There are actually random encounters on the way down, which is just incredibly funny to me. These guys are just having a fight to the death while in free fall, it's straight out of Shoot 'Em Up. Anyone remember Shoot 'Em Up?
...Darius? Are you thinking of the side scroller franchise Darius where you fight an evil space empire with strangely aquatic themed ships?
The pigeon postal service, incidentally, is how a wounded soldier who got stuck here somehow keeps in touch with his love back home in a place called Maranda.
OMI! OMI THIS IS THE GUY, DID YOU GET THE THING
At which point Gau decides the term 'thou' is so funny he just can't get enough of it and starts running around all over the screen while shouting "Thou! Thou!" until Cyan takes offense at being made fun of, Sabin tells Gau that Cyan is going through a rough time what with his family dying, and Gau shows some actual concern and apology.
And this is also the birthplace of the hilarious nickname, "Mr. Thou." For Sabin though, much to his consternation.
With !Leap, Gau jumps and quits the party, instantly ending a random encounter with no reward. A random few encounters later, he will reappear after defeating all enemies, at which point he must be convinced to join the party again by throwing him dried jerky, and he will have learned the special abilities of each monster we were fighting when he left, and each monster we were fighting when he returned.
The game doesn't communicate this to you, but you don't need to use the jerkey ever again. Just wait.
And for the love of god whatever you do don't accidentally attack Gau like I've done countless times. As soon as the enemies are dead just stop pressing buttons. Use the cancel button (B) to cycle through the dialogue.
Which is where the second point of complication comes in. Here is Gau's ability menu:
As somebody that enjoyed using Gau in their last playthrough, let me state for the record that I absolutely hate FFVI's rage menu for being completely without rhyme or reason. It's such a huge pain in the ass finding the one specific rage you want to use for a fight.
Not telling you what the hell any of his stuff does is also not great. Probably the devs were limited by their system and memory limitations. They worked really hard to cram all that game into the SNES cartridge and IIR had basically no room to spare.
I can't get over this stupid-ass pun in the context of him planning a mass murder.
Kefka is truly one of the characters of all time.
As mentioned at the Imperial Camp outside Doma, Leo got all the good bits and Kefka got the insane clown stuff.
Yeah! Remember that? Celes, Terra, Leo and Kefka were all present in that prologue sequence with Emperor Gestahl! They know each other! Terra says that Celes can use magic, but it's different from hers; Celes explains that she was raised to be a Magitek Knight basically from birth, having been infused with magic as a very young child.
Which. Okay. So the Empire is running a super soldier program, taking children and blasting them with magic to produce its magic-using elite. Wow. That's some new context and waaaiiiit that's basically SOLDIER from FFVII!!!
The game also mentions this a couple other times. The one I know of for sure is at the Imperial Camp, where the two mooks are talking about Kefka and Leo as mentioned above.
Which means that, in Celes's case, if I use Runic, there is a lag between me telling her to use it, and Celes actually 'casting' Runic; if the enemy casts a spell during that lag time, it goes through. Then, because Celes technically took her turn before the enemy attacked, her ATB gauge fills up waiting for a spell that never comes, and then her next turn rolls around, having wasted a full turn trying to defend against a spell that never came because it had already come through.
Not quite. It lasts until the next time Celes performs an action, which means you can just cycle to other characters using the Y button in order to keep the use of Runic banked. Doesn't work great if you've got Terra in the party though, as Runic works on your own spells just as well as the enemies, and it also means Celes isn't doing anything else. Even with all that, it's still a phenominal ability for keeping your party from wiping from enemy magic.
At some point I'm gonna need to actually level up my characters, I have been told 'by the way try to keep your level to a minimum in the early game because there is stuff that happens later that makes leveling up too high too early detrimental and it's been
four hours and I just got my ass handed to me by Kefka three times in a row
SOON
And yes, it's kind of... annoying to try and return to the Veldt at this point in the game. Not impossible, but you have to like... walk your way back across the entire continent so far and back through the path of Sabin's scenario (sans the Phantom Train), then jump back in the river again and take a ship again to get back to the main plot. Really not worth it until you have better transport to reach the Veldt later... meaning your Gau is probably going to be fairly dead weight for the time being.
Annoying but totally worth it. As you mention, the serpent trench enemies have some really fantastic abilities. Them plus a couple other already encountered enemies make Gau really strong at this stage of the game. Gigavolt oneshots several annoying bosses, and Fireball from the Lesser Lopros does work.
Also, too: WIND GOD GAU
