WARMTH LIKE HOME UNAWARES

Well, I finally got around to watching The Nth Degree. I was really excited about it because it's a Barclay episode but... it ended up being... underwhelming. Most of the episode had Barclay under essentially a mental reprogramming, so it wasn't really him, just... aliens using his body. I like Barclay for who he is, so... the very beginning and very end were nice but the rest of the episode was like... sad I guess XD

The next episode is the Robin Hood one XD

IDK what I want to do for the rest of the night lol. I streamed earlier but I didn't feel like doing much.



I got the Clean Bill of Health cheevo in FF9 on stream lololol. The chat was pretty inactive and people kept coming and then leaving immediately, and I super didn't feel like playing anything lol. I wanted to play DR2 on stream, but my computer was like NO NO NO and couldn't process the video fast enough to stream so the framerate on the viewers' side was really low, even though it ran well enough for me T_T

I really want a new computer D:

I have a skin tag in like... the most inconvenient place? It gets twisted up by like... sitting or walking around and it hurts lol X_X; It just appeared recently, like I think I noticed it yesterday or a couple days ago. I have tons of skin tags but the others are harmless.

Ok remember when I said Vivi was probably stronger than Dagger? I lied. Dagger's Diamond Dust is doing 8000-9999 damage against Grand Dragons, while Vivi's Blizaga is doing like 5000-7000. If Dagger is in trance, the summon does 9999 consistently.

Blizaga also costs 24MP and Shiva costs only like 18 or something. I am on my phone and can't check easily right now but it is less than Blizaga. So Dagger uses less MP for significantly more damage. She also has non-elemantal damage (and yes, Bahamut is stronger than Flare or Meteor, though I think in this case Bahamut costs more than Flare, but less than Meteor, iirc).

The only time Eiko's Holy outclasses dagger is when Dagger can't exploit elemental weakness. But she usually can, and even then Bahamut is just as good as Holy, it just costs more MP.

In fact, when exploiting weaknesses, Dagger's eidolons consistently do like 8000+ damage against every enemy, and that is without utilizing the Boost support ability (and idk if Concentrate affects summons). If concentrate affects it and you use boost, she would probably get close to 9999 against pretty much any opponent at any time. Collecting ores to power up her abilities is way easier than catching frogs or stealing a ton like you need to do to power up other abilities.

Plus, eidolons deal even damage to all enemies, unlike Vivi's magic which divides the damage if you target more than one enemy at a time, and stuff like Thievery can only target a single enemy.

So Dagger us stronger than pretty much everyone in the game once you are able to collect the gems to power up her eidolons. She also reaches that potential faster than other characters, though early in the game she doesn't have access to eidolons and is overall not built for fighting. But as the game progresses she becomes one of the best offensive characters, kinda how her character transforms from a self-questioning proper princess to a confident adventurer.

Anyway, as for cheevo progress, I went and ate frogs but needed 8 more (thinking on that now, I could have just went back and caught the "parents" of every marsh, oops) to get to 99, so I went to the forest outside Dali since strong enemies don't seem to pop up there, and I fought battles while doing lots of Goblin Punch and used the AP to learn the last two abilities I needed for the Pillar of Support achievement. One was some obscure Amarant thing, and the other was actually Absorb MP on Quina which I was really surprised I hadn't learned. I also nabbed the rest of the ragtime quiz while doing it.

After that I went back to marshes and ate frogs until I got 99, defeated Quale and got the Gastro fork. So that was 5 achievements down!

I wasn't really sure what to do so I synthed more ores to get Ifrit powered up with 99... Topaz or whatever it is (my phone just autocorrected topaz to tops... It was spelled correctly lol...)

Now I am trying out a method of autoleveling I thought of... I took one of the little hair bands I got for when my beard was long and put it around the analog sticks to make Zidane run in circles, and then used an autoclicker program and lined up the mouse so it could click on both "attack" and the enemy's name. I have the game speed up "cheat" turned on so it goes faster.

This is exactly what I was doing before except I was manually playing... Running in circles and mashing out the enemies. Instead of just attack, though, I was having Zidane steal, Eiko extract ores, and Vivi and Dagger attack with magic. It was a little slower but I was powering up Thievery and collecting ores that way. And it made it a little more engaging and fun trying to see how fast I could input the commands and memorize the menu order instead of just mashing attack. Though I guess I could have put the cursor to memory mode and still just mashed the confirm button... In fact, if I could get my controller to auto-press circle button somehow, I would do that?

Anyway, I have it grinding outside Daguerro on that little plateau. At first I was trying outside Gizamaluke's Grotto on Popos Heights, but Zidane would eventually get stuck running in mostly forest and fighting Garuda was not productive, plus there is a minor risk of them killing the party with Stop?? Maybe?? Anyway, I switched over to the place outside Daguerro because you will still encounter Grand Dragons most of the time, but sometimes run into Gimme Cat, which is better than hitting Garuda most of the time, even though it only gives you 1exp... You do get lots of money and sometimes ore for killing it though.

Haha, I just looked up and the achievement for 1000 battles just popped. For 10000 I guess I can do this somewhere else where there are more enemies in the encounters, preferably weak ones to go even faster... Maybe outside Treno or Dali. But I want to get my main party (Zidane, Dagger, Vivi, Eiko -- I went with an all-magic party this game XD) to level 99 for the achievement, and then try fighting Ozma.

In the time since I started writing this post, Zidane has gone from level 71 to level 79. Btw I have Auto-Regen and the anti-status support abilities, and from regen alone there is no real threat of my party dying I don't think. I should probably stop and save sometimes just in case. It also kinda sucks because I can't use the computer while this is going, because the game has to be in-focus and the mouse can't be moved so that the autoclicker works.

I guess I will eat something and respond to my notifs on here and then see how it is going. If I can get to level 99 soon, I can leave it on for the 10k kills overnight now and then, and it shouldn't be too hard to get. Idk who thought putting such a grindy achievement in the game was a good idea. Getting to level 99 requires way less than 10k kills... In fact when I beat the game I only had about 400 kills... And that was with a lot of subquests done, too.

Like I said last night, I'll post about FF9 today XD But first, today is our anniversary. We went to the mackerel place hahaha. They also had flounder. It's a buffet so it's all-you-can-eat. I ate so much... I had 3... pieces... of flounder (idk what to call them, it was like just a big cut of the fish down the middle?) and like at least 15 pieces of mackerel sushi. I had a few other things but eating the raw flesh of a dead fish is the best lmfaoooo. Well, only really mackerel. I mean other raw fish is good but mackerel is just so amazing XD Then we came back to Dennis's and he gave me a box of Cheez-It as present and I gave him nothing. Now he's sitting with heat pad because he is in pain. And now I'm on the computer. And that's about that.

So I'm gonna go through FF9 and try to remember the stuff I wanted to talk about while posting my screenies :P

There are early-game spoilers ahead. I'm mostly going to keep to opinions of the game/characters/etc. and not really try to detail the story too much, so I think if you haven't played it, it won't really give too much away. But still some stuff will be revealed anyway, and you'll see random screens from the game (though without too much context, as I'll just assume the reader either knows what it is already or doesn't want to know the spoilery details XD)

( lots of pics ahead )

So yeah, that's about it lol. I had some other things to say but I forgot oops. I have way more screencaps on Steam (and way way more in the local files) so you can check them out there I guess if you wanna see more. I like to kinda take them and make little comments as I go.