Do they know it from Jaws or from Baby Shark?
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Do they know it from Jaws or from Baby Shark?
- Location
- Nunya, Arizona
I mean, in fairness, lots of them probably know Goodman's Sing, Sing, Sing, too, and it's a lot less well known by name/source, heh.
... the jaws dun-dun is pretty hard to avoid even if you've never seen the movie, though, yeah. Googling that immediate pulls up the theme song
... the jaws dun-dun is pretty hard to avoid even if you've never seen the movie, though, yeah. Googling that immediate pulls up the theme song
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
To be fair, I'm not sure. Baby Shark has basically no relation melodically to Jaws, and they specifically call it out as Jaws, but maybe they pick it up via the shark association? Cultural osmosis? Who the hell knows 🤷♂️
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So I guess you're looking for the Omilore, fine
What I mean is more that it's genuinely very hard for me to recognize motifs as they are modified and integreated into other tunes and alluded to and so on. I have a very deaf musical ear, and a lot of the time when composers do very clever work incorporating aspects of one character's theme into a different piece to signal something about them, that goes completely over my head. Which I don't like! This is not something I'm particularly happy with! But it all started in 6th grade when I literally couldn't memorize a basic recorder playsheet. So really I was always doomed.
Okay, no, I do know the Jaws tune. I can recall it from memory. So too the Imperial March.
What I mean is more that it's genuinely very hard for me to recognize motifs as they are modified and integreated into other tunes and alluded to and so on. I have a very deaf musical ear, and a lot of the time when composers do very clever work incorporating aspects of one character's theme into a different piece to signal something about them, that goes completely over my head. Which I don't like! This is not something I'm particularly happy with! But it all started in 6th grade when I literally couldn't memorize a basic recorder playsheet. So really I was always doomed.
Well the good news is that Uematsu's work in FFVI is pretty obvious about when it's reusing character themes, so maybe this'll be an approachable environment for you!
I didn't mean the song itself, but the Jaws theme intro it has.
Cultural Osmosis of the shark association is powerful. I've never seen Jaws, but as a kid I still knew the theme well enough to parody it when my cat was stalking someone.
Being obvious generally doesn't help when you have a neurological block on a thing, since it's not really a matter of subtle or obvious, but you not having thing _thing_ that lets you recognize the function.
Oh! Relatedly 8-Bit Music Theory is a pretty great Youtube channel for music theory analysis of game music. Each episode is focused on a particular song or soundtrack, and granted I can read music but even the heavily technical stuff he gets into feels approachable for me. And he has a couple of videos of introductory material as well
Anyway, per the thread topic he's got a series of 3 videos about the FFVI soundtrack, but as there are some spoilers there I'll save those for later and I'll link his video on Battle at the Big Bridge for now instead:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBGRnWGJzPw
Anyway, per the thread topic he's got a series of 3 videos about the FFVI soundtrack, but as there are some spoilers there I'll save those for later and I'll link his video on Battle at the Big Bridge for now instead:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBGRnWGJzPw
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RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
Holy crap I never knew where that was from until now lol
Final Fantasy VI, Part 5: The Phantom Train
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's been brought to my attention that there is a bunch of missable loot in the Imperial camp and people seem to wonder why I didn't grab it. It's very simple. There are a total of four chests hidden in tents throughout the camp; entering the tent at first results in just your character disappearing and their path being blocked. You need to realize that this is because there is a single object in your path, not because the tent is inaccessible, and move around the invisible obstacle, upon, which the game highlights your character through the tent, and lets you find the chest:
Here, Sabin tried to kick the chest open, and alerted a pack of dobermans, triggering a fight.
Still, not that big a deal, right? There's a second issue. When we first enter the camp, there is only one tent which can be accessed. The cutscenes that play out as we advance trigger at fixed points of progression, and by the time the game actually relinquishes full control and allows us to explore the camp freely, it's, huh…
It's right there. In the middle of the chase with Kefka. We need to 'fight' him once, then when he moves and frees up the path, we can actually go around the camp and get the three remaining items, which include the Mithril Glove and Barrier Ring, which are items that cast a protective spell when the wearer is critically injured.
This is completely counter-intuitive and I literally did not even think to search the camp at the time, because the natural flow of the scene is that Kefka is running away, so you catch him, he runs away again, you catch him again. But no, you have to leave him just hanging there in the middle of the camp and go around exploring; you even have enough time to get into an extra fight with a monster-in-a-box for it!
This thing has a ton of HP, can use an alarm to call guards, and has an ability called 'Mega-Berserk' which inflicts Berserk on everyone, severely reducing our effective combat power, since special abilities are key to effective damage in this game. It is, for all intents and purposes, the actual 'boss' of this area.
Anyway. Now that we've played through this again and grabbed the loot, it's time to get back on with the story. Which…
Well, there is another reason beyond it being late at night and having reached my image limit that I stopped my last update where I did. Let us resume with Cyan's last, desperate charge against the imperial army.
Cyan engages the enemy in battle, their sprites bouncing back and forth on the screen, and we take control of Sabin and Shadow again; approaching the fight and talking to Cyan causes Sabin to offer his help - and Cyan's reply highlights a feature I hadn't actually noticed in the scene so far.
We do not control Cyan in this fight, he is AI controlled.
He's talking in Ye Olde English.
Not much, really - it's just using 'thee' and 'thine,' but at least he's using them correctly so far, combined with a high register to make him sound antiquated. It's… eh, it's fine I guess. He's no Urianger.
Also fun fact: I used an Invisibility Scroll to grant Shadow Invisibility during this fight, and it just… Stuck? From fight to fight? Whenever I ran into a battle during that whole sequence, Shadow was already invisible at the start. I wonder if this is specific to the Invisibility status effect, to Scrolls, or to Shadow himself?
Also this whole sequence makes it pretty clear that the poisoning of Doma Castle must have happened within minutes at most. I understand why people theorize that we're meant to read it as a timelapse, with people going about their day and drinking the water and the sudden dying only occurring after hours, but, well: Sabin and Shadow are still right here in the imperial camp, after initiating a fight with the local commander. The only way this makes sense is if the poisoning happened so fast that they were still in the middle of fighting imperial troops without having had time to escape the camp. The 'chemical fumes' theory is more plausible, but also it's not indicated in any way by the game itself, it's purely something you have to read into it in order to make it make sense. It's not text.
Several waves of soldiers come in one by one, and Cyan goes to confront each one, and we join up with Sabin each time until we've repelled enough of them for the group to catch a breather and talk, Sabin saying he's from Figaro and Shadow doing his best impression of not being in this scene; then Sabin says they have to leave, which goes against Cyan's plans.
