Defeat Kefka? Great idea game! I love it when a game actually commits to fighting the villains, instead of just having them swan about plot-armouring their way wherever they like. I'm sure this mission objective is in no way a blatant lie!
Aw fuck he graduated to a proper boss sprite. We're proper toast now.
Yeah it turns out the hopes I might have been holding on of Kefka being a fake who uses tricks to look like he has magic but not being an actual proper wizard, thus his fleeing from Cyan and Sabin last time, were short-lived. Dude's stronger than we are.
Proper boss fight, nice. If you're going to have the defeat of a major villain, it's always best to have you really feel the moment, instead of it just being scripted. Galuf's beatdown of Exdeath was really cool, but it's just more satisfying if it's actual gameplay, y'know?
He is, unfortunately, more than Cyan and Edgar can tackle at this stage - and wiping to the actual boss here, unfortunately carries the effects of a standard game over.
Anyway we won. I guess all we needed was to just keep doing massive damage every turn as fast as possible and not care about anything else.
What did we learn?
Hell if I know.
But at last! We've thwarted the Imperial attack. Kefka runs away while swearing that he won't forget this, and the group hurriedly rushes to the esper to see if it's intact.
Other fun fact in Figaro Castle. If you have Edgar or Sabin in your party, the item and tool shops will give you a 50% off discount. It's the best place to buy Ethers and tents in the game.
Edit: So twitter borked the image post apparently, so I dug it up from somewhere else. The original post went something like "Hey guys, I think I found the solution to the Trolley Problem", then had this image:
I exaggerated somewhat, and honestly it's not that the fight was particularly hard or anything. It's just that early on in the fight, I threw out a grease spell to cover the massive swarm of enemies infinitely spawning in the gate, and... promptly ended up with the "mandatory to kill" enemies prone in said grease with the rest of my party tripping over themselves to try and actually hit them. And because I was stubbornly keeping things on turn based mode instead of switching back to real time with pause (because I found said mode annoying to play in beforehand), it probably dragged things out longer than necessary.
Even with my own dumbassery taken out of the mix though it's not a particularly fun segment to play through, between the constant waves of enemies and the "can't save in combat" thing. That said rest of the game's been great.
Yeah, my companions sprinting into my own puddles of grease in the first act was what finally made me sit mostly in turn-based mode for my playthrough. Otherwise you have to turn their AIs off and then wonder why I lose fights sometimes only to discover that they've just been sitting there for like four rounds doing nothing. >.<
As a result, a number of things it does are almost intuitively easy in its native environment, but would require a lot of redesign if transferred to a different one.
But they wouldn't, is the thing. None of the examples you try to use for this argument are in fact in any way inherently easier in 2D than they would be in a 3D game. Your starting premise is just... not correct.
So, Terra's distressing transformation and the way you described that burst of power was reminding me of something I couldn't immediately place, but I know what it was now.
When one of the three parties is KO'd, they are sent back to the healing bucket at the start of the path. This isn't too onerous, it means a slight loss of time but the soldiers just aren't all that fast to begin with so we can easily catch up. We do get XP from these fights, which makes me think it's actually possible to skip them, but we won't find out today - despite our characters' shortcoming, we do manage to grind through all the soldiers and confront the special officer protecting Kefka:
Fun Fact: If you ignore Hell's Rider and focus on just defeating Kefka, the boss-level enemy still remains present in that area, continuing to move about. I forgot all about him until I returned to Narshe much later and wondered about the monster sprite wandering around.
Fun Fact: If you ignore Hell's Rider and focus on just defeating Kefka, the boss-level enemy still remains present in that area, continuing to move about. I forgot all about him until I returned to Narshe much later and wondered about the monster sprite wandering around.
... So, he doesn't retreat when Kefka and the rest of the troops do, and he rides around on a giant monster-thing instead of a Magitek construct.
Are we sure this guy was even an Imperial, and not just some random monster-rider who got lost?
... So, he doesn't retreat when Kefka and the rest of the troops do, and he rides around on a giant monster-thing instead of a Magitek construct.
Are we sure this guy was even an Imperial, and not just some random monster-rider who got lost?
She's a person who has no emotional memory, and has been raised for heaven knows how long as a mindless soldier.
She doesn't have the emotional foundation or the knowledge of how to handle her form, especially since she's clearly never used it before. So naturally, her manifestation as an esper is a particularly feral form. That will, of course, change with time (her control over herself, not her form).
The Veldt was such an obviously "gameplay mechanics over coherent lore" area, even the first time I encountered it. The handwave explanation was that monsters from all over the world converge on the Veldt, but there's no explanation for why. The Veldt isn't even the proper environment for some of them, like fish literally out of water. And randomly there's Magitek Armour and Imperial troops wandering around.
Also we know where the Narshe guards were during the defence of the Esper: they were all wandering around the Veldt too.
