Bad Breath (Final Fantasy IX)

Causes Confuse, Darkness, Poison, Slow, and Mini to the enemy.

Description

Bad Breath is a Blu Mag spell for Quina in Final Fantasy IX that attempts to inflict a target with myriad status abnormalities at a cost of 16 MP. Bad Breath cannot be reflected but works with Return Magic. Malboro uses it against the player party.

Obtain[]

Quina learns Bad Breath by eating an Anemone, Worm Hydra, or Malboro. The earliest it can be learned is after the party has the Blue Narciss and heading to the Qu's Marsh area on the islands on the southwest of the world map to find Anemones.

Mechanics[]

Bad Breath attempts to cause Confuse, Poison, Darkness, Slow, and Mini to a single target.

The chance of the Bad Breath spell working is calculated as follows:

${\displaystyle Chance = 40 + Level + [Magic / 4] - Target's Level}$

Two randomly generated values determine if the spell will hit:

A random number 0...99 >= Chance, the spell misses its mark

A random number 0...99 < Target's Magic Evade, the enemy evades

Use[]

Bad Breath is more useful than individual status ailment spells for its multi-ailment nature, but its accuracy is not great; whereas Vivi can somewhat improve spell accuracy via Focus, Quina must rely on their natural stats. It is still a good spell to try out on enemies susceptible to ailments, such as Grand Dragons, Red Dragons, Meltigemini, Earth Guardian, and the various enemies in Memoria. Dagger's Blind and Mini have better accuracy than Bad Breath, and various party members have ailment-inducing weapons with Add Status. Vivi, Eiko, and Dagger's ailment-inducing spells can also be multi-targeted (at the cost of lower accuracy), whereas Bad Breath is against one target only. Zidane's Soul Blade is the best ailment-inflicting ability in the game, but its effect depends on which thief sword he has equipped.