Sabin insists that if they stick around they'll have 'an entire regimen down their throat.' Cyan proves oddly easy to convince, which is part of, huh, a massive and jarring tonal shift that is about to occur right about nnnnnnow. Sabin says he has an idea for how to get them out of the camp, and takes the group to the Magitek parking spots, and…
So, first of all: how the fuck does Cyan not know about Magitek armor? Like, he's acting like he's never seen these before, but knowledge of the Empire using Magitek to conquer nations is widespread, and also, Doma was literally at war with the Empire. Like, the mechs right here are parked in a camp that was waging war against Doma. I did find it a little odd that Leo's troops seemed to use no Magitek in their assault on the castle earlier, but am I to believe that Leo just hasn't been using Magitek at all, in the whole campaign? Why? But that's not really the issue here, no. Sabin tells Cyan that he'll explain later and to just jump in, Cyan does so, and…
We've shifted to comedy.
For those among my beloved audience who are discovering this game at the same time as I do, I must emphasize that this happens within less than five minutes of the destruction of Doma; in a single sequence, Kefka poisons the river, all of Doma dies, Cyan discovers his king, his wife, and his child dead, and rushes the imperial troops alone, then after a couple of basic encounter fights, Sabin is like "dude we gotta leave though" and Cyan says "okay" and transmogrifies into Funny Grandpa Talks Weird And Doesn't Know How To Drive Stick.
No, seriously, this is the main gag of this sequence: Sabin apparently already knows how to drive a suit of Magitek armor (...how?), but Cyan doesn't and accidentally gets the lever stuck in reverse, causing the armor to start spinning wildly in circles, then accidentally barrels through an entire garrison of soldiers without any idea what he's doing.
It's incredibly jarring to go straight from the slaughter of Doma to this. And as comedy it's okay, but it doesn't land because of the sheer cognitive dissonance of Cyan turning into a gag character in the minutes that follow the loss of everyone he knew and loved?
Anyway, aside from that, I'm pleasantly surprised that we actually get another magitek sequence, I was fully expecting the Narshe raid to be a one and done affair that never gets repeated, but no! We actually get to fight several Magitek squads!
Because our armor has Thunder Beam, though, and because machines are weak to lightning damage, they all die in a single hit to our party. It turns out being in a mech makes everything we face into a pushover, including other mechs. We just punch through the entire camp, and once we reach the edge, Sabin and the others abandon their mechs, as the route to Narshe will take them through the woods, where the cumbersome mechs would be more of an inconvenience than anything. A quick trip across the map and we enter…
How delightfully ominous. And the music that plays over it doesn't help - the instrumentals are nice, soft, inviting, but there are vocals that go 'spooky choir' in contrast.
This area fascinates me because it's using a perspective trick to create the impression of a different angle of view? Also the strange ominous woods are signposted, which is as funny as it is creepy.
The game 'cuts off' a significant portion of the screen in order to create a 'background' layer, so our characters move in the 'foreground,' which gives a much stronger impression of a 2D environment than in other areas, right? Previous forest zones in prior games always stuck to the isometric view from 'above' the character sprite, with V having this circle around the character so you could see them through the canopy; this presentation makes the character feel a lot closer, a lot more trapped within the forest, all while allowing the scene to really flex its background - like goddamn, look at those trees, look at the reflection in that lake, this is gorgeous.
Also… wait, what's this in the distance of that second shot? Is that… a train?
…yeah, it's a train. And it doesn't look too good either, with holes in the walls and ceilings. What gives me pause here is Cyan's comment about how Doma's railways were destroyed in the fight, because that means Doma did have railways at one point, so rail isn't even an Empire-exclusive magitek thing - it's something anyone in this setting might have had, but we don't see any of it? It's one of the odd results of the way the game constructs its maps and locations - it doesn't show railway networks on the map, even broken ones, so until we're told so, we have no reason to believe Doma, or anywhere else, was advanced enough to have rail.
Well, that doesn't matter too much. Sabin thinks there might be Doman survivors inside the train and enters it; Cyan doesn't seem to think that's such a good idea and tries to keep him from doing so because he's scared (again, so weird he turned into a comedy character so quickly), but Sabin insists - only when they are inside does Cyan realize their predicament.
He warns everyone that they have to leave, but too late; the train starts, and by the time they reach the door, it is locked shut. Sabin asks what Cyan meant by 'Phantom Train,' and Cyan clarifies: The Phantom Train "carries the souls of the departed to their… final destination."
Puh. I was not expecting the meme ghost train to be the actual, literal psychopomp of the setting. This definitely has the "dude in a cart" of my homeland beat. Travel to the afterlife in class with this well-furnished train, featuring upholstered seats, wooden floorboards, and carpets! But wait, did that mean that a train was always ferrying souls to the afterlife, even before humanity invented it, as some kind of platonic ideal of The Train waiting to be born? Or did the afterlife upgrade when humanity invented the train, going "wow that's cool actually we need ourselves one of those"? Did the ancients of the time of the War of the Magi build a soul train because they thought their souls weren't traveling to their final reward in enough comfort?
Yeah, that's my take. The Magi saw whatever process the dead had to go through normally and went "well I'm above that" and built a magic soul train so they could go to the afterlife in first class. It's canon now.
And it seems like the Phantom Train doesn't differentiate between living and dead when they're on board, and if they can't find a way to get down, Sabin and friends are going to be trapped in the afterlife! Spooky. Thus the group decides to head for the engine room, in hopes of stopping the train.
The train is, incidentally, full of ghosts.
I love this bit as a setpiece. The train is moving through the forest the entire time we explore it, going from wagon to wagon, with the Phantom Forest as ominous background; the train is a kind of side-scrolling environment like the forest itself, where there is a very narrow range of 'up' and 'down' and progression is made from left to right, between the inside and outside environment that must both be navigated, using ladder and switches to get around doors and the like.
Of note is that, while most of the train's ghost population is hostile, not all of them are - there are Conductors, whose nature is ambiguous (souls that decided to stay behind to help conduct the others to the afterlife? Constructs spawned by the train itself?) who are unexpectedly helpful to us:
I guess they're sensitive to my plight as someone who's genuinely not meant to be there?
Also surprisingly helpful: this ghost who, upon being talked to… Wants to joins the party???
Despite his horrifying appearance, the ghost isn't a trap or anything, he's genuinely just happy to be along for the ride. And he helps in fights too! The ghost has its own set of sprites, including 'surprised' and 'KO' and has a weak attack command, and its own unique move, !Possess, which is essentially a mutual kill - the ghost targets an opponent, and both it and that opponent disappear from the fight. This does remove the ghost from our party, as well; we can go back to the rear car and talk to it (or another ghost like it) again to recruit them again, if we wish.
