Guide Dang It/Final Fantasy

Guide Dang Its for the mind-bendingly popular Final Fantasy series. Hold on, it's going to be a long ride.
 * Final Fantasy I's NES version almost manages to be this in its entirety. While the game's manual helpfully lists the effects of all spells and equipment (probably due to limitations in the game's text display as everything is truncated and comes with no further information than odd names like LOK2, XFER, Masmune and ProCape) if you got the game without the manual you wouldn't have any of this, and all those vaguely named items and spells may well have had you checking a guide. Similarly, the manual also contains a walkthrough of about half the game, probably circumventing the sloppy translation that otherwise makes certain early goals too vague. Again, no manual? Hope you had that one guide by Nintendo Power to tell you to go to the Marsh Cave and get the Crown and take the Crown to the Dark Elf in the Western Castle and so on because that NPC dialogue might not be so helpful! Thankfully everything was much clearer when Final Fantasy Origins and the many, many subsequent remakes came out with a better translation and interface, making everything coherent so the player could figure it out on their own.
 * Of course, if you lived in Europe and the Origins re-release was the first version you officially played, none of that was an issue. And they used to say PAL gamers always got screwed...
 * In the recent Final Fantasy III remake for the Nintendo DS, the only way to unlock the Onion Knight class in the game is to use the game's letter sending system to send a certain number of letters to another player over wifi. Not only is this never mentioned in the game, Square Enix seems not to have realized it might not even be possible for some people. Don't have easy access to a wifi hotspot? Don't have any friends who also have this game? TOO BAD.
 * The obvious solution is to shell out another $200 for a second DS and copy of Final Fantasy III.
 * The cheaper solution is to shell out thirty bucks or so for an Action Replay cheat device to hack the game into thinking you sent the letters.
 * The iphone version thankfully (and oddly, since it could have been recreated with Open Feint or something) removes the "mail your friends" requirement and simply allows you to get the mognet mails and sidequests by advancing the game and Talking to key NPCs.
 * In the DS release of Final Fantasy IV has, among other things, an "Augment" system wherein you can teach characters certain helpful abilities. These items are one-of-a-kind, and said character will know them permanently. The catch is, if you teach Augments to temporary party members, you are rewarded with more (better) Augments. This little fact is nowhere to be found in the manual, or in-game. What fun.
 * Final Fantasy IV: The After Years provides the player with a way to avoid the Player Punch where, requiring them to get three items, left completely unmentioned by the game. One of the items is in an obvious jar the player is unlikely to miss. Fair enough. The other two, however? Random drops from a monster that only appears in one out-of-the-way room during one specific lunar cycle (which is the worst lunar cycle for a party with a black mage and no white mages, as the chapter in question is), and the drop rate is absolutely inexcusably low in this game. And you need two different items from this. Yet any player who knows about this will do it, because
 * You can also save Golbez during his Taking the Bullet Heroic Sacrifice for Cecil. Of course, you have to have a very specific party.
 * Final Fantasy VI has a "Cursed Shield" that inflicts nearly every status ailment in the game on the wearer. But if they survive 256 battles wearing the shield, it becomes uncursed and is now the best shield in the game
 * You can also bet the shield at the Colosseum for a "Cursed Ring". Despite what logic tells you, the ring doesn't uncurse, and is plain useless (except for teaching a spell, but it's not even the only thing that does that.)
 * Speaking of the Colosseum, that's another Guide Dang It! The betting list is a total mystery, you have no idea what you can win by betting what. A lot of rare items can be won here, but they in turn require long chains of complex betting no one could figure out alone.
 * Finding the Ancient Castle, since it is found in an underground cave, and when the player can get to the castle they have their Airship and don't need to enter the cave. The castle contains a second Guide Dang It in the form of an invisible switch in the floor that opens a secret passage.
 * The game does mention both facts though. The location of the Ancient Castle can be learned by paying a thief near the Fanatic's Tower 100,000 gil. The location of the invisible switch can be learned by talking to a character in the library of Figaro Castle, but only after you have already been in the Ancient Castle. How likely you're going to find that out?
 * Finding Gogo requires the player to let an enemy monster kill their party members one by one on Triangle Island in the World of Ruin so they can find him inside its stomach. In the World of Balance, this same location was home to the Nigh Invulnerable Boss in Mook Clothing Intangir, and nothing else.
