- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The spears are stuck in their bodies from the previous hunters who thought they could take on the bear. The rest of the hunter is no longer with us.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
>no mention of swords, axes, arrows, etc only spears
>everyone else kills the bear just fine
>dragoons fuck up
Checks out.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Bears are well known for their anti-air defenses.
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Exdeath: "My fault, really. I had a brainfart and thought bears with spears would be the most awesome and terrifyingly evil thing ever. Turns out they just use the damn things as backscratchers..."
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Fearsome bears yearly bearing dear gear spears with tears and pears in their ears rear but nearly can't hear.
This should be classed as a warcrime.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
A war-rhyme.
- Location
- Texas
For those who care, I decided to spend the first 7 hours of FF2 grinding, and can now bully the Captains at Fynn whenever I want. Also, because the Fire Bow they sometimes drop is so much better than anything else available at the time, Maria is now at level 8 with Bows. She's supposed to be my Sage type (Firion will be my Red Mage/Weapon Master/Ultima Man, Guy is gonna end up a Paladin).
It's surprisingly hard to get playtime when there's four other guys also interested in playing video games, and you're all sharing a single TV.
It's surprisingly hard to get playtime when there's four other guys also interested in playing video games, and you're all sharing a single TV.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
That's one of the favored ways to cheese the game, yes. Now you just need to get Minwu and make your way to Mysidia, and then you'll be able to squish the entire rest of the game like a bug. Not sure that any of that will be fun, but it's definitely cathartic.
Final Fantasy V, Part 11, Part A
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
With our group reunited on Galuf's world and promptly knocked out a continent away from where they should be, it's time to engage in some classic Final Fantasy wandering. We cross forests and swamps, until eventually we reach a remote village.
I like the remote, moonlit vibe of this background screen, but holy shit are those pig fairies hideous. Incidentally, while we haven't seen orcs proper in the series so far that, that 'fairy orc's porcine appearance is a reminder of the strange split lineage of Dragon Quest that has led to Japanese fantasy media historically portraying orcs as much more pig-like than in Western media.
Regole's kind of a hole. I mean, it's a nice enough town, but one of the first lines of dialogue we bump into is literally "We haven't had a visitor in years!" In fact, this place is such a Nowheresville Indiana that even though they've heard rumors of Exdeath's return, they're confident that he'd never bother with an "out-of-the-way, podunk town like this."
There are also two children who are bickering over whether one of them actually saw a "moogle," which is our first hint that the little white fuzzball are coming back after being introduced in FF3 skipping a game in FFIV. I'll talk about this more when they show up. There's also someone warning me to stay away from a castle to the South that is full of LEGENDARY WEAPONS but also MONSTERS THAT WILL TOTALLY KILL ME, which, as you probably can guess by now, might as well put a neon sign on it that says "HEY OMI C'MERE."
Resting at the local inn triggers one of our usual night-time cutscenes - Galuf sneaks away from the group, and Barts wakes up soon after.
He woke up in the middle of the night to try out the local booze. That's a very Galuf move. Bartz finds him, and Galuf senses that something is wrong and offers him a seat. They need to clear the air. Earlier, Galuf brushed off the issue of having had to abort his castle raid to save the protagonists, and Bartz wants to actually apologize and settle the issue.
This is a neat character beat. When he deflected the issue earlier, Galuf framed it in a paternal "oh well, once again I'm the one saving you all, what would you do without me" way. Here, when Bartz gets serious and he decides to be honest, he acknowledge that having to interrupt his plans to save the heroes actually saved him and his troops - that in a way, though accidental, they're the ones who saved him. That's important because it means the heroes' choice to pull out all the stops and risk living their lives behind forever to come and help him wasn't incorrect. They didn't fuck up and ruin the day by keeping Galuf and his men from defeating Exdeath. Even though it was accidental, they chose correctly. Their bravery, selflessness and pure hearts drove them to the right course of action.
Of course part of the angle here is also Galuf assuaging Bartz's concerns and giving him an out of the guilt of ruining his plans. It could just be pretty words to reassure a younger man, but I prefer my read of it as being the truth.
Finally, since they're getting serious and all, Galuf looks at Bartz and asks him, why he came to his world knowing that he might never return. Bartz - unable to follow up and echo Galuf's sincerity at this time? - says "...no particular reason," and Galuf decides to let the matter lie and simply thanks him.
And with everyone properly refreshed and some basic info on our surroundings, we head out again!
Swapped in a Ninja and a Time Mage. Incidentally the fauna on this world is just, like, the worst, aesthetically. Does get the alien planet feeling across though.
Found the castle. Now to get inside…
Okay, cool design, I dig it. I'm guessing this is the beef gate that I have to beat in order to get access to the sweet sweet loot inside the castle, let's-
Well, at least I can say the 'Zombie' status effect has a pretty gnarly visual effect.
Okay, that thing has defense so high my attacks deal 0 damage, and it is protected by a passive Reflect effect that bounces off anything clever I try like Gravity (percentage base damage) or Raise (assuming it's undead). Summons get through it, but it has too much health regardless. Blue Magic might be able to do something? At this stage and without wiki-walking it I don't have an easy way around this one, so I'll just leave it for now.
Reloading and giving the castle a wide berth, all we have left is opening the world map and heading for the closest grey point, which turns out to be a forest region of sorts.
It's them! The kupos! We advance a little into the forest and one of the familiar fluffy faces spots us…
…and immediately attempts to run away only to fall down a hole. Oops.
