And the dread servant of Exdeath, master of necromancy, Raoul Razorback.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
And the dread servant of Exdeath, master of necromancy, Raoul Razorback.
Exdeath only wants to destroy the world to cross heretofore undreamt-of boundaries in Thanatology, and the party are unsophisticated philistines who can't appreciate his genius /Werber
- Location
- Alberta
Incidentally, the fact that Krile's name is written like that in Japanese caused some issues with early attempts to translate FF5. I believe the first significant English walkthrough anyone did online didn't realize it was meant to be anything and just called her Kururu. Then the fanTL by RPGe couldn't figure it out either, so they ended up calling her Cara as a sort of "we give up, here's something we know is wrong but at least it looks sort of right" option. Then the PS1 version, for all that it got almost everything else wrong, still managed to spell her name as Krile as was apparently intended from the start.
This whole thing is pretty much forgotten these days outside of the odd vestigial reference to it in a few places, but I'm sure there's someone out there for whom she's still Cara.
- Pronouns
- He
The engineer won't say what the ship's running off of now and isn't getting on it on its maiden voyage. I'm filled with trust about the effectiveness and moral righteousness of whatever the new fuel source is.
kairuf
(Verified Kaiger) (Not the Siberian)
- Location
- The land of Potatoes
Which is what makes FFXII interesting, because at no point are the Occuria a big bad.
Venat decides mortals should be in charge of their own destiny and makes an agreement with those least under control of the Occuria.
Venat: "In order to free yourself from the control of the Occuria you need to do these things (destroy the diefacted neithcite)."
Archadian empire: "In order for us to do those things we need to conquer the world. We will need your help to do that."
Venat: "I don't know enough about mortals to say that you are wrong, so sure."
Even the final battle when Venat fuses with Vayne is more of a 'now I die with my friends' rather the standard "behold my power!" or "No! This cannot be!" Final boss fight
Venat decides mortals should be in charge of their own destiny and makes an agreement with those least under control of the Occuria.
Venat: "In order to free yourself from the control of the Occuria you need to do these things (destroy the diefacted neithcite)."
Archadian empire: "In order for us to do those things we need to conquer the world. We will need your help to do that."
Venat: "I don't know enough about mortals to say that you are wrong, so sure."
Even the final battle when Venat fuses with Vayne is more of a 'now I die with my friends' rather the standard "behold my power!" or "No! This cannot be!" Final boss fight
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...It's undead Syldra, isn't it?
ChildishChimera
A umbran summon
- Location
- New York
Hopefully not since they'd have to drag the body from the other side of the world to do it even if they seem motivated enough
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I think we can safely say it's not undead Syldra.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Mid finds something in the Library of the Ancients he shows Cid.
It is, presumably, something of The Ancients.
Any discussion on if this implies anything particular should obviously wait until we see any technology of the Ancients, or have reached the end of the game to conclusively prove we'll never see such tech, to avoid any possible risk of spoilers.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Notably we haven't really seen any Ancient tech so far, so I don't know what their aesthetic is, if we're going full tech, studio Ghibli style or pure magic or whatnot.
Final Fantasy V, Part 7
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
We've cleaned out the demonic catalogue of the Library of Ancients, got the fire-powered ship back online, and it's time to scour the seas to find the Earth Crystal!
There's a missed opportunity there to have Faris bring up her nautical background, but without further ado, we're heading out.
In the past couple of games, ships were immune to random encounters, which was nice. Not anymore, which makes exploring the oceans kind of annoying.
There are three main areas of interest we haven't explored yet: one in the northwest, one at the southwest tip of the largest continent, and one in a crescent-shaped island in the southeast. First off, let's explore southwest.
Several of those grey dots are going to stay grey; they mark places we visited before that are now obsolete, like the Canal or the Walse Tower.
Bombs! It's cool watching how such a settled design gets tweaked a little over time. These are recognizably the same Bombs as in FF2, but they look bigger, weightier.
Jachol is a town that got talked about by NPCs back in Karnak as a place with high-quality arms and armor. According to one of the townsfolks, the inhabitants are descended from the 'ancient Ronkan,' whoever they are. Related to the Library of the Ancients, I assume? It's also Adventurer Central, interestingly; there are valuable riches in the mountains around the city, but said riches are guarded by traps set by the Ancients, so the town is full of the kind of people who are drawn to the prospect of danger and riches and settled there. At least two NPCs make mention of a place called Crescent Island that has spooky stuff making noise underground, which sounds like a solid lead on the Earth Crystal.
Those caves full of riches might sound promising, but actually since they draw so many people, we're warned that they've mostly been thoroughly looted. Still worth a look, but I'm not holding my breath for a wealth of rewards.