I decide not to use Possess and to just keep my new ghost friend for the whole train sequence because he's cute.
The conductor's room also contains two other interactions - one is the train's timetable, which is completely blank because there is so much conflict in the world right now that its schedule has become unpredictable. The other is a lever which, when approached, has Sabin pull it just to see what happens, which causes Cyan to freak out. Sabin, surprised, asks Cyan if he is scared.
Cyan: "...or try to stay as far away from them as humanly possible… or anything like that!"
Sabin: "Cyan… So, you're afraid of machines!"
Cyan: "Argh! Wh-what gave it away?"
Cyan really did transform into a comedy character after Doma, this is so wild.
We make our way through the train, but after a while, the background passivity of the train, whose ghosts only attack us if we actually interact with them, turns more… active. It starts with a pair of ghosts blocking our way out of one of the wagons and having to be fought, and as soon as we are out, a whole cohort of the thing starts flanking us while chanting ominous warnings.
Of course, there is one way to hide: up that convenient ladder and onto the rooftop. Unfortunately, this leaves them with nowhere to go as the ghosts proceed to climb up the ladder (I guess they can't fly?), which Cyan comments on, whereupon Sabin declares he's going to do Something Badass:
He then grabs the old man and proceeds to jump from one rooftop of the train to the other!
One thing that's never fully clear to me in this game is what the 'baseline' superhuman ability of our magical protagonists is meant to be like. That is to say, your Warrior can kill a red dragon the size of a house with their swordplay, but is that purely a matter of being 'good enough' in an action protagonist way, or is this a result of their strength and skill being so wildly beyond normal that they could also lift a car, jump across a river, or outspeed a horse? Often, fantasy settings have that question relatively blurry. It's a perennial issue in Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, where a wizard going from lv 1 to lv 20 goes from "can fire a gout of flame once" to "can call down meteorites from the sky, fly, teleport and read minds," whereas a Fighter going from lv 1 to lv 20 gains a number of numerical improvements that make them stronger at the tactical combat minigame the game is centered around, but the guidelines on whether this translates to actual superhuman physical ability are vague at best, and sometimes it feels like you are expected to act as if this high-level warrior has good numbers in the tactical combat minigame but, within the narrative of the story, is no more superhuman than John Wick.
Anyway, I raise this because "jump from one car of a moving train to the next" is classic action movie stuff, doing so while carrying another person is perhaps a little closer to 'meant to be superhuman in the narrative,' but it's kind of funny that this is presented as like, Sabin doing his utmost with all that his training has prepared him for when the animations for Aura Cannon and Meteor Drop are ten times more impressive than this.
Unfortunately, the ghosts don't let up!
I think it's really cute how Ghost Friend's sprite also unfolds during these scenes. He's really part of the team!
We enter the next car, find a switch and flip it, which causes the rear end of the train to disconnect and the front end to pull away, leaving our ghostly pursuers stranded and us free.
…
So like, are these ghosts now stuck on earth forever? Did we break the afterlife? Are Sabin and his friends going to be the reason undead exist because they broke the Phantom Train and stranded a bunch of departed souls on this earthly realm? Fucked up!
Just posting that pic because god those enemy sprites are badass as hell. Incidentally this, huh, is a team wipe. Wasn't quite expecting the punch these guys were packing.
We continue to make our way to the front car, only to bump into two more friendly ghosts, and it turns out we are in… the dining car?
'Food! Food! Bring me everything you've got!' Sabin shouts, doing his best Goku/Luffy impression; the ghost waiters are quick to oblige, bringing food and drink to the table.
SABIN
SABIN YOU IDIOT HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD A SINGLE UNDERWORLD STORY
YOU NEVER EAT THE FOOD OF THE DEAD THAT IS SPECIFICALLY ONE OF THINGS YOU NEVER DO THAT'S HOW PERSEPHONE GOT TRAPPED IN THE UNDERWORLD
God. What a dumbass. Broad of chest, pure of heart, dumb of ass: a true himbo.
Fortunately, it turns out the universe has a special providence for fools, as nothing bad happens and, in fact, the meal serves as a full recovery of HP, MP and all status effects. Fancy.
The next section of the train must be first class - it has these characteristic sub-compartments within the car, which have tables, couches, and wine bottles. As well as treasure chests! Unfortunately that loot isn't going to be let itself get got that easily. A voice shouts 'Hold it right there!' and as our group turns around, they come face to face with…
Sabin laughs out loud at that pretentious introduction, calls him the 'greatest windbag,' and tells him he'd best 'beat a brave retreat'; outraged, Siegfried draws his blade with some gratuitous French ('En garde!') and we open battle.
…
Yeah, the game is doing Gilgamesh again. Comically pretentious character steals treasure and boasts while the protagonists refuse to take him seriously. The only difference is that Gilgamesh is portrayed as genuinely strong in-setting, just hopelessly behind the warriors of light, whereas Siegried (and note how we're using the names of famous individual heroes of myth for both) does a high-pitched Bruce Lee scream, unleashes a flurry of attack that all bounce off the protagonists dealing single-digit damage, and is left panting and wheezing asking if we've had enough yet before disintegrating on my next attack.
Sabin contemptuously declares "All bark, no bite." Siegfried is in disbelief at his defeat, but then proclaims the last laugh belongs to him and steals the treasure from right under Sabin's eyes, who just stands there gormlessly while the thief runs away with more gratuitous French ("Au revoir, my friends!").
Sorry, this isn't doing it for me. It's too transparently an attempt to do the Gilgamesh beat again, except I've already seen it before, it doesn't have the same charm, and it raises more questions than it answers. Like… Did this guy just up and decide to do a heist on the afterlife soul train one day??? Where is he coming from? What even is the treasure in that chest that he's after, and why do I care?
Well, all we can do is just proceed with our exploration of the train. There's more loot, including one monster-in-a-box chest containing a particularly tough Apparition, which…
…hm.
Yeah, so this is a team wipe.
And more than that it's a full reset.
So here's the problem with our current party formation: we have no healing abilities. All characters are pure offense, except for Shadow having some self-buff scrolls. There is also no item shop on the Phantom Train. Meaning what you have when you get on is what you get, and I've run out of Potions and Phoenix Downs. There's the dining car, of course, but in order to get to the dining car you have to wade through random encounters and then back again the other way back, so it's a wash.
So…
I just have to reload to a previous save from after the Doma massacre, go to the itinerant merchant in the Cabin, buy a stock of healing items, and then do the entire Phantom Train sequence again.
Very irritating.