And, of course, we have a repeat of two past sections I commented in previous entries, with the underwater current being a repeat of the raft (which people tell me it's easy to do, but I still think it'd be somewhat tricky)
I admit when you were asking how the Lethe River raft sequence could be done in 3D and gave quick-time events as a possibility, I immediately thought "that's basically the Serpent Trench" and I'm still not sure what's the difference.
Last time: Terra resonated with the esper and turned into something weird, then flew away.
Today, we attempt to track her down!
First though let's briefly backtrack to here:
It turns out, we can actually send a letter for the injured soldier back in Mobliz!
This is a bit counterintuitive because the guy isn't complaining about not being able to pay for postage or get to the post office on his own, but about not being able to write at all. But I guess he just dictates and Sabin or Cyan transcribe for him.
This is a sweet side-story. Each time we send a letter for the soldier, he later receives a reply, which we read to him - first, she laments that she wishes she had his favorite record, so she could listen to it and remember him; we can send the record. Then, she says that her mother has fallen ill, and she can't afford medicine; we can send a Potion. Then she simply worries about not hearing word from him in a while, so we send another letter, and finally we send a book that he talked about in his last letter.
What's interesting to me in this story is that it's a rare example of Final Fantasy managing to successfully convey the passage of time. Each time we send a letter, the reply arrives only after we rest at the inn, that is to say, after at least a day has passed. Since we're paying for the regeneration, we might as well take advantage of it to go out and get into fights in the Veldt to farm some abilities for Gau. All in all this has the emergent feeling of Sabin, Cyan and their new friend, being stranded in a remote continent of the world, hanging around town for a few days, getting to know the locals, exploring the surrounding plains looking for a way out. It's a really nice feeling of decompressed time that is often missing from FF games, where it often feels like the world fits in the corner of a sketchbook page and traveling the world takes five minutes.
Which is also neat because it helps swallow the pill that between postage price and resting at the inn, this whole thing is costing us 3000 gil
There's a reward, though.
The soldier gives us the Tintinnabulum, an item which heals its wearers' HP with every out-of-combat step. I'm… not sure how good this is; in some RPGs this would be a fantastic item, but considering the availability of Potions and the fact that footsteps = random encounters in FF, I'm not so sure.
Alright. Back to the present timeline, and the town of Narshe!
Thankfully, the Narshe townsfolk, while so far utterly unhelpful, have finally decided to help us somewhat. A little. By letting us loot their inventory.
These chests contain a number of Relics such as the Reflect Ring (wearer is automatically under Reflect), the Thief's Bracer (Stealing has a better chance of succeeding), and another Hyper Wrist. Good stuff!
Once we've got our party set up, our gear sorted out and have talked to the townsfolk (nothing new; people complain about imperial aggression, lament all the trouble the esper has brought their town, and a drunk guy says he says he saw the moogles… playing with a yeti? How odd), and so we head out to Figaro.
If we show up there with Sabin, he goes to explore his childhood home - but, as far as a I can tell, he can't be found anywhere and has no further interactions until we leave again, which is a little disappointing. The guards repeatedly say that we look tired and should take a rest, however resting does not lead into a narrative beat as this suggests; that only seems to happen if we have both Sabin and Edgar on the team, in which case what plays out is a really important cutscene.
Sabin, in the throne room, muses that the castle hasn't changed much, yet everything seems different after their parents' death; he sits on one of the two thrones and reminisces about the past.
Instead of the usual sepia and dialogue boxes, the camera just pans down from Sabin onto these characters as if they were in the room right now, while their dialogue appears in unboxed lines with sentence bits cut off, strongly suggesting a vague murmur of too many things being said, rather than a coherent conversation; the memory moves through the priestess's chambers, to the stairs leading up to the king's bedroom - though we do not see the King, we hear him call Sabin's name, and specifically only Sabin's, which makes me wonder how much we're supposed to read into it - is this only because it's Sabin having the flashback from his POV, or is this because Sabin was actually the favored child this whole time? Either way, we soon move to Sabin standing in the open and Edgar catching up with him - and it definitely sounds, from the way Edgar is saying this, that he wasn't present for his father's last moments:
Like, the way this is framed, Edgar is the one seeing Sabin's sorrowful expression, and deducing "So, he didn't make it," which… I'm really curious what's going on between these twins. It could be as simple as "Figaro's law only allows for one king, and Sabin is the older sibling by a couple of minutes, therefore he's lived his life as the official heir, not Edgar;" if that's the case though it's not explicit, and the King's last words demand a different outcome:
This does not go over well with Sabin. This is how we learned that, at least according to rumor (and given their past behavior I have no issue believing that's true), the Empire poisoned the old King; and instead of talking about that, instead of talking about revenge, or even of mourning the old King, all everyone has on the mind is succession - in fact, he adds pretty viciously, he's sure people didn't even care when their mother died in childbirth either.
(Man these games just kinda love death in childbirth huh, it's such a convenient way of taking the mom out of the picture and it's never really given much attention by the narrative, it's always a casual 'And she died giving birth' drop.)
