History GuideDangIt / FinalFantasy

* Once you beat the first boss and get your first set of jobs, the Freelancer becomes utterly useless, right? Think again. Who'd have guessed that for each job you master, it powers up your Freelancer? Any innate support abilities of a mastered job are automatically attributed to the Freelancer (such as the Monk's Barehanded, the Thief's Vigilance, or the Ninja's Dual Wielding), and it will raise the default stats connected to it (like Monk's maximum HP, Black Mage's maximum MP, etc.). Master the right jobs and you gain a major advantage especially for the final dungeon and boss.

** The ATB Refresh technique is not mentioned anywhere in the game. If you switch paradigms 12 seconds or more after a previous switching, the ATB gauge to fill up immediately. This also goes unmentioned in XIII-2.

* The boss fight against Wrexsoul is a PuzzleBoss in a game that generally doesn't have them. At the beginning of the fight, Wrexsoul will vanish and give a cryptic hint about possession, leaving behind two Soul Saver enemies that will infinitely resurrect themselves when you kill them. There are two ways to win the fight. The proper way is to attack and kill off your own party members, one at a time, until the one Wrexsoul posseses dies and he is forced to reappear, giving you a chance to damage him until he disappears again. The other way is to use the Banish spell (called X-Zone in the SNES translation), which has a chance to instantly kill both Soul Savers and end the fight prematurely; the game does count this as a victory, but you don't get the item drop that you're supposed to get from killing Wrexsoul. And given that this item is a Memento Ring (which renders OneHitKill attacks useless against its wearer), you'll probably feel not having that item when you do Kefka's Tower.

** Reflect??? only works if there are any party members with active Reflect on them at the time, inflicting the Silence, Blind and Slow status on them. For extra infuriation, it's only used by two enemies in TheVeryDefinitelyFinalDungeon, long past any point where it would have been useful.

* Getting Shadow to join your party in the second half of the game requires you to do things that are never explained, defy common sense, and [[PermanentlyMissableContent give you only one shot to do it per save file]]. [[spoiler:After the Floating Continent is complete, you have to [[TimedMission intentionally stand around while a timer ticks down towards an instant game over]], on the spot where escape is literally a step away. If you do, Shadow emerges with five seconds to spare, JustInTime to catch up. It's a ViolationOfCommonSense as to why you would stand around and wait to jump unless you knew about Shadow arriving beforehand. There is a hint, but you don't get it until ''after'' you've refused to jump a few times - "Wait" becomes "Wait for Shadow". And if you jump before Shadow catches up, [[KilledOffForReal he's gone for good]]. And even if you manage to get Shadow into the World of Ruin alive, you then have to ''recruit'' him, which is itself rather difficult. Finding him is easy enough, since he's in the Cave in the Veldt. But he turns up wounded, stops in Thamasa to rest, and then disappears again. You have to find a specific item in the same cave you find him in, fly to the Coliseum, and bet said item. Win the fight, and he will join you. The only hints you're given about any of this are talking to random [=NPCs=].]] Simply put, the method to get Shadow to rejoin you for the final time is so obtuse, it's no wonder that many people missed it on their first playthrough.

* Lore (this game's form of Blue Magic) is once again a pain in the ass to handle. It at least has a significantly lower restriction -- Strago only needs to see the spell being performed in battle, not have it affect him personally. That said, Strago has less than stellar equipment options and stats. At least the UsefulNotes/PlayStation version has a !Lore tag for the enemies which have an ability you can learn, but later releases inexplicably removed this.

* Getting Quistis's final blue magic, Shockwave Pulsar. To obtain it; you have to refine 100 Curse Spikes into one Dark Matter. Sounds simple; but you may notice that Siren won't refine it. The sucker punch is that Siren herself has to be level 100 to be able to refine Dark Matters. The in-game tutorial only mentions turning the Curse Spikes into a Dark Matter, and mentions nowhere anything about a level stipulation; doubly so when no other GF in the game is asked to meet the same requirement. Mercifully, the level restriction is lifted in all rereleases the game had after the original UsefulNotes/PlayStation one.

