in Zanarkand made this seem rather trivial in comparison. My bad!




She's certainly much stronger than when she started the first two pilgrimages, since, y'know, she's moved more than one space on the Sphere Grid!




I came to get some much-needed character develop for you. We may as well just turn around and bugger off now!

But, hey, if Yuna feels to urge to Gotta Catch 'em All, then I won't object.




I'm sure the writing is Al Bhed for "NOTHING TO SEE HERE SERIOUSLY DON'T LOOK DOWN LALALALA!!"




Actually, nobody whispers or mentions your name anymore Odin Gilgamesh Yojimbo. Sorry...




I'm always up for beating down enemies. C'mon, Yojimbo, let's bust some hea---




.................................................................. WHAT.

Ugh, fine. Whatever.




Because he totally, totally is.




Now that one Aeon on the checklist has been crossed off, let's go get another!




Hey! It's that creepy temple we washed up on at the very beginning of the game.

Neat!





Ah, good times~

Speaking of, actually...




"RAAAAAAGAGAHGJKGAHSGKAJGHAHJSAHGJHFGAJHFAJHAGAHAGAAAAAH!!!"




It's time for some good ol' revenge beatdown on the big fishy! Geosgaeno is actually a pretty nasty boss if you're not properly prepared. His two main attacks are Stone Punch, which instantly petrifies and shatters someone (Stone Ward armour made from 30 Softs is vital here), and Inhale, which, durr, inhales one character and he gains any positive status effects they may have been carrying.

If you can get around the petrify, he's pretty straight-forward. Especially with Rikku, if you have elemental  gem-items to throw at him. Those do a surprisingly large amount of damage!




SHAZAM!

And no, I have no idea how it's possible to explode into fire and shoot off electricity underwater. Just roll with it.

Actually, I was feeling pretty chuffed about killing this guy, until I realized that I completely forgot to do something in the Zanarkand Ruins that's required to even get the stupid thing I came all this way and killed for. My brilliance astounds even myself at times, you know...

Right. Time for a quick excursion!




And on the way we run into Lady McThongBitchington and Mr Needsa Laxative.

So my two favorite reoccurring characters, let me tell you.




What did you expect from the world-famous ruins, exactly?

Actually, wait, she's probably talking about the--




"Yeah.... It's a funny story, really!"




WHAT NO YOU DON'T




She sounds about as convinced as I am.




... Are you coming onto me?




Inside we get to play another rousing game of Tetris Trials to unlock...




The final Destruction Sphere reward. Huzzahs!




Right, back we go into the creepy submerged temple!




In the next room, you have to light up all these strange glythy things, which only do so if you've properly used a Destruction Sphere at each Cloister of Trial in the game. You can go back and get any you've missed (Unless you're on the PAL version, for reasons that'll become distressingly obvious later), which is awfully chummy of them.




I think this is meant to be symbolic, but I can't tell of what exactly for the life of me.





LE GASP :O




Of course we do. Your Aeon's fucking awesome!




Okey-dokey then!




Eh, as long as you deal out hilariously large amounts of damage it's all good.




All smug.




Yes, because you sacrificing yourself willingly while he's was so young couldn't possibly go wrong!




Smugmour? Thirst for power? No! You're just being silly now.




Somehow flowers convey the feeling of wanting more power.

Who knew?





All in good time, lady. It's on my To Do list, alright?




Why, yes, I do have the sense of humour of a 12 year old. Thanks for asking!




Two Aeons down, three to go!




In the back areas of the Calm Lands is a spiffy hidden temple that can only be reached by Chocobo~

While you do get the Aeons here, we're not going for them just yet! Instead...




It's time for some Chocobo Racing! YAY!

The objective is to reach the bottom of the track before another chocobo does, all while picking up treasure chests along the way and avoiding the strange coloured beacon thingys. While the event does dish out some good rewards, we're here for the one you get by default the first time you play.




Jubiliations!

What does the Cloudy Mirror do exactly? Why, absolutely goddamn nothing!





Until you change it into the significantly spiffier Celestial Mirror on this weird crystal path that appears above Macarena Macalania Forest after you obtain the Airship. With this, we can now start obtaining the Celestial Weapons for each character. Score!




