it´s just a bonus for the people who buy the walktrough, and it´s not like you are ever going to get any of the rare treasure chest items without it either.
JRPG's have an expectancy that you will be an adventurer and explore every nook and cranny (how many people instantly turn around from their starting point to check around them to ensure they're not missing anything in the room? 😂). The idea of locking away something like the strongest weapon due to acting on the training ingrained with the genre is devastating to me 😅. Undertale played with that very concept but you don't expect that from an actual JRPG, lol.
@@gredsirlee3623 you can get as many zodiac spears as you like, it's one of the very rare treasure chest items, the game just gives you one for free if you know about the 100% chance chest.
Whats funny is that its not even the dumbest thing thing in the game. Getting the great trango, the op sheild in the great crystal or the invisible bow in the invisible chest is far worse. Even getting the baltoro seed is dumb
Same. I remember being told about it by my brother years ago when he was playing the PS2 version. I don't even think I got it on the Zodiac Age on PS4.
It pissed me to the highest heavens knowing that zodiac spear exist and opened all the forbidden chest in the game and start over from the beginning and never again opening any chest i find until i have the zodiac spear! 😫😭
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley Nah sod that mind state, just keep on loving life no matter how old ya get. You'll never get old if you keep on enjoying great things in life no matter where they come from. :D
@@Bozebo I struggled with the rope skip even with a script, lol. The frame rate in the remastered version made the script unreliable but I got there after hours of tries. I wouldn't have even bothered if there wasn't an achievement for it.
Same, though I only became annoyed at my inability to do so when they had to make it a trophy for the ps4. Yet they didn't bother to include getting all the cards for triple triad in 8 as a trophy, which is a challenge I actually enjoyed doing
RE: FFIV, the kitchen knife - I did this as a kid, because my child brain told me that Yang's wife would want to know that he was alive. No clues, but I figured that one out myself. As an adult, I occasionally have forgotten to go hit Yang with a frying pan.
As an 8-year-old when FF2 US released, I recall my neighbor and I playing it together and immediately going to Yang’s wife when we found him. Then afterwards, we immediately went back to his wife to see if there was more. This is what RPGs were commonly doing back in the late 80s and early 90s. I think you underestimate how straightforward the spoon quest was before the days of RPG hand-holding. That said, I’m shocked there was no mention of either the relics from FFX or the insane amount of side quests and stipulations thereof for X-2 to get the 100% perfect ending. I don’t know how anyone would get 100% in X-2 without a guide. Who would think to sleep in the airship’s inn each chapter when it wasn’t required mechanically to heal?
I'm currently working on a playthrough of FFX2 *with* a guide and I am still missing about half of one percent in the third chapter, checking and double checking my progress, with literally 100 save files along every step of the way. I still have no idea where I went wrong, after consulting three different "100% story in a single playthrough" guides.
God damn is ff7 chocobo breeding insanely nostalgic for me here on the other side of 35. My memories of watching my friends older brother grind chocobo breeding in pursuit of the gold (occasionally letting my buddy and I play around for a bit) may has well be wreathed in gold with how deeply and positively they're ingrained in my brain decades later.
My brother lost a good friend who got wrapped up with hanging around with the wrong kind of people, but before his passing, he gave us all a great laugh when he saw my brother playing FF7 and racing in the Gold Saucer. He paused, cocked his head to the side, and asked, "What is this, stick-shift chickens?!" None of us can look at them now without calling them the same thing 😂
I am surprised to see that nothing from X-2 made it into the video proper (just the intro montage). The Chocobo ranch dungeon is probably the one I would have highlighted. You can only unlock the ranch if you return to Mushroom Rock Road a second time after getting "Mission Complete" in Chapter 1, and let Clasko aboard the airship. Similarly, you have to revisit the Mi'ihen Highroad after its mission complete in Chapter 2, and let Clasko aboard again. If you advance either chapter without doing this, you can't get the Chocobo ranch to open. Once the Chocobo ranch is open, you can access the "choco-hunt" minigame, which allows you to capture chocobos in battle, and then send them out to look for treasure. But the Chocobo Ranch holds a much bigger secret. You can find the ranch's hidden dungeon in Chapter 5 by having 3 successful choco-hunts at each of levels 1 thru 5, and having all your active choco-runners at level 5. Hidden inside this confusing dungeon (which has shifting camera angles and no mini-map) you will find the Amazing Chocobo and the incredibly useful Higher Power Garment Grid.
So glad to see this comment, and that other people dealt with that damn ranch. I even remember the old GameFAQs guides recommending Bold Chocobos, which I believe wasn't even needed to open the caves. You could also encounter Ultima Weapons and get Supernova (FF10's "Nova") in that dungeon which was a sweet bonus.
Oh man, what a pain. You sent out thope chocobo and then forced battles to speed up their return just for you to have to load a save because one didn't return for some reason. It's this type of quest that makes me question how I ever managed on both the PS2 and remaster 😆
Paladin Shield , FF6 (ff3 USA) Getting the Cursed Shield in Narshe, with Locke opening a locked door. Equipping the shiled + a ribbon, fighting 255 fights... then getting the Paladin Shield (it teaches Ultima x1)
The FFT Cloud was a fun undertaking for me, it led me to recruit my favorite character Beowulf, also you had to find the Materia Blade at the top of the Mt Goug (I think) battle screen with move-find ability, only equipping Cloud with it, you can use his Soldier abilities
Beowulf was good.. I preferred worker 88 though. He got me through the very last battle and I thought he was the 'cheat' code character. He's the only machine character but he's well worth it..
Honestly I don't know of anyone that ever failed to recruit Cloud because they didn't buy the flower. Especially for a game like Tactics, when an abrupt scene occurs which requires a whole ass map to load and a character offers you a rose, every gaming instinct should kick in and scream yes, buy the damn flower.
The part of the Queen of Cards that I found most frustrating was the fact that you HAD to send her to Dollet in order to get the cards back (also possibly for the new cards to be made, can't remember), I mean, for obvious reasons, (her father made the new cards, her son held the old ones and they were both in Dollet) but still annoying because her destination once she won a rare card was random. I often had to reset and re-lose a card several times to send her to the right city.
There's actually a neat little trick I use to mitigate the Random Rule in Dollet: Just refine all your weaker cards in to items. Increasing the odds of having a good hand will simply let you win more often... and, I've found, that this also increases the chances of Random rule being abolished.
There are ways to manipulate what city the Queen will go to before you lose a card to her. In my run, she always went to Dollet from Balamb when she used certain rule. Kept sending her between Dollet and Balamb until I finished the quest.
I have done all of these things, including the Balamb-Dollet shuffle, but I have also had runs where it will take a good half-dozen resets for her to go to Dollet from Balamb or vice versa, so /shrug/
@@scribble71891 Yep! You could manipulate where the QoC went. It's been years since I last did it, so I forget the method, but there's videos on it I'm sure. Getting annoying rules like Random and Same Wall abolished is key to getting the quest done in a timely manner (Random especially).
Really, this video could be 10 seconds long and just say FF9. Somewhere between the Morrid's Coffee, Chocobo Hot and Cold (not hard but time consuming if you don't have speed mods turned on), Stellazio collecting, and Mognet Central, the game had so many elements tied into knowing to do the right thing at the right time or you missed, you needed a guide.
@@catbert88 And the worst thing is that the official printed guide is infamous for lacking explicit info on any of the game's optional secrets; it only gives you keywords which you can look up on SquareSoft's official website.
Disagree with the IV example, because the decisions behind it are incredibly intuitive. You find out Yang is alive, _of course_ you should go tell his wife, and then when he wakes up, but stays where he is, you should update her on the situation and return the frying pan. But the thing that really caught my attention with that one is that no one without a guide would be wondering about an empty slot in Rydia's summons, because there'd be more than one, due to the number of summons that are rare drops from enemies. _Those_ I had no idea existed without a guide. Anyway, despite breeding chocobos in VII being an infamous example of quests that can only be completed with a guide, all of the specific directions necessary are in fact provided in game by the Chocobo Sage, down to telling you where to catch certain chocobos and where to find enemies with certain nuts. If you talk to Choco Billy's sister, she'll even repeat every piece of advice the Sage gives you, so you can refer back to it at any time, from the place you'll spend the most time while breeding. The quest is a lot more generous with information than its reputation would have you think, and, as someone who has bred Pokemon before, a lot less tedious than you'd expect.
I think the main issue is that unless you hit it in your first playthrough you might not even realize it's a side quest as Yang recovers on his own soon after if you don't do it. In fact you have a very brief window to complete this quest, once you return to the surface but before going to the moon because once you return the giant event starts and Yang has recovered because of that. Many players eager to see what the story holds might just jump into the Whale and progress the story, then see the scenes afterwards and assume that's how Yang recovers. As it is, if you want to complete it you need to go back through the cave while a man down in your party, so people might try to hold it off until they get a 5th member again only to find then it's too late.
it's been such a long time since my first play through when the game came out in the US but i guess i must've lucked out because i remember doing that with Yang's wife and getting the spoon to throw at Zeromus. i think what was worse is if you wanted to be a 100% completionist there are two things that are seemingly impossible. One, get the full list of summons as there are four that can be won in battle (imp might've been the only one i found, maybe mage in a different play through) but the drop rate is so low you wouldn't think they exist but they are listed in the instruction booklet. the other is the pink tail to get the adamant armors from the mini guy in the adamantium cave. i know it drops from a monster near the end of the moon cave but heaven forbid that monster ever appears.
@@bob1986 the one issue is most people tend to go exploring and seeing as you dont get an airship till after you lose yang means most people found him. also pretty sure after you find him the game hints for you to see his wife.
