Alright ... I want to take some of the developers off the FFX team and smack the crap out of them for making me do something this stupid.

I'm trying for celestial weapons now. As far as the actual weapons go, I have all of them. And I have Auron's, Wakka's, Yuna's, and Rikku's Crest and Sigils. I don't have the Sigils for Kimahri, Lulu, or Tidus. I'm trying to get Tidus's ... and had to take a break, because I like my television too much to throw a controller through it.

Seriously. What the hell were they thinking?

I counted ... there are 24 balloons on the course. 24. And to finish with a time under 00.00.0, you need, say, 15 of them -- without getting hit by any birds. (Strangely, seagulls hate chocobos, and despite their small size, a mere brush of their wing can stop a large, human-carrying bird in its tracks. On the other hand, Tidus is too stupid to reach out and grab a balloon if he's right next to it.) The difficult parts of this are numerous ... first, the chocobo doesn't exactly go where you tell it sometimes. Second, even when you do try to tell it to turn, the steering is simply distorted. Third, if a seagull hits you, another might just wait until you're ready to start moving again before it hits you too -- I've actually seen, a few times, one of them pause in mid-flight, and resume when you do. Fourth, not only do these seagulls, for some strange reason, target you and your chocobo, they also occasionally come out of friggin' nowhere, ensuring that there's no chance at all to avoid being hit. Fifth, the camera angle changes also change your path, so it's nearly impossible to aim at certain targets without re-adjusting -- and, as mentioned, it is qiute possible to miss a balloon by a very small margin, but the birds aiming to stop you are three times as wide as your giant man-carrying chocobo is. And last, but certainly not least, you have competition. Another rider is pushing you out of the way to get their balloons as well, which, for some strange reason, always are on their side of the beginning of the course.

And honestly, I can barely dodge ONE lightning bolt on the Tunder Plains. I think my max is two in a row. And I'm supposed to get two hundred? In a row?

So the question is ... is there anything I can do (other than just keep doing it, over and over and over and over and over again) that will make this a little easier? Train a chocobo better? Anything? For the lightning or the chocobo race? I wouldn't think the butterfly thing could be THIS difficult.