So moogles are a known quantity on Galuf's world, who seem to be perceived as animals or 'benign' monsters of some sort. Lenna - who, along with Faris, officiates as our 'friend to animals' characters - decides we should help it, and so we promptly jump down the hole.
The Underground Waterway is not quite a typical dungeon. It is linear in the most literal sense; the 'waterway' takes you in one direction the moment you touch it, so there's only one path straight through.
Those enemies have a diverse range of resistances to physical attacks and magical attacks that make them a pain to handle except by just spamming Ramuh, which kills everything with Lightning-type damage. …which does mean I am still using Galuf primarily as a Summoner instead of a Time Mage, but hey, it works?
It's also a fairly short run through, and at the end, we arrive just in time to rescue the moogle.
Oh man, I love the look on this guy. Check out this sprite, the way its body is slumped over itself, its tail trailing at the back while its enormous head faces to the screen, coiled forward, its fangs parted into an evil grin. This is a sick fucking design.
However.
It is also a skeleton.
gg no re.
Immediately after the dinosaur's defeat, the moogle runs off into a corner, clearly scared, and the group stays behind while Lenna approaches and attempts to cajole it.
Interestingly, while FF3 moogles were perfectly capable of speech, this one isn't; instead it talks in Pokémon-speak (several years before Pokémon, obviously), which is to say its lines are composed of syllables based on "kupo," like "kupopo," "kukupo," or "kupo popo."
Random fact: According to what I have found in my cursory research, "kupo" appears to have originated in FFV. In FF3, the moogle's characteristic verbal tic was instead "nyaa," or "meow," the onomatopeia for a cat sound; the reason they said "kupo" in our playthrough is because the later translation of FF3 backported was had by that point become the species's trademark. But in their first appearance, moogles did not kupo… They nyaa~'d.
What was the reputation of Moogles at the time, I wonder? I wasn't really online in the late 90s-early 00s and, as I recall, I thought they were cute but not much more than that; it feels like today among older players they have more of a mixed reputation as being kind of obnoxious? I know FFXIV actually plays into the annoying angle for gags at times (such as another character being driven to fury by moogles' insistence on being cute at him), which feels like it's reacting to a particular fanbase reputation. They do still seem to appear to be very popular mascots, and I imagine at the time of FFV they were especially fresh and novel.
Reassured by Lenna, the moogle decides that we're his friends, excitedly declares "kupopo!" and then… this plays out:
An animation plays out of the moogle leaving the cave, going through a wide circuitous path around the region north of it, and finally walking on the thin green band between a range of mountains and deserts to land on this forest tile, where it disappears.
No, the moogle did not transport us there. We flash immediately back to our group still in the Waterway. Rather, the moogle showed us a path. A long, winding one - to what end?
Well, the moment I step out of the cave myself, it becomes obvious: that path was designed to avoid desert tiles. The moogle circled around them travelling exclusively through plains and forest.
The conclusion is relatively straightforward: there is Bad New in the desert and I should avoid it.
Which is of course why the first thing I do is set foot in it.
You may notice that not all these enemies are alike to one another.
The cactuses are just buffed hedgehogs. They are disposed of without trouble. That hideous thing emerging from the sand with its hateful beady eyes, though?
It has Maelstrom, which hits the entire party and reduces everyone to single digit damage, and a heavy attack that instantly kills anyone who wasn't healed several hundred HP above where Maelstrom left them, and it mixes the two freely and repeatedly. Also?
It has 15,000 HP.
At this point I quickly decide that discretion is the better part of valor, and elect to escape.
…which I cannot do.
Escape is straight up impossible, we get a message telling you "nope" every time we try. And even my most powerful spell attacks only did 1k damage to the sandcrawler. And it keeps killing my characters. Meaning the inevitable result is…
Well. Lesson learned. I shall simply reload, follow the trail the moogle laid out, and avoid dealing with that horrible thing. Frustrating, but easily solved.
…
NOT.
HEY, GUESS WHAT?
SANDCRAWLER IS A DESERT CREATURE!
I'm not letting my trajectory be decided by some kind of rabbit-cat with bat wings.
Even with Aqua Breath, it's rough. The sandcrawler takes three castings to kill, and Aqua Breath costs a ridiculous 39 MP. That means I can effectively fight it twice and that's it. Thankfully, cutting through the desert in a straight line instead of following the moogle path is rather fast. Within moments, we arrive at…
The Moogle Village!
Cut for length.
I like the remote, moonlit vibe of this background screen, but holy shit are those pig fairies hideous. Incidentally, while we haven't seen orcs proper in the series so far that, that 'fairy orc's porcine appearance is a reminder of the strange split lineage of Dragon Quest that has led to Japanese fantasy media historically portraying orcs as much more pig-like than in Western media.
Regole's kind of a hole. I mean, it's a nice enough town, but one of the first lines of dialogue we bump into is literally "We haven't had a visitor in years!" In fact, this place is such a Nowheresville Indiana that even though they've heard rumors of Exdeath's return, they're confident that he'd never bother with an "out-of-the-way, podunk town like this."
There are also two children who are bickering over whether one of them actually saw a "moogle," which is our first hint that the little white fuzzball are coming back after being introduced in FF3 skipping a game in FFIV. I'll talk about this more when they show up. There's also someone warning me to stay away from a castle to the South that is full of LEGENDARY WEAPONS but also MONSTERS THAT WILL TOTALLY KILL ME, which, as you probably can guess by now, might as well put a neon sign on it that says "HEY OMI C'MERE."
Resting at the local inn triggers one of our usual night-time cutscenes - Galuf sneaks away from the group, and Barts wakes up soon after.
