Ways to split up the Dark Magus Sisters in Final Fantasy X

Yojimbo performs Zanmato and slays the Dark Magus Sisters

Malroth in the NES version of Dragon Warrior II. I had heard he was one of if not the most difficult fight in the Dragon Quest franchise and I beat him on my first try with all of my heroes alive.

Also Braska’s Final Aeon in Final Fantasy X if only because I skipped the entire final phase of the fight because Yojimbo landed Zanmato and instantly killed Jecht.

wow i cant believe zanmato is free cheese omg.... THIS IS JUST SELPHIE'S THE END AGAINNN

yojimbo after yuna paying him 1 gil and he decides to perform zanmato:

A cherry blossom pendant with a replica Zanmato in the middle. That and an actual replica Zanmato. (For FFXVI Sue because I just randomly thought about how those related whether as a friend or family to the Swordwise family can recognize each other. As for the replica Zanmato? Kaizen asked a blacksmith he knew to make it after coming back to Valisthea. Sue might have a difference preference in terms of swords but he figured she'd like it.)

Give my muse an item and see how they react!

"Aww, Kaizen." Suzanne does have her weapon preferences, but he'd know her by now to be a fan of any quality weapon. And besides that, his was a beautiful marvel, & a dangerous catalyst. There were times she was almost jealous at what he could do with his Eikon's abilities, but she knew she belonged with Leviathan. And the pendant she was familiar with, she seen the other members of his family with it. It was something of their own version of the Oathsworn's brooch, it showed each other who they were, even the most distant & not-blood related members.

And she marveled over the items, nails gentle against the pendant, admiring it's details, soft pink petals hugging a brilliant blade. An an actual brilliant blade, she's slow to unsheathe, admiring as light from the sun shined clean off the blade. It's nothing quite like the original, but was a usable as any other sword, that much is clear.

She grin, daring to swing that blade for fun, similarity to how he would. She's seen him do it plenty of times, she might as well have his skills memorized. Just to laugh lightly, before putting the blade back into it's sheath. "They're beautiful, Kaizen." She finally said, grin falling to a more sweet smile. Hand reached to his cheek, making him lower his head just enough...

... so let her kiss his cheek. "Thank you." Sue understood the meaning in these gifts, so she was not about to ignore it. "I'll treasure them." And he will likely see them on her person more often.

Un petit nouveau Sim: Zanmato.

Hair @simomo-cc

eyes @dangerouslyfreejellyfish

pupil overlays @pyxiidis

Lips @goppolsme

Earring @suzuesims

Outfit Hanbok @rona-sims

I loaded up ffx for a bit with the goal of clearing just ONE dark aeon

Ofc I chose Ixion, which is actually TWO fights to clear >.<

I already had enough gil on the first fight to get zanmato, but I had to grind between fights to get yuna's overdrive back. Even then, I still didn't have enough loot to sell for another zanmato so I got rid of almost all of rikku's supplies to make up the difference. It took eightish reloads to trigger zanmato on yuna's turn (wakizashi on a dark aeon wtf T-T) but he finally took Ixion out the second time.

I think the Magus Sisters are the next dark aeon(s) I'm going to go after, but it'll be a while. Especially since I have to pay up to Yojimbo every time, cause I flat CAN'T get all the celestial weapons rn.

yojimbo pls...can I have just one well-timed zanmato

yojimbo:

so i was recording summoning animations cause i wanted to make gifs, and cause i also had to summon yojimbo i paid him 300k gil expecting him to use wakizashi or something. but nope i got fucking zanmato. FF10's RNG does whatever's funniest

FINAL FANTASY X - 2023

It’s been four years since my most recent playthrough of FFX, and my first time playing the Switch port. This was my all time favorite video game since 2008, with the only challenges to that title being Persona 5: Royal and Hades. How does it hold up now?

I completely fell in love with FFX all over again. The story, the world, the characters, everything. Auron is still one of my all time favorites, and I unexpectedly fell in love with Rikku this time around. Auron and Rikku’s relationship strangely became one of my favorite aspects of the game. (Platonically, not romantically. Auron reads very ace-aro to me now. Plus that age difference? No way.)

Also, I think I was too harsh on Tidus on my post four years ago. I actually really like him, and would definitely file him under the better half of Final Fantasy protagonists. 

On this playthrough, I did a lot of things for the first time ever: 

Did the chocobo racing mini games to get Tidus’ weapon, but not the sigil. (The controls are, frankly, infuriating.)