Which isn't an unfair criticism for a grieving…. Teenager…? Let's go with teenager to be making, given his emotional situation, although it's inherent to the models of Western monarchy I'm familiar with. There can't not be a King, the legal and constitutional system simply aren't designed to handle that situation, the monarch is the source of legitimacy and, even if they're an infant (with a regent, presumably) or comatose, they need to legally exist. The phrase "The king is dead, long live the king" is meant to emphasize that transference of power is instantaneous and automatic. There is never not a moment in which the kingdom has a monarch; the passing of the old king inherently transfers the crown to the heir, even if no one is even aware that they have died yet. Of course in practice there are plenty of challenges to the legitimity of royal succession, but here it's perfectly expected for the Figaroans to focus on settling the matter of succession - they have twin heirs, which could be a huge problem if their legal succession code isn't designed to handle this, and they are (implied to be?) minors, which means the king might not have bothered to settle the succession ahead of his death, thinking he still has time.
Therefore, it's natural for Figaro's people and administrative elites to have "what is the legal and constitutional situation of the Kingdom right now" as their primary concern ahead and above of everything else. Setting that sort of question aside for 'later' while we mourn is a quick way for a drunken argument at the wake between two brothers with competing claims that haven't been immediately and conclusively settled to turn into a bloody civil war. I can't blame them. Sabin can, though, and I understand him.
Sabin flees to the highest tower of the castle, where he contemplates the star and the horizon, and asks his brother to just abandon everything and leave with him to wander free.
Beautiful background design there, by the way.
So that's the core divide between Edgar and Sabin: Sabin is the free spirit who resents the structure and expectations of royalty, and who would abandon the whole kingdom to itself on a whim; Edgar is the responsible one who would bite down his own feelings (Sabin reveals that Edgar himself told him he did not, in fact, want to be a king) for the sake of his kingdom and his people.*
*royalist propaganda btw
The twins toss a coin to determine who gets to live their life the way they want, and as we find out in the future, Sabin won - that's why he's the one who left, and Edgar stayed to rule Figaro.
No hard feelings, though.
Edgar asks Sabin, perhaps the only person he'd ask that question to, if their dad would be proud of the job he's done as king, and Sabin says not to doubt it; they share a drink together, toasting to their parents and Figaro, and we move to the next morning.
Yeah, that's a pretty huge scene to put there in missable content. Now, of course, 'bring Sabin and Edgar to Figaro together' kind of a gimme, if there's any potential dialogue it's gonna be there, but still, what FFVI is doing here is kind of a huge deal and going to foreshadow decades of RPG design to come?
FFV had missable content, but it was only missable by failing to go to the right place. You couldn't miss it by not bringing the right party members, because you couldn't pick and choose your party members. FFIV was mostly the same; there was dialogue that would change depending on whether you talked to someone with X in your party but that was a matter of overall story progression, not party selection. This, here, potentially adds massive amounts of narrative content and character development to the story… while also introducing the possibility of missing it completely not because you didn't visit the right place, but because we didn't pick the right characters. It's both a huge advancement and a huge pitfall.
And this would go on to influence the whole subgenre of RPGs with flexible parties. Like, BioWare games all have unique interactions triggered by having the right people in your party when going to a particular place. I've mentioned I am playing the Owlcat Pathfinder games, and they do the same - though in their case it's more a matter of 'companions have unique reactions to event' than 'companions play entire dedicated cutscenes,' maybe precisely because that's such a big thing to be potentially missing?
No, actually, I think it's because cRPGs are driven by 'a player avatar, and the people revolving around them,' whereas JRPGs tend more towards either an ensemble cast, or a hero who's a defined character with their own personality (even when that defined character is 'blando'). It wouldn't really make sense for a Mass Effect mission to pause so Garrus and Wrex have a cutscene together shooting the shit and reminiscing about the past without Shepard present…
…even though it would greatly improve the games actually 🤔 We need to bring the light of 90s JRPG design to benighted modern Western RPG designer, it's the only way.
Wait, what were we here for again? Oh right, Terra!
Okay, according to the locals of Figaro, the 'girl blazing across the sky like she was shot out of a cannon' went towards the mountains to the west. It sounds like we're going to be doing a 'follow every step on Terra's flight to find the next one' thing.
Okay, a quick trip to South Figaro to check there's nothing new in town (the Imperial troops are barring the way so we can't enter), then we go back to Narshe to ditch one of the twins and make room in the party, and it's time for Castle Figaro to do like a mole rat and bury in the sand then under the ground to cross an entire mountain range and emerge on the other side, which is a thing it can do apparently. This lets us come out in the region of Kohlingen, whose namesake is a charming town to the north with no weird and disturbing secrets whatsoever.
Terra passed over that village, heading south, it looks like, and we are getting conflicting reports; according to one guy, she tore down his house, and said house is indeed a total wreck; however, she also apparently stopped in front of a little girl and she had 'gentle eyes' and did not scare the child, then left. So, huh, wonder what that's about!
