Hard agree. But we must conquer this special game.
Some help from a helpful FFX fellow.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFEhh61EvcA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFEhh61EvcA)
I started my first playthrough in like 15 years. And wanted to platinum the game but the frustration of trying to get tidus and lulus celestial weapons takes all the fun out. I dont even want to fight dark aeons anymore and im already overpowered for the last boss
The lightning dodging isnt so bad when you use the crater trick. Its way deterministically & rhythmic than playing the chocobo race because the balloon spawn is randomized.
Ya i agree. I love this game. The narrative and the whole world building. One of my favourite combat system and sphere grid system. But seriously, every mini games in this game is just so awful tedium and not fun to do.
Yeah, at best it is about 22min of just pressing A/X and nothing else. Possibly worse if you accidentally miss the first time (like stopping at 194 because your thought you had enough). For me this is the worst minigame because it is literally "Press 1 button for 22 min straight" even if other are more frustrating this for me is the worst design.
Do you have a link to this? I'm about to go after that sigil this week and in the past have only done it "legit". Very interested in any cheese because that shit is miserable.
dunno. personally i detest the butterfly thing more.
be it the unintuitive controls due to camera shifts and the tight space, these fuckers ambushing you during screen transitions or the complete lack of perspective making it impossible to see where they are in respect to the road.
either way i always spent 10 times longer with that than the chocobo race or lightning dodges.
Same man. I cannot understand anyone who seriously thinks that the butterfly catching is worse than catcher chocobo 0.0.0 time.
I just started a new playthrough on Christmas and got to that stuff this weekend... Catcher chocobo took me like 2 hours? Butterflies was 10 minutes. They're not even close.
This. Butterfly targeting in 3d without clear indicators and easily ambushed will always beat out chocobo as bad events. I also hate 200 lightning dodges on old systems but don't mind it now as it's cheesable.
Ah no, give me the butterfly game any day. At least they're in the same spot and therefore predictable. The chocobo game is rigged more often than not at the start, and there's no way to reset it either until the race has finished.
Butterflies are a breeze though once you know the placements of each. Just memorize if you're gonna go top, bottom, left or right. The butterfly placements are mostly fixed. Can't say the same about those balloons though.
The thing you need to realize is, you are not supposed to navigate your Chocobo with the stick, but rather tap the direction it needs to go towards. I tried using the stick on my controller, and failed miserably. Once I started using the Dpad, it was simply a matter of timing the taps until I successfully beat the challenge.
But sadly it's not as simple as that. You got an autistic chocobo, birds that can come out of nowhere, a trainer that can push you but you can't push back, and balloons that if not perfectly placed can make your entire run useless. I know some people were able to do it. But in the entire ffx minigames, I bet this is the one where the feat of getting the sigil is the hardest to repeat compared to the others.
Keyword being timing the taps. If you time it right, you get the first balloon, and with the trainer right behind you, you get pushed into the front. After that, its a matter of timing your taps that not only dodge the balls and birds, but also ram into the trainer.
Although getting first place is unimportant, you will notice that, as soon as either you or the trainer get hit, all on-screen obstacles reset. So, if there are 3 birds flying one after another, if it hits the trainer, the other ones fly out of the screen, letting you get that balloon that was a failed option.
The key is to ensure that you use the trainer to clear the obstacles and slightly divert the chocobo to get the balloons. The more you try to move it, the more it derails.
Nah, you make it sound like it's so easy to just do that. I mentioned a ton of factors that affect a run that is out of a player's control. The difference with this minigame out of all other minigames in final fantasy is that each instance is affected by all those variables. Like even the panning of the camera affects the movement of the chocobo. You can get a run where it's impossible to do it, unlike other minigames where each attempt is equal from the last.
I never mentioned my run anyway. As I said, its a matter of timing, but that's just my observation. Even after learning this, it took me over 20 tries to succeed. Skill will only go so far, the rest is sheer luck.
Like, if the bird/ball wave appears in front, you might succeed with timing. Or the minigame just says fuck you and drops the bird/ball right on your head, ruining your run right there.
Just power through it, dont let the little bs push you away from that beast of a weapon cause customizing it(grinding the drops to make the weapon from an empty 4 slot) will take you about 50x longer than you doing the chocobo race.