Feels weird to go for the Kitchen Knife quest which is 'go into this cave on the underworld map that the story never sent you to, meet a character from your party you thought was dead, and take a series of actions that have a clear (game) logic to them' and NOT the absolutely terrible Adamant Armor quest which even if you manage to figure out what exactly to do might still result in an hour (or god forbid, hours) of grinding for a rare drop.
Paladin Shield , FF6 (ff3 USA) Getting the Cursed Shield in Narshe, with Locke opening a locked door. Equipping the shiled + a ribbon, fighting 255 fights... then getting the Paladin Shield (it teaches Ultima x1)
I remember doing the FFIV quest back when I was a kid w/o a guide. Managed to get the 7 wonders of Nibelheim as well, but largely because I was over-paranoid about advancing the story because of the earlier Spies quest and building the carts for Aerith quest. Another honorable mention is the 6 Wutai spies from Crisis Core Reunion though. That one I didn't get w/o a guide.
If memory serves for the Queen of Cards, after the events of Lunatic Pandora and returning to Earth, she could be found in a very specific area of Cetra (I think) in the overworld, but in true exasperating fashion, with no guidance or indication as to where. There she would challenge you and use just about every rare card you still didn't have (except the PuPu card). The problem was she used EVERY rule in the game, including the dreaded random rule, so it was down to pure luck her using the card you wanted and being given a deck good enough to get it. It was a much simpler affair to simply complete the CC club side quest and challenge all members in the Ragnarok. Truth be told, only if you were a completionist was this necessary. If you wanted to cheese the hardest boss in the game, all you needed was Laguna's card for 100 heroes and killing it was cake. The chocobo breeding quest was fun in-of itself, albeit took forever for the chocobo sage to tell you the next hint. Well worth it for the bragging right of beating Emerald Weapon. The zodiac spear for FFX was IMO just aesthetic after a time. The Zodiac Age release toned down the ridiculousness of getting it, but still had its quirks. If you didn't get it by the easy way, then Henne mines was the way to go. But, the mine was so tough that you needed to be pretty op to simple navigate it, so getting it made little difference. By the time I got I had already beaten Yiazmat and just wanted to get Zodiark to finish up the game. Cheers!
Chocobo Breeding isn't needed for fighting Emerald or Ruby Weapon. In fact because Ruby Weapon gives you a Golden Chocobo for free this actually means that Breeding is a complete waste of time. Just get a lot of Counter Materia on the character you're going to 1v1 with and have a lot of healing items.
The FF7 side quest for the gold chocobo. You could also get a gold bird from the old traveller from Kalm by defeating Ruby WEAPON. But that involves defeating Ruby WEAPON so picking between the super boss challenge or taking on the tedious breeding process that makes mesuda method shiny pokemon farming look easy is literally asking you "ok pick your poison."
Ruby weapon is actually really easy, counter Materia and healing items. The result is this means Emerald Weapon is harder due to the time limit and the Materia damage based attack.
Or, defeat Emerald to acquire Master Summon, which has Knights of the Round. That negates the entire need for a Gold chocobo. Then, you'd only need a blue & green to get to the other caves. HP-MP materia from the black chocobo is useless for casual playing.
in 9, I only missed one coin without a guide, and it was in burmecia. the coffee beans though, I didn't even know where to start. The whole moogle thing was a complete mystery to me without a guide.
I try to think which one would I pick as soon as I saw this video. I feel like some in FF9 like the one you mentioned or the Excalibur sword one, I admit I was very quick to be like "ok let's look it up". But all in all, I like this type of side quests, in case I find myself in a deserted island with one of these games available, then I'd have a lot of time to solve it myself! (FF12 sounds like the perfect choice for that)
Yeah, I remember the Card Queen Quest. It was so annoying and sadly some of the cards you get are good. That is until I learned about how to rig the card game rules in each region, then it became a lot easier as all you needed were the best card for each corner and then one good center one and you were nearly unbeatable.
Surprised to see the FF7 gold chocobo quest in here. The chocobo sage tells you everything you need to know in-game. As a kid with no internet and no guide, I still completed the gold chocobo quest by visiting the chocobo sage repeatedly.
Pink Tail is infinitely worse than Yang. I can think of a multitude of quests from 11 though since it comes from the era of old school design where the game gave you almost no clues at all. Hell to this day even current subscribers still rely on the wiki because the game is so damned vague. I love it to pieces, but good F'ing luck completing 90%+ of the quests without some kind of guide lol. But if we preclude the MMOs then I would probably opt for Type 0 as it too has numerous convoluted quests including many that can only be done on NG+
I don't think the Stellazzio coins were that hard there were hints for every coin throughout the game, but the coffee or the missing siblings quest was much harder. And as a child I did the chocobo breeding without a guide because I was obsessed with the racing and kept breeding to get better chocobos.
to this day i have just never had the patience for the chocobo breeding. i generally hate racing in games, so making that mandatory just turned me off completely.
I did it without a guide, too. Carbo and Zeio nuts, and you only have to capture three chocobos and the rest is via imbreeding. A good, a great, and a wonderful. but all three need to be s-rank in the saucer of course.
I was committed to the chocobo breeding sidequest so I figured it out without a guide. Later on on another playthrough I used a guide and it was very different than what I did, which I found interesting.
I'm actually surprised that when it came to the Chocobo breeding quest, 7 was picked over 9. With the Chocograph pieces, the tedious Hot and Cold game, and some of the pictures on said graphs that would lead to a fair amount of globe trotting, all leading to a super boss that reads inputs I feel slightly tops the 7 one. Either way, awesome vid.
As a kid I managed to breed Golden Chocobo without any guide. Had no idea about min/maxing strats and basically force fed each bird 99 Syklis Greens. I loved racing, so rising to S class was no problem. Still it took millions of gil (from selling Master All materia) and amount of time I'd never have as an adult.
For FFXII, Specifc Chest opening for the Zodiac Spear is one thing, but has anyone EVER gotten the Tournesol? The ridiculous chaining/looting of rare monsters, and to make those rare monsters to spawn and other pre-requisites, you also need to keep a specific and unecessarily convoluted 'shopping list' to ensure you have every bit of loot and making sure you haven't sold any to make sure you could deliver these to the Bazaar. I love XII to death, and even managed to get the Zodiac Spear by following a guide and get early midgame, but Tournesol is definitely something I cannot hope to complete in this lifetime.
I remember playing this game as a teenager when i had my original PS2 and actually getting the Tournesol (my entire playthrough was literally following a guide step by step) Today i look back to that and wonder how the heck i even had the patience for it. In my latest playthrough, even with a guide, i looked at the requirements and just noped out
One thing not mentioned with regard to the Crisis Core entry was that if you miss the side quest and don't get the Phoenix materia, it locks you out of getting the Genji Armor later on in the game since you need 100% on all DMW abilities to get it so it's a double whammy there
Oooooh the Chocobo Breeding thing was INSANE. First time I ever "no life" played a game. I had a guide, and by the time I pulled off the Gold Chocobo I had got mad a few times, so it was DEFINITELY not my first playthrough haha Hilariously I bought the guide not for "all the secrets" but because I was still livid about Aerith and was dead certain there was some kind of trick that would save her life. Silly me. (Tho to be fair to Past Me, FF7 was my first Final Fantasy, my first JRPG, and the first game I ever played on Playstation; and only the 5th game I'd ever played on a home console, ever.)
When it comes to these quests you hit quite a few....and the lions share of them for me are in 9 and 12. the hardest part for me was not tracking down the coins....it was remembering which ones I had NOT turned in yet (for some reason I never had paper on hand for it? Mayhap I was too lazy). Also seconding that missable coffee key item.
Judiths spear from Tales of Vesperia is also high up on this sort of list in my opinion. One hell of a quest. With extremely easy missable segments with no player hints.
FF (American) 2 / 4 never had a guide released in the States when it first came out. A proper guide didn't exist until FF Chronicles was released. I made my own during the initial release and I always used the (Spoon) as Edge's first thrown item in the fight against Zeromus: always 9999 damage
It had a guide on the bosses sort of but it was ina Nintendo power book with other games mario world glols and ghost and Drakken among others but once you got to a,certain part of the game the guide literally said Best of luck you gotten so far (i think it was the 1st time you hit the moon)
@@MidnightTokenFloydChatAccount it was the cover story for Volume 30, which also featured weird art of a Rogue-styled character riding a black falcon. There are a few things about the game inside, as it was meant to hype up the game, but nothing like a proper guide the original Final Fantasy received.
I don't think I heard you mention in the chocobo breading that either in the game itself or the Prima guide from the 90s, that the nut and/or greens names were messed up, adding even more misleading frustration.
Beating a dead horse, but the FF4 entry really does not belong here. Especially considering there are much harder, more obscure collectibles in that game.
Ok so of those are legit, but Final Fantasy IV? You just need a little bit of immersion and an enjoyment of finishing dungeons. You find one of your treasured teammates in a cave, the right thing to do is to go tell his wife. Then Yang's wife gives you someone and explicitly tells you to wake him up, so you do... then the normal decent thing to do is tell Yang's wife that Yang is fine. Easy to miss? Sure. Never gonna finish without a guide? There weren't even guides when I did this.
I really disagree about the Yang side quest on this list. I did that quest back before guides were even a thing. It always made sense to me "Hey go back to the wife, let her know Yang's okay."
You actually skipped a step. You're supposed to go back to Troia and talk to Edward. He will then tell you to go to Yang's wife for the solution. I alwaysfound it funny that the developers thought a player might visit Edward before Yang's wife but didn't have to the foresight to think you would take Devil's Road to get the Lunar Whale.
