Publisher: Squaresoft
Developer: Squaresoft
Release Date: 7/7/2000
Date Played: 1/13/2017
Region: France
Time Played: Only 90 minutes. Fuck.
What’d you think?: Goddamnit. I was really excited for this game. I’ve loved Final Fantasy IX since it first came out when I was 12 years old. This is my favorite game in the series. I was confident I’d be beating the damn thing, because once you’re familiar with the game, you kind of have to really fuck up to get a Game Over, but really fuck up I did. As the first party-based JRPG to be selected, I let this game set the precedent for what “one try” meant, settling on actually getting a game over, because I knew some games in this genre would have fights that would guarantee the death of a character, and I wanted every game to be at least theoretically beatable. In the vagueries of my memory, I had thought that the Petrified Forest, the second area of the game featured such a fight. I knew that a plant-beast would trap one of my party members within itself, and I had mis-remembered this as being fatal. How it actually works, I was crushed to learn, was that if the trapped character is knocked out, it’s an immediate game over. No phoenix down, no Life magic, just the taunting strums of a harp. I want to blame this on the fact that I was playing in French, and probably missed Steiner or “Djidane” shouting to not let Garnet get knocked out, but no excuse can bring back this missed opportunity. The totem of disgust badge here lies solely upon my head.
YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6fpi2rL31o