Are we sure of that? For an evil tree spirit, Exdeath does have himself a pretty snazzy set of blinged-out armor and sword...
Galuf: "What...what do you mean 'sold out?'"
Kelger: "The legendary orichalcum armor can't be 'sold out.' We're the Dawn Warriors, it's supposed to be our last big upgrade!"
Merchant: "Yeah guys I dunno, some tall pale dude rocked up and bought the whole set on the spot. 750,000 gil cash. What was I gonna do, say no?"
Galuf: "Who could it have been...?"
Merchant: "Think he said his name was, uh...Ecks Dee, or something like that?" The pair stagger out to where Xezat and Dorgann await.
Xezat: "Oh that was quick, did you secure the..." Galuf walks up to Dorgann and grabs him by the collar before heaving him off his feet.
Galuf: "You delete that gil toss ability. Forever."
Dorgann: "But-"
Galuf: "If I see you so much as huck a 2g piece at a barmaid I'll hold you underwater until you stop moving."
Are we sure of that? For an evil tree spirit, Exdeath does have himself a pretty snazzy set of blinged-out armor and sword...
Galuf: "What...what do you mean 'sold out?'"
Kelger: "The legendary orichalcum armor can't be 'sold out.' We're the Dawn Warriors, it's supposed to be our last big upgrade!"
Merchant: "Yeah guys I dunno, some tall pale dude rocked up and bought the whole set on the spot. 750,000 gil cash. What was I gonna do, say no?"
Galuf: "Who could it have been...?"
Merchant: "Think he said his name was, uh...Ecks Dee, or something like that?" The pair stagger out to where Xezat and Dorgann await.
Xezat: "Oh that was quick, did you secure the..." Galuf walks up to Dorgann and grabs him by the collar before heaving him off his feet.
Galuf: "You delete that gil toss ability. Forever."
Dorgann: "But-"
Galuf: "If I see you so much as huck a 2g piece at a barmaid I'll hold you underwater until you stop moving."
Nah, no way, Dorgann didn't have Gil Toss, remember Kelger's big, dramatic intro? It's totally the werewolf who took the Samurai class, he had far too anime of a duel for it to be otherwise.
Nah, no way, Dorgann didn't have Gil Toss, remember Kelger's big, dramatic intro? It's totally the werewolf who took the Samurai class, he had far too anime of a duel for it to be otherwise.
Nah, no way, Dorgann didn't have Gil Toss, remember Kelger's big, dramatic intro? It's totally the werewolf who took the Samurai class, he had far too anime of a duel for it to be otherwise.
Galuf: "I swear to god, Klauser, if you've botched our one chance to kill this thing for good, I'm kicking you off this entire planet."
Dorgann: "It'll be fine. Unclench, Baldesion. We'll think of something."
...
Xezat: "So...the best we could do is seal him on another world, then? Hope that one day, stronger heroes will arise who might put an end to this evil?"
Galuf: staring
Kelger: "Well...sometimes things don't work out in the end, I suppose."
Galuf: staring
Dorgann: "Uh...h-hey now, we...uh...can't just leave the damn thing here...it's not...uh, right."
Galuf: STARING
Dorgann: "S-someone should, stay behind and...keep watch...tomakesurehedoesn'tbreakoutdon'thitme."
And then Galuf going back to clean up is him putting on his "Retired Badass who has to go in for One Last Job all the while grumbling 'I'm too damn old for this shit'" hat.
Eh, it'd probably not get locked just 'cause it's a straightforward answer: Yes, sometimes. Giggles shows up as a summon or summon equivalent in a few of the FF games, so they basically just end up in the same ally-slot as Shiva or Ifrit or whatev', any of the espercritter equivalents you throw down with at some point or another.
I think that was ally as in "lgbtq ally" because of the gender commentary on Gil's "let's fight like men, and ladies, and ladies who dress like men" quote.
Might be that I've tripped here into my own "You missed the point" bit though.
It's time to explore the merged world. First destination: the pirate cave and our old buddy Boko!
And then Krile surprises us again by revealing that in addition to Moogles, she can also speak chocobo! Which is convenient, because Boko has some, huh, interesting things to tell us.
LMAO???
This is such a funny twist and my favorite part is that, like, Koko isn't described as a 'mate' or a 'partner,' no, she's his wife. Did they get a chocobo wedding??? Are they chocobo married by civil law or religious??? WHAT IS THE LEGAL STATUS OF BOKO'S LIFE PARTNER
Ahem.