 * Getting to be able to join your party in the second half of the game requires you- in a major dungeon around the midpoint- to intentionally stand around while a timer ticks down towards an instant game over, with escape literally a step away, in order to give him time to catch up, which he only manages to do with 5 seconds left on the clock. To be fair, the game does give you one hint about this... if, upon reaching the exit, you choose not to escape to safety, then immediately try again, you will get the option "Gotta wait for ...".
 * Gau's "Rage" skill. How it works (which is explained by the game, although not very well), what the best rages are, what each rage will do...very little is immediately obvious. Experimentation and frequent visits to the Veldt will turn Gau into a Disc One Nuke machine.
 * Want to save ? Feed him fish. Not just any fish, mind you, you have to give him the fast-moving fish, otherwise he'll just get sicker. Granted, the game does hint at this; inspecting a regular fish in the menu gets the caption 'Just a fish', while a fast fish is 'A yummy fish', but what first-time player is going to be doing that? So you just fed him whatever fish you could get? Oops, you just killed off a poor, sick old man who'd done you nothing but good. I hope you're proud.
 * Later on, after acquiring the Airship, you probably have no reason to return to that old island. Would you guess that a very useful Esper washes ashore later on?
 * The skill "Chocobuckle" in Final Fantasy VII. To get Hundred-Percent Completion of enemy skills, you needed to feed a wild Chocobo a particular green and then reduce it to 1 hit point. This was typically done using the Useless Useful Spell L4 Suicide. Needless to say there was no way to guess this in game, while the occasional player got it by pure chance and puzzled everyone else.
 * Tifa's ultimate weapon is hidden in Midgar, and the only way to get to the area where you find it is by using a key you find buried in another location halfway around the world. There is a hint in finding a key from an NPC outside Midgar gates. Cait Sith's ultimate weapon is hidden atop the Shinra Tower when the player revisits Midgar near the end of the game, requiring them to climb back up 60+ stories and inspect a random locker.
 * To be fair, the game gives a subtle hint - during the first visit to the tower, inspecting the same locker will prompt a message about finding a megaphone, which is the type of weapon Cait Sith uses. But how is any player going to remember that?
 * Most likely a second playthrough. "What is this, a megaphone?" will immediately ring alarm bells in the head of any player who, thanks to having played through the game once already, knows who Cait Sith is. Given that they will also remember that they're coming back some day...
 * To last any longer than 20 minutes against Emerald WEAPON, you need the Underwater Materia. But to get the Materia in the first place, you need to trade a specific item to a specific NPC. This item must be Morphed off an enemy that is in a location that you're not very likely to revisit(Underwater Reactor/Sub Dock), as well, said enemy has a habit of removing characters from battle like the Midgar Zolom. And, of course, said NPC is in the early game, long after he tells you he is looking for rare items. Then the second Guide Dang It comes when you actually fight it, and it deals 9999 damage for you having too many Materia equipped.
 * Obtaining Aerith's final limit move is extremely time consuming, and damn near impossible without a guide, as you first have to find a man living in a cave, who can only be gotten to if you have the buggy, or any vehicle/chocobo capable of crossing shallow rivers. The problem is that the game doesn't tell you that you can just drive the buggy into Costa Del Sol to use it on the other continent, and the man's cave is exceptionally well hidden. When you speak to him, he merely tells you how many times you've ran from battle. This seems extremely useless, but interesting, unless you know that if the last two digits of this number are the same (IE 44, 133, or 11), then he will give you an item. This is never hinted to in game. Sometimes he just gives you a bolt ring, and sometimes he gives you a piece of Mythril. You then have to take this piece of mythril to a weapon maker near Gongaga, and redeem it to get one of two items. One of these two items is Aerith's final limit, and the other is a piece of armor. This can only be done once, and the game gives no hint as to which one it is. Oh, and hope you manage to do this on the first disc only, since.
 * Even the guide doesn't tell you about the buggy trick, which is about the only way to get it.
 * Chocobo breeding, and by extension, getting the Knights of the Round materia, which requires a Gold Chocobo do get to. In order to get a Gold Chocobo, you have to catch certain chocobo found in extremely specific areas, and breed them together. The game offers absolutely no hint on which of these chocobo you are supposed to catch, from where, and which ones are supposed to breed with which.
