You can play the “Catching Frogs” side quest / mini-game throughout the story as you progress through Final Fantasy IX. It involves traveling to each of the Qu’s Marsh locations throughout Gaia with Quina in your party and catching frogs in the pond areas.

There are four Qu’s Marsh locations, which you can see on the map below:

To initiate the “Catching Frogs” mini-game, enter a Qu’s Marsh location with Quina in your party and head to the pond with the bridge. Quina will automatically ask Zidane if he can go frog-catching.

You can catch frogs by quickly running up to them and pressing the or button rapidly. Each frog counts as one point, and you can quit the game at any time by leaving the area.

There are different types of frogs. Specifically, there are male and female frogs. The female frogs have red feet and a black stripe running down their back, while male frogs have yellow feet (and no stripes).

The markings can be difficult to distinguish on the screen. Leaving one male and one female frog at each march will ensure that the population will regenerate quickly, and leaving a golden frog will boost the regeneration rate significantly.

The difficulty of this mini-game involves dealing with the respawn mechanics, as conventional wisdom would be to catch all the frogs that you can. The frogs will respawn extremely slowly, though, if you catch them all or if you don’t leave a male and female frog at the pond.

Leaving a golden frog helps speed up the respawn rate, as noted above. The frogs respawn based on time spent outside Qu’s Marsh. It is not based on your progression through the story or the number of battles fought.

There are numerous points throughout the game where you should take the opportunity to catch frogs to gain access to the rewards as soon as possible during a playthrough of the game.

The number of frogs caught directly impacts the amount of damage done by the Blue Magic spell “Frog Drop.” The rewards for catching frogs are as follows:

• 2 Frogs: Ore
• 5 Frogs: Ether
• 9 Frogs: Silk Robe
• 15 Frogs: Elixir
• 23 Frogs: Silver Fork
• 33 Frogs: Bistro Fork
• 45 Frogs: Battle Boots
• 99 Frogs: Gastro Fork

After catching 99 frogs, you will automatically be thrown into battle against Quale, the leader of Qu’s Marsh and Quina’s master. Quale inflicts several status effects, which you can block beforehand by equipping Abilities that prevent Blind, Confuse, Mini, Poison and Silence. Aside from that, the only difficulty is Quale’s HP (65,535 HP).

You can also steal some powerful items from Quale, though, including Ninja Gear, Glutton’s Robe, or a Robe of Lords.