And they have kids on the way, too. Which I can only assume are eggs right now, but, hm.
Now I'm wondering how long the game's story has been taking so far?
FF game time scales have always been ambiguous but this does raise the implied scale to being… At least months, I think? Probably not years, I imagine chocobos have faster lives than humans do. Yeah, no, that tracks, I think; I can put the timeframe of the game at about six months or so, a year at the outside.
Bartz has a favor to ask Boko, but Boko says he already knows Bartz was going to go on a new journey and need a travel companion.
I don't know how to handle the knowledge that Boko fucks.
Incredible stuff.
And thus, we've unlocked the chocobo again - oddly enough a downgrade in mobility compared to the wind drake; FFV really likes to see-saw our overland mobility, and based on precedent I figure we have at most five minutes to spend with Boko before we move to a new transport. I mean, look at this:
The airship is right there! We can't access it (it may look like we can access that peninsula, but the tile between the mountain and the sea is actually too small for us to pass through).
God, it's been so long playing this game I'd actually forgotten I'd already unlocked the airship back on Bartz's world.
Doubling back quickly to check on the pirate hideout, these lads have some new dialogue complimenting Boko on the wife and kids, marveling at the news that the Captain was a princess all along - and, the most surprising of all, an origin story as to Faris's name:
…Faris is called Faris because when they found her, she had a lisp like young children often do, and so she mispronounced her name and it stuck? That's so cute.
Also, incidentally, this means the pirates do know Faris was a girl when they rescued her, so she had to, at some point, 'come out' to them by specifically asking she be referred to as a man from now on, which they all abided by. Trans-affirming pirates?? The Gender vibes have never been stronger.
Incidentally, I was wondering about random encounters and unbalanced XP gain from the party being split - but it looks like random encounters were either disabled, or significantly lowered in probability; I did the entire trip to Boko and the pirate cave and back without running into a single monster. Can't say I disapprove of the choice.
Alright, more revisiting of old places!
Remember Tule? That was one of our first towns! It has the Greenhorns' Club that teaches you about early game stuff! And in fact, the NPC who originally pointed us there goes "You look like you're hot shit now, do you think you're hot shit" and saying "Totally" gets us pointed back to the Club for some special late-game wisdom. Not anything we haven't heard - they're telling us about how Freelancers and Mimes can equip any gear or weapon (except Ribbons for Mimes).
There's new dialogue throughout the town. Several people mention the town looking kinda different, the party going on at Castle Tycoon, Zok (remember Zok? The guy from the canal gate?) mentions his shock at pirate captain Faris being the princess Sarissa…
If you don't check the map and haven't noticed something's weird with the world, this is where the game starts shouting it in your face.
Also, someone mentions a cave opened up near the town. A cave…
…with a turtle in it.
Well, that gives us a clear lead on where to go next! We pick up Boko again and go across some rivers (the chocobo has the same function as the canoe from previous games, incidentally, in addition to its overland travel). As we do, we run into a small mountain pass…
…and a hole opens in the ground and everyone falls down.
My screenshot function is having delays that are making it hard to capture specific moment like everyone pratfalling.
Everyone is having a hypocritical "It was totally YOUR fault!" session, which is pretty funny, UNTIL THE ANTLION ATTACKS
This is a FFIV beat we're revisiting here. I feel like someone on the dev team watched a documentary about antlions and their cool sand traps and then just had to put the party inperiled by an antlion in both games. It has Dischord, which halves character level, which seems pretty nasty, but it's also balanced with the knowledge that the group will have only two party members, so it's pretty weaksauce and Krile is in White/Time Mage mode so we're basically invincible, and the thing dies in short order.
Problem is, everyone is still stuck in the antlion's trap now. The characters putter about unsure how to get out (swap into Dragoon and Jump out guys, it's that easy), when a miraculous rope presents itself!
Bartz immediately approaches and tries to catch the rope…
…which pulls away from him.
It lowers again, so he jumps to catch it…
…and it pulls away again, leaving him to fall on his ass.
This goes on a few times, until the person yanking Bartz's chain finally speaks up:
Faris taking revenge on the duo for letting her behind by pulling the rope until Bartz apologizes. The interactions in this group are top-tier. They really have that RPG party energy of friends who aren't above fucking with each other all the time. Then she smacks them and tells them if they pull this shit again, they'll be "swinging from a yardarm," which would be very scary if I had any idea what it means. Faris's constant use of nautical slang is such a funny bit.