He woke up in the middle of the night to try out the local booze. That's a very Galuf move. Bartz finds him, and Galuf senses that something is wrong and offers him a seat. They need to clear the air. Earlier, Galuf brushed off the issue of having had to abort his castle raid to save the protagonists, and Bartz wants to actually apologize and settle the issue.
This is a neat character beat. When he deflected the issue earlier, Galuf framed it in a paternal "oh well, once again I'm the one saving you all, what would you do without me" way. Here, when Bartz gets serious and he decides to be honest, he acknowledge that having to interrupt his plans to save the heroes actually saved him and his troops - that in a way, though accidental, they're the ones who saved him. That's important because it means the heroes' choice to pull out all the stops and risk living their lives behind forever to come and help him wasn't incorrect. They didn't fuck up and ruin the day by keeping Galuf and his men from defeating Exdeath. Even though it was accidental, they chose correctly. Their bravery, selflessness and pure hearts drove them to the right course of action.
Of course part of the angle here is also Galuf assuaging Bartz's concerns and giving him an out of the guilt of ruining his plans. It could just be pretty words to reassure a younger man, but I prefer my read of it as being the truth.
Finally, since they're getting serious and all, Galuf looks at Bartz and asks him, why he came to his world knowing that he might never return. Bartz - unable to follow up and echo Galuf's sincerity at this time? - says "...no particular reason," and Galuf decides to let the matter lie and simply thanks him.
And with everyone properly refreshed and some basic info on our surroundings, we head out again!
Swapped in a Ninja and a Time Mage. Incidentally the fauna on this world is just, like, the worst, aesthetically. Does get the alien planet feeling across though.
Found the castle. Now to get inside…
Okay, cool design, I dig it. I'm guessing this is the beef gate that I have to beat in order to get access to the sweet sweet loot inside the castle, let's-
Well, at least I can say the 'Zombie' status effect has a pretty gnarly visual effect.
Okay, that thing has defense so high my attacks deal 0 damage, and it is protected by a passive Reflect effect that bounces off anything clever I try like Gravity (percentage base damage) or Raise (assuming it's undead). Summons get through it, but it has too much health regardless. Blue Magic might be able to do something? At this stage and without wiki-walking it I don't have an easy way around this one, so I'll just leave it for now.
Reloading and giving the castle a wide berth, all we have left is opening the world map and heading for the closest grey point, which turns out to be a forest region of sorts.
It's them! The kupos! We advance a little into the forest and one of the familiar fluffy faces spots us…
…and immediately attempts to run away only to fall down a hole. Oops.
So moogles are a known quantity on Galuf's world, who seem to be perceived as animals or 'benign' monsters of some sort. Lenna - who, along with Faris, officiates as our 'friend to animals' characters - decides we should help it, and so we promptly jump down the hole.
The Underground Waterway is not quite a typical dungeon. It is linear in the most literal sense; the 'waterway' takes you in one direction the moment you touch it, so there's only one path straight through.
Those enemies have a diverse range of resistances to physical attacks and magical attacks that make them a pain to handle except by just spamming Ramuh, which kills everything with Lightning-type damage. …which does mean I am still using Galuf primarily as a Summoner instead of a Time Mage, but hey, it works?
It's also a fairly short run through, and at the end, we arrive just in time to rescue the moogle.
Oh man, I love the look on this guy. Check out this sprite, the way its body is slumped over itself, its tail trailing at the back while its enormous head faces to the screen, coiled forward, its fangs parted into an evil grin. This is a sick fucking design.
However.
It is also a skeleton.
gg no re.
Immediately after the dinosaur's defeat, the moogle runs off into a corner, clearly scared, and the group stays behind while Lenna approaches and attempts to cajole it.
Interestingly, while FF3 moogles were perfectly capable of speech, this one isn't; instead it talks in Pokémon-speak (several years before Pokémon, obviously), which is to say its lines are composed of syllables based on "kupo," like "kupopo," "kukupo," or "kupo popo."
Random fact: According to what I have found in my cursory research, "kupo" appears to have originated in FFV. In FF3, the moogle's characteristic verbal tic was instead "nyaa," or "meow," the onomatopeia for a cat sound; the reason they said "kupo" in our playthrough is because the later translation of FF3 backported was had by that point become the species's trademark. But in their first appearance, moogles did not kupo… They nyaa~'d.
What was the reputation of Moogles at the time, I wonder? I wasn't really online in the late 90s-early 00s and, as I recall, I thought they were cute but not much more than that; it feels like today among older players they have more of a mixed reputation as being kind of obnoxious? I know FFXIV actually plays into the annoying angle for gags at times (such as another character being driven to fury by moogles' insistence on being cute at him), which feels like it's reacting to a particular fanbase reputation. They do still seem to appear to be very popular mascots, and I imagine at the time of FFV they were especially fresh and novel.
Reassured by Lenna, the moogle decides that we're his friends, excitedly declares "kupopo!" and then… this plays out:
An animation plays out of the moogle leaving the cave, going through a wide circuitous path around the region north of it, and finally walking on the thin green band between a range of mountains and deserts to land on this forest tile, where it disappears.
No, the moogle did not transport us there. We flash immediately back to our group still in the Waterway. Rather, the moogle showed us a path. A long, winding one - to what end?
Well, the moment I step out of the cave myself, it becomes obvious: that path was designed to avoid desert tiles. The moogle circled around them travelling exclusively through plains and forest.
The conclusion is relatively straightforward: there is Bad New in the desert and I should avoid it.
Which is of course why the first thing I do is set foot in it.
