Okay, I haven't actually played the game & may be missing some critical detail, but this puzzle has grabbed me, so: would it have been possible to make the Guard+Cover strategy work by equipping the relevant command(s) to Freelancer and throwing on a Ribbon?
Ranger's big claim to fame here is, as mentioned before, !Rapidfire. Basically, you attack four times, and it works for melee as well as ranged weapons. Coupled with the Ninja's Dual wield, you attack four times with each hand, rolling a grand total of eight attacks a turn. Properly equipped and buffed, it does mean you end up doing a whole lot of damage in one turn. The big issue is I don't recall if it applies to the Mystic Swordsman's attacks.
The biggest downside to !Rapidfire, of course, is the fact the targets hit are basically random. If you have multiple enemies in the field, you don't get to choose who gets hit, and in case of bosses with multiple parts, you still have the same problem.
Yeah, I know the big prize at the end of the tunnel for Ranger, the thing is none of the classes Bartz has unlocked so far combines with Ranger while training it, so Ranger is just itself and kinda sucks until that's unlocked
Doing Ranger first, Ninja second would probably have worked out better in the end, although the Murderblender build was very funny for midgame.
We're heading back to the Sealed Castle to confront the Shield Dragons. Are our characters better equipped to handle them with their now higher levels and completed jobs?
Okay, I haven't actually played the game & may be missing some critical detail, but this puzzle has grabbed me, so: would it have been possible to make the Guard+Cover strategy work by equipping the relevant command(s) to Freelancer and throwing on a Ribbon?
I do eventually run out of Ether (the strategy I'm using is extremely MP-expensive), but not enough to offset the Cave's reward. Two full rounds in the cave bring in 160,000 gil and put me at around 250,000 total, or thereabouts.
That can't matter, !Spellblade is a magic command and so should be setting Bartz's magic to a certain number unless it's already higher, and even more importantly, that's not how Spellblade works.
Blizzaga blade simply makes it so that, against Ice vulnerable enemies, they instantly die, unless they have the Heavy property that protects against that, in which case your hits do 4 times damage and ignore all defense.
There is no magic based aspect to this. The Mystic Knight deals damage just as well with a Summoner's awesome magic as with their own baseline or even reduced values. Spellblade does not factor magic into its damage output in any way.
(all the damage amping sorts of blades except flare blade which Omicron hasn't seen yet so is technically a spoiler work the same way, just not necessarily to the same degree. Only -Ga spells and spells on their general late game tier like Bio lead to spellblades with the instant kill property, and standard eg fire gets only a x2 multiplier and ignoring defenses while -ra level spells get a x3 multiplier and ignoring defenses, but at no point is a magic stat relevant to a spellbladers damage output.)
Fair enough; looking forward to see if what happens in the game will be a satisfying answer to this need or not, for you.
Speaking of growing in scope though, I forgot to ask you what you thought of the difference between FFIII and FFIV in that respect - FFIII had the initial floating continent, then the flooded world which evolved into the world raised from the waters, and included an underwater map as well. FFIV had the surface world, the underworld (with a cave leading to the Summon world), and the Moon. Which would you say gave their game a bigger sense of scope, and how does that compares so far with FFV two worlds, one of the two with an underwater map?
It's a tough questio, becasuse they're different kinds of twist.
FFIV's final map shift is just that - final. It introduces the last map in the game, with only two actual location (Hummingway Home and the Lunarian lair) plus a bunch of tunnels. It's a very "people never look up" kind of twist; after it's been hinted at during the course of the game, you go "oh shit, we're going up there," and then you do, and you get the final explanation of events and the resolution of the plot. It resolves things, rather than opening them.
FFIII is the opposite. The reveal appears at the start of the game. And, because the floating island was already fairly big, it's kind of mind-boggling in a different way, the game pulling a rabbit out of its hat to the gasps of amazement of the audience. It's telling you, "here's the entire rest of the game, and it's fucking enormous." And of course, the first time this happens, all that the world is is... nothing. An infite expense of still water. The Flood.