But after that's done, we meet the Apparition again and after a few false starts, beat him with everyone alive, and proceed to the final stretch of the train, where, tragically, we must say goodbye to our new friend:
It looks like our ghost friend's journey must continue as it was meant to, towards the afterlife, and so he parts ways with us here. Why he helped us will remain a mystery, but that was sweet.
The final step is the engineers' room, where we find indications on how to shut down the train - this requires pulling certain levers and then venturing on the outside of the locomotive, precariously climbing onto the smokestack to find a switch.
Predictably, the train isn't intent on letting us do this, not when we've brought ourselves squarely into its reach.
The entire fight proceeds with our characters 'running' away from the locomotive, although I'm not sure how literally I'm supposed to take this, since if they were able to jump off the train they could just… do that, instead of going through this whole rigamarole. This is one of the more abstract battles of the 2D eras, and I am not sure how I am meant to picture it happening in 'real space.' FFXIV translated that fight into 3D, but it did it in a very MMO way, so it still looks kind of abstract and unreal. Heh, I'm probably overthinking it. Here's the only thing that matters:
We did it. The meme is real. We suplexed an entire train.
The train is not helpless either, with this Diabolical Whistle move summoning its ghosts to deliver an onslaught of status effects, including the new status 'Imp,' which turns you into a duck.
The train attacks with charging, with its wheels, by causing an acid rain, and by summoning ghosts, but ultimately Cyan's Fang, Shadow's vast Shuriken supply, and Sabin's Blitz moves provide enough damage to force the unruly machine to finally step back and let us off.
I mean, good thing it ended relatively peacefully, for a moment there I thought we were about to break the afterlife.
The Phantom Train pulls into a new station, seemingly identical to the first, and the group gets off, oblivious to the extremely obvious set-up for a sucker punch the game is doing here. Sabin declares how glad he is to be off that thing and that 'the faster they leave that train, the better,' pumping his fist in the air, and then…
…yeah, the train was stopping to take on all the souls of the Doman people.
But alas, it is too late; the train is already leaving. Cyan desperately runs after the cars, pleading for the train to wait, to give him a chance to talk to his wife and son, but the Phantom Train waits for no one (especially not for people who just suplexed it into the forest floor lmao). He was so eager to get off the train, not realizing what he wanted most in the world would be there when it was too late to come back, that's what we call DRAMATIC IRONY, BITCHES.
There is only time enough for Elayne and Owain to look at Cyan as they leave and to send him one message each, before the Phantom Train moves on, and Cyan is left alone again.
The cutscene ends, and in a move inherited from Final Fantasy V, we resume control of Sabin alone, while Cyan just stands mournfully, not answering us until we leave the screen and the group joins up again.
Okay one thing though.
THIS IS SHADOW'S FIRST LINE SINCE HE JOINED OUR PARTY.
My understanding is that he is purely optional for this section of the game, and you can just not recruit him back at the Cabin, so it makes sense he's not heavily involved in the plot - but the fact that he has no dialogue line whatsoever, while the party gets involved in the Doman massacre, fights an imperial general, breaks out of an imperial camp, then MEETS THE AFTERLIFE TRAIN AND FIGHTS IT, is just wild. The most unflappable man ever. Also? For someone who was introduced as 'would kill his best friend for the right price,' surprisingly loyal. He made it clear he could vanish at any moment but no, he stuck with us through circumstances where any lesser mercenary would have gone 'lmao you're on your own guys.' Granted, once stuck on the train he didn't have much of a choice, but everything up to then…
Well, at least he did get one line of dialogue in before leaving, because indeed, this is where our journey together ends for the time being: having finally exited from the Phantom Forest, the next step on our journey are the Baren Falls.
Gorgeous, gorgeous background.
Beyond the falls lies 'the Veldt,' a dangerous land inhabited by all manners of ferocious beasts, but behind them is the Empire and its troops; Cyan knows a path to a village in the Veldt and, from there, idk; we seem to have kind of lost the plot in escaping from Doma.
Shadow, however, is not eager to go bungee jumping off a waterfall without a rope to wander through a place full of monsters, and declares he has 'served his purpose' before turning away to leave.
With Cyan and Sabin now forming a party of two, there is nothing left to do but turn to the falls, and dive in.
…
This isn't the end of the Sabin scenario, btw. I know it seems like it would be a natural cutoff point, especially as it has now been significantly longer than both the Locke and Terra/Edgar scenarios combined, but it just keeps going. We're about to recruit The Tarzan Kid and his insane personal mechanic, and more, though that'll be the next update. It's kind of crazy how the game presents three seemingly equivalent choices to do in any order, one of them is 'a short but fun solo escape from one city,' one is 'literally just walk through this cave it takes five minutes,' and the third is, like, the actual main story.
And it has some of the highest highs and lowest lows of the game so far (which still aren't very low lows but they exist). Sabin is just a fan guy to hang out with. The tragedy of Doma is logistically improbable but emotionally compelling (to me, anyway). Kefka really graduates in villainy to become our central antagonist figure here. Stylistically and aesthetically, the Phantom Train sequence may be one of the best story beats in all of Final Fantasy so far. On the other hand I shouldn't have to reload back to the last world map location two thirds of the way through because the game trapped me in a sequence with no healers or the ability to get healing items. Siegfried is kind of baffling as a weaker Gilgamesh copycat. The biggest sin of this sequence, though, is Cyan, a character the game just cannot decide on whether he's a funny old geezer who talks weird and can't into machines and is always comically scared of things it'd be sensible to be scared of as a normal person but not a fantasy protagonist, or if he's a noble, tragic figure who's lost everything in the world and is now adrift and purposeless and still actively grieving because it all happened like 24 hours ago, and it's genuinely hurting the game.
Still. Pretty good overall. More soon!
Here, Sabin tried to kick the chest open, and alerted a pack of dobermans, triggering a fight.
Still, not that big a deal, right? There's a second issue. When we first enter the camp, there is only one tent which can be accessed. The cutscenes that play out as we advance trigger at fixed points of progression, and by the time the game actually relinquishes full control and allows us to explore the camp freely, it's, huh…
It's right there. In the middle of the chase with Kefka. We need to 'fight' him once, then when he moves and frees up the path, we can actually go around the camp and get the three remaining items, which include the Mithril Glove and Barrier Ring, which are items that cast a protective spell when the wearer is critically injured.
This is completely counter-intuitive and I literally did not even think to search the camp at the time, because the natural flow of the scene is that Kefka is running away, so you catch him, he runs away again, you catch him again. But no, you have to leave him just hanging there in the middle of the camp and go around exploring; you even have enough time to get into an extra fight with a monster-in-a-box for it!
