To be fair, Phantasy Star's Numans are basically genetically engineered constructs that basically are either born adults from a cloning tank or have really fast aging when they're created (not born, mind you).
Though I agree Celes is in no way 18. I can maybe believe her being a general at 25, since she may have been entered into the military young and then had to work her way up the ranks, probably helped by her competence and her magical abilities (Emperor Gestahl seems to have a very social Darwinist view, surrounding himself with very strong people in both the personal and influence sense).
I think people are getting too caught up in the pseudo-modernity of FFVI; Celes isn't a general because she's good at it, she's a general because the Emperor said so. I seriously doubt she (or Kefka) did any 'rising through the ranks'. They were appointed directly, and probably directly as generals. They're the Empires fancy schmancy superweapons, who they've sunk vast amounts of money and effort into; they're going to show them off.
Think of it more as a pre-modern army, where the leaders are the leaders through inheritance rather than through talent/time served/etc. Alexander the Great wasn't supreme commander of the best European army of the time at 21 because he earned it, after all. None of the other generals you see will have been generals because of skill or whatever either.
And, like Alexander the Great, the Empire's armies are probably well-trained - and well-equipped, which gives them a massive advantage as we've already seen - enough that having people who don't know what they're doing in charge likely doesn't matter all that much. As this is a pre-modern situation with communications limited to birds, battles involve the armies lining up and then just... hoping the plan you came up with last night beats the plan the other side came up with last night. There's no changing your plans or mid-battle repositioning or anything, the most you can do is commit your reserves at the right place/right time.
There's an interesting potential version that makes it a little better, but it's also questionably canon.
In one of the earlier FFVI ports (I think for the Playstation?), there were added FMV cutscenes for the ending, which looked back on notable events during the story. The Figaro coin toss was one of the scenes, and the coin was indeed double-headed.
Yes, Playstation. There is one in the opening too. And honestly, I find both of them great even if I am disappointed by the facts that not all the characters appear in it. I think they have done good job when showing point to iconic scenes of the game.
I will probably post the opening when I will be sure that Omicron is safe of spoil, which should be happened soon.
To be fair, Phantasy Star's Numans are basically genetically engineered constructs that basically are either born adults from a cloning tank or have really fast aging when they're created (not born, mind you).
Though I agree Celes is in no way 18. I can maybe believe her being a general at 25, since she may have been entered into the military young and then had to work her way up the ranks, probably helped by her competence and her magical abilities (Emperor Gestahl seems to have a very social Darwinist view, surrounding himself with very strong people in both the personal and influence sense).
Making the the super weapon you've trained since childhood "work their way up" when magic is already a sign of competency seems weird. This is the pseudo- fascist return to magic empire using one of their generals as Cannon fodder instead of a symbol of the empires rightness seems weird. Especially since Celes runic abilities make her the perfect show of the emperors power. Not only is she one of the rare few that can sling out magic, if she somehow gets betrayed her Runic abilities make any magitech useless against her which leaves little defense against magic which is OP in lore. Putting this perfect propaganda piece at the same station as normal soldiers after all that work is counterintuitive.
I stop paying attention for a while and Omi's already at the Opera. LOL.
I never paid attention to how espers did leveling, I grinded for gil to get goodies and TBH I think omi's got less levels than I given how often he's been troubled with the fights compared to what (little) I remember.
Using 3-2-2 for the Narshe scene is a viable tactic, but I never did it. For me it's typically Cyan and Gau for one party, Edgar by himself because his tools let him wreck enemy parties, while the Magic Girl duo, Sabin, and Locke plunge through the lines to beat Kefka's face in. Though I think a few times I made Cyan part of the face-wrecker party and had Locke with Gau.
As for Zozo, it makes sense they're basically xenophobic because of how they were treated by Jidoor. But it's a good place for Ramuh to hide if he can scare or intimidate them into leaving him alone.
And it seems I may need to get the pixel remaster at some point if it's got so many nice overhauls....
I stop paying attention for a while and Omi's already at the Opera. LOL.
I never paid attention to how espers did leveling, I grinded for gil to get goodies and TBH I think omi's got less levels than I given how often he's been troubled with the fights compared to what (little) I remember.