For my money, the sight of coming out of the floating island, the idyllic-if-compromised home of the Orphans of Ur, only to find that there is an entire world and it's fucking dead, is the most powerful of the two twists.
However, it's a twist that then wears off, as after you've pulled the water, it becomes another world to explore, and a fairly normal one. By the end of the game, it no longer feels like anything particularly exceptional. By contrast, by the time FFIV closes, it's still riding high on the Moon Twist. Also, the dwarves are a lot of fun.
Over all, I'd say FFIV has the better Greater Scope Twist as a whole game, and FFIII has the better one for its momentary impact.
And congrats on taking out the gil turtle. I didn't really bother in my own playthrough, but golem would probably me my strat as well. Such a useful summon.
Also the reason I emphasized "reliability" and "consistency" in my description of my tactics is that you don't just beat the Gil Turtle once, you beat it several times to make your way through the gil path, and then again if you're doing it again, and you need to be doing perfectly each time, because a nail-biter victory just means you'll get crushed next.
Okay, I haven't actually played the game & may be missing some critical detail, but this puzzle has grabbed me, so: would it have been possible to make the Guard+Cover strategy work by equipping the relevant command(s) to Freelancer and throwing on a Ribbon?
Aaaand you're officially past where I quit on my final playthrough. I just sort of assumed the gimmick of Gil turtle was that he was an unbeatable* superboss, so you were just gambling each time you went in the gil cave as to weather you could get a decent amount of gil before the boss showed up. I never even tried to beat him.
* Until it was too late in the game to matter.
I, too, hit a wall in the dungeon right when all those dragons showed up, and I hadn't done any grinding at all. I'd skimmed some speedrun guides at the start of the game so that I knew which builds weren't terrible, but I didn't want to go back to a guide just because the fights were getting a little harder. I thought about doing some build experimentation, but that would require grinding, and I just couldn't come up with a grinding strategy that I liked.
Yeah, kind of the same here, although it's less "too many superbosses" and more "now I want to grind to cap all the Jobs" and then real life happened. I don't even remember what the last plot point I got to was, other than I picked up Krile and she took Galuf's party spot.
Admittedly at the time I didn't have access to a lot of the current knowledge about FFV's mechanics, so I had no idea what Jobs are good and which are synergistic and which fall off hard. So I was going to master all the Jobs, no matter how painful the grind.
I also admit I'm waiting for news on the Switch port of the Pixel Remasters; I have them on Android, but having it on a controller would feel much better, plus the portability. So even my current Pixel Remaster playthroughs are stalled.
(At least the lack of New Game Plus and savegame carry-over means starting over on a new platform is perfectly fine.)
Alright. It's time to actually finish Exdeath's Castle.
Without the need to check for chests (including a few hidden in secret pathways, which is why I have Lenna equip FInd Passage), getting back to the save room from our first run is pretty quick, and then it's time for another lava bath.
If you'll look closely, you'll see that these rooms are sort of symmetrical. This is because they're part of a falling puzzle. The platform with skulls on the right is full of tiles that break when we step on them; we need to experiment, falling into the lava bath below, until we find a path through the tiles that get us to various chests and to that bubbled flame thing. It takes a while, and the whole time we're facing tough as nails enemies. Like, the color dragon series:
You might notice that I still have Bartz as a Ranger instead of putting him on a Freelancer powertrip. This is because I have found something amazing:
Zeninage.
Now, this is an ability I've had for a long time. Zeninage is the Samurai's default command; it consumes gil in order to literally throw money at the enemy for huge damage. Previously, I did not use this skill; while I always had large sums of money on me, it always got mostly spent in huge chunks when upgrading my equipment in a new town or restocking Phoenix Downs and Ethers.
Now, though? I've gone through the gil cave. Throwing 3,000 to 6,000 gil at an enemy is nothing. I have other 270k gil going into Exdeath Castle, and I get 1k or more per battle, and a single gil toss does 5k damage to all enemies. This basically ends any encounter with anything that's not a pack of dragons.