 * It does, actually, give pretty much the entire list of steps, if you feel like wading through the finicky memory of an old man NPC who's hidden away and has a bit of Engrish in his dialogue. He only gives bits and pieces of the process at any one time, though.
 * It is unlikely to encounter all the Turtle's Paradise flyers, especially on a first run through the game, and especially considering one is very well hidden on the ground floor of the Shinra tower (it's one of two signs on the same billboard, which the player will likely then ignore if they read the wrong one first) and as such is quite easy to lose forever. The sixth and final flyer also becomes permanently inaccessible if the player never visits the location they're supposed to find it in before disc 3, though it's far less likely the player will miss that on the first run... no, they'll probably miss it on subsequent runs instead.
 * Getting the PuPu card in Final Fantasy VIII. Hints about some parts of the process are given in the game, but not all of it, and these hints are fairly obscure themselves. The player has to fight random battles at several small, nondescript, arbitrary patches of the world map in order to see a UFO each time. They then have to go to another arbitrary, unexceptional, and inaccessible area of land in order to encounter PuPu. Once they've done so they have to feed him five of a certain item. The only way to have five of this item is to have synthesized them ahead of time, by using another fairly obscure game mechanic. If the party misses the chance to feed PuPu five of the item, or they kill him, the card is Lost Forever.
 * You can use the Card skill on him, but that would require knowing ahead of time that the point of the sidequest is to obtain his card.
 * All of the enemies in the game have incredibly rare items to drop and steal needed for weapon refinement, but the enemy drops and steals change depending on the level of the enemy, making discovering what drops what by trial and error next to impossible.
 * In a Laguna flashback on Disk 1, the player can fiddle with explosives, find and lose a rusty key, and fiddle with some hatches. On Disk 3, if the player did all of the above correctly, three doors will appear in a particular dungeon, otherwise they'll be closed and the valuable items behind them are Lost Forever.
 * Many of the Guardian Forces are very difficult to find, and a good number of them can easily be Lost Forever. Most notable is the Tonberry GF, which can only be obtained by killing the Tonberry King, who will only appear if you kill about 20 Tonberries in a row. There is absolutely no clue about this anywhere in the game.
 * And good luck getting Doom Train, which requires gathering six each of three different items. There are hints to getting him available, in the form of occult magazines, but not only are they so vague to the point of being nearly useless, but you'll need a guide to find them as well!
 * Receiving the most powerful weapon in Final Fantasy IX, the Excalibur 2, requires that one must complete the game within the very difficult time limit of 12 hours. Not only is this information not given to the player at any point in the game, but the location of the weapon is just as difficult to find. What's worse, once the time limit has been reached, the weapon is Lost Forever. The guide also doesn't tell you that there is a technique that allows you to skip the cutscenes completely, which certainly makes the time limit easier to cope with. (In fairness, the makers of the guide may not have realised this.)
 * Hell, getting the first Excalibur is no picnic either. There's nothing at all that even hints at how you're supposed to find the MacGuffin a certain NPC wants (you have to buy four other MacGuffins and then sell them around town for it to even appear), and then you have to bid a king's ransom at the Auction House to buy it. Not only not fun, but it's not even his best sword! (That would be, not counting the above mentioned Excalibur 2, the sword Ragnarok, though Excalibur is the only sword that can teach Steiner one of his most powerful skills...except the one Ragnarok teaches is even more powerful. Go figure.)
 * The most absolutely frustrating thing in Final Fantasy IX, though, is that you're never told at any time what items you need to synthesize the very best weapons and armor in Disks 3 and 4. On your first playthrough, be prepared to pull out some of your hair in frustration as you realize that, in order to forge the Grand Armor, you needed to keep those Mythril Swords and suits of Mythril Armor you got all the way back in Disk 2. Oh, and the Mythril Swords become Lost Forevers after you leave Treno for the first time. That's just one example, mind you...
 * Theoretically speaking, one could go to Esto Gaza before the plot demands it and buy their lion's share then. However, the above still applies, as many don't really think about Esto Gaza during that time.