This thing has a ton of HP, can use an alarm to call guards, and has an ability called 'Mega-Berserk' which inflicts Berserk on everyone, severely reducing our effective combat power, since special abilities are key to effective damage in this game. It is, for all intents and purposes, the actual 'boss' of this area.
Anyway. Now that we've played through this again and grabbed the loot, it's time to get back on with the story. Which…
Well, there is another reason beyond it being late at night and having reached my image limit that I stopped my last update where I did. Let us resume with Cyan's last, desperate charge against the imperial army.
Cyan engages the enemy in battle, their sprites bouncing back and forth on the screen, and we take control of Sabin and Shadow again; approaching the fight and talking to Cyan causes Sabin to offer his help - and Cyan's reply highlights a feature I hadn't actually noticed in the scene so far.
We do not control Cyan in this fight, he is AI controlled.
He's talking in Ye Olde English.
Not much, really - it's just using 'thee' and 'thine,' but at least he's using them correctly so far, combined with a high register to make him sound antiquated. It's… eh, it's fine I guess. He's no Urianger.
Also fun fact: I used an Invisibility Scroll to grant Shadow Invisibility during this fight, and it just… Stuck? From fight to fight? Whenever I ran into a battle during that whole sequence, Shadow was already invisible at the start. I wonder if this is specific to the Invisibility status effect, to Scrolls, or to Shadow himself?
Also this whole sequence makes it pretty clear that the poisoning of Doma Castle must have happened within minutes at most. I understand why people theorize that we're meant to read it as a timelapse, with people going about their day and drinking the water and the sudden dying only occurring after hours, but, well: Sabin and Shadow are still right here in the imperial camp, after initiating a fight with the local commander. The only way this makes sense is if the poisoning happened so fast that they were still in the middle of fighting imperial troops without having had time to escape the camp. The 'chemical fumes' theory is more plausible, but also it's not indicated in any way by the game itself, it's purely something you have to read into it in order to make it make sense. It's not text.
Several waves of soldiers come in one by one, and Cyan goes to confront each one, and we join up with Sabin each time until we've repelled enough of them for the group to catch a breather and talk, Sabin saying he's from Figaro and Shadow doing his best impression of not being in this scene; then Sabin says they have to leave, which goes against Cyan's plans.
Sabin insists that if they stick around they'll have 'an entire regimen down their throat.' Cyan proves oddly easy to convince, which is part of, huh, a massive and jarring tonal shift that is about to occur right about nnnnnnow. Sabin says he has an idea for how to get them out of the camp, and takes the group to the Magitek parking spots, and…
So, first of all: how the fuck does Cyan not know about Magitek armor? Like, he's acting like he's never seen these before, but knowledge of the Empire using Magitek to conquer nations is widespread, and also, Doma was literally at war with the Empire. Like, the mechs right here are parked in a camp that was waging war against Doma. I did find it a little odd that Leo's troops seemed to use no Magitek in their assault on the castle earlier, but am I to believe that Leo just hasn't been using Magitek at all, in the whole campaign? Why? But that's not really the issue here, no. Sabin tells Cyan that he'll explain later and to just jump in, Cyan does so, and…
We've shifted to comedy.
For those among my beloved audience who are discovering this game at the same time as I do, I must emphasize that this happens within less than five minutes of the destruction of Doma; in a single sequence, Kefka poisons the river, all of Doma dies, Cyan discovers his king, his wife, and his child dead, and rushes the imperial troops alone, then after a couple of basic encounter fights, Sabin is like "dude we gotta leave though" and Cyan says "okay" and transmogrifies into Funny Grandpa Talks Weird And Doesn't Know How To Drive Stick.
No, seriously, this is the main gag of this sequence: Sabin apparently already knows how to drive a suit of Magitek armor (...how?), but Cyan doesn't and accidentally gets the lever stuck in reverse, causing the armor to start spinning wildly in circles, then accidentally barrels through an entire garrison of soldiers without any idea what he's doing.
It's incredibly jarring to go straight from the slaughter of Doma to this. And as comedy it's okay, but it doesn't land because of the sheer cognitive dissonance of Cyan turning into a gag character in the minutes that follow the loss of everyone he knew and loved?
Anyway, aside from that, I'm pleasantly surprised that we actually get another magitek sequence, I was fully expecting the Narshe raid to be a one and done affair that never gets repeated, but no! We actually get to fight several Magitek squads!
Because our armor has Thunder Beam, though, and because machines are weak to lightning damage, they all die in a single hit to our party. It turns out being in a mech makes everything we face into a pushover, including other mechs. We just punch through the entire camp, and once we reach the edge, Sabin and the others abandon their mechs, as the route to Narshe will take them through the woods, where the cumbersome mechs would be more of an inconvenience than anything. A quick trip across the map and we enter…
How delightfully ominous. And the music that plays over it doesn't help - the instrumentals are nice, soft, inviting, but there are vocals that go 'spooky choir' in contrast.
This area fascinates me because it's using a perspective trick to create the impression of a different angle of view? Also the strange ominous woods are signposted, which is as funny as it is creepy.
The game 'cuts off' a significant portion of the screen in order to create a 'background' layer, so our characters move in the 'foreground,' which gives a much stronger impression of a 2D environment than in other areas, right? Previous forest zones in prior games always stuck to the isometric view from 'above' the character sprite, with V having this circle around the character so you could see them through the canopy; this presentation makes the character feel a lot closer, a lot more trapped within the forest, all while allowing the scene to really flex its background - like goddamn, look at those trees, look at the reflection in that lake, this is gorgeous.
Also… wait, what's this in the distance of that second shot? Is that… a train?
…yeah, it's a train. And it doesn't look too good either, with holes in the walls and ceilings. What gives me pause here is Cyan's comment about how Doma's railways were destroyed in the fight, because that means Doma did have railways at one point, so rail isn't even an Empire-exclusive magitek thing - it's something anyone in this setting might have had, but we don't see any of it? It's one of the odd results of the way the game constructs its maps and locations - it doesn't show railway networks on the map, even broken ones, so until we're told so, we have no reason to believe Doma, or anywhere else, was advanced enough to have rail.
Well, that doesn't matter too much. Sabin thinks there might be Doman survivors inside the train and enters it; Cyan doesn't seem to think that's such a good idea and tries to keep him from doing so because he's scared (again, so weird he turned into a comedy character so quickly), but Sabin insists - only when they are inside does Cyan realize their predicament.
He warns everyone that they have to leave, but too late; the train starts, and by the time they reach the door, it is locked shut. Sabin asks what Cyan meant by 'Phantom Train,' and Cyan clarifies: The Phantom Train "carries the souls of the departed to their… final destination."
