The Ultimate Final Fantasy Thread: This Guy Are Knock You All Down

[Cadenza]

Congrats. I tried to do that once, got all the ultimate weapons (Blitzball was the worst, it took a whole Saturday), and than decided to give up, when I realized how much grinding there would have been involved.

Which ultimate weapon was the worst for you? Butterfly dodging was also very annoying, but it took way less time than Blitzball.

The chocobo race, easily, hands down, no contest. Everything else either has an exploit* or can be completed eventually with enough time. Getting a time of 0:0 in the chocobo race is down to pure dumb luck. Anybody who says otherwise probably got super lucky and completed it within ten minutes. It took me about an hour and a half, and I was expecting it to take longer than that, honestly.

*(Speaking of, I don't know if this holds true in the original, but in the HD versions of FFX there's a super easy exploit for the lightning dodging:

Basically, there's a certain crater in the southern half of the Thunder Plains that will always trigger a lightning bolt after you walk through it once. From there it's just a matter of patience.)

 

[SpoonyBard]

The Chocobo race is what broke me. If I'm remembering right you don't just need a time of 0.0, you need to be UNDER 0.0! I distinctly remember my last race ending with me landing on 0.0 exactly and not getting it, where I walked away from collecting it and never looked back.

I did get Auron, Rikku and Yuna's ultimates though, they're easy.

 

[Kazin]

I was one of the lucky ones on the chocobo race lol. Even with that lightning exploit, I couldn't finish that one. Tedious nonsense. And I've never even attempted Wakka's because I cannot stand blitzball.

 

[ozacrot]

I will say that the last time I replayed FFX (on Switch, shortly after its release on the system), I watched a youtube video of how to win the chocobo race, mimicked it as closely as possible, and ended up beating it within 15 minutes. Knowing which balloons to go for and which to avoid reminds me a little of high-level play in the FF Record Keeper gacha, where in addition to the necessary skills, you have to basically map out all of your actions around turn order and boss AI. Knowing when not to go full throttle is the single most unintuitive thing you can ask me to do as a gamer, so I fully endorse attempting to impersonate a 20-second video.

 

[FelixSH]

The problem with Chocobo racing is that the balloons (they are balloons, right?) you need to run over are randomly generated. You need to be skilled too, but that alone might not be enough. I had a race where, I swear, I got every balloon (or whatever it is you have to do), and it wasn't enough. It's really weird.

I also had a race with exactly 0.0 secends. That was frustratimg.

That said, I think it took me only one hour, and I actually had some fun with it. Just didn't overstay it's welcome.

 

[Zef]

The balloons aren't randomly generated, but they are randomly chosen from preset layouts. There's very specific layouts, if not a layout in particular, that give you just enough balloons to subtract enough seconds from the timer, and you can tell which one you got almost immediately when the race starts. You don't get it, you might as well reset.

And THEN there's the birds, which I think ARE randomly spawned? I don't remember whether the chocobo's jerking around is at random or if it happens at specific intervals, but I do remember that I had leveled my bird to max and it still tried to buck me or veer off from time to time.

 

[fanboymaster]

Last time I tried the FFX endgame nothing irritated me more than that damn chocobo race. There was essentially no correlation between how long I'd been attempting and how well I did, it just... happened eventually.

 

[clarice]

There's a path with less birds, close to the edges, i think. I love FFX, but i never do most of the optional stuff (never defeated one of those hard bosses). But i always do the Chocobo Racing. I like it.

 

[aturtledoesbite]

The birds spawn periodically in sets of four; two aim for you, two aim for the other chocobo.

 

[4-So]

I've gotten all of the ultimate weapons on more than one playthrough except for Wakka's; when deciding whether to play blitzball or take a swift kick to the vas deferens, I'll probably just brace for impact. I'm only halfway joking.

 

[Mogri]

The chocobo race is the only one of the stupid minigames I ever finished.

