The Desert
A quick review

Went through the AVI and cutscene marathon that follows the Treno card tournament AGAIN. Discovered a Moogle hiding in a corner of Lindblum Castle, and saved the game, then went and whupped the library book's blue ass. Woot. More AVIs. More cutscenes. Kuja-samaaaaa! ...except that he said "gonna." Kuja-sama does not say "gonna."

Got King Cid a brand-new body. It's glaringly obvious that two problems could be solved at once if they just brought him to Princess Garnet: She's get her voice back as she howled with glee at the sight of her uncle, and eventually, when she picked herself off the floor, she could kiss him and get him his body back. Unfortunately, he'd be demoted to Prince, which may be why they didn't do that.

Got the boat. Scudded about the world for a while. Found many fascinating new lands which I did not dare set foot on for fear of being handed Zidane's perky pink ass. Finally saw Kuja's digs. Eee. V. excessive; I approve. He has a bit of a vermin problem, what with the infestation of blockheaded priest monsters on the dock. And I still don't grok the "quicksand in the high desert" thing. Perhaps I have not played enough video games.

Kuja is still being a total nimbusbrain about the Good Guys. He has them all in little rooms suspended over lava pits, but he doesn't push the button and send them all into the burning deeps? He's got his archnemesis by the short hairs, but he doesn't either destroy him while he's still weak and cute, or corrupt him while he's still, well, cute? There had better be a Very Good Reason for all this.

Postscript: A funny thing happened on the way to Oeilvert.

I just fought a ship.

In normal games, this wouldn't be a problem. Ultima 3 was lousy with pirate ships, which would fire cannons at you even if you were on land. (The cool thing was, you could take over the ship and sail it around the world. You could even sail it into the whirlpool. It was like having a beater car, only wetter.) However, this FF9 ship, was on dry land. In the desert. It jittered on tiny oar-legs. It only makes sense, I guess, since the fish are all airborne too; but still.

I just fought a ship. In the desert.

Post-Postscript: Freakin' minigames.

So your basic villain's got your secondary heroes suspended over a lava pit while your primary heroes go do the butt-whupping, errand-running thing. He gets bored and announces that he's going to drop them all in the lava in ten minutes. He's conveniently overlooked a tertiary member of the cast, who's been hiding in a corner singing "It's Not Easy being Green" to himself and chewing wet cigarette butts. The tertiary member now has to save everyone's tuckuses through a deeply stupid series of games and tests. The mun, meanwhile, is sick of the whole thing and really wants to see the party drop into the lava.

It should be possible to crisp the party like so many potato wedges in the frying pan of Hell. None of this multiple-resetting, none of this do-it-right-or-do-it-again. No fart-arsing about with a six-minute limit in one part so you'll definitely have at least four minutes to do the next part. If you have ten minutes to save the party, at the end of ten minutes they should DIE. And their deaths should be shown. In technicolor, preferably in an AVI.

I am annoyed.

On to Kuja's ecclesiastically pimpin' digs...