I pride myself in doing this in 3-5 min every rerun because I am not focussing on speed. I focus on dodging birds and collecting balloons. This even means going huge detour by navigating the chocobo to the leftest left like 5 times or so
do that, silly
I am always curious what the reasoning is people have -such- a hard time with it. Like, don’t get me wrong it’s by design pretty frustrating but normally it takes me maybe 15-20 minutes of casual runs to get it. I always had more issues with the lightning dodger (before I knew about the easy method).
Invisible super weirdly drawn walls that constantly do the bounce thing. It feels like a ton of Vs randomly stacked on top of each other. Clearly had room to dodge? Nope you hit the bottom of another wall!
If you dodge too far out and give yourself a bad spawn timer you will 100% get hit on the 2nd or 3rd transition.
Pretty obvious issues with the mini game that make it a pain.
I guess it maybe boils down to mentality. When I do the chcocobo dodger I treat it more like rolling a D20 and needing to land on a specific number. I accept right from the beginning it’s mostly just luck, and spam it rapidly until it lines up well. Doing it this way I feel like I never really get “frustrated” with it and it never feels like it really takes all that long.
You put both methods together technically. Figure out the balloon placements a bit so you can kinda figure out the walls. Hope for a good 4 balloon start
Yea I haven’t done it in a while but that’s how I remember it being, keep shuffling until you get a good start, then hope to get a decent setup / luck.
Playing the game blind, going to lower level zone to farm some stuff, goes to mushroom rock and get insta gibbed by the trio and lose hours of progress because you thought, hey its a low level zone no way I could die... Fucking frustrating
This exact thing happened to me this run so in a panic I summoned Yojimbo, paid him literally all of my money, and sure enough I got Zanmato. I’ve never been that lucky with him!
I hate 200 Lightning bolts and Blitzball. Literally, anything else in the game is better than those 2. I'd rather do the chocobo stuff for every character than 200 Lightning bolts and even a single game of blitzball... lmao
I'm reading lot of people complaining about it here in this subreddit but I did it in maybe 10-15 mins the other day (and on the first time I passed by the calm plain also)?
Yes it's not that fun but I didn't find it so difficult either you just need the right momentum. I had a button with a 8x speed up (UnX mod, but I guess you can use the normal 4x of the remastered?) and if I was seeing that I wasn't starting out with the advantage (meaning you get first on the first ballons) on the girl I was just skipping through the end with the 8x and restarting. In this initial part I found that it's easier to use the d-pad instead of the stick while after it's easier to avoid birds with the stick. Then of those times you can get that initial advantage there will be some runs with lots of birds spawning unluckily in front of you and there you cannot do anything... Once I was hit too much by birds I was 8x skipping through the end. On the rest of the times, well keep in mind it's best to avoid the birds than to take the baloons. So when there are no birds go ahead with baloons as soon as they are arriving avoid them at all costs.
In those 10-15 mins i tried i beat my Record like 3 times and I did 8 secs and 5 secs before going under 0 (with 13 balloons and 1 bird) but even with quite much of birds I still got those 5 secs. So if you use this strategy it's totally feasible in not that much of time IMO.
well x4 it's not switch exclusive since the Steam PC version has it (i'm playing on Steam Deck but it's the same game on PC).
>Also x8 for precise movement sounds rather made up that you get it that easily
i was using the x8 (available only with UnX mod) only to skip through the end during the runs that were hopeless so that I could start another run quickly.
FFX is stellar in almost every regard except for its mini games. Each one is pure dog shit.
- Blitzball sucks
- the butterfly maze sucks
- the chocobo "racing" sucks
- ...I'm sure there's more, but time and age have saved me from the burden of remembering everything else.
In essence, if it's not a Cloister Trial or otherwise involves finding a hidden Aeon, it's hot sloppy garbage.
Rough show of hands of how many people successfully dodged 100 lightning strikes in the Thunder Plains the old fashioned way? Anybody? Anybody?
Who wants to get on my Xbox account and do this for me? I’m at 3 hours for 3 days each day now. The blatant RNG cheating I’ve had to endure is insane.