@@rikudaman That's crazy! I had no idea that Edward had dialogue about it too... but maybe it was in there just in case people never met Yang's wife? I don't remember if she was around without you exploring the castle to find her... but maybe she saw him off at the docks? But what is this about taking devil's road to get the lunar whale?
@@anthonydelfino6171 So what's the first you think of doing when the Dwarf King tells you about a legendary town called Mysidia? You would fly to Mysidia via airship and enter right? If you do that the elder walks out to greet you at the front of the village and the cutscene for the Lunar Whale happens as normal. If for some reason you decided to go to Baron instead and take the Devil's Road back to Mysidia, the first step you take into the town is at Devil's Road instead of the front gate. The game will freak out since you aren't in the right place and weird graphical stuff happens.
@@rikudaman I never thought to try that.... I still have my SNES cartridge, so I feel like I want to try that now. It doesn't brick the cartridge, though, does it? I know that some of the glitches on the FFVI can ruin it.
I feel like the kitchen knife quest in 4 is very much out of place in this list. Yes, you can miss the sylph cave, but only if you dont explore almost at all. The underworld is unbelievably small, and once you are able to fly over lava, giving the map a quick flyover isnt that hard a requirement, to then see the very obvious cave you just have to traverse to the end. And yes, you might not know to go to yangs wife afterwards, but those who remember her can make a very easy connection between the two of them, like thinking "what would yangs wife say to him being alive?", prompting them to visit. Again, yes, you can miss it, but figuring it out on your own is not even close to as hard as knowing how to breed chocobos or where to find the coins.
You forgot all clouds limit breakers were unusable unless you found the buster sword which great reduced his strength. Also it was on a story mission that if you missed it you could never get it again.
Also worth noting about Zodiac Spear is that characters in that game could equip many weapon types, so getting both was more relevant for a complete run because you could use both on two characters.
The Zodiac Speer still remains the most ridiculous gaming challenge of all time imo, they actually had to remove the opening chest element of it from the remaster. I remember for hours and hours trying to make the thing appear and I never got it
The best guide that ever came out for Chocobo breeding was that one on Steam and RUclips that detailed how to get a gold one without racing, making it possible to do as soon as you get the Highwind rather than waiting for Cloud to rejoin the party. I'd also rank Morrid's coffee sidequest above the Stellazio sidequest, there's only 3 coffees to collect but they're at least as tricky to find as the coins, and the whole thing is missable. You had to collect the coffees from South Gate and Madain Sari on your first visit, and if you progressed past the Treno card tournament on disc 3 without going back to Dali, getting the 3rd coffee, then visiting Morrid, that was it.
While the Stellazzio Coins collect-athon side quest is hard to do without a guide, I know an even harder one. The Friendly Monster Side quest. While running around in different areas, you can stumble onto "friendly" alternately colored variants of specific random monsters. Rather than attack you, the will ask for specific jewels you may or may not have in your inventory. If you give them what they ask for, they will give you a jewel and a large amount of AP in return. Interestingly, there is a bit of a proper order to this. The first 5 monsters in the chain will ask for Ore, but starting with the fifth one the jewel you receive will be the same one that the next monster will ask for. Useful, since the seventh monster asks for a Moonstone, of which there are only 4 in game and one is super hard to get. Completing the quest makes it easier to defeat Ozma, an optional Super Boss found in the Chocobo's Air Garden, which you ALSO need to complete a collect-athon side quest to reach, this one being Chocobo Hot & Cold!
I had no problem with the 7 wonders of Nibelheim without a guide or any prior knowledge of the quest on my first playthrough of Crisis Core. For this list, I would have probably included FF9's Excalibur II though since the game gives you no indication that there's any reward for speedrunning it.
I weirdly managed to get the 7 wonders when I originally had Crisis Core, but missed them when I played it again on an emulator. Kind of upset me how there were no do-overs. Get it right the first time or say goodbye to the Phoenix materia. This being said, though, if you're playing on normal, the game isn't so tough that you'll really need it...but it'a nice to have.
I honestly had no problem finding the Nibelheim Seven Wonders quest. I talked with everyone since there was missable stuff, and he wasn't too hard to find, nor was the quest difficult. It honestly never struck me as something so obscure you needed a guide for it, lol.
The guide for the DS version of Final Fantasy IV mentioned the Namingway sidequest. One thing that made the sidequest infuriating was one the items in for the quest, Rainbow Pudding, only had a droprate of 0.4%. I have never completed that sidequest.
The tournesol in ff12, It was doable but man it was a pain collecting loot to sell.. then sell the loot you got from that loot.. I never would have figured it out.
In my opinion, it many of these quests, and some not on this list, were methods to get players to buy strategy guides. However, some guides didn't have all of the information needed, like FFXII's great crystal map or a list, locations, or circumstances to find rare monsters. Filling out the bestiary is a pain in XII.
trying to fill out the bestiary is what eventually made me give up on xii's sidequests and just rush to the ending to finish the game. i didn't even do the back end of the lhusu mine, when wanting to play the gilgamesh hunt was one of my incentives to starting the game to begin with.
@@Bozebo yea and Three Stars can be also gotten from cards so only reason nowdays to do that is if you want 100% achievements as it is requirement for it. I think it was Ultima or Omega weapon that can be mugged to get it
his really makes me appreciate a well made side-quest. Every time I come across one of these where I have to keep checking a guide, it just makes me like a game less.
A common misconception about chocobo breeding is that the races are required. Races won increases the chances of getting a new color chocobo, but it's never 0% and never 100%. The Chocobo Sage gives you some hints on the class of chocobos you need to start out with (good, great, wonderful), but doesn't tell you where to get those.
Personally obtaining Doomtrain in FF8 was one I always assumed you never could get without a guide until someone pointed out that the occult magazines you can pick up provide the hints you need on how to get him. The Tonberry gf certainly requires a guide as nowhere in the game tells you to go back to the place you found Odin and kill like 15 tonberries until the Tonberry King appears as far as I am aware. Final Fantasy 12 had an insane number of weapons rely on pure rng to get. If you beat the first demon wall (instead of running away like the characters recommend), you can access a chest that potentially contains a very powerful weapon for that point in the game. The problem is that it is completely up to chance if the chest has the weapon or a random item. The chest does respawn letting you try again as much as you want, but you still have to leave the area and come back over and over again until you finally get it. There was also the fact that a lot of the stronger weapons required you to collect rare materials. The best way to get them was to kill tons of monsters one after another to create a chain that boosts the chance to get said materials. Even then, it takes a long time to both get the chain high enough and actually get the drops you need. FF12 had a lot of fun stuff like the monster hunts and exploration, but boy did the developers really lean into rng in the worst possible way.
I absolutely finished Yang's "knife" quest with no guide book (didn't exist) and no online guides (again...) back in 1993. Called the spoon back then. Not really a cryptic side quest. Now, the pink tail/adamant armor, on the other hand...
The first time I did Chocobo breeding in FF7, I used a guide. And I was flabbergasted at how obscure some of the requirements seemed. On a subsequent playthrough, I decided (for whatever reason) to exhaust the Chocobo sage's clues. I was surprised to find that he will eventually tell you everything that you need to know: where to find the good/great/wonderful chocobos, what nuts to use, and where to steal those nuts. The tricky part is having the patience to go revisit him after every few battles in order to get a new clue. And, as an aside: breeding a gold chocobo can be done in just a few hours if you have lots of excess money and know how to be efficient about it. (Racing chocobos to rank them up is better than save-scumming, for example.)
@@dansmith1661 You don't need to race them, but racing them does improve the odds of getting a blue/green/black/gold chocobo when you breed the right parents. So depending on your console, it might be quicker to race your green and/or blue chocobo a few times in order to ensure a Black Chocobo after one breeding, rather than trying to breed them with a 10% chance of success, and reloading after every failed attempt.
Strange, I just got the Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age the other day and I didn't have the Diamond Armlet equipped. I just kept running back and forth in that area of the Henne Mines until it appeared.
The missable Zodiac Spear issue was from the original release of FF12, they fixed it in Zodiac Age. Of course, the chests that you had to give up didn't have any good loot in them, so once you knew of them you could avoid then easily. I kind of dislike Zodiac Age, cause they broke up the license board. Literally the only thing I dislike about it.
@@snuggie1849 it's still rare but there's multiple ways to get the spear aside from treasure chests in Zodiac ver there's a lot.of grinding no doubt but still there's alternative way to get it instead of dealing with RNG
Playing through the PS2 version of Final Fantasy 12 back in the day, finding out you gimped yourself out of the Zodiac Spear, was a mind-numbingly baffling design choice.
I loved the Chocobo Raising and Racing side-quest, but I'll admit, it was more fun because I had a guide. Knowing what to do and how to catch the right chocobos is what made that tolerable. I can't imagine attempting it without a guide. Maybe that's why everyone seems to love Chocobo Hot/Cold from FF9: it's pretty straightforward and you don't need a guide to know how to do it. Meanwhile, I hate it bc there's no way to cheese it and no guide that will help: you just have to take the time and dig and dig and dig.
12:00 I managed to get a black chocobo and left it there, stumbled upon it after hundreds of playtime, then later in life i found out about the gold one existing and it pissed me off
Oh God I remember doing Pitioss dungeon in FF15 after Christmas Eve. Took me 6 hours to finish it without guides and by breakfast time I was worn out of frustration. I was with family at a countryside house with no internet and it added another layer of frustration upon learning you can skip it with some easy jumping glitch
Don't forget about acquiring the Materia Blade in FF Tactics, which requires you to use Move-Find Item on a very specific square. Otherwise you can't even use Cloud's abilities.
Really feeling old because I can verify that the internet hadn't become a thing when some of these games where out. Which guid would make you go online to get info? During the age of daily up internet. Scary how fast tech has evolved in 20 years.
