Found in the Shuffle. 7 achievements which had me cheating

Let's play a game!

Final Fantasy 9 is one of the games that I have the greatest sentiment to. The first time I played it was during the winter of 2000 on the PlayStation console – a great time was had and no assumptions were made that I would return to this production almost 20 years later on PC... just to cheat. But let's start at the beginning...

FF 9 – like most of Finals – had many secrets. I discovered some of them fairly quickly. My juvenile mind was most enchanted by Excalibur II – the most powerful weapon in the game, which can be obtained for completing almost the entire story campaign in less than twelve hours (which becomes trivial in the Steam version of the game thanks to numerous facilitations) – and a certain key item, about which you can read later in the article. Little did I know, however, that SquareSoft (RIP) studio presented fans with an extremely difficult test of perceptiveness.

If you've played Final Fantasy 9 , you surely remember the Nero twin brothers. At the beginning of the third CD – the title was originally released on four CDs – Zenero, Benero and Genero challenged the main character to a duel. The brothers lined up in a row, and after a while, they started jumping side to side, changing places. Our task was to find out where the one who spoke last before the "dance" was standing: on the left, on the right, or in the center. If we predicted correctly, we gained twice as much money as we previously staked, and could play for a higher stake with the increased movement speed of the brothers. If we were mistaken, we of course lost the money.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that the refreshed version of the game contained an achievement related to this particular event, which – as I thought – was only there to let you get some more dough in-game. I was not really mistaken with that; I just didn't know the contest was over after the twelfth correct pick in a row. However, the speed achieved by the Nero brothers in the last rounds is so high that human eye – at least in my opinion – has no way of catching the order of their movements. Nevertheless, I wanted to get the achievement, so I decided... to record the part of the game twelve times, and then play it in slow motion. It worked out on the second try.