Attempted the lightning dodging bullshit and have currently maxed out at approximately 100 consecutive dodges. (Yes, I’ve been using the crater trick.) 

Completely powered up Rikku’s celestial weapon. (That cactuar thing was tedious as hell, but I’d take tedium over the rage quit-worthy chocobo racing, butterfly catching, and lightning dodges any day.) 

Beat a Dark Aeon. (Dark Valefor via Yojimbo’s Zanmato.)

Really progressing everyone on the sphere grid. Almost all my party members have maxed out HP already. 

Acquired enough Level 4 key spheres to finally get skills I’ve never gotten before. (Ultima is mine!)

Jury is still out on whether or not I will finally learn how to play blitzball properly. This is the closest to being a completionist I’ve ever been with this game. I’m still trying to acquire everything, though I probably won’t go this far ever again. (But those celestial weapons...really...the radical differences in acquiring each one is annoying. I always just got Yuna’s and Auron’s fully charged because they’re the easiest.)

FFX was incredibly formative on my preference in games and storytelling, and I’m thrilled that my deep love for it still holds up. 

Yojimbo performs Zanmato on Dark Yojimbo

got my brilliant theorbo for hurdy in from the mistleaf bonga bugle :3 i always get a little nervous over this battle because i need to defeat the last enemy in exactly the fourth turn, but it turns out this battle is easier than i remember. i just haste my entire team with my tinker's red spring and kill off all of the enemies except one. my team is higher level than the enemies so they aren't too bad. then i just loiter until turn 4 comes around and then i kill off the last enemy. soul etude's a great skill :3 that's why i care about getting the brilliant theorbo lol. i think i prefer using nurse or soul etude to cleanse debuffs as opposed to esuna. i find that esuna misses a lot, or that's just my mages having bad accuracy i guess.

Oh and also I got an aqua galac drop as loot! So I could scurry along and craft a zanmato so my viera assassins can learn ultima masher :3

Siegfried and Gilgamesh

"...."

"You're tougher than you look"

"Now I shall be the rightful owner of the Zanmato"

"Take it then, fellow Rift traveler, you won it fair and square"

"As someone who removed his horns, you sound like a sore loser. You don't want to take it back?"

"The sword was given to me as a family heirloom from the kids in a orphanage. Of course I will take it from you someday"

Siegfried owned Zanmato, or at least the FFXIV's ver of it

YOJIMBO I OWE U MY LIFE I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING BAD I HAVE EVER SAIF ABOUT YOSUDNCNSKDJ

Raku Plays Her Faves, FFX Edition: Update

Followup to this post. Getting very close to the end of the game now folks, and I’ll probably wrap it up soon because I’m getting antsy about trying the sequel, which I own now but have never played before. It’s been fun this time around; I’ve already leveled up everyone way past the point I did last time, and have even unlocked abilities on the Sphere Grid that I’ve never tried, with mixed results. Some were absolutely worth the trouble (Full-Life, Copycat), others not so much (Nab Gil). Anyway, some quick updates for the things I went over in the previous post:

- Every character now has their fully unlocked Celestial weapon. Wakka especially has been tearing shit UP, but pretty much everyone can take out even the toughest regular enemies in just a hit or two.

- Especially those damned Great Malboros.

- In addition to the ultimate weapons, I’ve been bribing certain monsters with money to get their item drops, which can then be used to customize some pretty kickass armor. It takes a lot of currency, but by this point I’ve got a lot of it, and there’s not much else left to spend it on anyway. Turns out, making that armor is pretty crucial if you want to take on the optional superbosses. And speaking of which...

- After smiting Dark Valefor for the crimes of being an uber-powerful jerk and getting in the way of my errand-running, I’ve been slowly working my way through the Dark Aeon hitlist. So far I’ve defeated Dark Ifrit, Ixion, and Shiva. The main thing that’s annoying about these battles is that every time a character attacks, the boss counterattacks with enough power to instantly KO that character. So what you have to do is automate the process of reviving your characters; otherwise, you’re constantly wasting turns just trying to keep your party alive, never mind getting any damage in. Fortunately, you can do this: remember that kickass armor I mentioned in the last point? That’s basically what it does. Bless you, Auto-Phoenix. And thank you, for not being that awful to obtain, which is more than I can say for some other auto-abilities.

