The Grotto was to the north of the marsh, so I didn’t have trouble getting to it. The place was already under attack by the mages, led by Zorn and Thorn. This meant I was involved in a couple of unavoidable fights, but thanks to my previous training, I didn’t have any trouble here, whatsoever.
The Grotto was dark and moody.
Once again, I’ve spent some time learning new spells with Quina, before I started to actually move forward through the area. I think blue magic is way more fun to collect in this game than in Final Fantasy VII, for the simple reason that I get to chose when and if I want to learn it. Additionally, most of the enemies I’ve encountered since I got Quina had a spell to teach me, so there’s no guessing or randomness involved. You find a new enemy and you try to eat it. You either learn something, or it tastes bad. In both cases, you aren’t interested in that enemy any more.
The area was mostly a large key puzzle. I had to gather bells, each of which I could use to open a single door. Sadly, there are some areas I skipped because of this, partly because I wasn’t able to figure out which route is correct and which is optional, but partly also because I was to lazy to go back at one point.
Before I could leave the area, I had to fight against Gizamaluke, of course. I used Quina’s Mighty Guard to make the first half of the fight extremely easy and, as usual, kept stealing with Zidane, while Freya and Vivi did the damage. Stealing is getting a lot more difficult now, with most of my attempts failing. I’m not even sure if I got all the items I could before the fight was over, but Zidane definitely didn’t get a chance to attack at all. I think I’m gonna have to start using the Detect skill, which tells me which items the boss has.
This one gave me a lot of trouble when I was a kid.
In any case, I was out and I could get to Burmecia, finally. My memory served me well, though, so before I went there, I remembered there’s another treasure I could get with my chocobo now. I’ve found the bird tracks nearby, so I used Chocobo to get to the only beach in the area and dig out the treasure.