* A way to allay the above problem: in the PSP and iOS port, these characters (along with the main cast) also have special weapons that can only be obtained by going through the game's ''other'' BonusDungeon - which is itself divided into four sub-dungeons scattered across the northern part of the world map. While doing this is certainly feasible, several characters are only available for brief periods for you to give them their weapons, to the point that traversing the dungeon will probably take up more time than they're actually with you. And this also requires you to try to make your way through the BonusDungeon and fight a BonusBoss, ''very'' early in the game. While this isn't anywhere near as difficult as it sounds (the game scales the boss's stats to your progress), it's not something anyone wise to the genre would do.

* In ''VideoGame/CrisisCore: VideoGame/FinalFantasyVII'', the BonusBoss Minerva 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 OneHitKill 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 LimitBreak, Judgment Arrow, disables Phoenix Downs. Thankfully, you can Mug her for 99 of them.

%% ** There's an [[BonusBoss endgame Notorious Monster]] that no one knows how to beat, even though Creator/SquareEnix ''has'' started dropping hints about it.

** The quest "Last One Standing". If you thought killing all of the Last Ones would be time consuming but doable, you're in for a treat. Namely, it ''can't'' be completed on a first playthrough; three of the Last Ones you need to defeat are in the final dungeon, which is past the PointOfNoReturn. So it can only be turned in on any NewGamePlus playthroughs. And even on a first playthrough, if you drive every possible species to extinction - including Aeronite, one of the game's two [[BonusBoss superbosses]] - you'll still have to dive into the [[BonusDungeon Ultimate Lair]] for the remaining two pre-final dungeon Last Ones: Meonekton (who have an extinction number of ''[[UsefulNotes/PowersOfTwoMinusOne 65,535]]''), and Ereshkigal, the other superboss.

* The 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=][[note]]Focara[[/note]], [=XFER=][[note]]Dispel[[/note]], Masmune and [=ProCape=][[note]]Protect Cape[[/note]]), if you got the game without the manual you wouldn't have any of this. 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 made clearer when Final Fantasy Origins and the many, many subsequent remakes came out with a better translation and interface, making it so the player could figure it out on their own.

* 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, [[RandomlyDrops roughly .1% of the time]] (that is to say, 1/1000 chance)... but the existence of ''that'' chest is in and of itself an example of Guide Dang It.

* The LimitBreak of the espers. 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 itself. There is ''nothing'' in the game that hints at these conditions. It's a good thing then that the UpdatedRerelease made them controllable. [[note]]This happened for two reasons when making the original. 1) They were afraid the graphics would suffer, as without the time to work the camera to accommodate their presence, it could result in glitches. 2) They would've had to walk them through every single map for debugging purposes, and as mentioned, there was a general lack of time to do in regards to the espers.[[/note]]

** Completing all [[PopQuiz 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 Cryptic's questions are worse - and first, you have to find him. He can be found in 11 different locations across town... and he's virtually invisible, requiring Mog's help.

* Getting Shadow to join your party in the second half of the game requires you to do things that are never explained, defy common sense, and [[PermanentlyMissableContent give you only one shot to do it per save file]]. [[spoiler:After the Floating Continent is complete, you have to [[TimedMission intentionally stand around while a timer ticks down towards an instant game over]], on the spot where escape is literally a step away. If you do, Shadow emerges with five seconds to spare, JustInTime to catch up. It's a ViolationOfCommonSense as to why you would stand around and wait to jump unless you knew about Shadow arriving beforehand. And if you jump before Shadow catches up, [[KilledOffForReal he's gone for good]]. And even if you manage to get Shadow into the World of Ruin alive, you then have to ''recruit'' him, which is itself rather difficult. Finding him is easy enough, since he's in the Cave in the Veldt. But he turns up wounded, stops in Thamasa to rest, and then disappears again. You have to find a specific item in the same cave you find him in, fly to the Coliseum, and bet said item. Win the fight, and he will join you. The only hints you're given about any of this are talking to random [=NPCs=].]] Simply put, the method to get Shadow to rejoin you for the final time is so obtuse, it's no wonder that many people missed it on their first playthrough.