Also, it looks like there's an old friend of ours in the pub.
3000 gil to feed his dog. The cheeky fuck.
Well, it's a steep price, but I'm never going to turn down an extra party member, even if odds seem good Shadow'll just be a silent presence as usual and not contribute to the story. So I'm bleeding the last of my funds getting this guy on board, and then visiting some unassuming house a little off from the main body of the town -
What in the everloving Snow White fuck.
OKAY SO LOCKE APPARENTLY JUST HAS SOME COMATOSE GIRL IN A BASEMENT, WHAT THE FUCK.
She is being watched over by the creepiest man alive, an old herbalist dude who can barely go a single sentence without some creepy "Gwee-hee-hee-hee!" laughter, even when talking about the most horrible things. We briefly witness a flashback of Locke looking at the girl and the old man telling him "the love of your life will sleep here just like this forever… and ever… and ever! Hee-hee-hee!"
Seriously, dude sounds like a Disney villain. Except he seems to have induced this state at Locke's urging, because this 'Rachel' seems to be… missing her spirit? Locke muses that if he could 'call her spirit back' using 'the legendary treasure,' he might be able to reawaken her.
So… I guess we know why he became a treasure hunter, huh.
Then as the flashback ends,the party splits, with Locke looking sorrowful - he has yet to find the treasure, after all - and everyone leaves, except Celes, who stays behind a moment, turns around, goes over to the bed, and whispers Locke's name while looking at Rachel. What's that about?
Also, to further the creepy vibes? Several people in town ask Locke if he's visited Rachel's house (which is a different house than the one we just visited), or say that there used to be a girl called Rachel used to live here but has been gone for a while, or say that the cooky old guy at the edge of town has a ghost in his house, which means nobody knows about the secret coma girl in the basement.
The creepiness meter is through the roof.
Thankfully, actually visiting Rachel's old (now-abandoned) house alleviates things somewhat by providing blessed context.
Okay. Stay with me here, because this shit is convoluted.
Rachel was Locke's girlfriend. One day, our Thief/Treasure Hunter led her into the mountain, claiming he'd found an 'amazing treasure' he wanted to show her for her birthday. Unfortunately, while crossing this rickety bridge on the right, Rachel fell through and hit her head hard, suffering from, say it with me now it's only the fourth game in a row to use this plot point and the second character within this one game to have it, AMNESIA.
Unfortunately, Rachel's parents blame Locke for her accident, and Rachel, since she doesn't remember him, only sees that his presence makes her parent upset and wants him to go away, so Locke is kicked out of her house; even other townsfolk tell Locke that Rachel is going to need a 'new start' and would be better off without him (I think it's implied that this is because he's a thief, and everyone would rather she date someone more respectable). So Locke leaves town for a year.
Except when he returns, the Empire had attacked the town, and Rachel was killed in the attack! Except her memory returned with her last moments, and she called out Locke's name. 'I never should have left her side,' he says, 'I failed her.'
Okay. So.
Girlfriend -> Accident -> Amnesia -> Breakup -> Exile -> Girlfriend dies -> Girlfriend remembers Locke in her dying moment -> Locke steals her body??? -> Locke asks alchemist dude to preserve her -> Alchemist dude… preserves her body? Puts her in a medically-induced coma? -> Locke goes out looking for the magic treasure that can bring her soul back into her body.
Although, the first scene suggests Locke put Rachel into her sleeping state before she died. The second scene suggests he found her after she'd already died. Did he dig up her corpse to embalm it so it could be preserved for soul infusion? Is Rachel a fucking mummy?
What a wild subplot to deliver in two flashbacks. Does explain why Locke is so focused on the Returners' cause and nobody suffering the same loss he did but I'm not… sure… about the medical ethics of what he's doing here?
Well, in any case.
That seems to be all there is to be found in Kohlingen, and we've been pointed South, so North we go!
No, look, it makes sense, there is a grey dot North of Kohlingen that I want to explore before heading further South.
We are in the middle of a world-wide campaign of conquest by a fascist Empire and this guy has decided the world is too peaceful, exiled himself to this random spot at the ass-end of the world, and is currently single-handedly trying to build a coliseum.
Incredible. Just. What a guy.
Anyway, there's a chocobo stable nearby, so we can grab a choco and run down the entire length of the continent all the way down to the city of Jidoor, which differs from Kohlingen in both being larger and having fully paved streets, which is a really neat way of immediately conveying how this is a bigger, more urbane town than the rural Kohlingen which only has worn cobblestone paths amid grass.
…how does that work. How do you call something 'westernmost', isn't the planet a globe. Wouldn't you just go west and find more land because you're circling the world?
Jidoor seems wealthier, as well, with fenced homes, and two fancy fixtures in the form of an opera house and an auction house. It seems to have done pretty well for itself considering the world's circumstances-
What the fuck?