Bartz asks why she came after them, and Faris says she's just not cut out for being a princess, which… Wait, are they actually leaving Lenna behind for good? Guys! She fulfills a vital party function! I can't do this with three characters!!!
Well, in any case, Faris has joined the party again. Before we leave, though, Krile says "ouch," and Bartz asks if she's alright.
What an odd detail to bring into focus like that! It's probably nothing to worry about.
Anyway, we head off to the cave of the mysterious turtle, which, of course, turns out to be Ghido's.
The merging of the world shook his cave around and turned the turtle upside down, so now he can't get up.
Funniest game in the franchise.
Bartz helps Ghido right himself, upon which he complains about his age while dropping in what just happened for the sake of the characters, who aren't privy to the same understanding as we are:
Ghido recounts the legend, according to which Krile's and Bartz's world were once one and the same; they were split deliberately, in order to seal "the Void." In an odd use of the passive form, Ghido says that "one thousand years ago, there existed Enuo, a presence of the strongest evil." Enuo created the Void, and had the power to control it; after a long and harrowing battle, the people were able to defeat Enuo using the twelve legendary weapons. But even after Enuo's demise, the Void still remained. As a last resort, people split the crystals and the world in two, sealing the Void in the space between the worlds - the 'Interdimensional Rift.' Gilgamesh's new house.
So, I totally called it. I knew there had to be some thousand year old cosmic evil involved in the plot somewhere, and some kind of ancient past thing relevant to the plot today, and Exdeath on his own wasn't cutting it - his plans had to relate to something bigger and older, and that'd be the Void.
The party realizes two things - one, that Exdeath truly did mean to return the world to its former state. Two, both worlds' crystals are broken now, meaning the world will still die out. And if you, the viewer sitting at home, are thinking 'wait, there is something else rather important to consider here!', then congratulations, you're quicker on the uptake than our protagonists - but not to worry, somebody is about to put two and two together for them!
Oh my god.
He turned himself into a splinter, Bartz! He's splinter Exdeath! Funniest shit you've ever seen.
Fuck, that's so good. Faking his own death and turning himself into a splinter and hitching a ride on one of the characters is probably one of the smartest plans devised by a Final Fantasy villain so far! Also it's just inherently funny, the Big Bad just turning into a tiny bit of wood and sticking himself in a kid's thumb as part of his master plan. I love it.
Exdeath, lest it be believed that he merged the world back together to be nice, immediately explains his true goal: to take the power of the Void for himself! In order to do this, he had to merge the worlds back together and undo the sealing on the interdimensional rift by bringing the Void back into this world. Which means…
Castle Tycoon just got swallowed up by the opening Void.
The heroes defy Exdeath, saying they won't let him claim the power of the Void for himself, upon which Exdeath blasts everyone.
Knocked down, Krile and Faris whisper Castle Tycoon and Lenna's name, realizing that the emergence of the Void over that area puts them in dire peril, and we flash to Lenna herself, who, huh, looks to be in trouble indeed:
It just… swallowed up a chunk of land and left nothing in its place? But… But Lenna??? My fourth party member! You can't do this!
The heroes find the strength to stand up and throw themselves at Exdeath again, but with a party of three, they can't hope to match a proper boss balanced for 4v1, and Exdeath once again blasts everyone.
Which is where Ghido decides to step in and handle things.
No, seriously. I couldn't capture that in screenshot because it's a very fast moving scene, but they have a flash step battle. They zoom around the room while everyone else is knocked out, trading blow like i those animation cost-cutting DBZ scenes that gave us "zwee fighting." This game is really wearing its anime inspiration on its sleeve.
Ghido knocks Exdeath on his back, and everyone stands up to face the warlock, but Exdeath gets up, and he and Ghido have a last clash in the middle of the room.
Of course they'd throw in a TMNT reference.
This is the point where Exdeath decides to cut things short and teleport everyone away. Which is an… interesting move?
One thing about Exdeath is that he tries to get rid of problems. I realize that this may sound obvious, but what I mean is: when confronted with something getting in the way of his plans, he consistently tries to make it go away without having to commit to a drag-out fight to the death. You see it when he takes the heroes hostage to get Galuf to back off, when he uses the barrier to make sure nobody can bother him in his work, when he sinks Ghido's island, when he sets fire to the Forest of Moore, when he fakes his own death, and here, when he teleports everyone away. He gives a shot at killing people and, when that doesn't work quickly enough, he finds some other way to get rid of them so he can work on his own plans.