* The boss fight against Wrexsoul is a PuzzleBoss in a game that generally doesn't have them. At the beginning of the fight, Wrexsoul will vanish and give a cryptic hint about possession, leaving behind two Soul Saver enemies that will infinitely resurrect themselves when you kill them. There are two ways to win the fight. The proper way is to attack and kill off your own party members, one at a time, until the one Wrexsoul posseses dies and he is forced to reappear, giving you a chance to damage him until he disappears again. The other way is to use the Banish spell (called X-Zone in the SNES translation), which has a chance to instantly kill both Soul Savers and end the fight prematurely; the game does count this as a victory, but you don't get the item drop that you're supposed to get from killing Wrexsoul.

* 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. Once an item of loot has unlocked one item for sale, it must be acquired all over again and sold once more.

** [[CombinationAttack Bands]]. More specifically, searching for them. Some of them are unlocked with plot, others you can unlock anytime if you have required characters and input correct commands. Most of them make sense (friends/relatives usually get some), but then there are ''those'' ones that don't make any sense. After all, how could you expect [[spoiler: [[BareFistedMonk Yang]] and [[HighlyVisibleNinja Gekkou]]]] to actually have a Band, even though they didn't even as much as ''talk'' to each other? But the worst of them all is Call Me Queen. To perform it, you need to have four specific (female) party members. The catch? They all need to be equipped with whips. And one of them ([[spoiler: Leonora]]) can equip literally ONE whip in the whole game - the one that could only be bought way back in the chapter where she first appears, meaning, at the point where you can try to perform this Band it's already [[PermanentlyMissableContent gone for good]]. You probably wouldn't even know it's there, because the shop that sells the whip in question can only be accessed [[CashGate by paying 50000 gil to get to an "exclusive" area of the chapter]].

** [[CombinationAttack Bands]]. More specifically, searching for them. Some of them are unlocked with plot, others you can unlock anytime if you have required characters and input correct commands. Most of them make sense (friends/relatives usually get some), but then there are ''those'' ones that don't make any sense. After all, how could you expect [[spoiler: [[BareFistedMonk Yang]] and [[HighlyVisibleNinja Gekkou]]]] to actually have a Band, even though they didn't even as much as ''talk'' to each other? But the worst of them all is Call Me Queen. To perform it, you need to have four specific (female) party members. The catch? They all need to be equipped with [[WhipItGood whips]]. And one of them ([[spoiler: Leonora]]) can equip literally ONE whip in the whole game - the one that could only be bought way back in the chapter where she first appears, meaning, at the point where you can try to perform this Band it's already [[PermanentlyMissableContent gone for good]]. You probably wouldn't even know it's there, because the shop that sells the whip in question can only be accessed [[CashGate by paying 50000 gil to get to an "exclusive" area of the chapter]].

** The ATB Refresh technique is not mentioned anywhere in the game. If you switch paradigms 12 seconds or more after a previous switching, the ATB gauge to fill up immediately. This also goes unmentioned in in XIII-2.

* Speaking of the Colosseum, 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 that no one could figure out alone. Did you know that betting the Impartisan spear can lead to a ChainOfDeals to get the Miracle Shoes, the best accessory in the game? Not without looking at a guide, you didn't.
* 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 Gogo inside its stomach. In the World of Balance, this same location was home to the NighInvulnerable BossInMookClothing Intangir, and nothing else.

* Want to learn the Quick spell, which lets you take two free turns? You'll need to find the Odin magicite by going to Figaro Castle and telling it to go underneath the sand (which you'd have no reason to do anymore, since you've got the second GlobalAirship by now), then stop halfway in to go into the Ancient Castle. Once you're in there, go up to Odin's statue to get his magicite, then upgrade it to Raiden, which is the only way to learn Quick. How do you upgrade it? By finding another statue in the castle's basement. Which you can only access by standing on one specific spot in the same room where you found Odin and pressing a button on your controller. There's nothing that suggests this spot is in any way important, so good luck finding it. The Pixel Remaster version at least puts a bubble over your head when you're on the right spot, but unless you know it's there, you're still very likely to miss it. Also, Blue Dragon, one of the eight legendary dragons, is in the same room as the statue, so this whole process applies to finding it as well.

* The ''Origins'' version adds a new quest which stars the four player characters who die during the main plot...and they start out in the middle of a dungeon, several floors away from any chance to heal or restock, with nothing but the equipment they had on them when they suffered their PlotlineDeath. While one of them is a BareFistedMonk, if you tried to subvert SoLongAndThanksForAllTheGear by stripping the other three, the quest can be pretty much unwinnable.