Also we get swept up into an improv dance routine, which is fun.
Absolutely not.
The local stores stock a variety of items; Green Berets, Ninja Suits and Sage's Sulpices are all upgrades on the armor I was wearing previously, and the Trident and Silver Bow seem to foreshadow Dragoon and some kind of Archer job coming up soon, which is going to confront me with some tough character choices. There's also a magic shop, but it doesn't sell anything I care about. Wait, am I still only on lv 2 spells? After this long playing the game? That's wild.
Well, there isn't much else of interest in Jachol, so after resupplying we head out to explore that cavern up north.
It's not a large place, but traversal is obstructed by large walls that have to be moved using skull switches. The wildlife of the area appears, oddly enough, to be composed entirely of squirrels; these come in two flavors, packs of adorable chubby 'Nutkins' that always appear in three and are easily dealt with, and, hrm.
'Skull Eaters'???
O...kay…
This is an absolutely wild encounter. Not only can that thing one-shot any of my party members, I can't do anything to it; all my attacks miss completely. Maybe magic would work? I don't know but tbh it's not really relevant, because that thing has another mechanic: it flees after a random number of turns. Sometimes it OHKOs one of my party members then immediately escapes, sometimes it goes the full round and I wipe. When it flees, any surviving party member get 0 XP or Gil, but 5 ABP, which would be really good value if not for the fact that it's driving a wedge between their respective progress owing to the fact that there's nearly always at least one KO character by the end of the """fight."""
And it's not a rare encounter, either. I would guess there is like a 50:50 chance of either getting the harmless Nutkin or the terrifying Skull Eater. What a place.
Well, navigating our way through these simple puzzles and baffling encounters, we finally reach the end of the cave, where we find a giant climbable rock facade and an exit giving onto…
Absolutely jack shit.
Just an empty corner of the overworld with nothing in it.
Incredible. What a waste of time. I guess that covers everything I wanted to do in that region of the world??? I feel like I have somehow been pranked. But I mean, I guess they did warn me there wouldn't be anything to find in that cave! Joke's on me!
Anyway, I leave the place, take my ship again, and head northwest. It turns out there's another town there!
This is the town of Istory, a peaceful shepherd town, with an adorable herd of fluffy sheep.
Nearly toxic levels of cute.
Inexplicably it's also the place selling the most high-end items in the game so far - its item shop sells a Flame Ring, Coral Ring, and Angel Ring; these are powerful items, with the Flame Ring granting fire absorption and ice immunity, the Coral Ring water absorption and fire immunity, and the Angel Ring granting immunity against 'aging' and 'zombification,' which are status effects I don't think I've seen before. This could have been huge had I found this town before the Fire-Powered Ship, although the cost is likewise enormous - at 50k gil, I could just barely afford one of these things if I blew all my savings.
I'll leave it alone for now. Istory is home to the Istory Falls, a huge waterfall that looks pretty but doesn't appear to have an immediate use; I'm pretty certain I'm missing something and it's bugging me, but try as I might I'm not finding any secret passages or whatever around town. Instead, one of the old ladies here has some interesting things to tell us:
Old fella? Staff? Bolts of lightning?
Looks like Ramuh's on the menu, boys. All we gotta do is leave town, head for the forest nearby, and…
Ramuh once again shows the oddity of Final Fantasy triptych of power. Pokémon starters are well known for forming a perfect triangle of elemental weaknesses, Grass > Water > Fire > Grass, so that each 'mon counters another and is countered by another. And so far we had Shiva and Ifrit, who are each other's weakness - Ice damage works against Fire-aligned enemies and vice versa. Ramuh, though, who completes the Ice/Fire/Lightning triangle, isn't connected to either end; using Libra on him just says "No specific weaknesses." That makes Bartz's Mystic Knight levels a lot of wasted space in that fight, and Faris and Galuf not exactly impressive on their own, with Lenna having to step up for everyone.
Ramuh attacks with Thundara and knocks with his staff, and actually manages to take out Bartz! Thankfully, I can still put out enough damage to run his relatively shallow HP count, and then something actually really cool happens:
Ifrit and Ramuh actually talk to each other! Zerban said this would happen if you got Ramuh before Ifrit, but it turns out it also works the other way around? Ifrit asks Ramuh if he would lend us his newfound strength, and Ramuh says that he'd be happy to, as he and Ifrit have never been enemies; he plays out a "disintegrating" animation, and joins us as a summon.
That was really cool.
Well, with no idea what else to do in Istory, let's investigate our last location, the Crescent Isle!
On the way though, I'd like to make a note:
Look at those ABP counts.