 * The Synthesis system in general will turn you into a hoarder with your items. Usually, most players will sell old equipment that they no longer use, only to kick themselves when they see that a powerful item to create needs some old items that you used to have and most likely can't get another one. Players who are playing the game more than once (or looked up an FAQ online) can avoid this trope, but many first time players were not pleased to discover that it is better to save your old stuff so you can use them later to create better items.
 * There's one scene in which you can perform a certain action, and it does nothing. You have to do it thirteen times in succession to reveal one of the secret items. Needless to say, there are no hints for this.
 * In Final Fantasy X, players can input one-word destination passwords in the Global Airship that lead to hidden locations that each contain a treasure chest, one of which houses Rikku's Infinity+1 Sword. While perhaps not technically a Guide Dang It, virtually all players learned of these passwords via a guide, as the method for discovering the passwords the normal way is so incredibly obscure that most players don't even know it exists (it involves deciphering deeply-hidden, nonsensical messages left throughout the game world).
 * Finding the all 26 Al Bhed Primers without a guide is nigh impossible. About half of them is easy to find or get from NPCs, but the other half is either lost forever in a location you can't go back to, blend into the scenery so well your only hope finding them is smashing the 'X' button while you walk or hidden in an optional location you can only find if you, again, keep hitting the 'X' on the airship map in hopes of finding something, without any in-game hint to ITS existence.
 * Also the ultimate weapons and the ridiculous hoops we had to jump through. The biggest example would probably be having to dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row. There is no in-game hint about how many you have to dodge, or even that there will be a reward; without a guide, many players would probably stop around 50-60 and assume the item they were given was the final prize. The Chocobo race also deserves a mention.
 * The Chocobo race definitely deserves mentioning. You are required to finish with a time under 0:0:0. No sane gamer alive could reach such a conclusion without a guide.
 * And to make things even worse, even if you KNOW you have to finish with such a low time, the random factor of the items that lower your time and the utterly ATROCIOUS controls means no sane gamer would persist in trying to GET it.
 * Getting the Celestial Mirror to unlock some of those ultimate weapons is, itself, pretty silly. First you have to win a chocobo race at Remiem Temple. Once you've managed that, you have to take the Cloudy Mirror to the Macalania Woods and reunite a man with his wife and child. When you do so, if you talk to the man twice, he'll ask you to find his kid, who has wandered off. If you go up a path that you may not instantly realise is even a path rather than awesome scenery, which looks like it's a beam of light and thus something you wouldn't immediately suspect you could walk on, and which isn't visible on the minimap, and then go up a fork that was until that moment Drone Jammed. Now, bear in mind, this item has no use at all except as a key to boxes containing ultimate weapons.
 * Valefor's second Overdrive, Energy Ray. Did you know it exists? If you haven't either read a guide or encountered Dark Valefor, you probably didn't. As for actually getting it, if you didn't talk to a dog in Besaid before you left, you won't have a chance to get it until you can throw down successfully with Dark Valefor. Bear in mind that the Dark Aeons are only exempt from being a collection of That One Bosses on a technicality.
 * To get Hundred-Percent Completion in Final Fantasy X 2 one has to take a detour from chasing a villain in order to talk to someone hidden in a Moogle costume, early in the game. The game is riddled with one-time, easily missable scenes like this, and despite the fact you get fully healed from touching a save point, you have to use the bed in the airship at least once a chapter. And that isn't even the worst part. The game allows you to skip cutscenes, but what it doesn't tell you is that skipped cutscenes doesn't count towards the Hundred-Percent Completion.
 * There's one bit even worse than that. At one point you can have a long sit down for a Maechen Period from the original Maechen himself. Periodically, you'll get a text box where you can either interrupt him to leave, or urge him to continue his story. But what you're supposed to do for this to count toward completion is NEITHER, and let him just keep rambling without you pressing a single button on your controller. If Maechen wasn't voiced by Dwight Schultz, this would be nearly as tedious and unbearable as the legendary hot-springs webcam sequence.
 * Speaking of, the Comm Sphere sequences in Chapter 4 itself. Unless a guide is right by your side, you'd never know that a few scenes only appear after looking through the camera for a while, after other scenes that have nothing going on, and the whole Mi'ihen Highroad clusterfuck, of which, a number of potential targets don't give any completion points upon the reveal.