It's not a side quest in a main Final Fantasy game, but speaking of chocobo breeding, I had to drop Final Fantasy XV: Comrades when I couldn't get a strong enough chocobo to move to a new section of the map. Better chocobo were obtained from harder missions but with a dwindling playerbase, it left you with only NPC's to run missions with (which, kudos at least for providing them. Except...) The NPC's, however, weren't as strong or intelligent as a human player, so you often either finished missions alone or didn't finish them at all. Getting a chocobo that was tough from the start was random, so you had to grind missions to hopefully get a good chocobo, THEN had to feed it various greens to hopefully make it stronger. The info I could find at the time said this was all RNG, with no real strategy to confidently net you a good chocobo. The chocobo also had to do certain tasks, if I remember correctly, that if done too much, could affect its level due to exhaustion. The damage done wasn't immediately saved, at least, so you could quit the game and retry, but that was a HUGE slog, especially given the load times. I finally just had enough and quit the game, my one and only foray into an MMO (I usually heavily prefer to play solo). I do wonder if Comrades is still online, lol. Given how quickly they packed up shop with FFXV, I'm going to guess no.
The thing about Chcobo breeding was unless you knew about the Materia Caves and The Knights of the Round there was no reason to breed a Gold Chcobo so while the quest is not extremely difficult most people likely missed it due to not knowing about the rewards. I for one was definitely one of those people on my first playthrough. Also since the game was released prior to Social Media most people would not know about it unless they bought a guide or personally knew someone who knew about it.
The only one I found on my own was the Kitchen Knife, Frying Pan, Sylph summon from FFIV. I didn't have a whole lot of SNES games growing up so the ones I did have, I played through several times. I don't think I figured it out on my first playthrough, but somewhere along the way I got through trial and error + being thorough.
I'd actually go with Deep Dungeon for FFT as opposed to the entire secret character line because Goug is a place you should return to to buy guns and unique items jump starting it. Also near the very end of the game you pass through it to visit certain shops. Once you see it you'll obviously revisit and take reading rumors seriously to figure these things out. Deep Dungeon on the other hand is a near pitch black dungeon with 1 out of 5 tiles being randomly chosen to let you go down a floor but you have to find it mid fight. You have no way to know this though so you'll likely visit the first floor and leave. The tiles are mostly down near the bottom where the enemies are meaning they move away from said tiles. You may find it if you are incredibly lucky, but more then anything it will look like a 1 floor dungeon with no way to get to deeper floors.
that spear sidequest sounds like such a huge troll move by the developers like good grief that is an easy to miss objective. Like removing the item simply for grabbing specific items laying right there for you to grab by punishing you by removing a powerful weapon permanently like that seems like such troll move like good grief. Same with that summon you can get through I think dodging 200 lightning bolts but removing the counter if you need a break through saving and quitting. Like jeez man....thats cruel game design like how is anyone supposed to find out how to unlock the spear with how convoluted the conditions are.
I think the mog net mail should be on this list since you could mess this up if you don’t know which mail to carry to deliver as well as some places you won’t be able to visit anymore
Yeah I think DarkKefka broke that down best To get this rare item you need to sell this item To get this item you need to beat this boss To fight this boss you need to beat this hunt To beat this hunt you need to talk to this NPC To talk to this NPC you need to beat THIS hunt
@@QuantemDeconstructor Thing is you can do all that (at least all the hunts, getting every item excluding ZS would still require luck) by exploring and exhausting options so doesn't really fit this video. There's also another side quest in 12 though with the viera in Rabanastre at the stairs which everyone will screw up without a guide, but the reward doesn't matter late game.
I love how the Cloud side quest in FFT allowed the player to acquire a handful of powerful characters... and Cloud wasn't one of them lmao. Every time I play FFT I unlock Cloud and then promptly never use him again.
Hard disagree on 9 and 4's stuff. I actually completed the Knife quest without a guide, so you're wrong on that, and 9 is annoying, but due to how the game works, you are sticking your nose in every nook and cranny anyways, so its certainly viable to find all the stones on their own. For 9, a better choice would be the side-quest to unlock melee attacks vs. Ozma, because you'd have to run into the various friendly monsters, know that they're in forests around the world, have the proper materials to feed to them (moonstones are rare, could lock yourself out there), and you have basically no hints in-game to help you on this. Or, Excalibur 2, since without outside knowledge you woon't know about it until you get to Memoria to find the note, then you'd have to realize you have to speedrun the game (which almost no one would pick up on), and even then, in OG 9, it was so precise to speedrun that you had to cancel FMVs to get the time to do so. That's much more unreasonable than a side-quest which is basically interact with everything. For 4, the Pink Tail would be a better choice, mostly because of how rare the drop is, so you wouldn't go after it unless you knew it existed, then having to take it back to the Smith in order to make the rare armor. The Yang stuff, as explained by others, is extremely intuitive if you're just playing the game normally and exploring and trying new things out. The secret summons, like Bomb, are probably worse as well, just because you wouldn't think to grind certain enemies for rare drops to learn mediocre summons, which is not how any other summons are learned.
Choco racing was fun on 7, final fantasy 10 and the Choco wobble race where you have to get 0.00 time is the most infuriating chocobo mini game known to man..
Getting cloud in FFT was one of my favorite things to do in ff.. Even though hes lvl 1 its very easy to lvl him since everything u fight is scaled to your original parties lvl so he lvl's quickly u just need a passive move from a squire to make sure he does something every turn he gets.
The Fafnir hunt in FFXII, you need to wait for a specific weather condition to occur and then follow a very specific path to make sure you end up on the correct side of the area it will spawn in and if the weather changes too bad try again.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I believe the Zodiac Spear mess was the result of them selling the secret exclusively to Brady Games to be in a player's guide, meaning you needed to have the guide (or know someone who did or shared it online) to know about it. It was deliberately not revealed in game what you had to do to offer an exclusive secret to sell.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Not opening chests to get the Zodiac Spear was the dumbest thing about that game
it´s just a bonus for the people who buy the walktrough, and it´s not like you are ever going to get any of the rare treasure chest items without it either.
@@RyuSaarva Yeah, but I didn't think I'd ruin my chances of getting one of the best weapons bc of something I did 15 minutes into the game :/
JRPG's have an expectancy that you will be an adventurer and explore every nook and cranny (how many people instantly turn around from their starting point to check around them to ensure they're not missing anything in the room? 😂). The idea of locking away something like the strongest weapon due to acting on the training ingrained with the genre is devastating to me 😅. Undertale played with that very concept but you don't expect that from an actual JRPG, lol.
@@gredsirlee3623 you can get as many zodiac spears as you like, it's one of the very rare treasure chest items, the game just gives you one for free if you know about the 100% chance chest.
Whats funny is that its not even the dumbest thing thing in the game. Getting the great trango, the op sheild in the great crystal or the invisible bow in the invisible chest is far worse. Even getting the baltoro seed is dumb
I will never stop being completely baffled by the Zodiac Spear.
Same. I remember being told about it by my brother years ago when he was playing the PS2 version. I don't even think I got it on the Zodiac Age on PS4.
@@danielhn93 Zodiac Age has a few options for the Spear. And you CAN open the chests now.
stupid side quest but great weapon
It pissed me to the highest heavens knowing that zodiac spear exist and opened all the forbidden chest in the game and start over from the beginning and never again opening any chest i find until i have the zodiac spear! 😫😭
I just download a mod called "Less RNG BS" that makes all chest spawn 100%. I don't regret it one bit.
I've been a massive fan of FF9 for over 20 years and I still cannot do that jump rope 1000 jump challenge.
Shut up, don't say "over 20 years", you're reminding me how old I am 😂
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley
Nah sod that mind state, just keep on loving life no matter how old ya get.
You'll never get old if you keep on enjoying great things in life no matter where they come from.
:D
For that and the lightning dodging in FFX I make an autohotkey script and let it do the work for me xD
@@Bozebo I struggled with the rope skip even with a script, lol. The frame rate in the remastered version made the script unreliable but I got there after hours of tries. I wouldn't have even bothered if there wasn't an achievement for it.
Same, though I only became annoyed at my inability to do so when they had to make it a trophy for the ps4.
Yet they didn't bother to include getting all the cards for triple triad in 8 as a trophy, which is a challenge I actually enjoyed doing
RE: FFIV, the kitchen knife - I did this as a kid, because my child brain told me that Yang's wife would want to know that he was alive. No clues, but I figured that one out myself. As an adult, I occasionally have forgotten to go hit Yang with a frying pan.
As an 8-year-old when FF2 US released, I recall my neighbor and I playing it together and immediately going to Yang’s wife when we found him. Then afterwards, we immediately went back to his wife to see if there was more. This is what RPGs were commonly doing back in the late 80s and early 90s. I think you underestimate how straightforward the spoon quest was before the days of RPG hand-holding.
That said, I’m shocked there was no mention of either the relics from FFX or the insane amount of side quests and stipulations thereof for X-2 to get the 100% perfect ending. I don’t know how anyone would get 100% in X-2 without a guide. Who would think to sleep in the airship’s inn each chapter when it wasn’t required mechanically to heal?
I'm currently working on a playthrough of FFX2 *with* a guide and I am still missing about half of one percent in the third chapter, checking and double checking my progress, with literally 100 save files along every step of the way.
I still have no idea where I went wrong, after consulting three different "100% story in a single playthrough" guides.
God damn is ff7 chocobo breeding insanely nostalgic for me here on the other side of 35. My memories of watching my friends older brother grind chocobo breeding in pursuit of the gold (occasionally letting my buddy and I play around for a bit) may has well be wreathed in gold with how deeply and positively they're ingrained in my brain decades later.