Basically all four members of my party are in their last stage of job mastery. Bartz is learning the last level of Spellblade, Lenna is learning HP +30%, Galuf is learning Summon lv 5, and Faris is (still) learning Dualcast. Faris I'm fine with, I've just accepted she'll be spending maybe most of the game in Red Mage learning mode, but the others are still several hundred ABPs from reaching their job mastery and it's… so… slow.
I could swap them to different jobs for a little bit, play around with configuration, I guess? But at the same time that just feels like delaying an inevitable grindfest that has to be resolved sooner or later. Once this is done it'll be a huge leap, I can transfer them all to a new job with their mastered abilities equip and try out fresh new strategies, but in the meantime… Watching these 400 ABP counts eroded one single point at a time with every encounter is exhausting.
Anyway, onwards.
I'd just like to take a moment to register a complaint about these horrible things, which hit hard, have thousands of HP, and don't even give any XP? What the fuck.
Upon arrival in the Crescent Isle, we enter the aptly-named town of Crescent… and we've barely even set foot in there than an earthquake starts!
Welp.
I guess we're stuck now.
Nothing to do but explore the town, then. That same old geezer in the screenshot actually laughs at me for having my ship sunk, and tragically I cannot stab him in the ribs over it. There are also some… interesting facts about this town:
Magically fertile island with super-soil that has been undergoing regular earthquakes of late? This really sounds like the Earth Crystal is buried under there, which is odd, because we saw the Earth Crystal's power reach us back at the Wind Shrine and it didn't look like it came from this place at all.
In the local pub, an old man is sharing stories, telling us about the ruins of Ronka on the Western continent, and that black chocobos used to live in the forest near the town, but are now extinct. Also, there's this funny exchange:
I'm pretty sure we're at most two games out from chocobo racing showing up in FFVII, but it's clearly already on the brain of at least one of the devs.
This village is also home to a minstrel:
He teaches us "Mighty March,' which I am going to assume is a song the Bard job can use in battle, and that we'll be unlocking Bard soon.
Also, there are some weird enemies around.
What the hell is a 'Bio Soldier'? And why am I being attacked by a crazed madman with scythes? How strange.
Anyway, having surveyed the town, we head south to the forest where the black chocobo allegedly used to dwell, and…
Bartz, our resident Chocobo Wrangler (hey, remember Boko from like six updates ago?), decides to try and catch the thing. This is presented kinda like a minigame; the other three members of the party split up, blocking the exit, and we control Bartz alone as he approaches the Chocobo, but there's not really any gameplay involved; you just approach the chocobo and interact with it and that's it.
Once you do, the group realizes that this is a black chocobo, Lenna marvels that they aren't extinct after all, and Bartz decides to take it for a ride - if you will recall from previous entries, black chocobos are able to fly.
They promptly faceplant right back down to earth.
Thankfully, Bartz's head is made of plutonium and he suffers no lasting consequence from the fall. Galuf asks jokingly if Bartz "broke it or something," and Faris, ever the animal lover, tells him that it's not funny before examining the chocobo and identifying something stuck in its throat as the source of the trouble. A quick Heimlich maneuvre later and…
How the fuck did that happen.
Faris says the explosion at Karnak, AN ENTIRE OCEAN AWAY, must have sent them flying here. I know sometimes these games get goofy with their sense of scale, but seriously, what the fuck.
Well in any case, that's two more job unlocks! I did think only three was a little low for the Fire Crystal. Those two would be the Bard and the Ranger. Bard appears to be a passive buffing class that sings song which provide beneficial effects and whose attacks deal percentage-based magic damage; Ranger is our archer job and appears mainly noteworthy for one of its abilities being part of an endgame doom combo. I will care about that bridge when I get to it; right now I'll just keep focusing on mastering my current job roster.
And, now that we have liberated the chocobo from its burden, we can use it to fly!
The black chocobo can cross low-altitude mountain ranges, but it can only land in forest tiles, so several of the locations I just went and scouted are impossible to access as it stands.
Preeeetty sure that village over there is where the Earth Power came from during the Wind Shrine sequence. We're going to land in a forest on the far side of a desert and try to reach it…
…no dice. If you look closely at this picture, you'll see "bands" of moving sand; these act like conveyor belts, and the entrance to the desert is surrounded by a full square of them that drops us back at our starting point no matter what we do.
At this point I don't really have a good idea what to do next, but hey, my chocobo is parked near the Library of the Ancients, so why not pay Cid and Mid a visit?
Turns out, that was the right move!
They are surprisingly chill about this.
Cid tells us that there are more important news to be concerned with than some silly old sunken ship; King Tycoon was spotted traveling through Karnak and into the Shifting Sands. Apparently, the ominously titled 'Town of Ruin' lies beyond the desert, but due to the sand flowing like water, no one's been able to cross it to find out.
