Final Fantasy's Most Evil Side Quest

FF9 may have the hardest side quest of the Final Fantasy series. Steiner's ultimate weapon, Excalibur 2, is incredibly difficult to obtain without a guide, and maybe impossible. The player must reach the end of FF9's final dungeon, Memoria, in under 12 hours in order to receive it.

One of Square Enix’s masterpiece JRPGs for the PS1, Final Fantasy 9 was guided by the genius Hironobu Sakaguchi, while Tetsuya Nomura focused more on Kingdom Hearts. With classic video game music by Nobuo Uematsu, this PS1 game is one of the greatest games ever made.

Featuring footage from FuzzfingerGaming:

#finalfantasy #ff9 #squareenix #jrpg #ps1 #classicgames #restrospective #videogameretro

[gfkgrgrkm]

and then after this game they made you dodge lightning 200 times in a row to get another ultimate weapon, the developers are psychos

[ShaneC]

Most evil thing is that it forces you to skip on experiencing such a beautiful game.

[Umbra_Nocturnus]

Really feels like someone at Square Enix is obsessed with putting in items that you'll only find by following a guide.

[Ghaleon]

I have one word that describes what happened to the sword. Gilgamesh.

[turtlecantalkgaming]

the biggest challenge without tricks in FF9 is the goddam jumprope. to this day, I've never obtained the card won from those damn children.

[MCocchiola]

I never saw the point of getting this sword. You would rush through the game with no enjoyment to get one weapon that you would only be able to use for a few fights before the game ended.

[cooltrainerjay]

Steiner is so powerful by this point in the game that I never even stressed not getting the Excalibur2 legit lol

[XEndlessSteelX]

I remember reading about Excalibur II in a "Tricks, Codes and Cheats" book as a young teen. I genuinely took it as one of those "Mew under the truck" stories and moved on, only to several years later, learn that it was indeed, real.

[Pluveus]

Aww, the note is a message from Enkidu to Gilgamesh, that's nice.

[Zero_Tester]

After all these years, FF9 still amazed me with how beautiful the background was rendered, miss those kind of stuff

[hafurg]

A quick note: about the text you read when finding Excalibur II, it is signed by Enkido. In other games named Enkidu, it is always the companion of Gilgamesh, which in almost every instance of the game is an epic sword wielder and collector, showing up epic swords from the franchise usually. In FF IX Gilgamesh is a character which name you discover when getting a bunch of secrets done (getting all chocographs, defeating ozma, etc) because he is a tier S adventurer and won't tell you his name until you earn his respect in the matter. So it makes sense that his "bro" found a sword for him and is again another wink to the whole franchise with just a little block of text. It is romantic and beautiful while at the same time horribly painful to get the damned thingy.

[JimStorrie-vs]

only just noticing on this day in 2024 that the excalibur ii is a moonlight greatsword

[magicfrae]

Missing it by a few minutes 💀my heart goes out to you bro

[JustinBrown-ghvv]

It's a running gag with me and my buddy. Always say "Excalibur II run, baby!" Followed by six hours of playing cards in Alexandria.

[thegoodgeneral]

4:38 I just love that the note is from "Enkido, " clearly a reference to Enkidu, the best friend and companion to Gilgamesh in "The Epic of Gilgamesh." The name "Gilgamesh" is used frequently in Final Fantasy games, and even here this Enkido fellow starts his letter off with "To Brother Gil." (Gil being short for Gilgamesh.)

[wmen]

The worst part is finishing it like that feels really bad. When you kill the hardest enemy for the best weapon it's ok but what's the point? When you skip most of the game to get it just feels bad.

[BasktChase]

Between this and the 18 hour FFXI boss fight, there was obviously someone at Square that was a spite filled homebody. Not even Yoko Taro would do something as heinous as this challenge.

[adad]

I got it in under 9 hours. My tactic was to forge the coral ring on disc 1 and to get a bunch of phoenix dawns and to get to this plateu and fight this dragon thing (i think on early disc 2) that was about dozens of levels higher than my group. after fighting a few of them and jump leveling to level 40 or 50 i rushed to the end and got the sword.

[diamondmetal]

You know it’s gonna be hardcore when the guide sites have ASCII art.

[imnotlikeanyone]

FF9 is my favorite game since the PS1 days and not even once I felt like doing this side quest, I just can't imagine rushing this game like that. And this weapon doesn't even have much value since by this point in the game you can easily make steiner hit 9999 damage every turn