I feel like y'all are grinding more than you should. I was able to beat the game without grinding for anything but the AP skills the first time you leave Alexandria.

After that, just normal exploration got me everything I needed.

Yeah I'm pretty conscious about not grinding. Like I said there was a chance in gargan roo but I didn't take it, didn't want to spoil the challenge at the end of the day! 

I'm trying to get all of the gear, abilities and experience all of the content that I can. I can't do that by scraping by. If there's places to explore, treasures to be found, nasty bosses to beat, I'm there. I never just do the minimal amount to beat a game.

I have a friend who only beat Dark souls once while in soul form the entire time. He didn't do any of the extra or side stuff. Nothing to do with the online part of the game. Same thing with Elder scrolls V: Skyrim. Only beat the main quest and no side quests. That's crazy. He may of beat those games technically but he never really experienced them fully.

None of that is grinding. You're just exploring and playing the game.

Grinding is ceasing your progress and exploration to take time and do the same battles over and over again for more experience.

I am grinding though but just in good spots for it. It's because you can't access some things or get certain items with your party not being strong enough. There's also alot of good gear and important items if you do the mini-games. 

Not too sure on when Coney is coming back but I played a little bit on my own to backtrack a little on some areas that I missed, so think of this as a half update.

Since we're back with Zidane and the main gang, I decided to check out the Chocobo Forest, which I missed earlier, and try to get Quina some skills. I bought some new staffs for Vivi so he has a few new abilities now. I also noticed that I missed out on a ton of abilities with this party, so that's a bit of a pain but I'll manage.

I've picked up quite a few potions and tents from the ability grinding with the other party so going back through the Grotto and traveling around the overworld wasn't too much trouble. One of those Ironite dragon things suddenly froze on me and then disappeared, not sure what that was all about. But finding the forest was easy enough, got my own chocobo now which is really handy! I played the digging minigame in the forest, which is a lot harder than I thought it would be, but it seems like you can find some interesting loot and for 60 gil it's not too bad.

I went back to Qu's Marsh after to see what I can do about Quina, let him/her hunt some frogs for a bit although I'm not too sure if it was really worth the time but at least I got a few items out of it. I learnt how Quina's eat ability works so I managed to get a few abilities out of it, Angel's Snack seems to be pretty useful. Blue magic is interesting so far, not really what I expected it to be, but in any case I'll have to experiment more with it.

So that's pretty much it for this short mini-update! Next update we'll check out what's happening in Cleyra!

Will it end up being just Blue and I posting in here? If so then I'll have to call it off, which I'd rather not do.

Excellent writeup though Blue! Seems we're about at the same point now.

Don't call it off. I'm enjoying reading the updates and seeing first impressions from other people for a game I love.

Alright then cool! Will be playing some more tomorrow, any advice of where we should go next or what we should look out for?

Blue Magic has always been a bit of enigma in FF games. I really like the implementation in FF9 though. Angel's Snack is OP and you can some things you never quite expected by acquiring the right skills.