 

[Zef]

I've gotten all of the ultimate weapons on more than one playthrough except for Wakka's; when deciding whether to play blitzball or take a swift kick to the vas deferens, I'll probably just brace for impact. I'm only halfway joking.

The real problem with Blitzball is that, if you're even slightly decent at covering opponents and learning their shots, you can get all the winning tricks within a dozen games (about an hour) and then it becomes mind-numbingly easy. Even WORSE if you get Jecht Shot II and you convince Wakka to come out of retirement. But you STILL have to play hundreds of games until the Sigil shows up as a prize, at least in the original version, so if you're like me and you were playing in a 2001-era CRT, you bet you had to desaturate the image or you'd get a permanent blue tint burned into your screen.

Incidentally, I never even tried to go for Red 'n' Green in FF7, nor did I ever even think of getting Knights of the Round. Comparatively speaking, how much more/less infuriating is it to raise a Gold Chocobo, or to get the exact Materia configuration, needed to get KotR and beat the Weapons in 7 versus all the Celestial Weapon requirements in 10?

I did pretty much everything in FF8 except Triple Triad because most of the extraneous sidequests were just running around and talking to rocks and monkeys, and speaking of monkeys the only boxes I didn't check in 9 were Ozma and Excalibur II (I HATED Hot & Cold my first run, but I learned it and enjoyed it from my 2nd onwards). There's a bunch of Hunts and most higher-grade weapons in 12 I'm probably never going to get, and I did everything in 15 but the DLC.

 

[Mightyblue]

7 is pretty laidback relatively speaking? The challenges are mostly front and center for the Weapons outside their big gimmicks (Ultima flies off and regenerates slowly if you don't keep chasing after him, Emerald has the air timer that doesn't stop for anything + partywide damage per materia equipped, Ruby has the desert suckdown move), the chocobo breeding is mostly tedium as you obtain the various colors and sitting through RNG.

Honestly, most of the materia in 7 are green magic materia and link/stat blues, but almost all of the really useful stuff are yellow command materia. Summons are just there to look cool and pad time (I used to use quad-cast summons to go get snacks).

I found getting all of the respective ultimate weapons and level 4 limit breaks to be more annoying and time consuming than most of the superbosses, tbh.

 

[MetManMas]

Comparatively speaking, how much more/less infuriating is it to raise a Gold Chocobo, or to get the exact Materia configuration, needed to get KotR and beat the Weapons in 7 versus all the Celestial Weapon requirements in 10?

Considering it's mostly just about keeping a FAQ or strategy guide onhand to know what to do instead of having skill in alternate gameplay modes, I'd say it's less infuriating.

Granted, I don't blame anyone for screwing up the submarine mini game on their first try, but most of FF7's challenges prize knowledge over skill (even if said knowledge is the button combo to cheese the races) and the ones that do require skill are not "avoid getting hit 200 times in a row" difficult.

 

[jpfriction]

I did not know that Emerald weapon did damage based on materia. Neat!

I know there was a materia you could equip to negate the air timer at least, but I had knights of the round and a couple of mimes at that point so it was over quick.

 

[Mightyblue]

Yeah, it has an opener attack which it will repeat (?, fuzzy on that bit) that hits the entire party for 1111 times the number of materia that character has equipped. Depending on your level, that's a hard cap of 8 materia per person.

 

[fanboymaster]

Or the old tried and true final attack phoenix combo.

 

[Bongo]

The beef I have with Final Fantasy X's ultimate weapons is that four of them are unlocked by beating annoying mini-games, whereas the other three are unlocked by simply playing the game, which is to say, by fighting monsters and exploring. So I always end up with Yuna's, Rikku's, and Auron's, and nobody else's.

 

[aturtledoesbite]

Yeah, it has an opener attack which it will repeat (?, fuzzy on that bit) that hits the entire party for 1111 times the number of materia that character has equipped. Depending on your level, that's a hard cap of 8 materia per person.