In the Calm Lands, there's a tiiiiiiiny path in the north western corner where a monk is standing about. The stupid bastard won't let you pass him until you've completed a few Chocobo Racing trials and tests. This wouldn't be so bad, but... um... I'll explain later on, okey-doke?

Long story less long, you need to complete the stupid things before you can obtain...




Neato!
The Caladbolg was called the Ultima Weapon in the Japanese version of the game, but it changed for some odd reason in the English. This has been your Entirely Pointless Fact Nobody Gives a Shit About for the day~ 




Back at Baaj Temple, you can find Lulu's Celestial Weapon in a treasure chest in the main underwater area.

What it's doing here I have absolutely no clue.




At the Djose Shoreline, if you grab the Rusted Sword from near the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth and bring it here, you'll get the standard Great Katana weapon for the series!




Most of that would snap the second you hit anything, but who cares? It's awesome!




If you input the password GODHAND into the Airship's naviagtion computer, you'll unlock a secret location underneath Mushroom Rock Road (the place where Operation Mi'ihen took place) that leads you to Rikku's Celestrial Weapon!




The Godha...

That probably would've been a bit more useful to note if the password didn't give it away. Poopy!




In the Thunder Plains, if you pray to three Qactuar statues, a ghostly image of one will very faintly appear before you and lead you to a small, broken tower. When you press Square near it, thunder will strike down and reveal Kimahri's Celestial Weapon!




Wheeeeeeeeee~!

This was called the Longinus in the Japanese version. Again, nobody cares?




Back to the Calm Lands again to find this strange store/arena thing hidden away on the East side of the plains. Here, a man will ask you to capture monsters in every area of Spira and bring them back to him, so he can make super-powerful bosses out of 'em. Sadly capturing them doesn't involve any Pokeballs ;; , but instead you need to buy a sword from him that has the Capture ability on it, then just kill whatever.

Capturing one of each fiend in the Calm Lands will net you...




An influential, but ultimately overrated band Yuna's Celestial Weapon~!

There's also the case of Wakka's Celestial Weapon, which involves playing Blitzball. I did obtain the blasted thing, but the FRAPS screenshot corrupted, so you'll just have to take my word for it! Except for the part where it'll show up in battle screenshots in the future, but that's beside the point.




For anyone who hasn't played the game, you're probably thinking, "Hey, obtaining everyone's ultimate weapons was actually very simple! That's a bit lame." Or at least that's what you'd be thinking if your entire focus was to give me a somewhat dubious segue into the next section of this entry.

Y'see, to 'unlock' the ultimate weapons, you need three things. The Celestial Weapon itself, a Sigil and a Crest. The weapons and crests are easy to get, and mostly just involve exploration. The sigils on the other hand range from being time consuming to the bane of my goddamn existence.

But more on that later. Let's start with, by far, the best Sigil to get~!





On Bikanel Island, there's a very adorable mini-game that involves finding and hunting Cactuar that live in the sands, in order to obtain Rikku's Mercury Sigil. Rikku's is the best to get because this quest is actually fun. Unlike most of the others, which seemed to be designed to royally shit me right up the walls.

But, once again, more on that later!




The quest just involves running around Bikanel and using clues given by the rock above to find Cactuar, then you initiate a mini-game where you have to sneak up on them without them spotting you (they just detect by movement). Once you're near them you start up a battle~

You can fail to catch any and all of the Cactuar and it ultimately doesn't matter. It just affects what secondary reward you get at the end.




They can show up in all sorts of downright bizarre locations.





Even off the desert!




; ;

I always feel kinda guilty about doing this quest, but then I get the Mercury Sigil and all is well~

OH GOD I AM A MONSTER WHAT HAVE I BECOME?!?!




Next up is.... ugh... dodging lightning in the Thunder Plains.

I seriously despise this mini-game. It's tedious, arbitrary and most importantly, just downright cruel in many regards. You have to stand around in one spot and dodge 200 bolts of lightning in a row. You only get the slightest of warnings, and occasionally the game pulls a colossal Dick Move and has one bolt come immediately after the other, almost assuring defeat.