Oh my god this is a gated community. They literally exiled all the poor! What the fuck!!! Oh and it gets even better, even after kicking out all the poor, there is still a stark class divide, as the 'middle-class families' live in the southern part of town whereas the 'richer families' live in enormous mansions in the northern part of town - mansions so large the game only has room to fit one in its town map, but with the implication of many more.
I think I hate these people.
Oh my god these people are insufferable. It's like I walked into a bougie part of Paris, the kind where the store clerks look at you judgementally for daring to step foot into their shop. Oh, also, this is the Jidoor Auction House, where all the wealthy bid on stuff which they want to own for no reason than to own it - one of them even mentions being on the lookout for 'one of those legendary treasures that can bring back deported souls,' the very thing Locke wants desperately to save Rachel, because 'none of the other rich folks have one yet…' That is, purely to own it, out of vanity.
Look, I'm not going to wish the Empire on anyone, but all I'm saying is there are people I'll be crying a little less for when it happens is all.
Also, if we do visit the one rich people's mansions that is available, we find two interesting things, one which may be foreshadowing a later plot and one which is just a funny easter egg:
Calling it now, Celes is going to need to disguise herself as Maria the opera singer as part of an important ruse.
Most of this guy's house is made up of his collection of paintings, which include still lifes with flowers, a portrait of a woman, and…
Ultros, you punk.
Why this guy has a portrait of the beast in his home, I do not know, and may prefer never to find out. Let's simply ignore this and move on, as there is nothing else for us to find in Jidoor for the time being, beyond some equipment that I do not have the money to buy. Which means there's only one place left for us to go…
Zozo. The settlement created by all the poors and wretches cast out of Jidoor in their great purge.
And ooh boy, is this going to be A Place.
Well!
Okay so first off: love the aesthetic, so much. We've had old-timey fantasy town with a touch of steam power here and there, we've had Narshe's steampunk aesthetic, we've had glimpses of the Empire's technology, but this is the first time we step into a place and it looks actually modern. Zozo has high-rise buildings, it has this support structure of construction steel with the characteristic reddish color, it has fully paved streets, it has interior lighting in multiple colors…
..and we can see even more of it on the combat backgrounds, because it turns out Zozo is full of random encounters. Which isn't a first for a FF town (that showed up as early as Fynn in FF2), but is notable because this one actually seems… alive? To actually have ongoing business and people living in it?
Look at the tasteful railing on these balconies above the shopping stairs. The signage and the streets… This is truly modern living.
There seem to be shops in Zozo, and potentially a puzzle (several people make references to clocks and time), although we won't be getting to it today, as the first location I headed to turned out to be the main plot location; heading to the main building to the south (and past several bodies lying in the street; it's not clear which ones are passed out drunk and which one are unconscious or dead from having been robbed), we end up being in what appears to be some kind of thieves' hideout.
When we visited Jidoor, the locals spoke disdainfully of Zozo as a town of untrustworthy thieves, which in the context of 'they're the poor people that we exiled' struck me as rank prejudice, but at the same time it's not surprising for a settlement driven to the margins and deprived of resources to resort to whatever it has to do to survive. I'll need to explore Zozo more to figure out exactly what the local population is like but, for now, we have all these guys using the 'thug' sprite, who lie to us when we enquired about the glowing girl, although in an incredibly obvious way ('we didn't see any girl and she's definitely not on the top floor of this building'), and who are moving forward in a file into the building. If we follow them, we climb up the outside stairs along the facade of the high rise, and at several points we actually have to jump from one building to another to make our way:
I just love this aesthetic so much.
Until, eventually, we run into a guard who appears to be a monk, oddly enough:
I don't know if the guy was being sarcastic or just trying to be sneaky before ambushing us but it's very funny to have this guy tell us he doesn't want any trouble before jumping on us in attack mode with this goofy jumping kick sprite.
Dadaluma, you won't be surprised to hear, is a boss. His offense is mainly made up of simple physical attacks, but he has two complications - one, midway through the fight, he tosses several potions at himself then casts protect. Then, he summons two more monks.
I just love the idea of this rogue monk who split from his order to live a life of crime and is a huge coward who lies about not fighting people then just drinks an entire stocking shelf of potion mid-fight when it looks like he's having trouble before running behind his friends. Absolutely top tier boss narrative right there.
And Dadaluma + Two Monks is actually a pretty serious threat on account of the amount of damage per turn they can dish out, but thankfully, we have two characters who can deal party-wide damage without hurting their effectiveness - those being Shadow, thanks to new damage scrolls found in shops since recruiting him, and Edgar's GOOFY-ASS CONTRAPTIONS, SERIOUSLY WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT THING:
And with this flame scroll, the battle is settled, the monk is out of the way, and we can climb to the top of the tower and find Terra - who has been laid down in a bed by who ever owns this place, and is growling in her sleep like a wounded animal.