Same man. Except it was me and Mt older brother lol
I’m 36 so around the same age. Did not have the patience for breeding when I was 12. Maybe I should give it another shot now.
My brother lost a good friend who got wrapped up with hanging around with the wrong kind of people, but before his passing, he gave us all a great laugh when he saw my brother playing FF7 and racing in the Gold Saucer. He paused, cocked his head to the side, and asked, "What is this, stick-shift chickens?!" None of us can look at them now without calling them the same thing 😂
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley love this
I don't think it's that bad tbh. Took a while but its ok...
I am surprised to see that nothing from X-2 made it into the video proper (just the intro montage). The Chocobo ranch dungeon is probably the one I would have highlighted. You can only unlock the ranch if you return to Mushroom Rock Road a second time after getting "Mission Complete" in Chapter 1, and let Clasko aboard the airship. Similarly, you have to revisit the Mi'ihen Highroad after its mission complete in Chapter 2, and let Clasko aboard again. If you advance either chapter without doing this, you can't get the Chocobo ranch to open.
Once the Chocobo ranch is open, you can access the "choco-hunt" minigame, which allows you to capture chocobos in battle, and then send them out to look for treasure. But the Chocobo Ranch holds a much bigger secret. You can find the ranch's hidden dungeon in Chapter 5 by having 3 successful choco-hunts at each of levels 1 thru 5, and having all your active choco-runners at level 5. Hidden inside this confusing dungeon (which has shifting camera angles and no mini-map) you will find the Amazing Chocobo and the incredibly useful Higher Power Garment Grid.
So glad to see this comment, and that other people dealt with that damn ranch. I even remember the old GameFAQs guides recommending Bold Chocobos, which I believe wasn't even needed to open the caves. You could also encounter Ultima Weapons and get Supernova (FF10's "Nova") in that dungeon which was a sweet bonus.
Oh man, what a pain. You sent out thope chocobo and then forced battles to speed up their return just for you to have to load a save because one didn't return for some reason. It's this type of quest that makes me question how I ever managed on both the PS2 and remaster 😆
That entire original comment was so quintessentially final fantasy it hurts 😂
@Sup no its one of the best
Paladin Shield , FF6 (ff3 USA)
Getting the Cursed Shield in Narshe, with Locke opening a locked door.
Equipping the shiled + a ribbon, fighting 255 fights... then getting the Paladin Shield (it teaches Ultima x1)
As soon as I saw Yang on the thumbnail and saw the title I went back to my childhood and went "SEE! IT WASN'T JUST YOU!"
Lemme guess...the sylph//frying pan stuff?
@@johnnyscifi Yup
That was the only one I was did without the aid of a guide. FFIV still my favorite today!!!
@@actechchris I think I found this one on my own, too, if I recall correctly. It's not on the same level as the other ones in the video.
S A M E
The FFT Cloud was a fun undertaking for me, it led me to recruit my favorite character Beowulf, also you had to find the Materia Blade at the top of the Mt Goug (I think) battle screen with move-find ability, only equipping Cloud with it, you can use his Soldier abilities
Beowulf was good.. I preferred worker 88 though. He got me through the very last battle and I thought he was the 'cheat' code character. He's the only machine character but he's well worth it..
@Xen Xander glad I'm not the only one that loved worker 88
Kitchen Knife? Really!? Compared to the others in the list, this one is very short and straight to the point.
Like a kitchen knife should be.
Honestly I don't know of anyone that ever failed to recruit Cloud because they didn't buy the flower. Especially for a game like Tactics, when an abrupt scene occurs which requires a whole ass map to load and a character offers you a rose, every gaming instinct should kick in and scream yes, buy the damn flower.
Especially since 7 had just released on PC with a 2nd resurgence in popularity. That was a no brainer.
I agree, finding Cloud isn't that hard, but finding his Materia Blade on the other hand, well...
The part of the Queen of Cards that I found most frustrating was the fact that you HAD to send her to Dollet in order to get the cards back (also possibly for the new cards to be made, can't remember), I mean, for obvious reasons, (her father made the new cards, her son held the old ones and they were both in Dollet) but still annoying because her destination once she won a rare card was random. I often had to reset and re-lose a card several times to send her to the right city.
You can just get all the card by playing with the short hair twins in ragnarok ship disk 4 but you have to complete cc group quest before disk 4.
There's actually a neat little trick I use to mitigate the Random Rule in Dollet: Just refine all your weaker cards in to items.
Increasing the odds of having a good hand will simply let you win more often... and, I've found, that this also increases the chances of Random rule being abolished.
There are ways to manipulate what city the Queen will go to before you lose a card to her. In my run, she always went to Dollet from Balamb when she used certain rule. Kept sending her between Dollet and Balamb until I finished the quest.
I have done all of these things, including the Balamb-Dollet shuffle, but I have also had runs where it will take a good half-dozen resets for her to go to Dollet from Balamb or vice versa, so /shrug/
@@scribble71891 Yep! You could manipulate where the QoC went. It's been years since I last did it, so I forget the method, but there's videos on it I'm sure. Getting annoying rules like Random and Same Wall abolished is key to getting the quest done in a timely manner (Random especially).
I did the ffvii and tactics secrets, both with a guide. There is no way I would have even guessed it was a thing without it.
I am replaying ff9 now. I tell you without a guide...it is hard to find those friendly creatures too!
Just go to every forest. It is easy.
@dansmith1661 not true. Some of them only show up on the plains area.
@@jennyf-eg5gl Sorry that that dude was immediately contrarian, lol.
It's definitely hard
Really, this video could be 10 seconds long and just say FF9. Somewhere between the Morrid's Coffee, Chocobo Hot and Cold (not hard but time consuming if you don't have speed mods turned on), Stellazio collecting, and Mognet Central, the game had so many elements tied into knowing to do the right thing at the right time or you missed, you needed a guide.
@@catbert88 And the worst thing is that the official printed guide is infamous for lacking explicit info on any of the game's optional secrets; it only gives you keywords which you can look up on SquareSoft's official website.
Disagree with the IV example, because the decisions behind it are incredibly intuitive. You find out Yang is alive, _of course_ you should go tell his wife, and then when he wakes up, but stays where he is, you should update her on the situation and return the frying pan. But the thing that really caught my attention with that one is that no one without a guide would be wondering about an empty slot in Rydia's summons, because there'd be more than one, due to the number of summons that are rare drops from enemies. _Those_ I had no idea existed without a guide.
Anyway, despite breeding chocobos in VII being an infamous example of quests that can only be completed with a guide, all of the specific directions necessary are in fact provided in game by the Chocobo Sage, down to telling you where to catch certain chocobos and where to find enemies with certain nuts. If you talk to Choco Billy's sister, she'll even repeat every piece of advice the Sage gives you, so you can refer back to it at any time, from the place you'll spend the most time while breeding. The quest is a lot more generous with information than its reputation would have you think, and, as someone who has bred Pokemon before, a lot less tedious than you'd expect.
I think the main issue is that unless you hit it in your first playthrough you might not even realize it's a side quest as Yang recovers on his own soon after if you don't do it. In fact you have a very brief window to complete this quest, once you return to the surface but before going to the moon because once you return the giant event starts and Yang has recovered because of that. Many players eager to see what the story holds might just jump into the Whale and progress the story, then see the scenes afterwards and assume that's how Yang recovers. As it is, if you want to complete it you need to go back through the cave while a man down in your party, so people might try to hold it off until they get a 5th member again only to find then it's too late.
it's been such a long time since my first play through when the game came out in the US but i guess i must've lucked out because i remember doing that with Yang's wife and getting the spoon to throw at Zeromus. i think what was worse is if you wanted to be a 100% completionist there are two things that are seemingly impossible. One, get the full list of summons as there are four that can be won in battle (imp might've been the only one i found, maybe mage in a different play through) but the drop rate is so low you wouldn't think they exist but they are listed in the instruction booklet. the other is the pink tail to get the adamant armors from the mini guy in the adamantium cave. i know it drops from a monster near the end of the moon cave but heaven forbid that monster ever appears.
@@bob1986 the one issue is most people tend to go exploring and seeing as you dont get an airship till after you lose yang means most people found him. also pretty sure after you find him the game hints for you to see his wife.
I found the Chocobo breeding fairly easy. Getting Yuffie on the other hand required a guide and grinding an area way below my level for about an hour.
ye the yang one is pretty intuitive....tho the spoon reward is kinda shit
Finding that Knife from Yangs Wife is one of my greatest self found secrets. No guidebook.
Just world exploration and trying to save the world
Same, I loved that game as a kid so I explored every inch of it and decided his wife needed to know he was alive after I found him
@@ajaverill08 crazy that was my same reaction.
" Yangs wife gotta know about him with all these side Faires"
Feels weird to go for the Kitchen Knife quest which is 'go into this cave on the underworld map that the story never sent you to, meet a character from your party you thought was dead, and take a series of actions that have a clear (game) logic to them' and NOT the absolutely terrible Adamant Armor quest which even if you manage to figure out what exactly to do might still result in an hour (or god forbid, hours) of grinding for a rare drop.
Paladin Shield , FF6 (ff3 USA)
Getting the Cursed Shield in Narshe, with Locke opening a locked door.
Equipping the shiled + a ribbon, fighting 255 fights... then getting the Paladin Shield (it teaches Ultima x1)
1:24 FF9 - Stellazio Coins
3:45 FF8 - Queen of Cards
6:09 CCR - 7 Wonders of Nibelheim
8:01 FF4 - The Kitchen Knife
9:50 FF7 - Chocobo Breeding
12:15 FFT:WOTL - Recruiting Cloud
14:23 FF12 - Zodiac Spear
"Only 1 per game" **says only final fantasy games
Thank you fuck
@@BatFan_Attic as if the channel is about final fantasy, crazy
I remember doing the FFIV quest back when I was a kid w/o a guide. Managed to get the 7 wonders of Nibelheim as well, but largely because I was over-paranoid about advancing the story because of the earlier Spies quest and building the carts for Aerith quest. Another honorable mention is the 6 Wutai spies from Crisis Core Reunion though. That one I didn't get w/o a guide.