Bartz asks how the king managed to go there, if the desert is impossible to cross, and Mid says witnesses claim to have seen it "floating in midair," which…
He's using Float. He's using Float to bypass the environmental hazard the same way I did in FFIV. He's having his own Final Fantasy game way over there while I'm running around. Hilarious. Unfortunately, our party doesn't know Float, so we don't have that option. Mid, whose attitude to everything seems shockingly cavalier, says we'll just walk over to the desert and then figure something out on site.
When we arrive at the desert entrance, the same loop plays out, and Galuf laments that it really was a pointless idea before Mid arrives with his greatest idea yet.
Seriously, who did that localization? This dialogue is delightful.
Cid and Mid have an incredible idea: they're gonna build a bridge.
A corpse bridge.
You see, this is a desert in a fantasy setting. Which means it has sandworms. Gotta have sandworms. Cid and Mid's marvelous plan is to draw the sandworm's attention, have it emerge, and then we kill it and use its giant body as a bridge to cross the desert.
Which…
Considering the distances involved…
Yeah, that thing's gotta be properly Dune-sized for this plan to work. Jesus, what has the party been eating for breakfast?
Galuf notes that this is "not the most sophisticated of methods," to which Mid scoffs that Galuf himself isn't the most sophisticated guy, and Mid asks us if we're ready. We say yes, and only AFTERWARDS, when it's TOO LATE TO SWAP JOBS, does he tell us "by the way, don't use any magic on the sandworm or it'll fuck you.' I swear to God.
This is one of these "the games doesn't explain shit to you so you have to figure it out as you fight." These holes? Hitting them causes the hole to cast Gravity, taking a percentage-based chunk of a character's health. You are supposed to wait until the sandworm pops out of one of these holes to hit it; however, even doing that is finicky as heck, because the menu preferentially targets the hole instead of the worm, so if I tab too fast through my attacks I end up attacking the holes anyway instead of targeting the sandworm properly. Additionally, the sandworm will move between holes, meaning your last attack might target a hole and eat a gravity to the face. I'm doing okay, but that's purely because I am running the Punch Wizard party; without Barehanded Faris and Galuf would just be sitting pretty doing absolutely fuck all. I still win, but…
…
Wait a minute.
I just went and checked the wiki.
Mid straight up lied to me, the sandworm has no counter-magic defense. There's none. It doesn't exist.
…
…..
Oh, I feel real good about my life right now.
There's a missed opportunity there to have Faris bring up her nautical background, but without further ado, we're heading out.
In the past couple of games, ships were immune to random encounters, which was nice. Not anymore, which makes exploring the oceans kind of annoying.
There are three main areas of interest we haven't explored yet: one in the northwest, one at the southwest tip of the largest continent, and one in a crescent-shaped island in the southeast. First off, let's explore southwest.
Several of those grey dots are going to stay grey; they mark places we visited before that are now obsolete, like the Canal or the Walse Tower.
Bombs! It's cool watching how such a settled design gets tweaked a little over time. These are recognizably the same Bombs as in FF2, but they look bigger, weightier.
Jachol is a town that got talked about by NPCs back in Karnak as a place with high-quality arms and armor. According to one of the townsfolks, the inhabitants are descended from the 'ancient Ronkan,' whoever they are. Related to the Library of the Ancients, I assume? It's also Adventurer Central, interestingly; there are valuable riches in the mountains around the city, but said riches are guarded by traps set by the Ancients, so the town is full of the kind of people who are drawn to the prospect of danger and riches and settled there. At least two NPCs make mention of a place called Crescent Island that has spooky stuff making noise underground, which sounds like a solid lead on the Earth Crystal.
Those caves full of riches might sound promising, but actually since they draw so many people, we're warned that they've mostly been thoroughly looted. Still worth a look, but I'm not holding my breath for a wealth of rewards.
Also we get swept up into an improv dance routine, which is fun.
Absolutely not.
The local stores stock a variety of items; Green Berets, Ninja Suits and Sage's Sulpices are all upgrades on the armor I was wearing previously, and the Trident and Silver Bow seem to foreshadow Dragoon and some kind of Archer job coming up soon, which is going to confront me with some tough character choices. There's also a magic shop, but it doesn't sell anything I care about. Wait, am I still only on lv 2 spells? After this long playing the game? That's wild.
Well, there isn't much else of interest in Jachol, so after resupplying we head out to explore that cavern up north.
It's not a large place, but traversal is obstructed by large walls that have to be moved using skull switches. The wildlife of the area appears, oddly enough, to be composed entirely of squirrels; these come in two flavors, packs of adorable chubby 'Nutkins' that always appear in three and are easily dealt with, and, hrm.
'Skull Eaters'???