The group is at a loss for words, only calling her name, unsure what to do - when another voice is heard: She's frightened, it says, and then he appears:
It's remarkable to me the anger that is conveyed in Terra's transformed sprites.
Ramuh.
An esper, who looks just like a human, and has been watching over Terra in the throes of… whatever is happening to her right now.
Terra isn't herself at this moment, she is almost feral - as Ramuh introduces himself and asks if the others are her friends (and, interestingly, seems surprised to learn her name is Terra, indicating he doesn't know her or at least not by that name), she jumps out of bed, running across the room and hitting the walls in her blind chase, knocking herself out.
As Ramuh explains, and as we figured out by now, Terra used a power she didn't know she had, and it overwhelmed her. Now her body won't listen to her mind - which suggests she is, too some extent, still conscious and aware, but unable to control herself. That's… Sad.
When Ramuh reveals himself as an esper, everyone is shocked and finally delivers some on-the-spot exposition of stuff they already knew about but never told the player: that espers live in another world, like the Summons from FFIV. Ramuh explains that this is true, but that nothing prevents them from visiting the human world - and then delivers some exposition of his own, and strap in, because this is the real meat of the issue here.
Espers, Ramuh explain, can take any variety of forms; he took a human form so he could live among humans, as one of them, without anyone discovering the truth. This is because humans and espers 'are incompatible creatures,' according to him.
…
Okay, quick note:
Quick question: who's talking here?
One answer is that it's Celes; she is the one who moved, her head moving to look directly at Ramuh before this question appeared.
Another answer is that we don't know: there are no dialogue indicators. And the thing is, there are no speech indicators for the whole conversation.
It would be perhaps difficult to arrange the dialogue of this scene to account for everyone who could or could not be here. To make sure that whoever says 'I've heard that long ago humans and espers lived side by side' is someone who could have plausibly heard this (so like, not Gau). The game's solution appears to be just… Ditching markers of speech entirely and letting it be ambiguous who is saying what. Sometimes, though, the game is moving sprites in such a way that it strongly suggests it's a specific character talking, but I think it's doing this based on formation order; so for instance sometimes it looks like Shadow is talking, even though he is otherwise completely silent in all dialogue scenes.
It's… an interesting experiment in bypassing the inherent limitations of the game, although it's not very elegant - but it's subtle, and if you just roll with it, you'll barely notice.
Anyway, secret world history time.
Ramuh confirms what others believed to be only a fairy tale: Espers and humans used to live together in harmony - until the War of the Magi.
'Espers fought humans who had been infused with magical powers extracted from other espers. After that meaningless war had ended, the espers fashioned a new realm to which they exiled themselves. They feared that if they remained, it would only be a matter of time before their powers were targeted again.'
So there it is, the Original Sin. Magic once dwelled within this world, but it is gone because of the hubris of humans. They sought to forcibly take the power of espers for themselves, and fought - either humanity against espers, or esper-exploiting humans against each other - until it devastated the world, and the espers retreated within a dimension of their own making. Magic was gone, because humans had chased it away.
…
I'll have to think about this some.
So, if espers were the source of magic, then it must follow that they are also the source of their resurgence, and indeed: twenty years ago, humans found the entrance to the esper realm. Led by Emperor Gestahl, they began hunting the espers for their powers.
That is a really cool slide right there.
Unfortunately, they did not bar the way to their realm in time to save all espers. Two groups were left behind: One are those whom the Empire successfully captured, and which are now being held in the Empire's Magitek Research Facility, being drained of their powers to fuel its Magitek engine of conquest. The other is Ramuh and a few others, who narrowly escaped the Empire and went to ground, keeping a low profile to avoid capture - hence Ramuh's human guise.
Which explains why the Empire is so intent on capturing Narshe's icebound esper: with the way to the esper realm barred, espers within this world are a limited resource. They may eventually run out of esper 'fuel,' exhausting their captives, and then their Magitek will be useless. To ensure the Empire's ever-expanding conquest, they must continue to look for and find espers within this realm. As for Terra…
Celes is the one who lifts Terra after she falls unconscious, and who carries her to bed. It's a touching moment, and I'm wondering if it's keyed to specific characters or to formation order (Celes is the 'leader' of the group, being in the topmost row).
Ramuh called to Terra so he could keep her safe after her power ran wild. The group then asks the obvious question: Is Terra an esper? Frustratingly, Ramuh answers 'No, she's a bit different from us,' but does not tell us what she is - he probably doesn't even know.
We've eliminated the most obvious answer, which leaves only further questions. Terra is something esper-like. A hybrid? An artificial esper?
The group remarks that Terra still looks like she's in pain, and Ramuh explains that her pain is caused by her fear of what she is; only by understanding her true nature will that fear and doubt fade. Unfortunately, Ramuh himself does not have the answer. But he knows some who might - the other espers, trapped in the Magitek Research Facility.
Hmmm.