If memory serves for the Queen of Cards, after the events of Lunatic Pandora and returning to Earth, she could be found in a very specific area of Cetra (I think) in the overworld, but in true exasperating fashion, with no guidance or indication as to where. There she would challenge you and use just about every rare card you still didn't have (except the PuPu card). The problem was she used EVERY rule in the game, including the dreaded random rule, so it was down to pure luck her using the card you wanted and being given a deck good enough to get it. It was a much simpler affair to simply complete the CC club side quest and challenge all members in the Ragnarok. Truth be told, only if you were a completionist was this necessary. If you wanted to cheese the hardest boss in the game, all you needed was Laguna's card for 100 heroes and killing it was cake.
The chocobo breeding quest was fun in-of itself, albeit took forever for the chocobo sage to tell you the next hint. Well worth it for the bragging right of beating Emerald Weapon. The zodiac spear for FFX was IMO just aesthetic after a time. The Zodiac Age release toned down the ridiculousness of getting it, but still had its quirks. If you didn't get it by the easy way, then Henne mines was the way to go. But, the mine was so tough that you needed to be pretty op to simple navigate it, so getting it made little difference. By the time I got I had already beaten Yiazmat and just wanted to get Zodiark to finish up the game.
Cheers!
Chocobo Breeding isn't needed for fighting Emerald or Ruby Weapon. In fact because Ruby Weapon gives you a Golden Chocobo for free this actually means that Breeding is a complete waste of time.
Just get a lot of Counter Materia on the character you're going to 1v1 with and have a lot of healing items.
The FF7 side quest for the gold chocobo. You could also get a gold bird from the old traveller from Kalm by defeating Ruby WEAPON. But that involves defeating Ruby WEAPON so picking between the super boss challenge or taking on the tedious breeding process that makes mesuda method shiny pokemon farming look easy is literally asking you "ok pick your poison."
Dude i get Gold Chocobo in 30 Minutes, pokemon breeding is way more annoying
Dude i get Gold Chocobo in 30 Minutes, pokemon breeding is way more annoying
Ruby weapon is actually really easy, counter Materia and healing items. The result is this means Emerald Weapon is harder due to the time limit and the Materia damage based attack.
With modern rng manipulation knowledge it's pretty easy if slightly time consuming. But without a guide I could see it taking a while.
Or, defeat Emerald to acquire Master Summon, which has Knights of the Round. That negates the entire need for a Gold chocobo. Then, you'd only need a blue & green to get to the other caves. HP-MP materia from the black chocobo is useless for casual playing.
in 9, I only missed one coin without a guide, and it was in burmecia. the coffee beans though, I didn't even know where to start. The whole moogle thing was a complete mystery to me without a guide.
I try to think which one would I pick as soon as I saw this video. I feel like some in FF9 like the one you mentioned or the Excalibur sword one, I admit I was very quick to be like "ok let's look it up".
But all in all, I like this type of side quests, in case I find myself in a deserted island with one of these games available, then I'd have a lot of time to solve it myself! (FF12 sounds like the perfect choice for that)
Yeah, I remember the Card Queen Quest. It was so annoying and sadly some of the cards you get are good. That is until I learned about how to rig the card game rules in each region, then it became a lot easier as all you needed were the best card for each corner and then one good center one and you were nearly unbeatable.
Surprised to see the FF7 gold chocobo quest in here. The chocobo sage tells you everything you need to know in-game. As a kid with no internet and no guide, I still completed the gold chocobo quest by visiting the chocobo sage repeatedly.
My greatest achievement in every Final Fantasy was eliminated the rule Random from every region of FFVIII
Mine is making rule to all regions open only and trading is diff 😂 getting all the advantage to me to get rare cards!
@@adolcristin3526I drove me crazy when I found out All can't be kept permanently.
Pink Tail is infinitely worse than Yang.
I can think of a multitude of quests from 11 though since it comes from the era of old school design where the game gave you almost no clues at all.
Hell to this day even current subscribers still rely on the wiki because the game is so damned vague. I love it to pieces, but good F'ing luck completing 90%+ of the quests without some kind of guide lol.
But if we preclude the MMOs then I would probably opt for Type 0 as it too has numerous convoluted quests including many that can only be done on NG+
Agreed. The incredibly low drop rate of getting that from the flan princesses meant it was something I never knew existed till the internet and guides
Low drop rate items isn't a side quest lol
@@philbuttler3427 but what if the item is needed for a quest, but the quest doesn't even tell you that you need that item from that monster
It wasn't just getting Cloud in tactics, for him to be any use ya had to get his materia sword which was on top of a volcano for some reason
I don't think the Stellazzio coins were that hard there were hints for every coin throughout the game, but the coffee or the missing siblings quest was much harder. And as a child I did the chocobo breeding without a guide because I was obsessed with the racing and kept breeding to get better chocobos.
I'll be honest here, I had NO clue about the coffee until reading a guide. And the missing siblings? Forget about it.
@@mariawhite7337 First time I'm hearing about this coffee quest and ff9 is my favorite FF game
to this day i have just never had the patience for the chocobo breeding. i generally hate racing in games, so making that mandatory just turned me off completely.
I did it without a guide, too. Carbo and Zeio nuts, and you only have to capture three chocobos and the rest is via imbreeding. A good, a great, and a wonderful. but all three need to be s-rank in the saucer of course.
yeah i remember 9 had a few quests that were only available for a short time.
I was committed to the chocobo breeding sidequest so I figured it out without a guide. Later on on another playthrough I used a guide and it was very different than what I did, which I found interesting.
I'm actually surprised that when it came to the Chocobo breeding quest, 7 was picked over 9. With the Chocograph pieces, the tedious Hot and Cold game, and some of the pictures on said graphs that would lead to a fair amount of globe trotting, all leading to a super boss that reads inputs I feel slightly tops the 7 one. Either way, awesome vid.
Got stumped on the ffx-2 thunder Plains cave the first time I played it, needed a guide for that one
As a kid I managed to breed Golden Chocobo without any guide. Had no idea about min/maxing strats and basically force fed each bird 99 Syklis Greens. I loved racing, so rising to S class was no problem. Still it took millions of gil (from selling Master All materia) and amount of time I'd never have as an adult.
For FFXII, Specifc Chest opening for the Zodiac Spear is one thing, but has anyone EVER gotten the Tournesol? The ridiculous chaining/looting of rare monsters, and to make those rare monsters to spawn and other pre-requisites, you also need to keep a specific and unecessarily convoluted 'shopping list' to ensure you have every bit of loot and making sure you haven't sold any to make sure you could deliver these to the Bazaar.
I love XII to death, and even managed to get the Zodiac Spear by following a guide and get early midgame, but Tournesol is definitely something I cannot hope to complete in this lifetime.
I remember playing this game as a teenager when i had my original PS2 and actually getting the Tournesol (my entire playthrough was literally following a guide step by step)
Today i look back to that and wonder how the heck i even had the patience for it. In my latest playthrough, even with a guide, i looked at the requirements and just noped out
@@edinaldoc1 As I get older I find myself more and more saying "Nope I'm not doing that". I don't know how I had that much time as a kid.
One thing not mentioned with regard to the Crisis Core entry was that if you miss the side quest and don't get the Phoenix materia, it locks you out of getting the Genji Armor later on in the game since you need 100% on all DMW abilities to get it so it's a double whammy there
Oooooh the Chocobo Breeding thing was INSANE. First time I ever "no life" played a game. I had a guide, and by the time I pulled off the Gold Chocobo I had got mad a few times, so it was DEFINITELY not my first playthrough haha
Hilariously I bought the guide not for "all the secrets" but because I was still livid about Aerith and was dead certain there was some kind of trick that would save her life. Silly me. (Tho to be fair to Past Me, FF7 was my first Final Fantasy, my first JRPG, and the first game I ever played on Playstation; and only the 5th game I'd ever played on a home console, ever.)
When it comes to these quests you hit quite a few....and the lions share of them for me are in 9 and 12. the hardest part for me was not tracking down the coins....it was remembering which ones I had NOT turned in yet (for some reason I never had paper on hand for it? Mayhap I was too lazy). Also seconding that missable coffee key item.
Judiths spear from Tales of Vesperia is also high up on this sort of list in my opinion. One hell of a quest. With extremely easy missable segments with no player hints.
FF (American) 2 / 4 never had a guide released in the States when it first came out. A proper guide didn't exist until FF Chronicles was released. I made my own during the initial release and I always used the (Spoon) as Edge's first thrown item in the fight against Zeromus: always 9999 damage
It had a guide on the bosses sort of but it was ina Nintendo power book with other games mario world glols and ghost and Drakken among others but once you got to a,certain part of the game the guide literally said Best of luck you gotten so far (i think it was the 1st time you hit the moon)
@@MidnightTokenFloydChatAccount it was the cover story for Volume 30, which also featured weird art of a Rogue-styled character riding a black falcon. There are a few things about the game inside, as it was meant to hype up the game, but nothing like a proper guide the original Final Fantasy received.
@@MattChristensen9 fair
I don't think I heard you mention in the chocobo breading that either in the game itself or the Prima guide from the 90s, that the nut and/or greens names were messed up, adding even more misleading frustration.
Beating a dead horse, but the FF4 entry really does not belong here. Especially considering there are much harder, more obscure collectibles in that game.