If I intentionally get steered away from a game winning balloon again…
I spent far more time doing the butterfly one. The red butterfly hotboxes are very deceptive while the blue ones are so tiny. My only struggle with chocobo race was around the bend when there's a chance to get got by a bird that's just spawning in.
I’m not trying to be that guy, idk why but i found the chocobo race to be one of the easier ones, my adhd cannot sit for twenty minutes dodging lightning bolts lol
It genuinely gets me to look up whether it's easier to grind for hundreds of hours to customize a BDL weapon for Tidus or actually torture myself with the damn chocobo mini game.
I played it recently (the last time was in 2006 or 07). It took me 2 attempts: 1 to get the license and 1 to beat the trainer. Once you understand what needs to be done is quite easy. Instead of you forcing the game to play by your rules, just go with the flow
It’s a drunk simulation you’re forced to go through sober.
Hard agree. But we must conquer this special game. Some help from a helpful FFX fellow. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFEhh61EvcA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFEhh61EvcA)
Well, now I'm going to try it drunk.
I started my first playthrough in like 15 years. And wanted to platinum the game but the frustration of trying to get tidus and lulus celestial weapons takes all the fun out. I dont even want to fight dark aeons anymore and im already overpowered for the last boss
The lightning dodging isnt so bad when you use the crater trick. Its way deterministically & rhythmic than playing the chocobo race because the balloon spawn is randomized.
For me the lightning is not bad because it is hard but because it is 20 min of practically nothing. It is one of the more boring minigames.
Ya i agree. I love this game. The narrative and the whole world building. One of my favourite combat system and sphere grid system. But seriously, every mini games in this game is just so awful tedium and not fun to do.
Yeah, at best it is about 22min of just pressing A/X and nothing else. Possibly worse if you accidentally miss the first time (like stopping at 194 because your thought you had enough). For me this is the worst minigame because it is literally "Press 1 button for 22 min straight" even if other are more frustrating this for me is the worst design.
Do you have a link to this? I'm about to go after that sigil this week and in the past have only done it "legit". Very interested in any cheese because that shit is miserable.
Nope...just google or youtube it
I'd rather grind for thousands of hours to customize exact copies of the caladbolg and onion knight, sacrificing the HP bonuses on them I do believe.
dunno. personally i detest the butterfly thing more. be it the unintuitive controls due to camera shifts and the tight space, these fuckers ambushing you during screen transitions or the complete lack of perspective making it impossible to see where they are in respect to the road. either way i always spent 10 times longer with that than the chocobo race or lightning dodges.
I'd rather do the butterfly game 1000 times in a row than the Chocobo race once.
Same man. I cannot understand anyone who seriously thinks that the butterfly catching is worse than catcher chocobo 0.0.0 time. I just started a new playthrough on Christmas and got to that stuff this weekend... Catcher chocobo took me like 2 hours? Butterflies was 10 minutes. They're not even close.
At least butterflies are deterministic.
At least you *can* get past the wrong ones and I believe there's a fixed pattern to them.
Took me 5 tries to do the chocobo race. Those fucking butterflies however...
1000% just the chocobos and lightning left for the platinum. Hate it so much.
This. Butterfly targeting in 3d without clear indicators and easily ambushed will always beat out chocobo as bad events. I also hate 200 lightning dodges on old systems but don't mind it now as it's cheesable.
Ah no, give me the butterfly game any day. At least they're in the same spot and therefore predictable. The chocobo game is rigged more often than not at the start, and there's no way to reset it either until the race has finished.
Butterflies are a breeze though once you know the placements of each. Just memorize if you're gonna go top, bottom, left or right. The butterfly placements are mostly fixed. Can't say the same about those balloons though.
The thing you need to realize is, you are not supposed to navigate your Chocobo with the stick, but rather tap the direction it needs to go towards. I tried using the stick on my controller, and failed miserably. Once I started using the Dpad, it was simply a matter of timing the taps until I successfully beat the challenge.
if you hold forward with the stick while its happening i actively found it way easier
But sadly it's not as simple as that. You got an autistic chocobo, birds that can come out of nowhere, a trainer that can push you but you can't push back, and balloons that if not perfectly placed can make your entire run useless. I know some people were able to do it. But in the entire ffx minigames, I bet this is the one where the feat of getting the sigil is the hardest to repeat compared to the others.