That makes him a very proactive villain, ironically because of the steps he takes to keep the heroes from bothering him. And it makes sense in-character; the last time he committed to a toe-to-toe fight to the death, confident in his regenerative abilities, he got sealed away for thirty years. The time after that, Galuf used the power of feelings to kick his ass. There's too much risk involved in messing with heroes that way, even with all his power - especially when he has this power, because that power can be used in sideways fashion to fuck with them. All he needs here is for Ghido and the Dawn Warriors to be out of his way while he claims the power of the Void, he doesn't need to defeat the old sage in a fateful showdown.
The group find themselves transported in the middle of a nowhere plain, far away from Ghido's island.
Ghido interrupts himself midway through his warning, moving to the edge of the screen and asking 'What's that?' To which Bartz replies "Just the Library of Ancients…"
Come to think of it, I wonder what Cid and Mid are up to.
Well, without further ado, let's head to the Library of Ancients!
It turns out the scholars of the Library and the scholars of Surgate have found each other, and, quickly getting over the whole "literal aliens to each other" in a flurry of academic excitement to start working together, which is exactly how I would expect a bunch of secluded obsessive academics to act upon meeting aliens who are also secluded obsessive academics.
And look! They're color-coded so we can tell which ones are from where!
I love this. I love that Ghido turned the central staircase into a table with some kind of secret button and then announced a strategy meeting and had everyone gather around the table to lay out the fact for us. Along with the Void, "many fearsome monsters" were also sealed in the Rift a thousand years ago, all of them "unimaginably evil and incredibly strong," which.
Okay, it could mean just that monsters happened to be in the Void at the time of its sealing, but it's much funnier to imagine that the scholars of old looked at the Interdimensional Rift about to close, looked at all the annoying monsters, and then dumped them into the giant interdimensional trash can. Making them our problem! I hate past people! All our problem today are because of them!
Wait, could it be that Final Fantasy V has some kind of overarching theme about the new generation being forced to deal with the old generations's failure to conclusively deal with their problems and instead putting up temporary stopgap measures so they wouldn't have to deal with them, which is implicitly a sin for which even the most righteous of them (Galuf, Xezat, Kelger) must atone in sacrificing themselves? Is the game telling the story of a succession of people who kept rolling the same shit downhill and saying 'the next generation will deal with it' until we, the last generation, ended up having to deal with all of it, at once? All that in a game which started with a metaphor for pollution/climate change/industrialization?
Shit lads, I think the Funny No Thoughts Head Empty FF game might actually have something to say about stuff.
In order to defeat these monsters, we must use the Legendary Weapons that were sealed a thousand years ago.
You know, I don't know when this localization dates from, but it honestly feels like it's deliberately making of memetic Metal Gear Solid codec conversations. Also 'there are even twelve of them' is peak passive-aggressive humour.
Now that both libraries have been reunited, the scholars were able to put the two halves of the Sealed Tome together, and it is meant to reveal to us how to unseal the legendary weapons… Which it does!
No, you can't just throw in a rhyme at the end of two sentences and call it poetry.
Thankfully the limericks don't last, and the book itself speaks: "Following Enuo's defeat, the weapons of legend were sealed within Castle Kuza. To break the seals, the four tablets must be assembled. One rests alongside spirits of the past, blessed by the soil… One rests within an island shrine, kissed by winds… One rests beneath the ocean's floor, engulfed by flames… One rests beyond the river's torrents, protected by water… These four tablets are the keys that will break the seals, but standing guards beside them are our servants. If the tablets are moved, our servants will awaken. The ultimate spells of white and black… The magic of space and time, Meteor… The ruler of the seas, Leviathan… And Bahamut, king of dragons."
Oh, okay.
We are doing four elemental dungeons!
This feels a bit late in the game? Running a gauntlet of four dungeons back to back right now sounds honestly kind of exhausting. At the same time, the promise that not only the legendary weapons, but also the ultimate spells for each caster class are the rewards behind these dungeons is a pretty tasty carrot to go with that.
The Sealed Tome is the key that will open each of these dungeons, and we receive it as an item, before Ghido wishes us good luck.