Ok so of those are legit, but Final Fantasy IV? You just need a little bit of immersion and an enjoyment of finishing dungeons.
You find one of your treasured teammates in a cave, the right thing to do is to go tell his wife. Then Yang's wife gives you someone and explicitly tells you to wake him up, so you do... then the normal decent thing to do is tell Yang's wife that Yang is fine.
Easy to miss? Sure. Never gonna finish without a guide? There weren't even guides when I did this.
I really disagree about the Yang side quest on this list. I did that quest back before guides were even a thing. It always made sense to me "Hey go back to the wife, let her know Yang's okay."
Yeah this was an obvious and easy one. Hardly "infuriating" or requiring a guide.
You actually skipped a step. You're supposed to go back to Troia and talk to Edward. He will then tell you to go to Yang's wife for the solution. I alwaysfound it funny that the developers thought a player might visit Edward before Yang's wife but didn't have to the foresight to think you would take Devil's Road to get the Lunar Whale.
@@rikudaman That's crazy! I had no idea that Edward had dialogue about it too... but maybe it was in there just in case people never met Yang's wife? I don't remember if she was around without you exploring the castle to find her... but maybe she saw him off at the docks?
But what is this about taking devil's road to get the lunar whale?
@@anthonydelfino6171 So what's the first you think of doing when the Dwarf King tells you about a legendary town called Mysidia? You would fly to Mysidia via airship and enter right? If you do that the elder walks out to greet you at the front of the village and the cutscene for the Lunar Whale happens as normal.
If for some reason you decided to go to Baron instead and take the Devil's Road back to Mysidia, the first step you take into the town is at Devil's Road instead of the front gate. The game will freak out since you aren't in the right place and weird graphical stuff happens.
@@rikudaman I never thought to try that.... I still have my SNES cartridge, so I feel like I want to try that now. It doesn't brick the cartridge, though, does it? I know that some of the glitches on the FFVI can ruin it.
I feel like the kitchen knife quest in 4 is very much out of place in this list. Yes, you can miss the sylph cave, but only if you dont explore almost at all. The underworld is unbelievably small, and once you are able to fly over lava, giving the map a quick flyover isnt that hard a requirement, to then see the very obvious cave you just have to traverse to the end. And yes, you might not know to go to yangs wife afterwards, but those who remember her can make a very easy connection between the two of them, like thinking "what would yangs wife say to him being alive?", prompting them to visit. Again, yes, you can miss it, but figuring it out on your own is not even close to as hard as knowing how to breed chocobos or where to find the coins.
You forgot all clouds limit breakers were unusable unless you found the buster sword which great reduced his strength. Also it was on a story mission that if you missed it you could never get it again.
Also worth noting about Zodiac Spear is that characters in that game could equip many weapon types, so getting both was more relevant for a complete run because you could use both on two characters.
The Zodiac Speer still remains the most ridiculous gaming challenge of all time imo, they actually had to remove the opening chest element of it from the remaster. I remember for hours and hours trying to make the thing appear and I never got it
Og ff7s happy turtle shop definitely gave me more trouble. Since 2 of the posters are missable cause youll never return to those spots
The best guide that ever came out for Chocobo breeding was that one on Steam and RUclips that detailed how to get a gold one without racing, making it possible to do as soon as you get the Highwind rather than waiting for Cloud to rejoin the party.
I'd also rank Morrid's coffee sidequest above the Stellazio sidequest, there's only 3 coffees to collect but they're at least as tricky to find as the coins, and the whole thing is missable. You had to collect the coffees from South Gate and Madain Sari on your first visit, and if you progressed past the Treno card tournament on disc 3 without going back to Dali, getting the 3rd coffee, then visiting Morrid, that was it.
What... what...WHAT!? -holds head- Why couldn't this have existed sooner!?.. all the hours of my life lost..all the tedious racing.. I..
-seppuku-
While the Stellazzio Coins collect-athon side quest is hard to do without a guide, I know an even harder one. The Friendly Monster Side quest. While running around in different areas, you can stumble onto "friendly" alternately colored variants of specific random monsters. Rather than attack you, the will ask for specific jewels you may or may not have in your inventory. If you give them what they ask for, they will give you a jewel and a large amount of AP in return. Interestingly, there is a bit of a proper order to this. The first 5 monsters in the chain will ask for Ore, but starting with the fifth one the jewel you receive will be the same one that the next monster will ask for. Useful, since the seventh monster asks for a Moonstone, of which there are only 4 in game and one is super hard to get. Completing the quest makes it easier to defeat Ozma, an optional Super Boss found in the Chocobo's Air Garden, which you ALSO need to complete a collect-athon side quest to reach, this one being Chocobo Hot & Cold!
I had no problem with the 7 wonders of Nibelheim without a guide or any prior knowledge of the quest on my first playthrough of Crisis Core.
For this list, I would have probably included FF9's Excalibur II though since the game gives you no indication that there's any reward for speedrunning it.
I weirdly managed to get the 7 wonders when I originally had Crisis Core, but missed them when I played it again on an emulator. Kind of upset me how there were no do-overs. Get it right the first time or say goodbye to the Phoenix materia.
This being said, though, if you're playing on normal, the game isn't so tough that you'll really need it...but it'a nice to have.
I honestly had no problem finding the Nibelheim Seven Wonders quest. I talked with everyone since there was missable stuff, and he wasn't too hard to find, nor was the quest difficult. It honestly never struck me as something so obscure you needed a guide for it, lol.
The guide for the DS version of Final Fantasy IV mentioned the Namingway sidequest. One thing that made the sidequest infuriating was one the items in for the quest, Rainbow Pudding, only had a droprate of 0.4%. I have never completed that sidequest.
The tournesol in ff12, It was doable but man it was a pain collecting loot to sell.. then sell the loot you got from that loot.. I never would have figured it out.
I didn’t have the internet back in the 90’s, so I almost always bought the Brady games guide book for it. It was so helpful.
I loved those strategy guides. I think the last one I bought was last year for FFXIII. Finally got around to beating the trilogy
In my opinion, it many of these quests, and some not on this list, were methods to get players to buy strategy guides. However, some guides didn't have all of the information needed, like FFXII's great crystal map or a list, locations, or circumstances to find rare monsters. Filling out the bestiary is a pain in XII.
trying to fill out the bestiary is what eventually made me give up on xii's sidequests and just rush to the ending to finish the game. i didn't even do the back end of the lhusu mine, when wanting to play the gilgamesh hunt was one of my incentives to starting the game to begin with.
FF8 Obel Lake Quest - that must have been put there to sell more guides.
Yea that was annoying and reward wasn't even worth the trouble
@@MultiHumala Yeah moon stone and three stars I think? Items you can just get from mugging or killing enemies.
@@Bozebo yea and Three Stars can be also gotten from cards so only reason nowdays to do that is if you want 100% achievements as it is requirement for it. I think it was Ultima or Omega weapon that can be mugged to get it
his really makes me appreciate a well made side-quest. Every time I come across one of these where I have to keep checking a guide, it just makes me like a game less.
FF12tza- Chaos is definitely the most complex Esper to find.
A common misconception about chocobo breeding is that the races are required. Races won increases the chances of getting a new color chocobo, but it's never 0% and never 100%. The Chocobo Sage gives you some hints on the class of chocobos you need to start out with (good, great, wonderful), but doesn't tell you where to get those.
Personally obtaining Doomtrain in FF8 was one I always assumed you never could get without a guide until someone pointed out that the occult magazines you can pick up provide the hints you need on how to get him. The Tonberry gf certainly requires a guide as nowhere in the game tells you to go back to the place you found Odin and kill like 15 tonberries until the Tonberry King appears as far as I am aware.
Final Fantasy 12 had an insane number of weapons rely on pure rng to get. If you beat the first demon wall (instead of running away like the characters recommend), you can access a chest that potentially contains a very powerful weapon for that point in the game. The problem is that it is completely up to chance if the chest has the weapon or a random item. The chest does respawn letting you try again as much as you want, but you still have to leave the area and come back over and over again until you finally get it.
There was also the fact that a lot of the stronger weapons required you to collect rare materials. The best way to get them was to kill tons of monsters one after another to create a chain that boosts the chance to get said materials. Even then, it takes a long time to both get the chain high enough and actually get the drops you need. FF12 had a lot of fun stuff like the monster hunts and exploration, but boy did the developers really lean into rng in the worst possible way.
From memory you could always find the Queen of Cards in Dollet. There was a get-around and you never had to look for her anywhere else.
I absolutely finished Yang's "knife" quest with no guide book (didn't exist) and no online guides (again...) back in 1993. Called the spoon back then. Not really a cryptic side quest. Now, the pink tail/adamant armor, on the other hand...
The first time I did Chocobo breeding in FF7, I used a guide. And I was flabbergasted at how obscure some of the requirements seemed.
On a subsequent playthrough, I decided (for whatever reason) to exhaust the Chocobo sage's clues. I was surprised to find that he will eventually tell you everything that you need to know: where to find the good/great/wonderful chocobos, what nuts to use, and where to steal those nuts. The tricky part is having the patience to go revisit him after every few battles in order to get a new clue.
And, as an aside: breeding a gold chocobo can be done in just a few hours if you have lots of excess money and know how to be efficient about it. (Racing chocobos to rank them up is better than save-scumming, for example.)
You don't need to race them.
@@dansmith1661 You don't need to race them, but racing them does improve the odds of getting a blue/green/black/gold chocobo when you breed the right parents. So depending on your console, it might be quicker to race your green and/or blue chocobo a few times in order to ensure a Black Chocobo after one breeding, rather than trying to breed them with a 10% chance of success, and reloading after every failed attempt.