You may notice that not all these enemies are alike to one another.
The cactuses are just buffed hedgehogs. They are disposed of without trouble. That hideous thing emerging from the sand with its hateful beady eyes, though?
It has Maelstrom, which hits the entire party and reduces everyone to single digit damage, and a heavy attack that instantly kills anyone who wasn't healed several hundred HP above where Maelstrom left them, and it mixes the two freely and repeatedly. Also?
It has 15,000 HP.
At this point I quickly decide that discretion is the better part of valor, and elect to escape.
…which I cannot do.
Escape is straight up impossible, we get a message telling you "nope" every time we try. And even my most powerful spell attacks only did 1k damage to the sandcrawler. And it keeps killing my characters. Meaning the inevitable result is…
Well. Lesson learned. I shall simply reload, follow the trail the moogle laid out, and avoid dealing with that horrible thing. Frustrating, but easily solved.
…
NOT.
HEY, GUESS WHAT?
SANDCRAWLER IS A DESERT CREATURE!
I'm not letting my trajectory be decided by some kind of rabbit-cat with bat wings.
Even with Aqua Breath, it's rough. The sandcrawler takes three castings to kill, and Aqua Breath costs a ridiculous 39 MP. That means I can effectively fight it twice and that's it. Thankfully, cutting through the desert in a straight line instead of following the moogle path is rather fast. Within moments, we arrive at…
The Moogle Village!
Cut for length.
Final Fantasy V, Part 11, Part B
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Unfortunately, the moogles here react to our approach about as well as their friend did when we first met him; they immediately scatter in a panic, leaving us in an empty village, save for the occasional sight of a moogle running between treelines. And I do mean 'village':
Note the stairways and hinged doors built into fully living trees. We are dealing with an intelligent, tool-using species that is living in a special harmony with their environment, perhaps with magic capable of shaping it without hurting it. Almost like fae spirits, or the sylphs of previous games.
After exploring for a bit, we find a different treehouse a little ways from the others, and finally one of the moogles approaches us.
The moogle leads us to an isolated treehouse and opens the door for us, allowing us to enter, and presents us with a bounty of chests:
Very nice of them to be so helpful.
There's gil and a cottage in the chests, but the most interesting item is one Dancing Dagger, which seems to have unique properties and is equippable by Ninjas, and thus goes to Bartz. Later testing will prove… inconclusive? The Dancing Dagger appears to trigger one of two or three "dance" moves, each of which has Bartz steal a certain amount of health from the enemy, ranging from the two digits to the three digits - so ranging from crazy good to mediocre. The thing is, thanks to Ninja's dual wielding, I can have Bartz wield a normal dagger in one hand and the Dancing Dagger in the other, thus ensuring the reliability of a normal weapon's full damage while still having the drain.
…it's a neat trick that I end up dropping mainly because I am tired of the dancing animation taking time during random encounters. An interesting case of a practically effective tactic being discarded for quality of life reasons.
As we leave the moogle's house, it turns around and lets out a "kuku popo!" directed at seemingly no one.
Interesting. It looks like Krile has a moogle friend of her own, and they share some kind of… hive mind? Long-distance communication? Either way, Krile appears to speak moogle, and hurries to warn the soldiers that her father and friends are lost at the other end of the world.
Okay, yeah, moogle telepathic network. This would be really potent if the moogles were part of the organized fight against Exdeath, but that doesn't seem to be their vibe. The moogle village is "very far" from wherever this castle is, and Krile's wind drake is very tired, but when she approaches him, the drake volunteers nonetheless.
I don't like the sound of that 'just enough energy for one more flight.' Krile probably wouldn't let her wind drake friend sacrifice itself like this and probably think it just means it'll have to take a nap afterwards, but pets and animal friends in this game have had a tendency towards the recklessly self-sacrificing.
Krile gets up on the drake and flies off towards the forest, where the moogles 'on the ground' are performing some kind of… interpretative dance session?
…uh.
I guess the moogle forest is concealed by some kind of illusion, and they gather up to break the spell, then send a telepathic message to the moogle aboard the drake to point him to the right spot? Or, given that the forest now looks like a moogle's head, they cast a spell that made it look like a moogle's head? I'm not sure what's happening here.
I don't really get what's happening with the moogle-head forest, but I do get the point: they're doing an aircraft landing scene. They have moogles on the ground gather and wave while communicating by 'radio' with the incoming 'plane' until the wind drake stops on the 'landing strip' made up of the two split ranks of moogles. It's a cute idea.
The group boards the wind drake, and it flies everyone back home, landing in the court of that castle from earlier. Krile says she'll take the drake back to his roost so he can rest and flies away, leaving the room alone; now, if you have been paying any attention to this whole thing with castles and wind drakes, it will come as no surprise when we are greeted with…
King Galuf asks about the state of his troops, and is told that they've been almost wiped out by Exdeath's monster hordes. This is the tragedy of Galuf: while he was struck with amnesia, wandering about the world having fun adventures with his friends, or while he was stuck at the other end of the world exploring Moogle forests, men looking for his leadership were fighting and dying to try and save their world and Bartz's. It's a darker pendant to Lenna's arc, in a way.
Bartz, who kind of missed the hint the game laid out previously, expresses his shock by walking straight up to Galuf's throne in the middle of his conversation with the guards. "All this time I thought you were some crazy old man - you never said anything about being a king!"
Galuf is having fun with this.
You know what, yeah, if I did recover my memories of being a king in the middle of a dramatic situation, I would keep that information under my sleeve just so I can reveal it to my friends at the funniest possible time.