Using 3-2-2 for the Narshe scene is a viable tactic, but I never did it. For me it's typically Cyan and Gau for one party, Edgar by himself because his tools let him wreck enemy parties, while the Magic Girl duo, Sabin, and Locke plunge through the lines to beat Kefka's face in. Though I think a few times I made Cyan part of the face-wrecker party and had Locke with Gau.
As for Zozo, it makes sense they're basically xenophobic because of how they were treated by Jidoor. But it's a good place for Ramuh to hide if he can scare or intimidate them into leaving him alone.
And it seems I may need to get the pixel remaster at some point if it's got so many nice overhauls....
Notably I don't think I put this in any update but when I redid the whole Narshe Raid sequence to get some missed dialogue and items it turned out you don't have to actually engage with the battle on its own terms. You can literally just dodge every soldier encounter and do a deep pull on Kefka at the end, ending the whole sequence in a single fight (or two if you do fight the Hell's Rider). No extra fights, no xp gained, no time wasted, blamo.
My last group had Edgar and Terra in one team, Sabin and Gau in another and finally Celes, Locke and Cyan in the boss fighting team.
Terra and Celes unfortunately don't have the best synergy as Runic tends to interfere with Terra's spell casting. Locke was there for stealing and Cyan actually had a Gauntlet on so his dps with Flurry was actually pretty damn good.
Gau ended up just doing nothing as Sabin wrecked entire encounters by himself. Terra was underleveled and couldn't contribute much other then heals but Edgar's tools were OP.
A brief note before I begin, when I'm talking about instrumentation I'm frequently going to neglect mentioning the percussion. This isn't a slight against them, it's just that percussion is one of the most unappreciated jobs in an ensemble. Nobody cares about you unless you're fucking up and then suddenly everyone REALLY cares. Good percussion work means that by and large you're chugging along in the background providing a rhythmic framework for the rest of the musicians to build upon.
So, there are things you like, and then there are things that dictate what you like about everything else. For me, apparently the SNES days were a fuckin' golden age for badass timpani parts, because I grew up on the Illusion of Gaia soundtrack (Clash of Light and Shadow just as one example, but the game is full of good stuff), as well as tracks on the FFVI OST that we haven't gotten to yet in this thread. Shit probably more that I'm not thinking of offhand.
But, uh, anyway you're right in most classical-style ensembles, which this section is obviously trying to emulate, percussion is kind of relegated to the back seat.
Listen to the bass dig in with their bow into those quarter notes. Hot damn. When the pros bring their A game they can turn even the dumbest bass lines into something that is really engaging to listen to.
I think they're actually doing a similar thing to the section with woodwinds and triangles you talked about earlier, but here I think it's either the timpani or concert bass drum are giving a bit of emphasis to the string downbeats. I'd say more likely timpani because I'm pretty sure I'm hearing a note, but something is resonating past the stacatto string notes. As a neat bit of layering flair, the snare drums stay on after the big ensemble section as well so that the energy doesn't totally return to what it was before.
The original was already quite excellent despite the limitations of the midi samples, being about as close to a true aria orchestration as one can get with 16bit hardware.
I love FFVI, but even as a kid the SNES midi voices made me kind of cringe. I never muted the opera, but there's one other part of the soundtrack that leans heavily on the midi voice sample and honestly I did mute that one a few times.
Celes is, remember, not a classically trained vocalist. Which means that even if they sing the part there's going to be a couple things missing, specifically, 1) vibrato, 2) diction technique, and 3) timbre. Out of all the Celes' I think the English and Japanese vocalists do the best job of really selling the fact that what we're hearing is Celes the (surprisingly talented) amatuer and not Maria the professional.
Yeah, the choice to have the vocalist reflect Celes, the character, definitely inspired some discourse. I agree it was definitely the right pick for the game, but sort of zooming out a moment, I've wondered why the Japanese and English versions stuck so much clearer to that vision than the other dubs. Less close contact with the japanese team? Language barriers? They literally could not find an Italian singer who would not use their opera voice?
Our soundscape to start is string bass on the booms, violin/viola (I want to say viola) on the chucks, and woodwinds on the melody. Yes, woodwinds. I want to say this is flute and clarinet playing in unison here - it's not breathy enough to be straight flute, and there's too much roundness in the sound to be just clarinet. Hard for me to say for sure.