O...kay…
This is an absolutely wild encounter. Not only can that thing one-shot any of my party members, I can't do anything to it; all my attacks miss completely. Maybe magic would work? I don't know but tbh it's not really relevant, because that thing has another mechanic: it flees after a random number of turns. Sometimes it OHKOs one of my party members then immediately escapes, sometimes it goes the full round and I wipe. When it flees, any surviving party member get 0 XP or Gil, but 5 ABP, which would be really good value if not for the fact that it's driving a wedge between their respective progress owing to the fact that there's nearly always at least one KO character by the end of the """fight."""
And it's not a rare encounter, either. I would guess there is like a 50:50 chance of either getting the harmless Nutkin or the terrifying Skull Eater. What a place.
Well, navigating our way through these simple puzzles and baffling encounters, we finally reach the end of the cave, where we find a giant climbable rock facade and an exit giving onto…
Absolutely jack shit.
Just an empty corner of the overworld with nothing in it.
Incredible. What a waste of time. I guess that covers everything I wanted to do in that region of the world??? I feel like I have somehow been pranked. But I mean, I guess they did warn me there wouldn't be anything to find in that cave! Joke's on me!
Anyway, I leave the place, take my ship again, and head northwest. It turns out there's another town there!
This is the town of Istory, a peaceful shepherd town, with an adorable herd of fluffy sheep.
Nearly toxic levels of cute.
Inexplicably it's also the place selling the most high-end items in the game so far - its item shop sells a Flame Ring, Coral Ring, and Angel Ring; these are powerful items, with the Flame Ring granting fire absorption and ice immunity, the Coral Ring water absorption and fire immunity, and the Angel Ring granting immunity against 'aging' and 'zombification,' which are status effects I don't think I've seen before. This could have been huge had I found this town before the Fire-Powered Ship, although the cost is likewise enormous - at 50k gil, I could just barely afford one of these things if I blew all my savings.
I'll leave it alone for now. Istory is home to the Istory Falls, a huge waterfall that looks pretty but doesn't appear to have an immediate use; I'm pretty certain I'm missing something and it's bugging me, but try as I might I'm not finding any secret passages or whatever around town. Instead, one of the old ladies here has some interesting things to tell us:
Old fella? Staff? Bolts of lightning?
Looks like Ramuh's on the menu, boys. All we gotta do is leave town, head for the forest nearby, and…
Ramuh once again shows the oddity of Final Fantasy triptych of power. Pokémon starters are well known for forming a perfect triangle of elemental weaknesses, Grass > Water > Fire > Grass, so that each 'mon counters another and is countered by another. And so far we had Shiva and Ifrit, who are each other's weakness - Ice damage works against Fire-aligned enemies and vice versa. Ramuh, though, who completes the Ice/Fire/Lightning triangle, isn't connected to either end; using Libra on him just says "No specific weaknesses." That makes Bartz's Mystic Knight levels a lot of wasted space in that fight, and Faris and Galuf not exactly impressive on their own, with Lenna having to step up for everyone.
Ramuh attacks with Thundara and knocks with his staff, and actually manages to take out Bartz! Thankfully, I can still put out enough damage to run his relatively shallow HP count, and then something actually really cool happens:
Ifrit and Ramuh actually talk to each other! Zerban said this would happen if you got Ramuh before Ifrit, but it turns out it also works the other way around? Ifrit asks Ramuh if he would lend us his newfound strength, and Ramuh says that he'd be happy to, as he and Ifrit have never been enemies; he plays out a "disintegrating" animation, and joins us as a summon.
That was really cool.
Well, with no idea what else to do in Istory, let's investigate our last location, the Crescent Isle!
On the way though, I'd like to make a note:
Look at those ABP counts.
Basically all four members of my party are in their last stage of job mastery. Bartz is learning the last level of Spellblade, Lenna is learning HP +30%, Galuf is learning Summon lv 5, and Faris is (still) learning Dualcast. Faris I'm fine with, I've just accepted she'll be spending maybe most of the game in Red Mage learning mode, but the others are still several hundred ABPs from reaching their job mastery and it's… so… slow.
I could swap them to different jobs for a little bit, play around with configuration, I guess? But at the same time that just feels like delaying an inevitable grindfest that has to be resolved sooner or later. Once this is done it'll be a huge leap, I can transfer them all to a new job with their mastered abilities equip and try out fresh new strategies, but in the meantime… Watching these 400 ABP counts eroded one single point at a time with every encounter is exhausting.
Anyway, onwards.
I'd just like to take a moment to register a complaint about these horrible things, which hit hard, have thousands of HP, and don't even give any XP? What the fuck.
Upon arrival in the Crescent Isle, we enter the aptly-named town of Crescent… and we've barely even set foot in there than an earthquake starts!