Galuf dismisses his men, tells everyone to takes some rest, and asks Bartz why he's still gawking at him. Galuf pretends to take this as an insult ("You're saying I'm not the epitome of kingliness?") so they can engage in slapstick running around the room. Then after Bartz says he'll just mind his behavior around "King Galuf," Galuf tells him they knew him as a friend before they knew him as a king, and to them, he'll always be just Galuf.
I love these guys. It's a shame you never seem to see any of them in extra material.
Talking to the guards with the actual king as part of our party is pretty neat; everyone is all reverential and helpful. One of them even points us to the Teleport spell contained in a conceived alcove in the wall (automatically revealed by Thief's Find Passage, lmao). We are warned that the barrier 'blocks the access to Big Bridge,' and that without a wind drake we won't be able to get near Exdeath castle.
Which, as a random note, is an odd inaccuracy: the first thing I do after getting free roam again is head to Big Bridge to check out what the barrier visual effect looks like, and you can in fact go the entire way across the bridge and to Exdeath's castle; the barrier only prevents entry into that small mountain circle the castle's in. There's no reason to do that though, other than checking out that what the guard is saying is oddly just a bit removed from the facts.
Anyway, this implicitly alludes to our next step: we need a healthy wind drake to get us there. So next step is, we head towards the aerie upstairs to find the drake…
…yeah, it's as I suspected. Krile thought the drake was just willing to go the extra mile and exhaust himself, the drake was pulling a Syldra and sacrificed himself to find and rescue us. As Krile explains, the wind drake wasn't just tired, it had been wounded earlier, and exerting himself so much made his wounds much worse.
It would be really bitter a development if the drake died here, not so much because I'm not over Syldra (EVEN THOUGH I'M NOT OVER IT), but moreso because even though there are reasons why getting the heroes back home ASAP is important the moogle village bit was really light-hearted and having a character throw their lives away to "save us" while we were being entertained by fluffy fuzzballs would feel like real whiplash.
Thankfully, just as with Hiryu, Lenna is not about to let this be another needless wind drake death. Faris asks Krile if there's any way to save the wind drake, and Krile doesn't know, but Lenna immediately brings up the dragon grass and asks if this world has any. Krile doesn't know about dragon grass, but Faris suggests that if this world has wind drakes, logically it has dragon grass, and unlike Bartz's world, it turns out wind drakes on Galuf's world never went extinct. Galuf thinks on this, and recalls a place called 'Drakenvale, the valley of wind drakes. However, no one who's entered has ever returned.'
When I tell you about this game and what it manages to do with reutilizing so few sprites in such circumstances. There: Somber reflection at the danger of the journey ahead, broken up by Bartz's shounen protagonist optimism.
This is a great scene because it utilizes all five characters well - Krile's empathy to the drake, then Lenna sharing that empathy and already knowing the solution from past experience, Faris bringing her worldly knowledge as an experienced pirate, then Galuf contributing to it with his personal knowledge of his own world's geography and history, and then Bartz keeping everyone from a worry spiral with bottomless self-confidence.
It's efficient while showcasing each character's own thing in a neat way.
Krile worries about the monsters outside, and the group tells her they will all be fine together and save her wind drake. Galuf indicates that Drakenvale is located to the north, past Quelb, the werewolf town, which is certainly an interesting place I'm eager to visit. With our next objective clear in view, we're just going to do a brief run through the castle to check there isn't anything to grab before we leave!
…yeah, I guess Gilgamesh really is a massive threat when he's not dealing with "literally the Crystal Warriors."
Krile backstory, good. But also, sad. It's kind of fascinating how many characters' lives are tied to wind drakes in this game.
Mysterious area with a closed door and new opponents, sure, we'll be back here later.
Nothing much to be found really, although there's an out of the way corner that leads us to a chest containing the Angel Robe and one of the 'meta advice' guys who appears to be randomly lost fifteen hours into the game and tells us about the Optimal command and how the game handles automatically equipping 'best' gear when swapping jobs…
WHAT? OH MY FUCKING GOD, THIS IS WHY I KEEP FINDING MY CHARACTERS WITHOUT ELVEN MANTLES EQUIPPED
I HATE THIS WHY DID THEY DESIGN IT LIKE THIS
AAAAAAARGH
It's time to head out.
The guards exclaim in horror that if they do that, we won't be able to come back in, but we insist, and the guards let us out, before shutting the gates behind us. Nor was the threat overstated; the moment we're outside, we are attacked by one of Exdeath's Abductors.
You may recall Abductors as those dudes who kidnapped everyone back at our first campfire, one of whom Bartz killed solo. A real boss fight this ain't.
But hey, I get to test out cool spells like this game's version of Comet, which is time magic!
And with this, the path forward opens, and it's time to find us some werewolves who this time won't treat us as dirty as Lone Wolf the Pickpocket.
Note the stairways and hinged doors built into fully living trees. We are dealing with an intelligent, tool-using species that is living in a special harmony with their environment, perhaps with magic capable of shaping it without hurting it. Almost like fae spirits, or the sylphs of previous games.
After exploring for a bit, we find a different treehouse a little ways from the others, and finally one of the moogles approaches us.
The moogle leads us to an isolated treehouse and opens the door for us, allowing us to enter, and presents us with a bounty of chests:
Very nice of them to be so helpful.