 * And if you want a Unique Sphere, you can't get Episode Complete if you do want to see Auron again and what the hell is up with Gippal. I'm starting to expect this game WANTS to make you unable to get 100% or even Episode Complete in any feasible way without buying it's specially endorsed guides....
 * And let's not forget that to get the best ending, you have to wait until Yuna says "I'm all alone..." then press X to hear a whistle. Then after that, you just keep pressing X until she runs out of the Farplane. The second part is much worse, as you need to press X at a specific point during what is essentially the last cutscene of the game, in order to get the Perfect Ending.
 * And how, when at that point of the game, the Youth League and New Yevon are portrayed as being both basically good except for their conflict with each other,
 * Likely just an accident. Complete % carry over in a new playthrough, so it's likely that players were only intended to get 100% after playing once with each route. Also, % from all scenes add up to more than 100%, so you can afford to miss one or two and still get 100%, if you play both routes. The Youth league route giving 100% in one playthrough if you get absolutely every single possible scene (really annoying to keep track of, since some give less than 1%) might be a mistake. But it's absolutely impossible without a guide, and still damn hard with one.
 * Final Fantasy XI is probably the king of this trope in MMORPGs, if only for the fact that noone knew how to make Goblin Drinks, which pop a Notorious Monster for a very useful Paladin and Dark Knight gorget, until the developers told them about it, and there's an endgame NM that no one knows how to beat even though Square Enix has started dropping hints about it. Add quests where you are not really told what exactly you are doing and can't find out from NPCs, and the fact that the in-game reminder text for quests is vague and doesn't update with gathered information -- even if you don't know the point of the quest until step three or so -- and you can see it gets kinda stupid. Thank god for around 500,000 people playing, or we'd probably never figure a lot of stuff out.
 * Let's not even get into the stuff that would be way too obtuse to find if the game files weren't so heavily picked apart for information...
 * For example, to obtain the useful unique armor for the Scholar class, you are told to find some random object. The name at best suggests a single zone to look in. Now, amongst the items you need to get, one only appears during certain weather, transporting between many spots in the zone each time it rains. Another only appears at certain times of the day. In addition, these objects (And the vast majority of quest items not dropped from monsters), do not actually appear on the map. Rather you must mash the tab button until a blank point on the ground gets highlighted (Labeled as ???, just in case you might have thought to write down what you found and where you found it for later). Even with guides telling you where and when to look, it can still take hours.
 * And yet we still haven't talked about the gardening yet. It sounds easy: buy a flower pot and get some seeds, then put the pot in your Mog House and plant the seeds. What they don't tell you is that the seeds will not only have different yields, but also give you different crops depending on: what day of the week you planted them on, what elemental energy is flowing in your house, what crystal, if any, you feed the plant when you have the option to, how long you leave it planted, how many times you examined it per day when it was growing, and the phases of the in-game moon. Squenix apparently loves having you figure crap out by yourself because time it takes you to figure it out means more subscription money for them. Those magnificent bastards...
 * Crafting. Just... Crafting. While yes, the NPCs in the guilds flat out tell you SOME recipes for random items, they don't tell you all of them. Especially, ya know... The useful ones.
 * In Final Fantasy XII, obtaining the Zodiac Spear requires not opening four specific unmarked chests which are not mentioned anywhere in the game. This would be a prime example. Granted, if you got greedy and opened the "unlucky" chests, there is another chest that can cough it up, roughly .1% of the time (that is to say, 1/1000 chance)... but the said existence of that chest is in and of itself an example of Guide Dang It.
 * There is also the case of the Bazaar system, by which selling loot is the only way to unlock some of the high end items. The loot items needed for these are not only very difficult to acquire, but are also used to unlock other, more easily unlocked, items. And once an item of loot has unlocked one item for sale, it must be acquired all over again and sold once more.
 * Don't forget that if you want to get all eighty rare game, you have to either be the luckiest gamer in the world or have a guide by your side. Many of these monsters just have a high-percentage random chance to show up, but many more have an inexplicable list of criteria that need to be filled before they might rear their ugly heads. Some appear for only a ten-minute window once an hour. Some require you to chain-kill a certain number of a certain kind of monster. Some have time limits on top of this criteria. Some require you not to kill any monsters at all. Some appear in tiny, tiny areas, again, randomly. Some have chances of appearance at just 5%. Some only appear if you sit around doing nothing for five minutes or more. Sure, the average gamer stumbles across at least a few of them by accident across the game, but all eighty? Forget it.