Puh. I was not expecting the meme ghost train to be the actual, literal psychopomp of the setting. This definitely has the "dude in a cart" of my homeland beat. Travel to the afterlife in class with this well-furnished train, featuring upholstered seats, wooden floorboards, and carpets! But wait, did that mean that a train was always ferrying souls to the afterlife, even before humanity invented it, as some kind of platonic ideal of The Train waiting to be born? Or did the afterlife upgrade when humanity invented the train, going "wow that's cool actually we need ourselves one of those"? Did the ancients of the time of the War of the Magi build a soul train because they thought their souls weren't traveling to their final reward in enough comfort?
Yeah, that's my take. The Magi saw whatever process the dead had to go through normally and went "well I'm above that" and built a magic soul train so they could go to the afterlife in first class. It's canon now.
And it seems like the Phantom Train doesn't differentiate between living and dead when they're on board, and if they can't find a way to get down, Sabin and friends are going to be trapped in the afterlife! Spooky. Thus the group decides to head for the engine room, in hopes of stopping the train.
The train is, incidentally, full of ghosts.
I love this bit as a setpiece. The train is moving through the forest the entire time we explore it, going from wagon to wagon, with the Phantom Forest as ominous background; the train is a kind of side-scrolling environment like the forest itself, where there is a very narrow range of 'up' and 'down' and progression is made from left to right, between the inside and outside environment that must both be navigated, using ladder and switches to get around doors and the like.
Of note is that, while most of the train's ghost population is hostile, not all of them are - there are Conductors, whose nature is ambiguous (souls that decided to stay behind to help conduct the others to the afterlife? Constructs spawned by the train itself?) who are unexpectedly helpful to us:
I guess they're sensitive to my plight as someone who's genuinely not meant to be there?
Also surprisingly helpful: this ghost who, upon being talked to… Wants to joins the party???
Despite his horrifying appearance, the ghost isn't a trap or anything, he's genuinely just happy to be along for the ride. And he helps in fights too! The ghost has its own set of sprites, including 'surprised' and 'KO' and has a weak attack command, and its own unique move, !Possess, which is essentially a mutual kill - the ghost targets an opponent, and both it and that opponent disappear from the fight. This does remove the ghost from our party, as well; we can go back to the rear car and talk to it (or another ghost like it) again to recruit them again, if we wish.
I decide not to use Possess and to just keep my new ghost friend for the whole train sequence because he's cute.
The conductor's room also contains two other interactions - one is the train's timetable, which is completely blank because there is so much conflict in the world right now that its schedule has become unpredictable. The other is a lever which, when approached, has Sabin pull it just to see what happens, which causes Cyan to freak out. Sabin, surprised, asks Cyan if he is scared.
Cyan: "...or try to stay as far away from them as humanly possible… or anything like that!"
Sabin: "Cyan… So, you're afraid of machines!"
Cyan: "Argh! Wh-what gave it away?"
Cyan really did transform into a comedy character after Doma, this is so wild.
We make our way through the train, but after a while, the background passivity of the train, whose ghosts only attack us if we actually interact with them, turns more… active. It starts with a pair of ghosts blocking our way out of one of the wagons and having to be fought, and as soon as we are out, a whole cohort of the thing starts flanking us while chanting ominous warnings.
Of course, there is one way to hide: up that convenient ladder and onto the rooftop. Unfortunately, this leaves them with nowhere to go as the ghosts proceed to climb up the ladder (I guess they can't fly?), which Cyan comments on, whereupon Sabin declares he's going to do Something Badass:
He then grabs the old man and proceeds to jump from one rooftop of the train to the other!
One thing that's never fully clear to me in this game is what the 'baseline' superhuman ability of our magical protagonists is meant to be like. That is to say, your Warrior can kill a red dragon the size of a house with their swordplay, but is that purely a matter of being 'good enough' in an action protagonist way, or is this a result of their strength and skill being so wildly beyond normal that they could also lift a car, jump across a river, or outspeed a horse? Often, fantasy settings have that question relatively blurry. It's a perennial issue in Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, where a wizard going from lv 1 to lv 20 goes from "can fire a gout of flame once" to "can call down meteorites from the sky, fly, teleport and read minds," whereas a Fighter going from lv 1 to lv 20 gains a number of numerical improvements that make them stronger at the tactical combat minigame the game is centered around, but the guidelines on whether this translates to actual superhuman physical ability are vague at best, and sometimes it feels like you are expected to act as if this high-level warrior has good numbers in the tactical combat minigame but, within the narrative of the story, is no more superhuman than John Wick.
Anyway, I raise this because "jump from one car of a moving train to the next" is classic action movie stuff, doing so while carrying another person is perhaps a little closer to 'meant to be superhuman in the narrative,' but it's kind of funny that this is presented as like, Sabin doing his utmost with all that his training has prepared him for when the animations for Aura Cannon and Meteor Drop are ten times more impressive than this.
Unfortunately, the ghosts don't let up!
I think it's really cute how Ghost Friend's sprite also unfolds during these scenes. He's really part of the team!
We enter the next car, find a switch and flip it, which causes the rear end of the train to disconnect and the front end to pull away, leaving our ghostly pursuers stranded and us free.
…
So like, are these ghosts now stuck on earth forever? Did we break the afterlife? Are Sabin and his friends going to be the reason undead exist because they broke the Phantom Train and stranded a bunch of departed souls on this earthly realm? Fucked up!
Just posting that pic because god those enemy sprites are badass as hell. Incidentally this, huh, is a team wipe. Wasn't quite expecting the punch these guys were packing.
We continue to make our way to the front car, only to bump into two more friendly ghosts, and it turns out we are in… the dining car?
'Food! Food! Bring me everything you've got!' Sabin shouts, doing his best Goku/Luffy impression; the ghost waiters are quick to oblige, bringing food and drink to the table.
SABIN
SABIN YOU IDIOT HAVE YOU NEVER HEARD A SINGLE UNDERWORLD STORY
YOU NEVER EAT THE FOOD OF THE DEAD THAT IS SPECIFICALLY ONE OF THINGS YOU NEVER DO THAT'S HOW PERSEPHONE GOT TRAPPED IN THE UNDERWORLD
God. What a dumbass. Broad of chest, pure of heart, dumb of ass: a true himbo.
Fortunately, it turns out the universe has a special providence for fools, as nothing bad happens and, in fact, the meal serves as a full recovery of HP, MP and all status effects. Fancy.