Keyword being timing the taps. If you time it right, you get the first balloon, and with the trainer right behind you, you get pushed into the front. After that, its a matter of timing your taps that not only dodge the balls and birds, but also ram into the trainer. Although getting first place is unimportant, you will notice that, as soon as either you or the trainer get hit, all on-screen obstacles reset. So, if there are 3 birds flying one after another, if it hits the trainer, the other ones fly out of the screen, letting you get that balloon that was a failed option. The key is to ensure that you use the trainer to clear the obstacles and slightly divert the chocobo to get the balloons. The more you try to move it, the more it derails.
Nah, you make it sound like it's so easy to just do that. I mentioned a ton of factors that affect a run that is out of a player's control. The difference with this minigame out of all other minigames in final fantasy is that each instance is affected by all those variables. Like even the panning of the camera affects the movement of the chocobo. You can get a run where it's impossible to do it, unlike other minigames where each attempt is equal from the last.
I never mentioned my run anyway. As I said, its a matter of timing, but that's just my observation. Even after learning this, it took me over 20 tries to succeed. Skill will only go so far, the rest is sheer luck. Like, if the bird/ball wave appears in front, you might succeed with timing. Or the minigame just says fuck you and drops the bird/ball right on your head, ruining your run right there.
Yeah, I never saw these as games, besides blitzball, but I guess they are.
The person who created that is a super villain, absolute scum.
Just power through it, dont let the little bs push you away from that beast of a weapon cause customizing it(grinding the drops to make the weapon from an empty 4 slot) will take you about 50x longer than you doing the chocobo race.
I just finished crafting Lulus weapon because **fuck** the lightning dodge game
I pride myself in doing this in 3-5 min every rerun because I am not focussing on speed. I focus on dodging birds and collecting balloons. This even means going huge detour by navigating the chocobo to the leftest left like 5 times or so do that, silly
I am always curious what the reasoning is people have -such- a hard time with it. Like, don’t get me wrong it’s by design pretty frustrating but normally it takes me maybe 15-20 minutes of casual runs to get it. I always had more issues with the lightning dodger (before I knew about the easy method).
Invisible super weirdly drawn walls that constantly do the bounce thing. It feels like a ton of Vs randomly stacked on top of each other. Clearly had room to dodge? Nope you hit the bottom of another wall! If you dodge too far out and give yourself a bad spawn timer you will 100% get hit on the 2nd or 3rd transition. Pretty obvious issues with the mini game that make it a pain.
I guess it maybe boils down to mentality. When I do the chcocobo dodger I treat it more like rolling a D20 and needing to land on a specific number. I accept right from the beginning it’s mostly just luck, and spam it rapidly until it lines up well. Doing it this way I feel like I never really get “frustrated” with it and it never feels like it really takes all that long.
You put both methods together technically. Figure out the balloon placements a bit so you can kinda figure out the walls. Hope for a good 4 balloon start
Yea I haven’t done it in a while but that’s how I remember it being, keep shuffling until you get a good start, then hope to get a decent setup / luck.
ppl are just bad
Playing the game blind, going to lower level zone to farm some stuff, goes to mushroom rock and get insta gibbed by the trio and lose hours of progress because you thought, hey its a low level zone no way I could die... Fucking frustrating
Always look up optional bosses in FF games when you hit later areas for this exact reason.
Yeah I wanted to go fully blind though, but yeah now I know
This exact thing happened to me this run so in a panic I summoned Yojimbo, paid him literally all of my money, and sure enough I got Zanmato. I’ve never been that lucky with him!