Welp.
I guess we're stuck now.
Nothing to do but explore the town, then. That same old geezer in the screenshot actually laughs at me for having my ship sunk, and tragically I cannot stab him in the ribs over it. There are also some… interesting facts about this town:
Magically fertile island with super-soil that has been undergoing regular earthquakes of late? This really sounds like the Earth Crystal is buried under there, which is odd, because we saw the Earth Crystal's power reach us back at the Wind Shrine and it didn't look like it came from this place at all.
In the local pub, an old man is sharing stories, telling us about the ruins of Ronka on the Western continent, and that black chocobos used to live in the forest near the town, but are now extinct. Also, there's this funny exchange:
I'm pretty sure we're at most two games out from chocobo racing showing up in FFVII, but it's clearly already on the brain of at least one of the devs.
This village is also home to a minstrel:
He teaches us "Mighty March,' which I am going to assume is a song the Bard job can use in battle, and that we'll be unlocking Bard soon.
Also, there are some weird enemies around.
What the hell is a 'Bio Soldier'? And why am I being attacked by a crazed madman with scythes? How strange.
Anyway, having surveyed the town, we head south to the forest where the black chocobo allegedly used to dwell, and…
Bartz, our resident Chocobo Wrangler (hey, remember Boko from like six updates ago?), decides to try and catch the thing. This is presented kinda like a minigame; the other three members of the party split up, blocking the exit, and we control Bartz alone as he approaches the Chocobo, but there's not really any gameplay involved; you just approach the chocobo and interact with it and that's it.
Once you do, the group realizes that this is a black chocobo, Lenna marvels that they aren't extinct after all, and Bartz decides to take it for a ride - if you will recall from previous entries, black chocobos are able to fly.
They promptly faceplant right back down to earth.
Thankfully, Bartz's head is made of plutonium and he suffers no lasting consequence from the fall. Galuf asks jokingly if Bartz "broke it or something," and Faris, ever the animal lover, tells him that it's not funny before examining the chocobo and identifying something stuck in its throat as the source of the trouble. A quick Heimlich maneuvre later and…
How the fuck did that happen.
Faris says the explosion at Karnak, AN ENTIRE OCEAN AWAY, must have sent them flying here. I know sometimes these games get goofy with their sense of scale, but seriously, what the fuck.
Well in any case, that's two more job unlocks! I did think only three was a little low for the Fire Crystal. Those two would be the Bard and the Ranger. Bard appears to be a passive buffing class that sings song which provide beneficial effects and whose attacks deal percentage-based magic damage; Ranger is our archer job and appears mainly noteworthy for one of its abilities being part of an endgame doom combo. I will care about that bridge when I get to it; right now I'll just keep focusing on mastering my current job roster.
And, now that we have liberated the chocobo from its burden, we can use it to fly!
The black chocobo can cross low-altitude mountain ranges, but it can only land in forest tiles, so several of the locations I just went and scouted are impossible to access as it stands.
Preeeetty sure that village over there is where the Earth Power came from during the Wind Shrine sequence. We're going to land in a forest on the far side of a desert and try to reach it…
…no dice. If you look closely at this picture, you'll see "bands" of moving sand; these act like conveyor belts, and the entrance to the desert is surrounded by a full square of them that drops us back at our starting point no matter what we do.
At this point I don't really have a good idea what to do next, but hey, my chocobo is parked near the Library of the Ancients, so why not pay Cid and Mid a visit?
Turns out, that was the right move!
They are surprisingly chill about this.
Cid tells us that there are more important news to be concerned with than some silly old sunken ship; King Tycoon was spotted traveling through Karnak and into the Shifting Sands. Apparently, the ominously titled 'Town of Ruin' lies beyond the desert, but due to the sand flowing like water, no one's been able to cross it to find out.
Bartz asks how the king managed to go there, if the desert is impossible to cross, and Mid says witnesses claim to have seen it "floating in midair," which…
He's using Float. He's using Float to bypass the environmental hazard the same way I did in FFIV. He's having his own Final Fantasy game way over there while I'm running around. Hilarious. Unfortunately, our party doesn't know Float, so we don't have that option. Mid, whose attitude to everything seems shockingly cavalier, says we'll just walk over to the desert and then figure something out on site.
When we arrive at the desert entrance, the same loop plays out, and Galuf laments that it really was a pointless idea before Mid arrives with his greatest idea yet.
Seriously, who did that localization? This dialogue is delightful.
Cid and Mid have an incredible idea: they're gonna build a bridge.
A corpse bridge.
You see, this is a desert in a fantasy setting. Which means it has sandworms. Gotta have sandworms. Cid and Mid's marvelous plan is to draw the sandworm's attention, have it emerge, and then we kill it and use its giant body as a bridge to cross the desert.