Ghido adds that the first place mentioned in the book, "blessed by soils and the spirits of the past," must be the Pyramid in the Desert of Shifting Sands. Thanks, I could have guessed that one myself.
The Scholars of both worlds working on their mutual maps to work out where everything is and what the map of the new world looks like is such a neat touch. They really do feel like scholars.
Other dialogue bits include one scholar saying Cid and Mid went to Crescent Island for reasons unknown, and another mentioning that when forming the Interdimensional Rift, a town was trapped there - a town that sold fantastic weapons and magic, so I guess we know what the last town selling the endgame gear will be.
More grimly, one of the scholars call the battle against Exdeath "beating a dead horse" - with the crystals shattered, the world is still doomed. Not that there is anything we can really do about it, we have to address the immediate threat, and hope in some resolution to the crystal problem.
How cryptic.
And so we head to the Pyramid…
…Lenna still isn't in our party? And she is trapped in the void?
Are we seriously going to be doing a full dungeon down a party member?
Are we going to do the whole rest of the game down a party member?
Surely not. That would be madness. But now I worry.
We eventually do run into random encounter, but they've been weighted significantly lower, and occur much less often.
On our way to the desert, we do make an unexpected encounter… The Guardian Tree, and it's… alive?
Wait wait wait.
The game is listing Lenna among the lives lost???
Okay, I totally misread the vibe the game was going for. I don't believe Lenna is dead, obviously, because there isn't a secret Sixth Ranger to take her place and there is zero chance the game just wraps up on a three-people party, but I thought I was supposed to scan the scene of her being swallowed by the Void as "Oh no, the Girly Girl team member has been captured, time to rescue her!" I didn't realize that diagetically people thought she'd actually fucking died. Sometimes the narrative of a story doesn't properly convey what I'm supposed to think happened, and that create these moments of cognitive dissonance.
Like, for instance, if an hour from now it turns out that we still haven't gotten Lenna back and she actually is dead, that's going to feel really weird because I'll have spent that entire time thinking I wasn't meant to take that seriously.
In any case. After a moment of somber reflection regarding the need to stop Exdeath, and the fact that not only the people of this world, but all life depends on them, the characters go on to the Desert of Shifting Sands.
Or Not So Shifting Sands, as the case maybe.
I like this. My immediate reaction to the sands having stopped is "Oh good, this was annoying as hell, glad I don't have to put up with it this time around," and then it's immediately hit by the backhand of "Oh right that's because the earth is dying."
Some of the obstacles on our path are actually just healthy manifestations of a living world, and their being gone is sinister in its implications!
So.Pyramid time.
We present the Sealed Tome in front of this locked stone door and these two statues, and they raise into the air… Before attacking us!
These two gargoyles are built on the 'safe side' of a boss fight considering our reduced party composition, and have a mere 5000 HP each. They are promptly annihilated in a deluge of Dualcast.
The Sealed Tome raises into the air, and one of its pages split from the book to burn while speaking aloud.
The door to the pyramid opens… And we enter.
Well, fuck me. We actually are doing a full dungeon on a three-man band. I genuinely wasn't expecting this, although I don't really see any way for the game to bring back Lenna without stretching disbelief.
I… don't know how I feel about that, huh. There's no way we do all four elemental dungeons and unlock the legendary weapons before Lenna returns, right? Or that Lenna is actually out of the game?
Yeah, this is odd. But also? A good place to stop for now!
These two gargoyles are built on the 'safe side' of a boss fight considering our reduced party composition, and have a mere 5000 HP each. They are promptly annihilated in a deluge of Dualcast.
Fun fact: when you kill one gargoyle, you have a handful of seconds until the other simply resurrects it, so it's meant to be a careful game of target selection. You overlevelled psychopath-
And yeah Lenna getting Swallowed By The Hellvortex is something I sure as shit didn't expect, Galuf's death was sort of expected and very convenient due to Krile being right there to take his place, but having to go into a full-fledged dungeon without Lenna is really when you go "wait... uh-oh..."
Well, fuck me. We actually are doing a full dungeon on a three-man band. I genuinely wasn't expecting this, although I don't really see any way for the game to bring back Lenna without stretching disbelief.
I… don't know how I feel about that, huh. There's no way we do all four elemental dungeons and unlock the legendary weapons before Lenna returns, right? Or that Lenna is actually out of the game?
Yeah, this is odd. But also? A good place to stop for now!