There's gil and a cottage in the chests, but the most interesting item is one Dancing Dagger, which seems to have unique properties and is equippable by Ninjas, and thus goes to Bartz. Later testing will prove… inconclusive? The Dancing Dagger appears to trigger one of two or three "dance" moves, each of which has Bartz steal a certain amount of health from the enemy, ranging from the two digits to the three digits - so ranging from crazy good to mediocre. The thing is, thanks to Ninja's dual wielding, I can have Bartz wield a normal dagger in one hand and the Dancing Dagger in the other, thus ensuring the reliability of a normal weapon's full damage while still having the drain.
…it's a neat trick that I end up dropping mainly because I am tired of the dancing animation taking time during random encounters. An interesting case of a practically effective tactic being discarded for quality of life reasons.
As we leave the moogle's house, it turns around and lets out a "kuku popo!" directed at seemingly no one.
Interesting. It looks like Krile has a moogle friend of her own, and they share some kind of… hive mind? Long-distance communication? Either way, Krile appears to speak moogle, and hurries to warn the soldiers that her father and friends are lost at the other end of the world.
Okay, yeah, moogle telepathic network. This would be really potent if the moogles were part of the organized fight against Exdeath, but that doesn't seem to be their vibe. The moogle village is "very far" from wherever this castle is, and Krile's wind drake is very tired, but when she approaches him, the drake volunteers nonetheless.
I don't like the sound of that 'just enough energy for one more flight.' Krile probably wouldn't let her wind drake friend sacrifice itself like this and probably think it just means it'll have to take a nap afterwards, but pets and animal friends in this game have had a tendency towards the recklessly self-sacrificing.
Krile gets up on the drake and flies off towards the forest, where the moogles 'on the ground' are performing some kind of… interpretative dance session?
…uh.
I guess the moogle forest is concealed by some kind of illusion, and they gather up to break the spell, then send a telepathic message to the moogle aboard the drake to point him to the right spot? Or, given that the forest now looks like a moogle's head, they cast a spell that made it look like a moogle's head? I'm not sure what's happening here.
I don't really get what's happening with the moogle-head forest, but I do get the point: they're doing an aircraft landing scene. They have moogles on the ground gather and wave while communicating by 'radio' with the incoming 'plane' until the wind drake stops on the 'landing strip' made up of the two split ranks of moogles. It's a cute idea.
The group boards the wind drake, and it flies everyone back home, landing in the court of that castle from earlier. Krile says she'll take the drake back to his roost so he can rest and flies away, leaving the room alone; now, if you have been paying any attention to this whole thing with castles and wind drakes, it will come as no surprise when we are greeted with…
King Galuf asks about the state of his troops, and is told that they've been almost wiped out by Exdeath's monster hordes. This is the tragedy of Galuf: while he was struck with amnesia, wandering about the world having fun adventures with his friends, or while he was stuck at the other end of the world exploring Moogle forests, men looking for his leadership were fighting and dying to try and save their world and Bartz's. It's a darker pendant to Lenna's arc, in a way.
Bartz, who kind of missed the hint the game laid out previously, expresses his shock by walking straight up to Galuf's throne in the middle of his conversation with the guards. "All this time I thought you were some crazy old man - you never said anything about being a king!"
Galuf is having fun with this.
You know what, yeah, if I did recover my memories of being a king in the middle of a dramatic situation, I would keep that information under my sleeve just so I can reveal it to my friends at the funniest possible time.
Galuf dismisses his men, tells everyone to takes some rest, and asks Bartz why he's still gawking at him. Galuf pretends to take this as an insult ("You're saying I'm not the epitome of kingliness?") so they can engage in slapstick running around the room. Then after Bartz says he'll just mind his behavior around "King Galuf," Galuf tells him they knew him as a friend before they knew him as a king, and to them, he'll always be just Galuf.
I love these guys. It's a shame you never seem to see any of them in extra material.
Talking to the guards with the actual king as part of our party is pretty neat; everyone is all reverential and helpful. One of them even points us to the Teleport spell contained in a conceived alcove in the wall (automatically revealed by Thief's Find Passage, lmao). We are warned that the barrier 'blocks the access to Big Bridge,' and that without a wind drake we won't be able to get near Exdeath castle.
Which, as a random note, is an odd inaccuracy: the first thing I do after getting free roam again is head to Big Bridge to check out what the barrier visual effect looks like, and you can in fact go the entire way across the bridge and to Exdeath's castle; the barrier only prevents entry into that small mountain circle the castle's in. There's no reason to do that though, other than checking out that what the guard is saying is oddly just a bit removed from the facts.
Anyway, this implicitly alludes to our next step: we need a healthy wind drake to get us there. So next step is, we head towards the aerie upstairs to find the drake…
…yeah, it's as I suspected. Krile thought the drake was just willing to go the extra mile and exhaust himself, the drake was pulling a Syldra and sacrificed himself to find and rescue us. As Krile explains, the wind drake wasn't just tired, it had been wounded earlier, and exerting himself so much made his wounds much worse.
It would be really bitter a development if the drake died here, not so much because I'm not over Syldra (EVEN THOUGH I'M NOT OVER IT), but moreso because even though there are reasons why getting the heroes back home ASAP is important the moogle village bit was really light-hearted and having a character throw their lives away to "save us" while we were being entertained by fluffy fuzzballs would feel like real whiplash.
Thankfully, just as with Hiryu, Lenna is not about to let this be another needless wind drake death. Faris asks Krile if there's any way to save the wind drake, and Krile doesn't know, but Lenna immediately brings up the dragon grass and asks if this world has any. Krile doesn't know about dragon grass, but Faris suggests that if this world has wind drakes, logically it has dragon grass, and unlike Bartz's world, it turns out wind drakes on Galuf's world never went extinct. Galuf thinks on this, and recalls a place called 'Drakenvale, the valley of wind drakes. However, no one who's entered has ever returned.'