The next section of the train must be first class - it has these characteristic sub-compartments within the car, which have tables, couches, and wine bottles. As well as treasure chests! Unfortunately that loot isn't going to be let itself get got that easily. A voice shouts 'Hold it right there!' and as our group turns around, they come face to face with…
Sabin laughs out loud at that pretentious introduction, calls him the 'greatest windbag,' and tells him he'd best 'beat a brave retreat'; outraged, Siegfried draws his blade with some gratuitous French ('En garde!') and we open battle.
…
Yeah, the game is doing Gilgamesh again. Comically pretentious character steals treasure and boasts while the protagonists refuse to take him seriously. The only difference is that Gilgamesh is portrayed as genuinely strong in-setting, just hopelessly behind the warriors of light, whereas Siegried (and note how we're using the names of famous individual heroes of myth for both) does a high-pitched Bruce Lee scream, unleashes a flurry of attack that all bounce off the protagonists dealing single-digit damage, and is left panting and wheezing asking if we've had enough yet before disintegrating on my next attack.
Sabin contemptuously declares "All bark, no bite." Siegfried is in disbelief at his defeat, but then proclaims the last laugh belongs to him and steals the treasure from right under Sabin's eyes, who just stands there gormlessly while the thief runs away with more gratuitous French ("Au revoir, my friends!").
Sorry, this isn't doing it for me. It's too transparently an attempt to do the Gilgamesh beat again, except I've already seen it before, it doesn't have the same charm, and it raises more questions than it answers. Like… Did this guy just up and decide to do a heist on the afterlife soul train one day??? Where is he coming from? What even is the treasure in that chest that he's after, and why do I care?
Well, all we can do is just proceed with our exploration of the train. There's more loot, including one monster-in-a-box chest containing a particularly tough Apparition, which…
…hm.
Yeah, so this is a team wipe.
And more than that it's a full reset.
So here's the problem with our current party formation: we have no healing abilities. All characters are pure offense, except for Shadow having some self-buff scrolls. There is also no item shop on the Phantom Train. Meaning what you have when you get on is what you get, and I've run out of Potions and Phoenix Downs. There's the dining car, of course, but in order to get to the dining car you have to wade through random encounters and then back again the other way back, so it's a wash.
So…
I just have to reload to a previous save from after the Doma massacre, go to the itinerant merchant in the Cabin, buy a stock of healing items, and then do the entire Phantom Train sequence again.
Very irritating.
But after that's done, we meet the Apparition again and after a few false starts, beat him with everyone alive, and proceed to the final stretch of the train, where, tragically, we must say goodbye to our new friend:
It looks like our ghost friend's journey must continue as it was meant to, towards the afterlife, and so he parts ways with us here. Why he helped us will remain a mystery, but that was sweet.
The final step is the engineers' room, where we find indications on how to shut down the train - this requires pulling certain levers and then venturing on the outside of the locomotive, precariously climbing onto the smokestack to find a switch.
Predictably, the train isn't intent on letting us do this, not when we've brought ourselves squarely into its reach.
The entire fight proceeds with our characters 'running' away from the locomotive, although I'm not sure how literally I'm supposed to take this, since if they were able to jump off the train they could just… do that, instead of going through this whole rigamarole. This is one of the more abstract battles of the 2D eras, and I am not sure how I am meant to picture it happening in 'real space.' FFXIV translated that fight into 3D, but it did it in a very MMO way, so it still looks kind of abstract and unreal. Heh, I'm probably overthinking it. Here's the only thing that matters:
We did it. The meme is real. We suplexed an entire train.
The train is not helpless either, with this Diabolical Whistle move summoning its ghosts to deliver an onslaught of status effects, including the new status 'Imp,' which turns you into a duck.
The train attacks with charging, with its wheels, by causing an acid rain, and by summoning ghosts, but ultimately Cyan's Fang, Shadow's vast Shuriken supply, and Sabin's Blitz moves provide enough damage to force the unruly machine to finally step back and let us off.
I mean, good thing it ended relatively peacefully, for a moment there I thought we were about to break the afterlife.
The Phantom Train pulls into a new station, seemingly identical to the first, and the group gets off, oblivious to the extremely obvious set-up for a sucker punch the game is doing here. Sabin declares how glad he is to be off that thing and that 'the faster they leave that train, the better,' pumping his fist in the air, and then…
…yeah, the train was stopping to take on all the souls of the Doman people.
But alas, it is too late; the train is already leaving. Cyan desperately runs after the cars, pleading for the train to wait, to give him a chance to talk to his wife and son, but the Phantom Train waits for no one (especially not for people who just suplexed it into the forest floor lmao). He was so eager to get off the train, not realizing what he wanted most in the world would be there when it was too late to come back, that's what we call DRAMATIC IRONY, BITCHES.
There is only time enough for Elayne and Owain to look at Cyan as they leave and to send him one message each, before the Phantom Train moves on, and Cyan is left alone again.
The cutscene ends, and in a move inherited from Final Fantasy V, we resume control of Sabin alone, while Cyan just stands mournfully, not answering us until we leave the screen and the group joins up again.
Okay one thing though.
THIS IS SHADOW'S FIRST LINE SINCE HE JOINED OUR PARTY.
My understanding is that he is purely optional for this section of the game, and you can just not recruit him back at the Cabin, so it makes sense he's not heavily involved in the plot - but the fact that he has no dialogue line whatsoever, while the party gets involved in the Doman massacre, fights an imperial general, breaks out of an imperial camp, then MEETS THE AFTERLIFE TRAIN AND FIGHTS IT, is just wild. The most unflappable man ever. Also? For someone who was introduced as 'would kill his best friend for the right price,' surprisingly loyal. He made it clear he could vanish at any moment but no, he stuck with us through circumstances where any lesser mercenary would have gone 'lmao you're on your own guys.' Granted, once stuck on the train he didn't have much of a choice, but everything up to then…
Well, at least he did get one line of dialogue in before leaving, because indeed, this is where our journey together ends for the time being: having finally exited from the Phantom Forest, the next step on our journey are the Baren Falls.
Gorgeous, gorgeous background.
Beyond the falls lies 'the Veldt,' a dangerous land inhabited by all manners of ferocious beasts, but behind them is the Empire and its troops; Cyan knows a path to a village in the Veldt and, from there, idk; we seem to have kind of lost the plot in escaping from Doma.
Shadow, however, is not eager to go bungee jumping off a waterfall without a rope to wander through a place full of monsters, and declares he has 'served his purpose' before turning away to leave.
With Cyan and Sabin now forming a party of two, there is nothing left to do but turn to the falls, and dive in.