On the one hand, Ramuh has the affect of a wise man, and is presenting genuinely useful information, and based on stuff he does a couple minutes later I don't think he's dishonest in any way. He's trying to help Terra and the world as a whole.
On the other hand, it probably doesn't take much effort for him to come to the conclusion that the other espers might know something he doesn't - it makes sense on some level, they have been in the Empire's captivity and Terra comes from the Empire in some way - because that means the next step for the protagonists is to go and rescue his kindred, which is what Ramuh really wants most of all. It's easy for him to present this right away as the most obvious solution even if it's kind of a shaky premise, because if the espers could help Terra it would really tie everything up nicely.
Which is a big deal to Ramuh because, as he soon reveals, the old man is wracked with guilt.
"I escaped alone, abandoning my friends and hiding here like a coward," he says. "But I fear I can remain here no longer."
For twenty years, Ramuh hid instead of working to save the other espers, and now he seeks to atone the only way he knows how. Gestahl, he explains, is mistaken in his methods - he only knows how to drain an esper's power by force, but the only way to unlock an esper's full potential is when they become magicite, at which point their full power can be transferred to another, such as a human. Magicite is an esper's power rendered into its purest form, and it is also what becomes of them when they die.
Before anyone has time to fully internalize the implications of what he's suggesting, Ramuh calls forth three magicites, the remains of his companions who fled the Empire and fell, and announces his intent to turn himself into magicite willingly to aid the group in breaking out the captive espers:
The power of the blast knocks everyone back, and by the time they gather their senses, Ramuh is gone, replaced by a stone holding his power and floating in the middle of the room. Celes (and here, the dialogue specifically calls her out as Celes) looks down and asks why, why he would do this?
And I think the answer is threefold. One is that Ramuh has been laboring under the guilt of failing to save his friends, fleeing, and hiding for twenty years 'like a coward,' and this is his way of atoning. Another is that he wants the Returners to have the power to stop the Empire and save the espers, and he was willing to sacrifice himself for that. But also…
I think this is subconscious, and I don't want to say it's deliberately manipulative. But by sacrificing himself, here on the spot, before the protagonists have time to fully grasp what he's saying and what he intends to do, Ramuh is binding them. If they harbored doubt, if they were afraid to stand up to the Empire in such a way, the dramatic weight of his sacrifice casts such doubts and fears in a stark shadow. Would they make his sacrifice be for nothing? They can't, they're heroes. They have to honor his sacrifice, take up the Magicite, and use it for good.
There is an echo of Ramuh within the Magicite, a voice that speaks when Celes asks again why he would do this:
"If our power is used for destruction, the skies will darken and life will fade from the earth."
The threat of a Second War of the Magi is too much for the world to bear, and we must stop the Empire at any cost.
And thus, we receive four Magicites, each one tied to a summon - Ramuh is known to us, but all three others are new to Final Fantasy, at least as summons (some have been present as random monsters): Cait Sith, Kirin, and Siren.
The group tells Terra to wait, they will be back for her, and then heads out.
What plays out next makes absolutely no narrative sense and is handwaved in dialogue, because it's a pure contrivance: Gau, Sabin and Cyan are all waiting at the entrance to the room. They apparently gave up their post at Narshe that they explicitly stayed behind to protect and just followed the party anyway, or else teleported or something. It doesn't matter, it's a pure excuse to have all characters in the same place so they can have marked dialogue between individual characters.
There's this pretty neat scene of dialogue unfolding in pairs as the characters make their way down the stairs and to the exit of the town - Sabin asks Celes if the stuff about the nature of Magitek is true but she confesses that she was asleep when she was infused with magic, and only heard rumors, though the rumors do whisper that this is indeed the case.
At the border of Zozo, Celes announces that she will be part of the group that goes to the Empire, as she knows it inside and out; Locke, unsurprisingly, insists on going with her (she asks why and his answer, which is likely true but may hide that he just feels obligated to stick with Celes and protect her regardless, is that he's heard the 'legendary treasure' is inside the Empire). Shadow announces that he can't stay any longer and leaves - which gives us the structure of our next group: Celes and Locke are mandatory, and we have two free picks out of Edgar, Sabin, Cyan and Gau.
I'm just putting that picture here because I really dig that silent shot of the group all together, with Gau looking sad in the rafters. Poor kid; this whole story is a bit beyond him, he's only there because he's friends with some of these people.
There's talk about the logistics of how they're going to get past the Empire's borders but whatever, I'm going to stop here for the narrative because I haven't settled on my party lineup yet, and also I want to get to the biggest thing in this play sequence before I close this update:
The espers.
We have them.
…some of them, anyway.
Each esper can be equipped to a character. Once equipped, the esper has three effects: it can be summoned (so any character can Summon, this is no longer restricted to a specific Summoner character or Job); it grants access to a list of spells which are learned over time; and it grants stat boosts upon leveling.
So that's why we don't get stats upon level up normally. Because this is the 'real' leveling system.