I mean 'not breathy enough' isn't any kind of marker on whether it's a solo flute or not. Removing the breathiness from your sound is one of the hallmarks of great flute tone (flute was actually my first instrument before I moved to percussion. Filling in vacancies in high school ensembles is fun. ), but especially on the high end I am hearing something reedy there, but I think it might be an oboe instead of a clarinet? You're right that it's hard to place. Which, honestly, is a pretty high complement to their blend.
Maybe for Ralse it's just that the vowel shape for "duel" doesn't let you get a lot of power? As an example, compare what the English guys are doing with the Japanese language - the performances in the latter are unquestionably, crushingly better.
Man, I dunno, I can hear a bit of difference (most of what I'm hearing is in, like, Draco going to the end of his vowel sounds too quickly I think) but to call it crushingly better seems like hyperbole.
We are then treated to woodwinds taking over with a moving eightnote line that serves as a transition to a really tense and beautiful moment in the strings, with a rising half note quarter quarter passage. Wait, three notes rising before the sequence repeats…it's the three note motif again! Again, inverted and with a shift in the rhythm but it's there, I swear.
Heh, you sound like my inner monologue during the Grand Finale because I swear to god the part herefeels like it's quoting a leitmotif, but I can't pick which one it would be.
Hmm, I wonder if that informs on their decision to cast a tenor as Draco? Maybe out of the people they had audition they guy they picked could do low notes better than the baritones they heard could do the high range?
Simple, effective. All the while the entire orchestra is doing forte pianos with a crescendo every two bars to create a dynamic tension-release pattern that is constantly building the intensity of the music.
This is the most pedantic nit I've picked in a while, but did you mean subito-pianos, not forte-pianos? There's no 'sting' and then drop-off, just suddenly softer.
So, as I did research listening to this track, it turns out that while the end of the turnaround might be the end of the cue as we experience it in the game, that's not the end of the track. That's right, there's more and let me just start off by saying I am a HUGE fan of what's going on here. This turnaround theme modulates and gets developed, building tension as we race to the end. A flurry of reintroduced motifs from the rest of the cue, particularly the eighth note run sequence, is what drives us to the final, conclusive, cadence. LOL, nice stinger with the low strings. What a way to go out.
Seriously, give it a listen - it's wild. I understand why we don't get to experience that ingame, it would probably be too difficult/timeconsuming to introduce a context-sensitive element into the game particularly where the player still has control and could thus theoretically stall out the end of the cue. Still though, I was not expecting that, wouldn't even know it existed if I wasn't doing a deep dive into the score like this. What a delightful little surprise.
Oh, but there is! You found the one for the Wedding Waltz, but every part of the opera has an ending in the OST versions of the tracks. Well, except the aria because we already hear that whole thing in-game.
Setzer's vessel has reached the Southern continent, and landed a distance away from its dark, towering capital, the city of Vector.
This charming town near which the airship parked is Albrook, and it's seen better days. Magitek troops running around the place as if they owned it, artillery holes in the walls, the port has been shut off to civilian access… The Empire seized this town by force and seemed relatively unconcerned in rebuilding it. Notable features in the town include a painter who says Emperor Gestahl personally commissioned a painting from him, but who isn't sure what he should paint, and a scholar who drops -
Well, it's a quick dialogue mention, but it has my eyebrows shoot up. He mentions two weapons which were used during the War of the Magi known as the Ultima Weapon. One was a sword formed from the user's own strength, the other a monster born from destruction.
Turning FF2's Ultima from a legendary spell into a weapon fits the militaristic, industrial vibe FFVI is going for with its aesthetic and story. But also, the name 'Ultima Weapon' is definitely striking to me as an FFXIV player, as a monster/machine by that name forms a prominent part of the plot of the base game. Intriguing!
There is no pretense of bringing imperial 'efficiency' or 'prosperity' to conquered people here, as there might in a different story, the soldiers holding the town are openly demanding bribes to allow any business to be conducted at all, and the local pub has turned into an 'imperial clubhouse' that is there only to cater to their entertainment. The overall impression is one of oppressive occupation and squeezing blood from the population.