Although this is what happens when I get cheap and skimp on the Zeninage. These yellow dragons aren't fucking around.
And so, burning through our cash reserves, we complete the falling platform puzzle and reach the bubbled flame, which, as expected from its resemblance to the sealed form of Shiva, turns out to be another summon challenging us to prove our worth!
…Carbuncle, huh.
The design evolution here is fascinating. In FFIII, Carbuncle was a weird and ugly mass of stuff, with one eye peering out. Here, Carbuncle is a giant, animal-looking creature, kind of feline, although its large claws also evoke digging rodents; the name 'Carbuncle' likely referring to the red gemstone (carbuncle) set in its brow. Every other Carbuncle I'm aware of later in the series is instead some kind of cute furry rodent, like a cross between a squirrel and a rabbit? Except in Final Fantasy XIV, where Carbuncle is a cute furry rodent… Except when at some point you encounter a Carbuncle-related creature that is a huge angry feral monster, as a joke, and that design I am now realizing may well be referencing this early form of Carbuncle? Shit has layers, man.
Although...
...that's what Carbuncle looks like when summoned. Definitely not the cutesy mascot of later games, this thing looks weird as hell, kinda has an alien vibe to it, but definitely smaller and less overtly threatening. Also I think it's the first summon to have a different appearance when summoned as opposed to fought? Which is kind of odd - is this supposed to mean that Carbuncle is diminished by the summoning, or maybe that it is only granting us a fraction of its power? Alternatively, it was 'destroyed' by our battle but, being a spiritual being, it reformed into a smaller, lesser form that will grow over time?
You know what that thing reminds me? Gen 1 Mew. Back when it looked kinda fucked up rather than cute.
Anyway, the battle. I know Carbuncle historically is a summon that grants Reflect, and this guy is very visibly surrounded by a white, shield-like aura, so no points for guessing it's protected by Reflect. It also casts powerful magic and has 15k HP, so it's pretty powerful, but unfortunately for it I just unlocked Reflect back in Moore so I can play Spell Volleyball against it, bouncing spells off my own Reflect to blast it through its shield.
Also interesting that Carbuncle is characterized as kind of a jock, given its later cuteification.
And with this, we move on to the next stage of the dungeon.
Where we run into a conspicuously large room, with a chest at its center that is empty. Huh. Well nothing to do but move on.
Oh my god. It's Gilgamesh. And he stole the fucking dungeon treasure. What a genius. Few villains could aspire to the depths of cunning that this man is able to reach, especially seeing as he's now equipped with a weapon of no-doubt awesome power!
As expected, it's a total wipe. Gilgamesh's awesome power is too much for my group to contend with, and we fold within a single turn.
That's not too bad, though. It means that I can actually take the opportunity to unequip Find Passage from Lenna, and equip Mug so I can steal valuable loot from him. It's lucky we wiped, or else we would have been unable to steal, and that item might have been missed forever! In a way he did us a kindness by killing us.
Anyway, quick Ability swap afterwards, it's time for a rematch and, being Gilgamesh, it's a pretty chatty battle!
This guy is just so fun, he's impossible to dislike.
Some of the dialogue choices have aged questionably well. Like, when Gilgamesh says "I feel we have gained an understanding… An understanding that… I will pound you silly! Ha ha!" my immediate reaction is to scold him because there are children in the audience. When he asks about Galuf's whereabouts, though, we get something more interesting; Krile says that Galuf fought Exdeath, and Gilgamesh's answer is a sober "...I see," then an ellipsis "..." a little later, with no quip or joke, which suggests that… he is not unsympathetic to the protagonists? He has enough respect for them to not treat the death of one of their members lightly. He might, in fact, be kinda sad that Galuf died? Gil is just having fun with this, and his boss may be too evil for him.
Gilgamesh's next line of dialogue after this is in fact to simply say enough with the jokes and let's get serious and finish this. Except he's not saying it that way, of course.