…
When people warned me that grinding too much in the early game was not desirable, the comparison that came to mind immediately was KotOR, and there are similarities and differences. For those unfamiliar, in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, you start with a mundane character waking up on a ship in the middle of a Sith attack. You're a Soldier, a Scout, or a Scoundrel, good with a blaster or a melee weapon and with appropriate special abilities… Except you don't care about any of that because any levels you gain as one of those classes is effectively 'wasted,' because a couple hours later you unlock leveling up as a Jedi, which is objectively superior in every way because it has Fucking Magic (Force powers). So you want to avoid gaining XP as much as possible in the early game so you can maximize how many Jedi levels you get (since there is a level cap of 20; if you have 5 Scoundrel levels, you will never have more than 15 Jedi levels).
This isn't quite the same, because it's not like the espers bring with us level-gated capabilities we might never have otherwise. It's just that leveling up a character with an esper attached makes them better. Here's Ramuh:
As we fight with Ramuh equipped, we have a chance to learn Thunder, Thundara, and Poison. But also, every time the character with Ramuh equipped levels up, they gain +1 Stamina, which will permanently increase that stat and make the character tankier than they otherwise would be.
I started the game with Terra at lv 3. Right now the party members are around lv 11. If I'd somehow managed to avoid gaining a single level, that would be potentially +8 Stamina points on one character. That's… significant? But not as bad as if I were several levels higher.
And to complicate things, only three of the four Espers we have grant stat increases on level up.
Ramuh grants +1 Stamina, and teaches Thunder, Thundara and Poison.
Cait Sith grants +1 Magic, and teaches Confuse, Imp and Float.
Siren grants +10% HP, Sleep, Silence, Slow and Fire.
Kirin doesn't grant any stat boosts, but teaches Cure, Cura, Regen, Poisona and Life.
It's weird, because the espers with the most desirable stat boosts have the least desirable magics. Kirin could turn any of my party members into a White Mage, but also doesn't grant any magic boost. Should I equip Celes with Kirin to boost her known repertoire then, or with Cait Sith to increase her Magic stat? Or should I simply wait until I have done the Magitek Research Facility and presumably unlocked more espers to equip and choose from?
Man, the incentives here are weird. But this is also really interesting because it's the first time in the franchise Summons have been integrated so deeply into the plot and mechanics - even FFIV, which this game in many ways feels like a growth and expansion of, and which did have Summons involved in its plot, had them as a side-show mostly relevant to Rydia and to Cecil's early plot actions. Summons have been chatty before, but they've never shown… vulnerability the way Ramuh has.
Hmmm.
There's a lot to be chewing on here. Mostly good, but some stuff I'm ambivalent on in terms of mechanics and themes.
For now… Quickly throwing a party together. Say…
Celes (Cait Sith, for Magic gain)
Locke (Kirin, so he can be a backup utility caster)
Sabin (Ramuh, so he can tank better)
Edgar (Siren, same deal)
Maybe?
It's really interesting how you can kinda see the FFVIII system just sorta nascent in between the lines of this.
Well! That was a lot. Between the Sabin & Edgar Family Hour, Locke's... interesting... backstory, and finally meeting an esper and getting some real lore about what's going, I think we've made a lot of progress. See you next time!
Don't forget to get the chainsaw before you leave Zozo! You need to solve the clock puzzle to get it - everyone in town is a liar, so you have to narrow it down by working out what they don't say. Of course, if you don't want to bother with that...
Don't forget to get the chainsaw before you leave Zozo! You need to solve the clock puzzle to get it - everyone in town is a liar, so you have to narrow it down by working out what they don't say. Of course, if you don't want to bother with that...
I'm pretty sure we're to understand he never thought much about the ethics for a myriad of reasons. Which is mostly the point. He's been an emotional wreck all this time, only thinking about finding a cure and fuck with the Empire, with trying to protect other girls as a trauma reaction.
…how does that work. How do you call something 'westernmost', isn't the planet a globe. Wouldn't you just go west and find more land because you're circling the world?
Correction. Not a chance. Each battle will give you points like the FFV ABPs. Those points are multiplied by the acquisition rate which varies by each esper.
Say, Lightning. Ramuh has a rate of x10. Let's imagine an esper Barracuda who teaches Lighning too but at x5. If you gained 1 point per battle, you'd need 10 battles with Ramuh to learn Lightning, and 20 with Barracuda. And the points you've gained are per spell, not esper, so you can swap to a different esper with a better rate without loosing your progress learning that spell.
Some people start with the stat raising here, but other keep waiting until later because of reasons, like some espers giving far better stat raises. IIRC battles in the Veltd give now spell points, so you might be able to go there now, learn all the shit you need, and reduce the difficulty of juggling spell learning and stat raising at the same time. But it's all a tad complicated and more convenient when playing with an emulator and fast forward options, so don't feel forced to do none of that. You're probably going to level up some in the mean time anyway, so just equip espers as they come as you judge convenient and you should be good for the most part.
