After a short rest, I got to the overworld map for the first time. There wasn’t much I could do, though, other than going to my next destination. My final goal was Lindblum, but in order to get there, I had to ascend the mountains somehow. Luckily, Blank pointed me at the direction of the Ice Cavern.
I’m still amazed at how beautiful this game is, even today.
On the bright side, I managed to do plenty of training in this area. I also managed to get all of the items here, I think, mostly thanks to Vivi’s Fire magic, which allowed me to melt some of the ice walls and get to the chests behind them.The Ice Cavern is an area which reminded me of one gripe I always had with this game. It doesn’t always happen, but some of the areas in Final Fantasy IX have annoyingly frequent random encounters. Nothing annoys me more than making a wrong turn after a battle, moving two steps back and then entering another random battle before I could advance further on my path at all.
Eventually, I got to the top of the cavern where everyone faints due to the cold. Somehow, Zidane manages to wake up and follows the sound of chimes into the next room. This is where I had to fight another boss, or two of them, to be more precise.
Two against one, but I was just about to trance, so it wasn’t hard.
The cold winds the Waltz was creating stopped, so everyone woke up and we could finally leave the cavern. Next up was the village of Dali.The boss was Black Waltz Nr. 1 and there isn’t much I get to find out about him before he attacks. The peculiar thing is, apart from having wings, he looked a lot like Vivi. In any case, he summoned a monster named Sea Lion (which does not look very much like a regular sea lion) and I was forced to fight both of them. The first few turns, I just kept stealing until I got all of the items from both of them. Luckily, I had plenty of potions to heal through the damage, so that wasn’t a problem. Just about when I stole the last item, Zidane went into a trance, so I used his Tidal Flame to kill both of the enemies at the same time in a couple of hits.
By the way, I’m not sure if I already said this, but I decided to play this Final Fantasy without prior research or online guides. Of course, I used guides on my first play through, so I have memories of some of the secret stuff in the game, but most of it is to hazy to be very useful.