I'm expecting Gilgamesh to show up any minute now with a kidnapped princess.
Also that castle being meant for late-game and getting cheesed early.
Void appearing where the heroes got booted to makes since from Exdeath's prospective. Just one more thing to ensure they aren't a thorn in their side. (Instead, they're a thorn in someone else's)
I admit the very first thought I had upon reading this was that either this is Ghido and so we have a breadcrumb plot hook to give us direction, or this is the Gil Turtle and we can get more money. Either way, profit.
Then she smacks them and tells them if they pull this shit again, they'll be "swinging from a yardarm," which would be very scary if I had any idea what it means.
I personally only know this because I remember hearing about it from one of the sailing-involved Assassin's Creed games (I want to say Black Flag, but it might have been 3), and looked it up back then.
With an archetypical sailing ship of sufficient size, the masts are basically a big cross/plus/T shape, to hang square sails. The "yardarms" are the end bits of the horizontal bits of the mast.
So Faris is either saying they'll be suspended in a high place until they learn not to do stupid stuff, or she's threatening to hang them until dead.
I like that Ghido is specifically too old to get off his back.
A healthy tortoise is usually more than capable of righting itself if tipped over, and I was halfway through writing a very angry comment about the "helpless turtle" trope and the chelonian defamation it spreads before I scrolled down.
Well played, FFV. You've managed to avert my righteous fury for now...
With an archetypical sailing ship of sufficient size, the masts are basically a big cross/plus/T shape, to hang square sails. The "yardarms" are the end bits of the horizontal bits of the mast.
So Faris is either saying they'll be suspended in a high place until they learn not to do stupid stuff, or she's threatening to hang them until dead.
If you threaten to swing someone from a yardarm you're threatening to hang them until death, yeah. It was how mutineers and deserters and people who'd committed other 'high crimes' were executed. And it was the slow hanging, not the modern quick version.
This is the point where Exdeath decides to cut things short and teleport everyone away. Which is an… interesting move?
One thing about Exdeath is that he tries to get rid of problems. I realize that this may sound obvious, but what I mean is: when confronted with something getting in the way of his plans, he consistently tries to make it go away without having to commit to a drag-out fight to the death. You see it when he takes the heroes hostage to get Galuf to back off, when he uses the barrier to make sure nobody can bother him in his work, when he sinks Ghido's island, when he sets fire to the Forest of Moore, when he fakes his own death, and here, when he teleports everyone away. He gives a shot at killing people and, when that doesn't work quickly enough, he finds some other way to get rid of them so he can work on his own plans.
I never thought about it like that, but it's a really good dynamic.
Why don't we kill the big bad and end the problem once and for all? He's too powerful to keep down. But then why doesn't he kill us? Not because we are paradoxically also too powerful, but because we're just strong enough that he'd rather not bother.
It's so much better than the usual JRPG solution to "why don't you just kill him," which is "he somehow ran away after you defeated him in combat."
You know, I don't know when this localization dates from, but it honestly feels like it's deliberately making of memetic Metal Gear Solid codec conversations. Also 'there are even twelve of them' is peak passive-aggressive humour.
I like this. My immediate reaction to the sands having stopped is "Oh good, this was annoying as hell, glad I don't have to put up with it this time around," and then it's immediately hit by the backhand of "Oh right that's because the earth is dying."
Some of the obstacles on our path are actually just healthy manifestations of a living world, and their being gone is sinister in its implications!
The airship is right there! We can't access it (it may look like we can access that peninsula, but the tile between the mountain and the sea is actually too small for us to pass through).
God, it's been so long playing this game I'd actually forgotten I'd already unlocked the airship back on Bartz's world.
Yeah, the game kind of ping-pongs you through vehicles for most of the game. Wind Drake! Nah new continent leave it behind. Ship! Black Chocobo! Airship! New world eat shit. Drake again also submarine! Alright back to Chocobo.
Ngl it gets a bit silly at times, even if it's probably the best way to handle the multiple worlds.
Also, incidentally, this means the pirates do know Faris was a girl when they rescued her, so she had to, at some point, 'come out' to them by specifically asking she be referred to as a man from now on, which they all abided by. Trans-affirming pirates?? The Gender vibes have never been stronger.
Boy, Faris just continues to make FFV astoundingly gender-positive, huh? Not bad for a... 30 year old game, apparently. Goddamn FFV is clearly my spirit animal, born same year as I was.