No, he is giving us The Legendary Gilgamesh Introduction. Even before I knew Gilgamesh was in this game, I already knew this line from him in it. A good part of why I suspected Faris had some Gender going back when she was still presenting as a man was because I remembered that line. I remember that line being used as the header in some TVTropes article back when I still read TVTropes fifteen years ago. Here it is, in all its glory:
A+, no notes.
Tactically my memory of this battle is a bit of a blur. Gilgamesh in his initial form is mostly using Blue Magic as he's been the whole game, which isn't hard to deal with, and then his "Morphed' form is… well.
You can see that in his morphed sprite, he's wielding a huge sword, right? This is a noted difference from earlier, as his sprite made it clear he was a spear-wielder. Here, we're seeing sprite-based storytelling - Gilgamesh has grown multiple arms, each one wielding a different weapon, his old spear just one of them, and the most prominent of these weapons is that enormous golden sword, which he is using two of his hands to wield, so he's effectively two-handing a sword while leaving other arms available, which is just a really cool visual use of a character with multiple arms. That sword, he informs us, is Excalibur, the weapon he looted from the conspicuous chest earlier, and he's about to test it on us first-hand.
…except it can't be Excalibur, because I went to the top of the Sealed Castle, and I've seen Excalibur. So what's going on? Well…
…'Excalibur' deals two-digit damage a pop, and is completely incapable of hurting my characters.
At which point, Exdeath himself is cringing so hard that he decides to take executive action and banish Gilgamesh to the Shadow Realm so he can stop embarrassing his boss by proxy.
No, really.
Such a cool visual effect.
God, poor guy.
Excalipoor?!
This is hilarious. It says it has +100 Attack, but I do not believe it for one second.
…
Wait a minute.
I only realized this afterwards while stewing on it because it wasn't directly stated, but -
Gilgamesh didn't get sent to Eebie Deebie just for being too incompetent to beat us
It's because he ruined Exdeath's plan to sabotage us.
This is Exdeath's Castle, right? It's his place. Some of the loot in there is just there because Dungeons Have Loot, some of it is hidden in fake passages which makes sense as things Exdeath hid but which we found anyway… But that weapon was meant to be found in the middle of a giant room, in an unprotected chest, just before getting to Exdeath and fighting him.
It was a trap. We were the ones meant to pick it up so it would fuck us over in the boss battle. And because Gilgamesh is an idiot, he took the trap sword 'Excalibur' at face value.
That's what brought Exdeath over the edge, Gilgamesh not merely being unable to win fights against us on his own, but actively sabotaging his master's plans. That's kind of incredible. Especially when we know that from the perspective of everyone else in the setting, Gilgamesh is a huge badass who destroys armies on his own, the Dawn Warriors are just Built Different.
God. In the end, he was so strong, only he could defeat himself……
But also I just got the Genji Helmet from this fight, which is the real value loot here, and now I have the Gloves and the Helmet but not the Armor, so there's a 99% chance we fight him again, unless I missed a battle somehow.
That is a strange statement, and Bartz doesn't really interrogate it, just responding "You mean you'll turn it to a world full of evil!" at which point Exdeath loses interest in the conversation and decides to just do with the smiting.
So.
Exdeath.
Exdeath is lv 66 (wonder if that's a sneaky reference to 666, what with him being absolutely evil and all that), has 32k HP, and is weak to Holy (unfortunately I have no Holy attacks or spells available in my current party setup). He has a number of attacks, including the -ga trio he used against Galuf. He responds to character buffing themselves with Dispel; however, because Hastega covers the whole party and Dispel affects only one character at a time, buffing is still highly action-efficient for me. From a quick look at the wiki, he also has many more attacks and moves, and three separate phases; first he uses a number of neat monster abilities and normal like Doom, Gravity, Hurricane, Bio, Level 3 Flare; then he moves to alternating between Vacuum Wave, a special move that inflicts a progressive HP loss called Sap and the -ga trio he used against Galuf, and then in third phase he uses Meteor.