Which…
Considering the distances involved…
Yeah, that thing's gotta be properly Dune-sized for this plan to work. Jesus, what has the party been eating for breakfast?
Galuf notes that this is "not the most sophisticated of methods," to which Mid scoffs that Galuf himself isn't the most sophisticated guy, and Mid asks us if we're ready. We say yes, and only AFTERWARDS, when it's TOO LATE TO SWAP JOBS, does he tell us "by the way, don't use any magic on the sandworm or it'll fuck you.' I swear to God.
This is one of these "the games doesn't explain shit to you so you have to figure it out as you fight." These holes? Hitting them causes the hole to cast Gravity, taking a percentage-based chunk of a character's health. You are supposed to wait until the sandworm pops out of one of these holes to hit it; however, even doing that is finicky as heck, because the menu preferentially targets the hole instead of the worm, so if I tab too fast through my attacks I end up attacking the holes anyway instead of targeting the sandworm properly. Additionally, the sandworm will move between holes, meaning your last attack might target a hole and eat a gravity to the face. I'm doing okay, but that's purely because I am running the Punch Wizard party; without Barehanded Faris and Galuf would just be sitting pretty doing absolutely fuck all. I still win, but…
…
Wait a minute.
I just went and checked the wiki.
Mid straight up lied to me, the sandworm has no counter-magic defense. There's none. It doesn't exist.
…
…..
Oh, I feel real good about my life right now.
many of the jobs have an intentionally overpriced last stage, presumably for two different reasons:
1. if you really like a job, or your build requires it to be the main job, it feels bad to just pass on ABP.
2. Freelancer gets really good, really fast, if you start mastering jobs early.
Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
The Skull Eater is a classic example of what TV Tropes would call a "metal slime" enemy: a hugely-rewarding enemy that also happens to be very difficult to kill unless you use One Weird Trick, meant to make you try to figure out that one trick and then farm the shit out of it. Personally, I'm a big fan of Geomancy.
It's not a large place, but traversal is obstructed by large walls that have to be moved using skull switches. The wildlife of the area appears, oddly enough, to be composed entirely of squirrels; these come in two flavors, packs of adorable chubby 'Nutkins' that always appear in three and are easily dealt with, and, hrm.
'Skull Eaters'???
O...kay…
This is an absolutely wild encounter. Not only can that thing one-shot any of my party members, I can't do anything to it; all my attacks miss completely. Maybe magic would work? I don't know but tbh it's not really relevant, because that thing has another mechanic: it flees after a random number of turns. Sometimes it OHKOs one of my party members then immediately escapes, sometimes it goes the full round and I wipe. When it flees, any surviving party member get 0 XP or Gil, but 5 ABP, which would be really good value if not for the fact that it's driving a wedge between their respective progress owing to the fact that there's nearly always at least one KO character by the end of the """fight."""
And it's not a rare encounter, either. I would guess there is like a 50:50 chance of either getting the harmless Nutkin or the terrifying Skull Eater. What a place.
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- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Skull Eaters have defenses that dwarf even the mighty Jackanapes (90/90 vs 50/50 defense/magic defense) but like no hp.
If I recall correctly any of the ninja elemental scrolls will hit hard enough to just one shot them, for example, though I might be misremembering as it's been awhile. But yes. You're either going to have no ability to kill them or have trivial ability to kill them.
While we're on the topic of Ramuh, Shiva, and Ifrit, note that the three are not equal. Shiva has the least magic attack, Ramuh the most. Against enemies with no particular weaknesses or resistances, you should always use Ramuh, and against enemies resistant to lightning but not fire or ice, Ifrit, etc.
(by contrast, the fire/thunder/blizzard family are all equal at any tier. Aero is actually strange, having if I recall right better damage at basic, equal at -ra, and inferior at -ga compared to the classic elements.)
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Also, the trope "exactly what it says on the tin".
They get an attack in on you, your skull is eaten, presumably because they think it looks like a particularly large nut.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Coincidentally, it's also a grey recolor of a basic enemy.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
It's probably not coincidental- Dragon Quest is far more huge in Japan than Final Fantasy itself. The devs were almost certainly aware of metal slimes, given I'm pretty confident the archetype would have existed by the time FF5 was made, though I don't have enough personal familiarity with Dragon Quest (and, especially, it's early days) to know exactly when that particular thing became a thing.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Metal Slimes have been around since Dragon Quest 1, which predated FF1.
- Location
- California
Well maybe if you hadn't sunk the fancy nuclear-powered battleship he so kindly made for you.
- Location
- Canada, probably
Wait what? That's not the black chocobo. The black chocobo is purple! I swear, these remakes...