Strange, I just got the Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age the other day and I didn't have the Diamond Armlet equipped. I just kept running back and forth in that area of the Henne Mines until it appeared.
Because Zodiac Age is based the Japan exclusive release that add QoL and changed a lot of mechanics from the original FFXII release
The missable Zodiac Spear issue was from the original release of FF12, they fixed it in Zodiac Age. Of course, the chests that you had to give up didn't have any good loot in them, so once you knew of them you could avoid then easily. I kind of dislike Zodiac Age, cause they broke up the license board. Literally the only thing I dislike about it.
@@kratosgow342 its still really rare though
@@snuggie1849 it's still rare but there's multiple ways to get the spear aside from treasure chests in Zodiac ver there's a lot.of grinding no doubt but still there's alternative way to get it instead of dealing with RNG
It’s only 1% chance of the chest to appear but when it appears, you got the spear guaranteed
Playing through the PS2 version of Final Fantasy 12 back in the day, finding out you gimped yourself out of the Zodiac Spear, was a mind-numbingly baffling design choice.
I loved the Chocobo Raising and Racing side-quest, but I'll admit, it was more fun because I had a guide. Knowing what to do and how to catch the right chocobos is what made that tolerable. I can't imagine attempting it without a guide.
Maybe that's why everyone seems to love Chocobo Hot/Cold from FF9: it's pretty straightforward and you don't need a guide to know how to do it. Meanwhile, I hate it bc there's no way to cheese it and no guide that will help: you just have to take the time and dig and dig and dig.
Oddly enough, I got Cloud on my first play through of FF Tactics. I thought he was available to everyone 😅
16:50 - "And that, as they say, is that."
I understood that reference.
12:00 I managed to get a black chocobo and left it there, stumbled upon it after hundreds of playtime, then later in life i found out about the gold one existing and it pissed me off
Oh God I remember doing Pitioss dungeon in FF15 after Christmas Eve. Took me 6 hours to finish it without guides and by breakfast time I was worn out of frustration. I was with family at a countryside house with no internet and it added another layer of frustration upon learning you can skip it with some easy jumping glitch
Don't forget about acquiring the Materia Blade in FF Tactics, which requires you to use Move-Find Item on a very specific square. Otherwise you can't even use Cloud's abilities.
Thanks for the FFXV Frog Hunting nod at the end of the video. It was next side quest in my mind that could've been on this list.
I would say the FFIX Stellazio coins are missable after the occurrences on Disc 4 which block off access to some of them.
Really feeling old because I can verify that the internet hadn't become a thing when some of these games where out. Which guid would make you go online to get info? During the age of daily up internet. Scary how fast tech has evolved in 20 years.
It's not a side quest in a main Final Fantasy game, but speaking of chocobo breeding, I had to drop Final Fantasy XV: Comrades when I couldn't get a strong enough chocobo to move to a new section of the map. Better chocobo were obtained from harder missions but with a dwindling playerbase, it left you with only NPC's to run missions with (which, kudos at least for providing them. Except...) The NPC's, however, weren't as strong or intelligent as a human player, so you often either finished missions alone or didn't finish them at all. Getting a chocobo that was tough from the start was random, so you had to grind missions to hopefully get a good chocobo, THEN had to feed it various greens to hopefully make it stronger. The info I could find at the time said this was all RNG, with no real strategy to confidently net you a good chocobo.
The chocobo also had to do certain tasks, if I remember correctly, that if done too much, could affect its level due to exhaustion. The damage done wasn't immediately saved, at least, so you could quit the game and retry, but that was a HUGE slog, especially given the load times. I finally just had enough and quit the game, my one and only foray into an MMO (I usually heavily prefer to play solo). I do wonder if Comrades is still online, lol. Given how quickly they packed up shop with FFXV, I'm going to guess no.
how's progress on the History of Square part 4 going? Will it release before Elder Scrolls 6?
The thing about Chcobo breeding was unless you knew about the Materia Caves and The Knights of the Round there was no reason to breed a Gold Chcobo so while the quest is not extremely difficult most people likely missed it due to not knowing about the rewards. I for one was definitely one of those people on my first playthrough. Also since the game was released prior to Social Media most people would not know about it unless they bought a guide or personally knew someone who knew about it.
The only one I found on my own was the Kitchen Knife, Frying Pan, Sylph summon from FFIV. I didn't have a whole lot of SNES games growing up so the ones I did have, I played through several times. I don't think I figured it out on my first playthrough, but somewhere along the way I got through trial and error + being thorough.
Ah I have such fond memories of completely ignoring chocobo breeding in FF7. Even as a kid I knew it wasn't worth my time
The clue is in the title, you weren't meant to figure these out without a guide. Guides were a business and they wanted you to buy them.
I'd actually go with Deep Dungeon for FFT as opposed to the entire secret character line because Goug is a place you should return to to buy guns and unique items jump starting it. Also near the very end of the game you pass through it to visit certain shops.
Once you see it you'll obviously revisit and take reading rumors seriously to figure these things out.
Deep Dungeon on the other hand is a near pitch black dungeon with 1 out of 5 tiles being randomly chosen to let you go down a floor but you have to find it mid fight. You have no way to know this though so you'll likely visit the first floor and leave. The tiles are mostly down near the bottom where the enemies are meaning they move away from said tiles.
You may find it if you are incredibly lucky, but more then anything it will look like a 1 floor dungeon with no way to get to deeper floors.
You make the gold chocobo breeding sound a lot more complicated than it is.
I can do it in under an hour from memory.
Any content you could deep dive into final fantasy one on or would that plot just be a RUclips short?
Final Fantasy was the game that introduced me to RPGs- and needing a guide to acquire things through methods that weren’t obvious.
I honestly thought of the namingway quest line when I saw ff4. Flipping rainbow pudding
that spear sidequest sounds like such a huge troll move by the developers like good grief that is an easy to miss objective. Like removing the item simply for grabbing specific items laying right there for you to grab by punishing you by removing a powerful weapon permanently like that seems like such troll move like good grief. Same with that summon you can get through I think dodging 200 lightning bolts but removing the counter if you need a break through saving and quitting. Like jeez man....thats cruel game design like how is anyone supposed to find out how to unlock the spear with how convoluted the conditions are.
If I recall the master smith in ff3 is definitely annoying as she moves place to place and you need lvl 99 jobs for what she gives you for that job
I think the mog net mail should be on this list since you could mess this up if you don’t know which mail to carry to deliver as well as some places you won’t be able to visit anymore
Pretty much every side quest in 12
Yeah I think DarkKefka broke that down best
To get this rare item you need to sell this item
To get this item you need to beat this boss
To fight this boss you need to beat this hunt
To beat this hunt you need to talk to this NPC
To talk to this NPC you need to beat THIS hunt
@@QuantemDeconstructor Thing is you can do all that (at least all the hunts, getting every item excluding ZS would still require luck) by exploring and exhausting options so doesn't really fit this video. There's also another side quest in 12 though with the viera in Rabanastre at the stairs which everyone will screw up without a guide, but the reward doesn't matter late game.
My favorite thing is getting the rainbow pudding in the FF4 DS version. It's so rare that I never ever gotten it.
I love how the Cloud side quest in FFT allowed the player to acquire a handful of powerful characters... and Cloud wasn't one of them lmao. Every time I play FFT I unlock Cloud and then promptly never use him again.
Hard disagree on 9 and 4's stuff. I actually completed the Knife quest without a guide, so you're wrong on that, and 9 is annoying, but due to how the game works, you are sticking your nose in every nook and cranny anyways, so its certainly viable to find all the stones on their own.
For 9, a better choice would be the side-quest to unlock melee attacks vs. Ozma, because you'd have to run into the various friendly monsters, know that they're in forests around the world, have the proper materials to feed to them (moonstones are rare, could lock yourself out there), and you have basically no hints in-game to help you on this. Or, Excalibur 2, since without outside knowledge you woon't know about it until you get to Memoria to find the note, then you'd have to realize you have to speedrun the game (which almost no one would pick up on), and even then, in OG 9, it was so precise to speedrun that you had to cancel FMVs to get the time to do so. That's much more unreasonable than a side-quest which is basically interact with everything.
For 4, the Pink Tail would be a better choice, mostly because of how rare the drop is, so you wouldn't go after it unless you knew it existed, then having to take it back to the Smith in order to make the rare armor. The Yang stuff, as explained by others, is extremely intuitive if you're just playing the game normally and exploring and trying new things out. The secret summons, like Bomb, are probably worse as well, just because you wouldn't think to grind certain enemies for rare drops to learn mediocre summons, which is not how any other summons are learned.
Choco racing was fun on 7, final fantasy 10 and the Choco wobble race where you have to get 0.00 time is the most infuriating chocobo mini game known to man..
The chocobo breading really got me when I was a kid. Oh boy
I remember getting the gold chocobo. That was a proud moment.
Getting cloud in FFT was one of my favorite things to do in ff.. Even though hes lvl 1 its very easy to lvl him since everything u fight is scaled to your original parties lvl so he lvl's quickly u just need a passive move from a squire to make sure he does something every turn he gets.
The Fafnir hunt in FFXII, you need to wait for a specific weather condition to occur and then follow a very specific path to make sure you end up on the correct side of the area it will spawn in and if the weather changes too bad try again.
Maybe I am mistaken, but I believe the Zodiac Spear mess was the result of them selling the secret exclusively to Brady Games to be in a player's guide, meaning you needed to have the guide (or know someone who did or shared it online) to know about it. It was deliberately not revealed in game what you had to do to offer an exclusive secret to sell.
That's just how many of the FF games were. Cryptic unexplained secrets that you will never find without a guide
Thanks for the upload!