I don't really notice any of that because he folds like paper. Part of it may be bad RNG on his part: He uses Vacuum Wave once, and it misses, and he doesn't even get to Meteor. Part of it may be efficient strategizing: Golem can absorb damage and Hastega means taking actions real fast (although in the event I can only have one of the two, since Summoning/Time Magic goes on Krile; I end up deciding on Hastega), having two characters with White Magic (Krile and Faris) means I can layer Protect and Shell to blunt all of Exdeath's damage. And part of it is probably also just using busted moves. Even a couple of Zeninage are enough to deal severe damage - plus I equipped Bartz with the Ninja's Throw command and have been tossing Shurikens, so even Ranger Bartz is doing decent DPS. I have a quarter as many screenshots for this fight as I do Gilgamesh. By the time Exdeath kicks it, the party is still at full health.
I've reloaded to try the fight again once, and while my second run was a lot sloppier, Exdeath's first move was to cast Doom; putting a timer on Bartz, and I still beat him before the timer ran down.
We've just completely surpasses this guy.
And with this… The Warlock Exdeath…
…is dead?
Yeah, no, dude's gone. He plays out his disintegration sequence, and then he's out, with the scene immediately transitioning to the Dawn Warriors finding that the crystals are about to explode. Unfortunately, they're too late to stop it.
Huh.
The shattering of the crystals somehow transported the heroes back into the wilderness, mostly safe and hale. Bartz and Lenna wake up and shake the others awake, no one seeming much the worse for wear. They take stock of their surroundings and…
…they're back home. Somehow transported straight to their doorstep. As if by some kind of… last kindness of the crystals? No, that doesn't work on multiple levels. Superficially it makes enough immediate sense that you can buy it, "oh, magic deus ex machina sends the protagonists back home at the end of the story, that's a classic move," but Krile is with them, and she's now an exile from her world, right?
I'm not going to pretend to buy into the fake ending that the game is building up to, I think no one would be fooled, but it's well built up. There are just enough little details like that which are just a little off even as we proceed through the next sequence. To whit:
The Chancellor isn't supposed to know Faris is Sarisa, this was a plot point earlier; this, however, I don't think is supposed to be a hint of anything, we're just meant to assume he learned it off-screen for the convenience of the plot.
Faris muses about Sarisa being her 'true name,' which I'm not sure is framing I like, but she also refers to it as 'the name Papa gave me,' which, fair, obviously she has emotional attachment to that. Suddenly, the guards close in - it looks briefly sinister, but then the Chancellor revealed that he apparently had a banquet ready to roll out this entire time waiting for Lenna and Sarisa. It's time to celebrate the princess's homecoming! (Who's going to inherit the throne, though? Faris is the eldest, but also she's, you know, been in Tycoon all of five minutes.)
Which means it's time for another classic trope of genderbending romcoms across history: the clean-up scene.
Yeah, there was pretty much no way that scene wasn't going to happen at some point, it's kind of a genre expectation. It would be nice if the game let Faris be Faris, and, if relevant to the story, be attractive as Faris, rather than having to change into a more femme presentation as Sarisa, but it's just a cliché of the genre that we weren't going to be avoiding in 1992.
To be fair, I don't think this is a Breakfast Club situation, where every teenager with goth-y inclinations watching the movie goes "NO WAIT SHE LOOKED BETTER BEFORE THE MAKEOVER." To the extent that we can tell from 16bit sprites, Faris does seem to look great in that dress. It's actually kind of amusing because the game didn't bother making Lenna a custom gala sprite, so she's still in her adventurer garb, so in this scene Faris is more femme than her!
Although let's be real, if in-game Faris is meant to look like her concept art self, I know a lot of sapphics who would beg Faris to get back into the pirate outfit. And also to do the tilt-up-your-chin-with-her-sword thing.