The attack is even called "Aire-Tam Storm"; the first word being a not-very-subtle reverse of the word 'Materia'

 

[Octopus Prime]

...

Y’all know how much Teen Octo is seething right now that nobody ever told him this?

 

[FelixSH]

I beat all the Weapons in VII in one playthrough. No idea how, I wasn't clever or anything. I did level up three character to level 99, so I probably had a ton of HP, and the one Weapon that is flying away after a few rounds of combat wasn't that hard. No idea how I beat Emerald. Probably just KOTR spam?

Ruby I remember, I killed off two characters, and revived them at the start of the battle, because than they wouldn't be thrown out immediately. Ruby will throw two of your people out eventually, but the time you get with a party of three instead of one helps a lot. I also know that Ruby died to KOTR spam.

I never understood how to make a gold chocobo. I tried once, and it didn't work (part was probably that the German translation is as bad as the English one), so the way was really unclear. Instead, i found that strange hut in the middle of nowhere, where you could trade key items (I think you got them, after defeating the Weapons?) in. You got a KOTR materia, and a gold chocobo that way. Don't remember the third thing you got.

 

[SpoonyBard]

In my recent FFVII playthrough I beat Ruby and Emerald for the first time and I used an absolutely shameless cheese strat:

Final Attack <-> Revive combo
Final Attack <-> KotR combo x2
HP Plus
HP>MP

With this I just entered the fights and put the controller down, got up and got some snacks, used the bathroom, whatever, by the time I came back I had won.

While this setup is foolproof, it does come with a cost: getting that second KotR materia maxed (if you're not actually cheating, and if you are you don't need this strat anyway) takes an absurdly long time. I basically parked myself in the Mover room in the Northern Crater for hours grinding AP as they all need to be maxed materia. On the bright side, when I finally went down to fight Sephiroth I just kinda sneezed on him and won.

 

[YangusKhan]

I've never beaten Emerald or Ruby! Did everything else though.

 

[Sarcasmorator]

I beat Emerald and Ruby uhhhhh like 24 years ago now, once, because I wanted a Gold Chocobo and no way was I going to go to the trouble of breeding one.

 

[Destil]

screw lightning

What do you lancet with Kimahri to learn that one, again?

 

[4-So]

I've beaten Emerald but not Ruby.

I just did the chocobo breeding until RNG finally blessed me with Chocobo Prime; I'd still rather breed chocobos than play blitzball. Triple Triad? Shit. I play FF8 for Triple Triad.

 

[Kirin]

Yeah, I think back in the day I bred myself a Gold Chocobo but I'm not sure I actually got around to beating Emerald and Ruby (I definitely beat Ultima but that's comparatively easy).

The attack is even called "Aire-Tam Storm"; the first word being a not-very-subtle reverse of the word 'Materia'

...sonuva. How did I miss that one.

Meanwhile back in FFX, I'm pretty sure I got everyone's ultimate weapons, and I know I beat all the arena super-bosses. This was on the original so that was pretty much everything. I've never gone back and run the HD version with the new extras, not sure I'd really want to do it all over. If I could import my old save I'd be a lot more tempted, heh.

FFXIV going to the fucking moon

Okay I haven't kept up with FFXIV, what character class gets freakin Gundam bits?? XD

 

[Destil]

FFXIV going to the fucking moon

So he was a Dark Knight, but now he’s a Paladin going to the moon?
Nah, it’ll never work.

 

[Zef]

Okay I haven't kept up with FFXIV, what character class gets freakin Gundam bits?? XD

You see Gundam, I see Zone of the Enders.

 

[Torzelbaum]

I did all of the endgame stuff in FF7 backed when I played it 20 odd years ago. I think used the item duplication trick (with the W-Item command materia) to duplicate greens in order to make the Chocobo breeding easier.

Nothing I have ever heard about getting the ultimate weapons in X has ever been good.

Also, Excal 2 in 9 can go screw lightning itself.