It's really poorly worded, but it's not technically a lie. If you use multi-target magic (that isn't Aqua Breath for the OHKO), it'll set off the holes.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Tremble, mortal, to the sight of BILLY, THE BLACK NUTKIN.
It also folds down like a shitty umbrella if you use Geomancer. Nifty for ABP grinding.
You might want to remember this spot for later, though...
You can simply dabble into the jobs that are currently asking for the lesser amounts of ABP. Not trying to master them, just some casual leveling while wandering around, while returning to the "main" jobs for dungeons and bosses. Say, the jobs that you still haven't touched and/or only need 10-50 points for the next level up. That way you keep getting more goodies (even if only for the eventual Freelancer overlords) and some better sense of overall progression, without feeling any stagnation even if you're progressing on your current jobs.
Funny thing about the Bio Soldier. It's a mostly physical enemy. Until you kill the rest of its party. Then it starts to spam Bio on you. And that crap HURTS.
If you were to use Berserk and/or learn the Equip Axes passive, the murderhobo drops a nifty axe that applies Death on most shits.
Iunno, black chocobos can't be trusted with glass. I guess
Hope you saved before entering the area!
The problem is if one were to be a soft brained idiot and started throwing summons or multitarget spells, because then you'd hit the holes, and then you'd get reck'd. If you were particularly idiotic and went with at least one Berserk... well, you can imagine.
Of course, with Aqua Breath being a nuke for desert enemies, it bypasses the problem by grabbing the sandworm by the face and screaming "PERISH."
You heard it here folks, Omi is a coward won't even dance for us
Yeah, FFV has a kind of weird power curve on when spells are bought. Levels 1 through 3 are all pretty reasonable points in the story, but then there's just this massive gap until you'll get level 4 and higher spells.
Coincidentally, this does make the Red Mage actually viable for a longer period of time than they would be otherwise.
So, Skulleaters are actually one of the best ABP grinding enemies in this section of the game. Why? Because despite their massive defensive and offensive stats, they have exactly one HP. So if you have anything that can pierce those defenses (Geomancer or Ninja Scrolls tend to work), you can kill them easily for quick ABP. They aren't the best possible option because of that shitloads of offensive stats meaning if you don't go first someone probably dies, but still, a decent option.
Idunno everyone, I do believe Omni is skipping over a certain chest looted by a certain Lone Wolf in that cave.
(BTW the treasure he looted in there was the only one that's actually valuable, a whip for beastmasters)
tbh this is why I don't really bother fully mastering a lot of classes until later in the game, where even basic encounters give 3-4 ABP and there's much better grinding spots available. I mean, even if you do master Mystic Knight now, it's ultimate skill is "Magic Sword 6" for sixth level spells, which... you don't and won't have for another 10+ hours minimum.
Granted on the other hand, mastering some of these classes early does make dealing with difficult bosses by going "fuck you Freelancer Time" much more viable. In particular, Galuf's Summoner will mean he has the highest base magic class in the game, and Lenna's Monk will give her the highest base stamina and strength (not to mention pretty sure those passive HP+% bonuses carry over so she'll be beefy as fuck in Freelancer).
Tell it to me straight Omni: did you, like me, also beeline for the cool looking shape at the bottom of the map first with your ship and immediately lose it 30 seconds later, and have to reload a save?
If you haven't already, try that out sometime. I think it came up earlier in the LP, but yes using Gold Needles on stone enemies will instantly... de-stone them and kill them in what is presumably a sudden explosion of flesh.Also, there's this funny exchange:
Oh boy, new class assessments!
Bard is on one hand, phenominally squishy, I'm pretty sure it has the lowest durability of any class in the game. On the other hand, if you've learned enough songs there's a few pretty useful ones in there. In particular, Hastega on demand is nice, and there's a Requiem or something that does x8 damage to undead basically insta-blighting them from the face of the earth. Overall mostly a situational class or one you'd want to master and slap !Sing on someone who can actually take a hit.
Ranger has, as you mentioned, one of the endgame doom combos so you'll probably want to take Bartz through it at some point. In particular, once you get -Ga spells you can combine spellblade with X-Attack to insta-kill 4 enemies with elemental weaknesses at once. Other than that it's a decent back row class, because bows tend to have a lot of effects ranging from elemental damage to instant death chance to one that just triggers X-Attack without needing the actual ability.
Ah yes, the Aqua Breath OHKO. Funnest way to deal with an otherwise obnoxious as all hell boss.
- Location
- Phoenix
Yeah, the biggest problem with ABP is that your gains remain almost constant, so if you want to level up jobs, the best way is to go back to mobs that represent no threat to you, and just mindlessly farm. ABP would've been a lot better if they just had it so that higher level mobs gave more.