If you get hit or leave the zone, you fail. Which is especially annoying when the chest to get the stupid Venus Sigil is in a separate area. Friends of mine have dodged lightning for hours and then left the zone to grab the Sigil, only to discover they were at 199 hits instead.

Here's a video of me failing like a true idiot.




I eventually got 200 down, but it was the freakin' polar opposite of fun.

The things I do for the amusement of friends!




Next up on the Hey, Let's Make That Jerk Playing This Want to Kill Himself Tour, the Butterfly mini-game in Macalania! This is the game that... bird... thing from an earlier entry was harping on about. The game forces you to run along the narrow path in the forest, collecting blue butterflies and avoiding red ones within a certain time limit.

Because this involves precision and timing, I'm awful at it. It took me so many attempts to finally win this once. And then, to get the Sigil, you have to go through it again. AAAAARGH!

Calm down, calm down. Baby steps....




Now, to avoid me throwing my controller clear through the monitor, let's go do the only other particularly enjoyable Sigil Hunt~! We're back at Remiem Temple to get Yuna's Sigil, as well as collect the last Aeons for our Pokedex collection.




We're back to defeat all of Princess Leia's summons!




Dude, if I could have a giant kickass temple in the middle of nowhere to relax all bloody day, I'd fucking take it!




Who on this balking planet isn't dead? That's what I wanna know!




NOPE TOO LATE

*poof!*




Hold the mother of all Tupperware parties?





Well, someone thinks a little highly of themselves!




I could post images of every Aeon fight Belgemine pits you against, but here's how 90% of them went: I summoned Shiva and royally kicked their arse. The End.




After defeating Bahamut, Belgemine gives you the Flower Sceptre, which alongside the Blossom Crown you get for capturing fiends on Gagazet for that jerk in the Monster Arena, allows you to obtain...






NYUK NYUK NYUK

WHY I OUGHTA...





And then, to complete the mini-game, you have to fight Belgemine's version of 'em!

As usual, Shiva just sits there and laughs as Larry uses Blizarra constantly (healing wacky Shivs), as she rips the other two a new arse. I really should give Bahamut Curaga or something, but this is more amusing, methinks.




I HAVE TO GO NOW. MY PLANET NEEDS ME!




"And, for the love of Yevon, try not to fuck it up with too much J-Pop in the future!"




Sweet!




Well, that was fun!

Now, onto by far the worst mini-game in this fucking thing...




Chocobo Racing in the Calm Lands I feel was created by the most lowliest, evil designers at Square, who all got together to create a mini-game that was designed entirely around the idea that seeing me scream obscenities and death-threats at the monitor and a bunch of 1s and 0s would be just hilarious.

These people are now on my To Kill list. Right next to whoever decided to cancel Firefly, and the originator of obnoxious self-importance in gamers on the Internet.

To get Tidus' Sigil item from this event, you don't just have to complete it. Oh no, that would be far too reasonable! Instead you have to collect balloons (which deduct a few seconds off your completion time at the end), and avoid birds (who add 3 seconds onto). The point of this is that to grab that Sigil, you need a time of under 0.0.0 seconds. That's right. To complete this event you need to get a time that isn't even remotely possible!

You have pop 13-15 balloons and dodge every bird to nab this time. No short order when your Horsebird swerves left and right like an indecisive drunk who can't figure out what kebab store he wants to throw up in at 3am on a Saturday night, and the birds can hit you even when they fly right by you. Needless to say, this causes irritation remarkably quickly.

It took me about four hours, 80+ attempts and more profanities uttered per second than during any other time in history before I finally got the miserable friggin' thing!




Last up on the Sigil Roundup (there is the case of Auron's, but that just involves capturing monsters, which is time consuming, but not annoying) is getting Wakka's Sigil in Luca!




Wakka's Sigil is a random prize for winning at Blitzball after you obtain his three other Overdrive attacks as rewards. I have no idea how you can win an Overdrive, but apparently dogs can dig them up, so I dunno.

Anyway, Blitzball isn't too bad once you get used to it. Or maybe that's the Chocobo Racing insanity talking...

Ooooh, the wall has sound now! Hehehehehehehehhehehehehhehehehehehehehehheheeheheeeeee!