 * The game also riddles players with the Limit Break of the Espers. While a good portion of the creatures will use their last attack when time is about to expire, low on HP, or the summoner has low HP. However, some of the other Espers will never use their final attack unless certain conditions are met, such as casting Immobilize on the Esper, having the summoner AND the Esper with low HP, or casting Petrify on the Esper! There is NOTHING in the game that hints at these conditions.
 * It's a good thing (well, not for us) that the Updated Rerelease made them controllable. Not sure why they weren't to begin with.
 * Final Fantasy XIII: Destrucdo, how is anyone supposed to know that you have to do 12000 damage to the boss before he uses it?
 * Also, for the ingredient needed to create Rank 3 weapons (basically the Infinity+1 Sword) you either have to buy it for 2,000,000 gil for all 6 characters (you'll most likely never gather 12 million gil) or getting it as a 1% random drop from one of the strongest random enemies (which will decimate even a high leveled party really quickly). And there is no way finding it otherwise.
 * The Upgrade system in general is this. While the basic premise is simple enough, good luck not wasting your hard-earned gil. Not enough XP? You just lost your bonus multiplier. Too much XP? Oh well, nice job wasting those components.
 * Final Fantasy XIII-2: One word - fragments. Collecting all 160 requires several Guide Dang Its in itself:
 * Completing all Brain Blast and Captain Cryptic quizzes in Academia 4XX AF. Several Brain Blast questions either have no hints in-game to their answer, or are based on pure luck (heads or tails?). Captain Crypic's questions are worse - and first, you have to find him. He can be found in 11 different locations across town... and he's invisible.
 * Completing the bestiary will get you one fragment. Probably 90% of the monsters will be encountered as you play the game, level up, and go after the rest of the fragments, but some are either incredibly rare or require certain options to be taken along the story (for example, choosing anything but 'Scream at Hope' will cause you to fight a different version of the Proto fal'Cie Adam, in Augusta Tower).
 * The paradox endings themselves require locking a gate and playing through a given section of the story again, either fighting monsters you couldn't beat before, or choosing different dialogue options again.
 * Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is no exception, either. Finding a way to get through the barrier to the final level is only hinted at in a few of the numerous random encounters.
 * Let's just say the entire plot counts. Want to see the complete stories of De Nam, figure out what to do with the letter from Tida, or unlock the complete stories of the caravans? Want to get all the hints to finding the ? Want to learn about the miasma and the crystals from the   which are never actually mentioned in-game? Want to kill the Lich? Want to enjoy the incredibly rich and vast lore the game has to offer? Better shell out the cash for that guide, sucker!
 * If you chose blacksmith as your family's job background, you won't be able to get some of the best weapons or items in the game unless you actually create more players with different family jobs. While you don't have to switch players, you're clueless until you look online for help.
 * Also, Final Boss in his final form,  While it can be possible to beat him without those items, it can be harder and
 * Lets not forget the very long side-quest that ends in you getting.
 * Blue Magic in general can sometimes feel like this. Some of these spells are ludicrously powerful, reaching almost gamebreaker status, but these are invariably extremely rare, or even one of a kind. Didn't bring your Blue Mage along to fight the boss that has it? TOO BAD.
 * Final Fantasy VII has some of this with its Relationship Values. It was calculated by how many times you chose to speak to the other characters, and when forced to speak, what answers you gave. Avoiding as many conversations as possible with the female characters (including optional Yuffie) left you with Barret...for the one scene in the entire game that this affected. Completely pointless but for some dialog.
 * In Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Minerva is MADE of this. This Bonus Boss requires you to look up guides every step of the way. Locating the best armor in the game will require this, in addition to learning how to craft the best fusion materia in the game that is mandatory to surviving more than 10 seconds in her presence. Did we forget to mention she spams One-Hit Kill Ultima spells that leave you barely alive even if you block it while wearing said best gear and materia in the game? You'll need a guide to BEATING her too. Also, her Limit Break Judgment Arrow disables Phoenix Downs. Thankfully, you can Mug her for 99 of them.