When I tell you about this game and what it manages to do with reutilizing so few sprites in such circumstances. There: Somber reflection at the danger of the journey ahead, broken up by Bartz's shounen protagonist optimism.
This is a great scene because it utilizes all five characters well - Krile's empathy to the drake, then Lenna sharing that empathy and already knowing the solution from past experience, Faris bringing her worldly knowledge as an experienced pirate, then Galuf contributing to it with his personal knowledge of his own world's geography and history, and then Bartz keeping everyone from a worry spiral with bottomless self-confidence.
It's efficient while showcasing each character's own thing in a neat way.
Krile worries about the monsters outside, and the group tells her they will all be fine together and save her wind drake. Galuf indicates that Drakenvale is located to the north, past Quelb, the werewolf town, which is certainly an interesting place I'm eager to visit. With our next objective clear in view, we're just going to do a brief run through the castle to check there isn't anything to grab before we leave!
…yeah, I guess Gilgamesh really is a massive threat when he's not dealing with "literally the Crystal Warriors."
Krile backstory, good. But also, sad. It's kind of fascinating how many characters' lives are tied to wind drakes in this game.
Mysterious area with a closed door and new opponents, sure, we'll be back here later.
Nothing much to be found really, although there's an out of the way corner that leads us to a chest containing the Angel Robe and one of the 'meta advice' guys who appears to be randomly lost fifteen hours into the game and tells us about the Optimal command and how the game handles automatically equipping 'best' gear when swapping jobs…
WHAT? OH MY FUCKING GOD, THIS IS WHY I KEEP FINDING MY CHARACTERS WITHOUT ELVEN MANTLES EQUIPPED
I HATE THIS WHY DID THEY DESIGN IT LIKE THIS
AAAAAAARGH
It's time to head out.
The guards exclaim in horror that if they do that, we won't be able to come back in, but we insist, and the guards let us out, before shutting the gates behind us. Nor was the threat overstated; the moment we're outside, we are attacked by one of Exdeath's Abductors.
You may recall Abductors as those dudes who kidnapped everyone back at our first campfire, one of whom Bartz killed solo. A real boss fight this ain't.
But hey, I get to test out cool spells like this game's version of Comet, which is time magic!
And with this, the path forward opens, and it's time to find us some werewolves who this time won't treat us as dirty as Lone Wolf the Pickpocket.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
The conclusion is relatively straightforward: there is Bad New in the desert and I should avoid it.
Which is of course why the first thing I do is set foot in it.
You may notice that not all these enemies are alike to one another.
The cactuses are just buffed hedgehogs. They are disposed of without trouble. That hideous thing emerging from the sand with its hateful beady eyes, though?
It has Maelstrom, which hits the entire party and reduces everyone to single digit damage, and a heavy attack that instantly kills anyone who wasn't healed several hundred HP above where Maelstrom left them, and it mixes the two freely and repeatedly. Also?
It has 15,000 HP.
At this point I quickly decide that discretion is the better part of valor, and elect to escape.
…which I cannot do.
Escape is straight up impossible, we get a message telling you "nope" every time we try. And even my most powerful spell attacks only did 1k damage to the sandcrawler. And it keeps killing my characters. Meaning the inevitable result is…
Well. Lesson learned. I shall simply reload, follow the trail the moogle laid out, and avoid dealing with that horrible thing. Frustrating, but easily solved.
…
NOT.
HEY, GUESS WHAT?
SANDCRAWLER IS A DESERT CREATURE!
I'm not letting my trajectory be decided by some kind of rabbit-cat with bat wings.
HIMBOMI STRIKES AGAIN
The Dancing Dagger basically triggers the Dancer's... Dance command at a 50% rate when autoattacking. The four moves in the Dance pool are Tempting Tango (inflicts Confuse), Mystery Waltz/Jitterbug Duet (absorb MP and HP respectively) and Sword Dance (attack at x4 power). There are three other pieces of equipment which replace Temptingt Tango with a second opportunity for Sword Dance to proc. As you can see this makes dancing potentially really damn powerful, especially since I believe Sword Dance is doubled again by dual-wielding.
Bartz, who kind of missed the hint the game laid out previously, expresses his shock by walking straight up to Galuf's throne in the middle of his conversation with the guards. "All this time I thought you were some crazy old man - you never said anything about being a king!"
You know what, yeah, if I did recover my memories of being a king in the middle of a dramatic situation, I would keep that information under my sleeve just so I can reveal it to my friends at the funniest possible time.
Galuf is having fun with this.
Second priority is self-preservation. First priority should always be Committing To The Bit.
Joke's on you lot, it's just a pull door.
Galuf really is an absolute bro, gotta say. Replaying the game has rapidly shot him up to one of my favorite characters in the series.
You know, you comment that the fauna here is the worst, but that just makes me consider: Do you think Galuf has similar thoughts about the First World's fauna? Like "urgggh god what the hell is that thing Bartz". "Galuf it's a Bull." "WHY DOES IT LOOK LIKE THAT, WHERE'S THE SLIME FOR ITS SKIN".
Swapped in a Ninja and a Time Mage. Incidentally the fauna on this world is just, like, the worst, aesthetically. Does get the alien planet feeling across though.
Boy, this is what the third or fourth time the game has gone "yo don't go there you'll die instantly", and you've gone there, and died instantly, isn't it Omi?