Now that we've got everything we need, it's just a simple case of heading back to Macalania and using the Sigils and Crests to power up the Celestial Weapons!




Shiiiiiny!




I originally wasn't going to put this in, but I may as well for how much goddamn time it took away from me just to do it! To tackle some of FFX's harder bosses, you need to seriously level up. You don't need to go anywhere near as extreme as I did it, but.... well, I said I was gonna complete FFX, so I guess this comes hand-in-hand with it. Some friends insisted I show off how insane damage gets at the end, so here we are!

 The jerks.

Also, I cheated and set up a macro for my gamepad and walked away. Shhhhh!

Anywho, the gist of it is I needed levels and spheres to 'max out' the sphere grid. Which basically means I had to clear every non-ability slot on the grid, then obtain +4 Magic/HP/Strength/Luck/Ect spheres and put them in the right places to get the ultimate results. Time consuming to be sure, but it's nothing a gamepad macro and a x3+ Speed option on the emulator couldn't fix!

To sum it up, you need a really good Overdrive -> EXP set up, then you fight Don Tonberry at the Monster Arena until you get broken amounts of Sphere Levels out of it, then use the +4 spheres you can obtain from really tough fiends at the arena to HAX the Sphere Grid.




Several dozen hours of letting the game do its thing by itself playing later, shit be awesome, yo!

By the by, I am never doing this again.




But, hey, all the buffing up crap is over~

TIME TO KILL SHIT AGAIN HOORAY





No, that's a when, not a where. Silly Lulu!




What did he do?

Well... we're never told, so I'm just going to assume he got into big trouble when the Yevon official's monocles popped out when they saw "OMEGA WAS HERE. YEVON IS A LOSER" painted on Bevelle's temple walls in 80-foot high print.




Well I doubt they called it the Omega Ruins to bring in the tourist revenue.




Well, he sounds like a real swell guy!




He's an Internet troll then?




No, he's in the other ancient ruins that have their name dedicated to him, dingus!




THE CALL-OUT




Omega Ruins is, as far as memory serves, the hardest dungeon in the game. It's full of all sorts of nasty fiends, with the Great Malboro proudly winning the title of Biggest Pain in the Arse, with his Bad Breath attack (puts every status effect ever on you) and ability to get the first attack in on any party that doesn't have someone with the First Strike equipment on.




There's also a lot of treasure chests here. According to some there's a system where listening to the pace of the music in background when opening chests will let the usually randomly decided chest rewards work to your favor, but I could never figure it out.

Big shock there!




BUT NO TIME FOR THAT NOW!!




Yeah, I'm totally HAX now.

I can deal 99,999 damage, and Ultima Weapon here has 99,999 HP. Guess what happens?




BLAMMO!

In a cute nod to Final Fantasy VII, Ultima shakes violently and turns red and transparent when he dies~




It was... AN IMPOSTER :\/




Eh, also an acceptable reason.




We have candy and cookies for you!

Actually, wait, nuts to you. Those cookies are mine, bitch!




In the second part of the dungeon, we have to run from little arena to little arena, battling forced encounters along the way.




Including the forever dreaded demon.... wall.... rock.... thingy!




Also, I never noticed this before, but the Onion Knight has the FF3 sprite on its shield. Awwwwww~




Damn straight we do, son!




BRING IT OOOOOOOOOON!!




In the PAL/Int version of FFX, Omega Weapon got a serious upgrade in health. Going from 99,999 HP to 999,999. All of his stats were increased to boot! Ultimately, at the level of power I'm now at, Omega isn't much of a threat. That said, he's far from being the most powerful of his kind in this game now anyway!

But that's for another day~

Also, Kimahri can learn his strongest Blue Mage spell, Nova, off Omega, if so inclined.




Why does everything in Spira feel the sudden urge to just detonate when pressured enough?




LOLHYPOCRITEMUCH




Welp, I think that just about covers everything I need to for the first part of Filler-rama!

Tune in next time, when I take on the toughest fiends in Spira, and any semblance of sanity I have implodes in on itself like a neutron star! Should be a good, crazy-go-nuts time for all concerned~!