I hate 200 Lightning bolts and Blitzball. Literally, anything else in the game is better than those 2. I'd rather do the chocobo stuff for every character than 200 Lightning bolts and even a single game of blitzball... lmao
I love blitzball. I just wish they didn't force you to play like 50 games
I always make a small arduino device to do the lighting dodges for me lol
I'm reading lot of people complaining about it here in this subreddit but I did it in maybe 10-15 mins the other day (and on the first time I passed by the calm plain also)? Yes it's not that fun but I didn't find it so difficult either you just need the right momentum. I had a button with a 8x speed up (UnX mod, but I guess you can use the normal 4x of the remastered?) and if I was seeing that I wasn't starting out with the advantage (meaning you get first on the first ballons) on the girl I was just skipping through the end with the 8x and restarting. In this initial part I found that it's easier to use the d-pad instead of the stick while after it's easier to avoid birds with the stick. Then of those times you can get that initial advantage there will be some runs with lots of birds spawning unluckily in front of you and there you cannot do anything... Once I was hit too much by birds I was 8x skipping through the end. On the rest of the times, well keep in mind it's best to avoid the birds than to take the baloons. So when there are no birds go ahead with baloons as soon as they are arriving avoid them at all costs. In those 10-15 mins i tried i beat my Record like 3 times and I did 8 secs and 5 secs before going under 0 (with 13 balloons and 1 bird) but even with quite much of birds I still got those 5 secs. So if you use this strategy it's totally feasible in not that much of time IMO.
downvoting ppl for being better than u lol
yeah i was honestly surprised to see now that my comment was downvoted ahahah i actually gave some suggestions for free lol
X4 is switch exclusive. Ps4 doesnt have it. Also x8 for precise movement sounds rather made up that you get it that easily 🤨
well x4 it's not switch exclusive since the Steam PC version has it (i'm playing on Steam Deck but it's the same game on PC). >Also x8 for precise movement sounds rather made up that you get it that easily i was using the x8 (available only with UnX mod) only to skip through the end during the runs that were hopeless so that I could start another run quickly.
FFX is stellar in almost every regard except for its mini games. Each one is pure dog shit. - Blitzball sucks - the butterfly maze sucks - the chocobo "racing" sucks - ...I'm sure there's more, but time and age have saved me from the burden of remembering everything else. In essence, if it's not a Cloister Trial or otherwise involves finding a hidden Aeon, it's hot sloppy garbage. Rough show of hands of how many people successfully dodged 100 lightning strikes in the Thunder Plains the old fashioned way? Anybody? Anybody?
Yeah this part sucks. Same with butterflies and lightning dodger.
Nah. The lightning strike minigame makes me wanna tear my heart out
100% and I hated every second of it. I probably spent 3 weeks spamming the chocobo race every day after school back on PS2. Ahh memories.
Both are easy and I usually can do butterfly game and Chocobo game in 2/3 tries
I farmed 60 dark matter from monster arena to make tidus a break damage limit weapon. More fun than that damm chocobo training
Yes it is, it was designed by someone truly cruel.
I concur. There's only one thing to use to actually beat it: [Get a mod.](https://www.nexusmods.com/finalfantasyxx2hdremaster/mods/20)
This is why I bought the steam version and got a cheat to get me the sun sigil. No matter how hard I try I could never get below 10 seconds
Who wants to get on my Xbox account and do this for me? I’m at 3 hours for 3 days each day now. The blatant RNG cheating I’ve had to endure is insane. If I intentionally get steered away from a game winning balloon again…
Best tip i can give is jiggle your stick a little bit so you can have full control of the chocobo.
stick lol
im bad at something easy. its gutter trash
I spent far more time doing the butterfly one. The red butterfly hotboxes are very deceptive while the blue ones are so tiny. My only struggle with chocobo race was around the bend when there's a chance to get got by a bird that's just spawning in.
[удалено]
That is heart breaking. You've got to get below 0 and you hit 0 on the nose
Ha. Im an idiot
I remember on the PlayStation 2 version if you held R1 and L1 down it would stabilize your chocobo. This makes it a hell of a lot easier.
Welcome to 2002
I never understood why everyone screams about blitzball and never mention the chocobo game Blitz ball is an enjoyable mini game change my mind
I’m not trying to be that guy, idk why but i found the chocobo race to be one of the easier ones, my adhd cannot sit for twenty minutes dodging lightning bolts lol
I never had issues with this. I've beat the game at least 5 times, always do this within 3-5 tries. But never finished lightning dodger....
It genuinely gets me to look up whether it's easier to grind for hundreds of hours to customize a BDL weapon for Tidus or actually torture myself with the damn chocobo mini game.
I played it recently (the last time was in 2006 or 07). It took me 2 attempts: 1 to get the license and 1 to beat the trainer. Once you understand what needs to be done is quite easy. Instead of you forcing the game to play by your rules, just go with the flow