That said for all their power, Shield Dragons don't count as bosses, so if you have a Beastmaster in the party (or just someone trained as one) you can trivialize this entire thing with the !Control ability and make it kill itself. Decent rewards for doing so too.
And here we see Omi finally combining classes properly, halfway through the game. But yes Summoner + Time Mage is a crazy good combo, because it gives you massive AoE damage on command mixed with a ton of useful support spells. Even moreso when you start getting higher level spells like Hastega and Slowga, or a Gold Hairpin so summons aren't nearly as MP intensive.
Those enemies have a diverse range of resistances to physical attacks and magical attacks that make them a pain to handle except by just spamming Ramuh, which kills everything with Lightning-type damage. …which does mean I am still using Galuf primarily as a Summoner instead of a Time Mage, but hey, it works?
Mother of FUCK somehow that didn't even occur to me fighting this boss lmao. I got almost completely wiped because I was trying to fight legit and this boss has ridiculous counterattack abilities if you use magic and stuff on it.However.
It is also a skeleton.
gg no re.
Omi
Omi no we just went over this TEN MINUTES AGO with the Shield Dragon
Omi? Omiiiiiiiiii-
Zerban beat me to the punch, but basically the Dancing Dagger is just the Dancer's Dance command confined into the form of a knife that anyone can use (making the Dancer even more useless of a class sadly). It's up in the air if you'll find it actually useful most fights, because sometimes you'll get Sword Dance and murderize your target, sometimes you'll try to cast confusion on a boss. I used it for a long while though.
I reiterate: Galuf is Best Boi.
Personally, I really can't wait for the next episode of New Frame Plus covering FFV. Sure by comparison FFVI is obvious because all the overworld sprites got increased in size and detail so there's tons of extra to talk about there, but FFV is done in the same style of FFIV but just... has so much more character going for it, and so much versatile use of the same spritework.
When I tell you about this game and what it manages to do with reutilizing so few sprites in such circumstances. There: Somber reflection at the danger of the journey ahead, broken up by Bartz's shounen protagonist optimism.
Congratulations Omi, you just found one of the best grinding spots in the game. Those Art statues? Weak to Level 5 Death, and give you 4-8 ABP per battle.
Yeaaaah, gotta get used to double checking your equipment after every class swap/optimization. And not just accessories since the game will gravitate towards "Gauntlets give +2 defense way more important than status immunities and dodge chance!", but also you'll start getting shit like the Hypno Helm which for whatever reason, most classes can wear but it trades off making !Control more accurate for having an absurd weight stat. So you'll constantly change class, and the game will go "hrm yes your lightweight ninja sure wants their speed stat lowered by 15".
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
"Oh, he found about that. He ded -"
"'Bout now."
The moogles might have been half designed as cats, but they're not the ones being killed by their curiosity...
NOBODY STILL IS DECADES LATER. *sobs in guzzling booze*
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
They also instadie to gold needles, and drop more gold than a gold needle costs, so if you can set items on autobattle you can have all four members instagib them en masse as long as you like (with trips to the shop to restock, admittedly). I guess Galuf doesn't mind his friends smashing his decorative statue collection for hours on end? You'd think he'd say something about it at some point.
Also, incidentally, their kingdom being named Bal is where Galuf and Krile's surname, Baldesion (first appearing in the 2008 anniversary Ultimania) appears - its the same type of "royalty has country name for a surname" that Lenna has, except with a suffix because the country name is short.
Also also incidentally, as any fan of Ah! Megami-Sama could tell you, Japanese doesn't really distinguish between the letter b and the letter v, and often mixes them up in translation - and so the Island of Val that Galuf XIV is from is also named after his kingdom from V.
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GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Oh look, you've finally found the AP turbofarm area. Time to get that Doublecast!
Mysterious area with a closed door and new opponents, sure, we'll be back here later
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Ah yes, the Moogle Network, the psychic link shared by all monsters of that type, one of the reasons Moogles are considered both insightful and insane. There are rumors it was established by the clan's founder or that he ascended to become a being of pure psychic energy and became the Network itself. The Network's main function seems to be bringing Moogles together for gatherings through "The Call", a powerful psychic summons. This was the method used to gather the majority of the clan for the Great Prank – Oh wait, that's Malkavians and the Madness Network, my mistake.
FFV is peak series monster design in my opinion. I forget if it's been mentioned in this thread, but the enemy designs in this game was actually Tetsuya Nomura's debut as a designer at Square (previously he was a debugger on FFIV). Not a belt or zipper in sight either.
- Location
- Florida USA
Unfortunately, as I feared, Omi rushed to leave and so he can't do the grind until he completes the next few updates.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Not only did Omi miss the prime grind spot, they also appear to have missed out on two great pieces of equipment (and a harp).
A sword hidden at the end of the moat.
A dagger that's a rare steal from the AP fodder.
A harp from trying to experience the joys of capitalism for yourself.
Yeah. Just remember, @Omicron when you see a non-boss monster that appears to be way too strong for you and doesn't have an obvious weakness (like undead and desert creatures), the answer is always assisted suicide.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Honestly the way Galuf talks about it like he knew it was a concern but didn't think it was ready for use yet and has no apparent evidence of having had a countermeasure ready (nor do the soldiers in his castle suggest one or anything) makes it hard for me to see it as anything but the truth.
For him to be simply assuaging Bartz's guilt with a lie, he'd either need to be lying about having known about the barrier, or be hiding that he has some actual answer to it prepared.
As others have mentioned this is one of the more memorable cases of 'beastmaster's !control is just plain the best answer'. There's... not really a good answer otherwise, honestly, takes a long time to get strong enough to really just brute force it.