You've inspired me, BoB. I've been trying to decide what game I'd play next, and I think it's going to be another run of FFIX. It's been too long.
I just want to say that I share supernova's pain. It didn't occur to me that upon returning to a room I'd already been in that it would be a very different room with a save point. The annoying thing about this is that when I fought the boss of the area where Zidane is at the time, I'd gotten all steals done really quick, and been able to finish the fight extremely quickly. Of course, I then did everything up ot the point of the bookcases and thought to do a little backtracking to see if I missed anything, ran into the wrong enemy and had everything go wrong. Two characters got Stop'ed immediately, I had Garnet with me, and she constantly gets constipated or something and doesn't carry out her commands, so she didn't fix them, the other character had already been given a command and by the time he carried it out and started charging his bar for his next move, he'd been Stop'ed too. That left just Garnet, constantly getting flustered about how tricky it would be to use an item and failing each command, and then she got killed, and that was that.
And then I look up this Desert Palace thing, find supernova's thread and discover that all I had to do was go into the previously Moogle-less room in order to discover a Moogle has, at some point over the past 20 or so seconds, walked into the room and set up shop. Of course! Why didn't I think of that!?
Dammit, Squaresoft. >=( You do so many things right, but you can really be good at finding ways to do it wrong.
So basically I had to redo the boss fight in the previous area and it took smurfing forever to get that bloody Holy Lance this time, and then I get buggering up with Cid and his walking up to get a key from near a monster and got it done in the end with about 3 seconds to spare. Then I saved, then I went to bed. At least I know what I'm doing for the next 20 minutes of the game, and which enemies I'm not going to waste my time on.
Still enjoying the game, though.
Bow before the mighty Javoo!
I've written too much too many times about why I love FFIX. There's no game I have a closer emotional attachment to, and there are few games that I'd say have better characterization than IX.
For example, I can recognize while the beginning feels like a slow start, but I love the scale--it starts as a very personal story, or rather several intertwining personal stories, and it takes awhile for the plot to unfold into a grander thing. But I like the first third of the game or so the most. And there's just so much character and atmosphere in the early hours that I could gush about forever.
I think the ATEs are an underappreciated/undercopied mechanic for simultaneous storytelling.
I hope Square remakes the game at some point and fixes the battle system's terrible slowness. I don't care about remakes much, really--I'm happy to play it with its funky old PS1 graphics--but it was really doing too much for the hardware, and that would be so easy to fix in a modern remake and make the game much more playable.
Oh, that's okay, I'm an ability whore. I get really annoyed when my characters aren't growing something on every slot. How dare they have everything already!? I want them to be growing abilities forever and ever and ever. I purposefully spend time farming in order to save up so I can buy things even when I already have them equipped on other characters. I must always have one of everything in stock (weapons excepted) so I can ensure everyone has everything... and for wonderful synthing, of course.
Bow before the mighty Javoo!
That's not what I meant. It's definitely a waste of time to have your character in battle when they can't learn any abilities.
No, I meant EQUIPPING abilities. Like, you go into your abilities screen, and set which abilities you want your character to use for the moment. You can equip/unequip at any time.
Oh, yeah, I do that all the time. I enjoyed farming exp on those 3x Cactuar fights by putting Clear Minded on everyone while the Cactuars repeatedly tried to confuse me, and then I left it on through to the boss fight and that paid off when he had some kind of Propellor attack or something that spun everyone and then 'Guard' popped up on every character. xD Unintentionally being tactical, yes sir.
For the most part I keep Level Up, Ability Up on all characters, various different "_____ Killer", Counter and HP+ abilities on attackers and various status wards on my casters.
Bow before the mighty Javoo!
Stealing never annoyed me as much in this game than in IV and VI. I mainly use steal from regular enemies. It doesn't make sense that Locke and Edge struggle to steal from some random encounter monster. IX's thief doesn't struggle really at all with regular enemies and the only boss I found a pain to steal from was Hidegigas.
Also Bob didn't those cactuars have a tendency to run a lot from you, or are those the cactuars from X that act like that
Now I feel like playing FFIX...
"... and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written."
Ah, the good old days. FFVIII, Encounter against five cactuars... back attacked! *all cactuars run away*
In his last playthrough, my brother pretty much always used Steal with Zidane every turn throughout the entire game. By the end, Thievery did 9999 damage. It's not really like you end up missing the extra damage.
Towns, have you gotten to Daguerreo yet?