It's a bit of a stretch, since again the sprites are limited, but I think her poofy yellow dress might have been inspired by Beauty and the Beast? The Disney movie was 1991, this game was 1992, the year after - I think some direct inspiration is plausible, and certainly from a quick look it seems like fanart likes to put Faris in Belle's dress.
Well, it's time for the customary endgame dance scene!
The franchise already pulled that trick in FF2. I'm not fooled.
And, indeed, after a while Krile leaves the room, and we regain control of Bartz - alone this time.
These dancers move in the way and knock Bartz back if we try to approach Lenna and Faris.
After talking to the celebrants, we follow after Krile, who is looking out the same balcony we started the game at with King Tycoon flying off.
I'm sure it's nothing to worry about and the credits will roll any minute now.
Bartz, being his impulsive self, tells Krile that, since they're back on his homeworld, there must be a reason for it, and they might as well just go looking for it together. Krile asks about Faris and Lenna, and Bartz tells her there's no way the two can slip out right now, in the middle of the ball thrown in their honor. Kind of a dick move not to wait for them, though, but…
This is cute?
It's cute that Bartz is so quickly willing to just go out into the world to figure out some hunch his new friend/little sister figure is having. I've mentioned this before but one of the strength of this game is how it frequently has scenes pairing two characters specifically so that we have a better idea of how Faris and Lenna relates to each other as opposed to Galuf and Bartz or Bartz and Faris or Bartz and Lenna, and giving Bartz and Krile a 'let's go out together' moment helps sell him as a cool, helpful, but somewhat irresponsible and impulsive older brother figure, which is something that makes sense for him to be, but wasn't necessarily evident on its own.
Surely nothing to worry about.
The duo heads out, but at the door of the castle, a guard rams into them, too excited to deliver the news: a bridge over the river west of the castle has just been built!
Genuinely kind of surprised the game remembered Boko.
Krile expresses surprise that Bartz as a chocobo best friend; Bartz is surprised at her surprise; then Krile goes "well, considering how badly you're doing with the Wind Drake…" which incidentally confirms that every single time we board the wind drake in-game, Bartz is having the fright of his life. Flawless character building.
Bartz reacts by attempting a playful shove or blow (sprites make it hard to determine what he's going for), to which Krile instantly deflects and redirects, owning him.
They really are just kind of adorable together.
Okay. So. We gain control over the "party" in the overworld, with said party being composed of Bartz and Krile and no one else. Their goal is to cross the newly-built bridge to the west so as to get to the Pirate Cave and reunite with Boko. All of this? Good. Great. No problem.
Alright. We have the overworld now. Let's check out what the world map looks like.
Wait. Wait. Wait one moment…
It's a fused map.
Exdeath merged the two worlds.
The overlap isn't… Perfect, I don't think, but it's pretty visible. Both worlds had a chain of island in the southeast that is now a fully continuous land barrier creating an inner sea; the north region of the great lakes in Bartz's world got 'filled in' by the desert from Galuf's world; the forest in the west of Galuf's world got superposed by the Desert of Shifting Sands, while the mountains south of the Desert filled in the gulf west of Drakenvale.
Wow. That's… clever. That is a really neat twist on the 'going from world to world' formula. And it explains why the maps of the two previous worlds seemed relatively small in total landmass - this merged world is massive, with multiple great lakes and inland seas, vast mountain ranges, the franchises' trademark overbearing mountain ranges… Interestingly though, the Giants' Causeway-style mountains and dark swamp fields of Galuf's world appear to have disappeared in the merging; I'm wondering why that is. It makes the world a lot more familiar-looking, which is a bit of a shame, I dug the slightly alien vibe of Galuf's world.
And people have no idea this happened! The whole Tycoon population just thinks the sky looks kinda weird! People are about to find entire nations dropped on their doorstep! The political picture of the world is going to radically and completely change as everyone's lives have to adjust to a completely upended reality!
This is a really cool fantasy twist, and a completely unique take from the previous games, damn. It's also making my Final Fantasy XIV sensors go absolutely wild.