He turned himself into a splinter, Bartz! He's splinter Exdeath! Funniest shit you've ever seen.
Fuck, that's so good. Faking his own death and turning himself into a splinter and hitching a ride on one of the characters is probably one of the smartest plans devised by a Final Fantasy villain so far! Also it's just inherently funny, the Big Bad just turning into a tiny bit of wood and sticking himself in a kid's thumb as part of his master plan. I love it.
Once, many years ago, I found a webpage that rated every FF game based on how silly it was, in a scale of 1 to 10.
FFV rated an 11, and they specifically brought up the sheer ridiculousness of the main big bad just going "hell yeah gonna disguise myself as a splinter in this teenage girl's leg lmao".
Exdeath is just fantastic and I love him, easily the best FF villain in the series (so far).
…Faris is called Faris because when they found her, she had a lisp like young children often do, and so she mispronounced her name and it stuck? That's so cute.
Okay, it could mean just that monsters happened to be in the Void at the time of its sealing, but it's much funnier to imagine that the scholars of old looked at the Interdimensional Rift about to close, looked at all the annoying monsters, and then dumped them into the giant interdimensional trash can. Making them our problem! I hate past people! All our problem today are because of them!
[...]
Shit lads, I think the Funny No Thoughts Head Empty FF game might actually have something to say about stuff.
A classic. One group of fuckers says "Yeet the bad shit", and two generation later the kids respond "Yeet yourself, why won't you". The devs knew who they were talking to.
You know, I don't know when this localization dates from, but it honestly feels like it's deliberately making of memetic Metal Gear Solid codec conversations.
Something I heard in a podcast, is that this kind of "Blah blah blah Thingie." "Thingie?" that we've been mocking for decades is a perfectly normal conversational element in Japan. It's basically meant for the listener to convey to the speaker that they're listening and following what they're saying, just like our "uhuh", "right, right" or "go on"s. Most translators either didn't caught that, or choose to not organically explain why that happens.
That means Kojima hasn't been actually writing Snake as a dumbass for decades, and we didn't know because of a decades long failure of communication.
Something I heard in a podcast, is that this kind of "Blah blah blah Thingie." "Thingie?" that we've been mocking for decades is a perfectly normal conversational element in Japan. It's basically meant for the listener to convey to the speaker that they're listening and following what they're saying, just like our "uhuh", "right, right" or "go on"s. Most translators either didn't caught that, or choose to not organically explain why that happens.
That means Kojima hasn't been actually writing Snake as a dumbass for decades, and we didn't know because of a decades long failure of communication.
Also, incidentally, this means the pirates do know Faris was a girl when they rescued her, so she had to, at some point, 'come out' to them by specifically asking she be referred to as a man from now on, which they all abided by. Trans-affirming pirates?? The Gender vibes have never been stronger.
I think it makes more sense in context. The Metal Gear example is good because it's so overblown; the protagonist Snake in the English version parrots "Metal Gear!?" in a confounded tone everytime a game's particular version of the mecha is brought up in conversation as if he's been only NOW introduced to the concept, despite being an elite specops operative (ie: not a dumb uneducated grunt) and noted Metal Gear-slayer from previous games, and he already knows of the existence of one in the same game. So people in the West took as sort of a "I'm dumb and DUUHH!?"
Look at Bartz here. He seems to want more information on the legendary weapons in specific, but the way they have Ghido respond turns it around to make it look like Bartz is truly dumb and barely capable of following the little he's said yet. It's the same energy.
This might be my favorite bit so far! It reminds me of an old Zero Punctuation joke. "Frankly that's a problem for future me and fuck that guy! He's had some kind of grudge against me ever since he started putting on weight!"
Better question is how long was the group partying and relaxing in Tycoon? Because I'm pretty sure Koko is the female chocobo they couldn't ride from Galuf's world, so they couldn't have met until the worlds merged.
And yeah Lenna getting Swallowed By The Hellvortex is something I sure as shit didn't expect, Galuf's death was sort of expected and very convenient due to Krile being right there to take his place, but having to go into a full-fledged dungeon without Lenna is really when you go "wait... uh-oh..."
That feeling of surprise is interesting given this is a sequel to a game that had varying party sites as a big innovative thing. It makes sense due to us having the future knowledge that the entire genre dropped the concept pretty quickly, but I wonder how contemporary reactions were.
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