…
This isn't the end of the Sabin scenario, btw. I know it seems like it would be a natural cutoff point, especially as it has now been significantly longer than both the Locke and Terra/Edgar scenarios combined, but it just keeps going. We're about to recruit The Tarzan Kid and his insane personal mechanic, and more, though that'll be the next update. It's kind of crazy how the game presents three seemingly equivalent choices to do in any order, one of them is 'a short but fun solo escape from one city,' one is 'literally just walk through this cave it takes five minutes,' and the third is, like, the actual main story.
And it has some of the highest highs and lowest lows of the game so far (which still aren't very low lows but they exist). Sabin is just a fan guy to hang out with. The tragedy of Doma is logistically improbable but emotionally compelling (to me, anyway). Kefka really graduates in villainy to become our central antagonist figure here. Stylistically and aesthetically, the Phantom Train sequence may be one of the best story beats in all of Final Fantasy so far. On the other hand I shouldn't have to reload back to the last world map location two thirds of the way through because the game trapped me in a sequence with no healers or the ability to get healing items. Siegfried is kind of baffling as a weaker Gilgamesh copycat. The biggest sin of this sequence, though, is Cyan, a character the game just cannot decide on whether he's a funny old geezer who talks weird and can't into machines and is always comically scared of things it'd be sensible to be scared of as a normal person but not a fantasy protagonist, or if he's a noble, tragic figure who's lost everything in the world and is now adrift and purposeless and still actively grieving because it all happened like 24 hours ago, and it's genuinely hurting the game.
Still. Pretty good overall. More soon!
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Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
There are plenty of tonal shifts in the game, but in this case it might not the best time, I guess.
Don't worry, the company will make sure to fix things up. Wouldn't be the first time a passenger tried to remain on the land of the living.
And that's why, kids, I learned pretty soon in my JRPG career to never go further than two dungeons into a game without at least a full 99 stack of lowly potions.
As it was spoken, as it was written. Let it be so, let it go on.
A kappa, actually. Funnily, it reduces all your stats ridiculously low. But there's "imp" equipment that, while useless normally, turns an imp'ed character into a strong one. Why would you do that? Because it's funny, dammit.
Okay, so here's my crazy theory on why Cyan survived the poisoning of Doma. It has to do with the line about how he doesn't fear death, and how he reacted upon getting on the Phantom Train. I think that maybe in his youth, Cyan had some sort of encounter with the Phantom Train, but as a brave warrior, he managed to survive the encounter and defy death. Only as the price for his defiance, he received a curse that he would live when he would rather have died. So he survives Doma's downfall as a result.
Not really keen on this theory too much, though; I think it's more likely that he and that soldier survived by the fortune of just being high enough when the sudden miasma of death spread through the castle. But I do feel that a big part of Cyan's theme is that he did not fear his own death, but has come to realize the pain of living when those close to you die.
Not really keen on this theory too much, though; I think it's more likely that he and that soldier survived by the fortune of just being high enough when the sudden miasma of death spread through the castle. But I do feel that a big part of Cyan's theme is that he did not fear his own death, but has come to realize the pain of living when those close to you die.
So, fun fact, the train counts as undead, if you just want to skip the fight (but why would you want to not suplex it?) you can just use a phoenix down on it.
Oh, and the makers of this remaster did something unforgivable that they very quickly fixed. I'll let Reggie tell you.
View: https://www.twitch.tv/woolieversus/clip/RichFurryLapwingSoonerLater-tpiuHM2PrEKOu0Sx
Woolie (about the kid practicing his sword): "Little too late for that kid. You can't cut poison. But you know what you can cut? Clowns. You can sharpen a blade real nice on a clown."
Oh, and the makers of this remaster did something unforgivable that they very quickly fixed. I'll let Reggie tell you.
View: https://www.twitch.tv/woolieversus/clip/RichFurryLapwingSoonerLater-tpiuHM2PrEKOu0Sx
Woolie (about the kid practicing his sword): "Little too late for that kid. You can't cut poison. But you know what you can cut? Clowns. You can sharpen a blade real nice on a clown."
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The moment that perpetually inducted Sabin into the halls of Legend. Wrestling the grim, mechanical reaper.
Incidentally, I think this picture does a pretty good job of communicating the intended "3D" setup of the fight.
Incidentally, I think this picture does a pretty good job of communicating the intended "3D" setup of the fight.
Not sure if you missed it, but a neat detail about this scene is that if you try to talk to Cyan from the front of his sprite, i.e. in the middle of the brawl, your party gets knocked to the side leaving Sabin to just comment that he 'didn't mean to jump in the middle of that'.
There are several status effects in this game that persist from battle to battle. I don't remember the list offhand, but Float is definitely one, and Invisibility might be another.
This is the kind of thing that I honestly just never thought about as a kid but is pretty obvious now. Then again, I enjoyed the hell out of Centaurworld so maybe I'm just immune to mood whiplash.
I've been waiting for Zerban to pop into the thread to compare the two of you.
I'm sure you're gonna get a lot of this from the rest of the thread, but there definitely are merchants on the train. At least two, if memory serves. They share the same ghost sprite as the ones you find wandering around, some of whom tag along with you. So, the thing with that ends up being that you find these ghosts wandering along the train, and they'll either fight you, join the team, or sell you items and you have to talk to them to figure out which is which.
It's a rite of passage. My playthrough had this battle take a particularly epic turn when I got a bad roll on Diabolic Whistle, disabling my entire party while the train walloped me. I got control of Sabin briefly, so I did the suplex for the meme value expecting to have to reload only for a berserked Cyan to proc his desperation attack for enormous damage, one-shotting the train when all hope seemed lost.
Also:
Yeah, so I always thought that the order in which you did the side stories determined when Shadow would leave, but it just turns out that his 'leave chance' doesn't start until after the imperial camp, and is turned off during the Phantom Train, so unless you try grinding the overworld there's just not much opportunity for him to ditch you. Still can happen though if you're unlucky.
Here's the non-patched version they're talking about:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_r_ysVkYdk
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Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
"A samurai, a ninja and his dog, and a monk jump off a train..."
You know, for the longest time I thought Kate Beaton drew this because it reminded me so much of her Hark! A Vagrant style.
- Location
- Phoenix
*insert spongebob how many times do we need to teach you this lesson old man meme*
Yeah, Cyan straight up suffers as a character because he keeps bouncing between comedy and tragedy. The guy has no middle ground.
- Location
- Alabama
I think that might be a Kappa.
The train is not helpless either, with this Diabolical Whistle move summoning its ghosts to deliver an onslaught of status effects, including the new status 'Imp,' which turns you into a duck.
Shell on back, balding head. No clue why it's translated as Imp.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That's not balding, that's a small pool of water on the top of the head. Key part of the kappa mythos.
I imagine partly due to saving space and partly a localization choice due to the average American child in the mid-90s having no idea what a Kappa is.