There's no immediately obvious sidequest or anything in this town; mechanically it's mostly a pit stop for us to replenish resources, upgrade gear and move on, while narratively it mostly serves to show up what life in the Empire's conquered territory is like. Once we've thoroughly checked out the place, we can head out and explore the rest of the continent, which… Let's check out the map, shall we?
We landed there on that red dot, to the south of the western continent. In the center, surrounded by this three-fold mountain formation, is Vector, the Imperial capital. Before we head there, though, we can explore any of the grey locations first. And we should! It's our opportunity to take a survey of what the Empire is like to live in, after all!
East, next to that unnatural-looking vertical divide in the continent, is the 'Imperial Observation Outpost,' which people say is guarding something very secret on the other side. We can't get through; bumping into any guard causes a fight with a tough random encounter but, even on victory, we're immediately thrown out.
I estimate a 90% chance this outpost is guarding the way to the esper realm, so let's leave it for now.
To the north is the town of Tzen. It too has suffered considerable damage, it too is controlled by the tight fist of Magitek troops, and it's where we hear more about the Empire's habit of mass-conscripting survivors into its armies after slaughtering much of the population. It's grim. We also learn about the 'Guardian,' an imperial weapon/defense system that is static but overwhelmingly powerful, and which we should flee if encountered.
Maranda, to the West, was once 'the most beautiful town on the continent,' and it too has been bombed ravaged. This is where we see an other aspect of the occupation: the soldiers can do anything they want here, but they are bored as shit. They are reduced to gambling over dog fights as their main source of entertainment as can be seen here - or, elsewhere, in harassing the local women with marriage demands. 'Bored soldiers posted in a remote town with full local powers and no oversight' is, well, let's say it'd be best if we stopped the Empire before thinks really started taking a turn towards the Crimes Against Humanity Zone.
There's one bright spot in all this, though:
That fiancée of that wounded soldier back in Mobliz is here, she's doing fine, and she's happy with her latest gift. We did a good deed here.
All in all, though, a pretty grim picture of life on the southern continent and, if Gestahl is not stopped soon, the entire world.
…
Kefka was right.
I mean, I don't mean he was right in anything he actually did or said, but he was right in his interpretation of the Empire. Whatever General Leo believes, or whatever pre-turncoat Celes believed about the Empire, it's only interested in naked power and ruthless resource extraction. It does not build up, it does not integrate its conquests, it doesn't even have the pretense of doing that, its only concern is ensuring the prosperity and safety of its core population through the subjugation of all other nations. In that lens, wiping out an entire country in an act of genocide is preferable to accepting graceful defeat or victory after a long, hard-won struggle. Gestahl's Empire is a solipsistic endeavor which accepts no challenge, and Kefka is the purest expression of that philosophy.
This is noticeably (not so?) different from FFXIV's Garlean Empire, which is in many ways an obvious heir to the Gestahlian Empire in presentation, aesthetic, and goals - but Garlemald does have the pretense of a mission to bring civilization and prosperity to the world and to be doing what it is for the good of all. It's a lie, they're fascists plain and simple, but it's a well-crafted lie with a wealth of historical examples to draw upon to justify their actions that are good enough that much of their population and military officers believe in the Garlean Burden. The Gestahlian Empire doesn't even have that, it is nakedly pursuing its own power and advancement at the expense of all else.
Good times.
Alright. Now that this is established, let's head for the pièce de résistance, the city of Vector.
Sprawling construction iron scaffolds. Expansive webs of piping. Hostile locals. A dark color palette. A tiered city, whose edges seem to fall into a pit of dark machinery. This is not a happy place, and it's not welcoming. Some of the locals sneer at us, others comment of the folly of the Returners' hopeless rebellion, but perhaps the most striking example of the city's hostility is in its inn. The innkeep, oddly, uses the 'thug' sprite, but offers us to stay for the night for free. Usually, this would be a sign of a missable plot cutscene during the night that the game is hinting at us to take; here, though…
…the innkeep gets up in the middle of the night and steals 1,000 gil from the party. We can't prevent it, and we can't confront him to get it back. Such is the hospitality of Vector to outsiders.