- A special note about the battle against Dark Shiva: it was the very first time I got to see Zanmato in action. If you’re not familiar, Zanmato is the strongest attack of the aeon Yojimbo, and it can instantly kill anything - including bosses, which are normally immune from that kind of bullshit. That’s the short version - apparently there’s an insane list of factors that determine if he’ll even use it. In the past I’d never bothered because Yojimbo’s more or less a money sink. You can’t directly control his actions or teach him any skills like you can the other aeons; he basically does what he wants depending on how much you pay him, how well he and Yuna get along, etc etc see link above. And I’d never had enough spare cash on hand for it to be worth the trouble.   Even during this current playthrough, I hadn’t used Yojimbo much. I’d basically summoned him in this particular battle just to take Dark Shiva’s overdrive attack, which was coming up on the next turn, so that I could keep my party alive. But since the game gave me the chance, and I actually had a good deal of spare change for once, I said, “Fuck it, why not” and handed over what was probably far too much gil, just to see what that amount would do. It got Yojimbo’s fucking attention, is what it did. And credit where due, he delivered. Just like that, the battle was over, and the party got run out of town by the same enraged Guado mooks that chased them off the last time. They may have been a serious threat then, but now, with every character stat boosted and equipped with their best weapons, those guards weren’t shit.

- The slug boss that gave me absolute fits last time? Finally defeated it! (Take that, you smug old bastard, hahahahaha) (Actually, once you’ve caught 10 of everything in the game he’s surprisingly chill, says something like “I knew I picked the right people, I’m a good judge of character” Sure, Jan.)

I doubt I’ll bother to unlock Nemesis, which you do by capturing 10 of every fiend in the game AND defeating every single one of the old man’s monster creations - all the area conquests, all the species conquests, and all his original monsters. That’s just...too many bosses. Not that I’ll be abandoning the monster area completely - there are some items I’d like to farm that are either extremely difficult or even impossible to get otherwise.

I’ll probably keep going down the list of Dark Aeons, maybe even unlock Penance, though I imagine from here on out the battles will be even worse. Did I mention we had to face Dark Ixion twice? I don’t mean I tried two times to beat it, I mean I beat it once, then walked a little further down the Thunder Plains and encountered it a second time, which meant I had to battle it all over again. The game makes you do this. Had we not paid Yojimbo to insta-kill her, Dark Shiva would have been a hassle because her attacks instantly remove the Auto-Life status, aka the very fucking thing I need to keep everyone alive in case I mess up my timing. (If everyone in the party dies at the same time - which they will, if caught in an aeon’s Overdrive attack - having Auto-Phoenix on their armor won’t help. That’s where the Auto-Life spell backup is necessary). I can only imagine what bullshit they’ve concocted for the rest of the Dark Aeon fights.

I don’t know if I’ll have the patience or time to farm all the items needed to do it, but I’d also like to make two sets of armor for each character. One set, I’ve talked a little about already; it automates some functions like healing, reviving characters, casting protective spells, and so on. It’s the serious set, the Phoenix set, that I’ll be bringing to each Dark Aeon fight so my party can stay alive long enough to actually do some damage. The second set, I may not make for each character, depending on how much trouble the required items are to farm. But very quickly I’d like to mention that every character is naturally capped by the game at 9999 HP and 999 MP - even if your characters’ totals should be higher than that, due to extensive use of the Sphere Grid, those numbers are where they’ll stop.

Unless...they’re wearing armor with the Break HP Limit feature, which increases the limit from 9999 to 99,999. (And yes, there is a corresponding Break MP Limit, but honestly 999 MP is more than enough, so it’s really not necessary.) So yes, I’d like to try making it (or winning it, there’s a rare chance it drops from some bosses) just because I can. It absolutely isn’t required to finish the game - I didn’t have any the first time I beat it - and in some people’s opinion, it just shouldn’t be bothered with at all. And I can see why - if an enemy can hit for 9999 damage, chances are it can hit for much higher than that, so a few thousand more HP isn’t going to make any difference.

But hell, I just want to see it because big HP numbers are cool. And, well, it’s another thing I’ve never done before. Of course, there’s always the possibility that’ll I’ll realize, as I’m trying to find an elusive monster to bribe items from for the umpteenth time, that past me had the right idea after all and just go straight to the final battles. But I won’t know unless I try, and that’s kind of what I’m doing across all my video games this year - trying new games, and trying new things in games I’m familiar with.