But… how does that fit into Exdeath's plans? How is merging the two worlds in some way evil?
Well, I know, because that was a really exciting development so I had to keep playing, but this is a lot to take in, so we'll stop there for today.
Exdeath is lv 66 (wonder if that's a sneaky reference to 666, what with him being absolutely evil and all that), has 32k HP, and is weak to Holy (unfortunately I have no Holy attacks or spells available in my current party setup). He has a number of attacks, including the -ga trio he used against Galuf. He responds to character buffing themselves with Dispel; however, because Hastega covers the whole party and Dispel affects only one character at a time, buffing is still highly action-efficient for me. From a quick look at the wiki, he also has many more attacks and moves, and three separate phases; first he uses a number of neat monster abilities and normal like Doom, Gravity, Hurricane, Bio, Level 3 Flare; then he moves to alternating between Vacuum Wave, a special move that inflicts a progressive HP loss called Sap and the -ga trio he used against Galuf, and then in third phase he uses Meteor.
I don't really notice any of that because he folds like paper. Part of it may be bad RNG on his part: He uses Vacuum Wave once, and it misses, and he doesn't even get to Meteor.
i'm so glad he didn't even get out of his armchair when you fought him, because when i did he woke up and threw a full whiskey bottle directly at my head o_o
Fun fact: the throw command calculates damage separately from how the attack command calculates damage. Because of this, throwing the excalipoor does just as much damage as if it wasn't a booby prize, even if you can only do so once.
Also, Carbuncle is odd art-wise, in that they don't have concept art from the original release... but they do have concept art from the PS1 release. And it's, er, a thing. You note how Carbuncle isn't quite as cute and fuzzy as later versions, and sounded kinda jock-like? BEHOLD.
Fun fact: the throw command calculates damage separately from how the attack command calculates damage. Because of this, throwing the excalipoor does just as much damage as if it wasn't a booby prize, even if you can only do so once.
Also, Carbuncle is odd art-wise, in that they don't have concept art from the original release... but they do have concept art from the PS1 release. And it's, er, a thing. You note how Carbuncle isn't quite as cute and fuzzy as later versions, and sounded kinda jock-like? BEHOLD.
Goblin Punch, a Blue mage spell learned from - you guessed it - beginning-of-game Goblins, also gets the full attack power out of Excalipoor, and lets you do so multiple times to boot.
The map fusion is a pretty wild twist, wow. I figured we'd get a third map somehow, going off past game trends, but not the method behind it. Wonder if Exdeath survived, seeing as his plan seems to have worked out? Presumably world fusion was his plan.
...that's what Carbuncle looks like when summoned. Definitely not the cutesy mascot of later games, this thing looks weird as hell, kinda has an alien vibe to it, but definitely smaller and less overtly threatening. Also I think it's the first summon to have a different appearance when summoned as opposed to fought? Which is kind of odd - is this supposed to mean that Carbuncle is diminished by the summoning, or maybe that it is only granting us a fraction of its power? Alternatively, it was 'destroyed' by our battle but, being a spiritual being, it reformed into a smaller, lesser form that will grow over time?
Considering his dominion is basically "do light stuff to fuck up the magicky stuff the meatbags do" it kinda fits that he just... changes his appearance?
And even considering how many times they've been hinted about something developing between Bartz and Faris, it's kind of refreshing they just went for this found siblings angle with Krille.
Fun fact: the throw command calculates damage separately from how the attack command calculates damage. Because of this, throwing the excalipoor does just as much damage as if it wasn't a booby prize, even if you can only do so once.
Also, Carbuncle is odd art-wise, in that they don't have concept art from the original release... but they do have concept art from the PS1 release. And it's, er, a thing. You note how Carbuncle isn't quite as cute and fuzzy as later versions, and sounded kinda jock-like? BEHOLD.
Well, the original Dungeons and Dragons Carbuncle was kind of an armadillo-lizard with a gem in its head, so this is clearly borrowing a bit from that.