Which isn't to say that the city is without its tempting offers; that couple in the lower right of the screen has the man muse that he thinks he will stay here and join the army, even though his girlfriend protests that it's the same army that destroys their village. They swore to start over in Maranda, but, well, I've seen Maranda - there's not much waiting for them there either. What is it that draws this man? The lure of power and being on the winning side? Perhaps another answer might be found there there:
Okay, so we have this game's Cid. And it looks like we're going back to FFIV (once again, Final Fantasy games often iterate in odds and evens), with Cid working for the Empire and being a crucial part of its technical advantage. But also - here's a child who now has the power to heal, granted to him by the Empire's Magitek. Who wouldn't find that kind of power seductive? The ability to grant the power of life and death to anyone.
Talking to everyone for information isn't without its dangers. Some of the imperial guards will give us normal dialogue lines; others will actually recognize us as Returners and immediately attack, leading to tough battles in the middle of the city, set to this amazing background:
I'd like to take a moment to study it. Here, we can see the awkward fusion of FFVI's 'traditional' architecture style and the Empire's 'industrial' style. In the topleft corner, you can see houses in the white-walled, half-timbered Alsatian style which Pixel Remasters use for many of their houses, along with the same style of pavement and railing as in other towns, contrasted with the massive form of the fortified, steel-armored Imperial Palace looming at the heart of the town and the red imperial banner hanging over the quays; on the left, a cobblestone house is either reinforced by, or absorbed into, the red iron infrastructure that overlays much of the city. In the distant top right, one can see the towers of what are most likely industrial chimneys - the actual manufacturing/research core of the Imperial Machine, the Magitek Research Facility, locating outside of the residential/palatial area but inescapably visible from it. Inciidentally, this exactly mirrors the actual layout of Vector in-game, with the south and west dedicated to the residential area, the center-north leading to the palace, and the northwest exit leading to the Magitek Research Facility. This is legitimately excellent background design.
Beating one of these encounters still results in the group popping up at the entrance of the town and saying 'this was close' and they better keep a low profile.
Maybe the most interesting place in the city, though, is the bar. There, we find a soldier praising General Leo and nearly insulting Kefka before interrupting himself and telling us to forget he said that, a man saying that Albrook, Maranda and Tzen being under imperial control is 'for their own good, really,' a barkeep wondering whether the rumors of extracting 'magic from monsters' at the Magitek Research Facility are true, and this:
That guy, surprisingly, doesn't rat us out, saying "I don't judge!" and asking if we want to hear about something juicy. And it is juicy indeed. First, he tells us all the soldiers at the Facility have been infused with magic and can now use it, but more interestingly, he reveals to us that Kefka was the first experimental Magitek knight. But at the time, Cid's research hadn't perfected the process, and so Kefka received enormous power, but it broke his mind.
…
I don't know how I feel about Kefka having been driven mad by Magitek experimentation. On the one hand, it makes sense given everything we've seen so far about the Empire's cavalier approach to ethics and the pursuit of power. On the other hand, it seems like it weirdly absolves him for his own actions by making him not truly responsible, if he's just 'mad' because of what other people did to him.
…on the other hand, it doesn't absolve the blame, it just displaces it. Gestahl and his Empire still chose to use that madman; they still chose to give him a position of power, and authority to commit untold war crimes. It's not like Golbez being mind-controlled, which removes the blame entirely to put it on a space alien we don't care about. It just shuffles the cards in the Empire's evil. Nor does it make Kefka sympathetic. Dude's still an absolute psycho who must be stopped, not someone who has to be freed from someone else's influence.
Yeah, he really is just the Joker. Complete with the same possibly-maybe-sympathetic origin story (though he was already a fighter for the Empire, and thus hardly an innocent, kinda like Jack Nicholson's Joker was already a mobster) but being, in the here and now, an active, willful force of evil that deserves being punched in the face.
Okay, moving on.
It's actually possible to attempt to enter the Imperial Palace right now. Keyword 'attempt.' This is what awaits us if we do:
Cool robes, btw.
The Guardian is so powerful none of our attacks can put a dent in it. Luckily, as hinted at in Tzen, it is also a static defense system, not a walking mech as its sprite might seem to indicate; therefore, it is completely possible to flee the encounter.
Once that's done, it's time for our actual infiltration. Of course, as the most sensitive place in the Empire, it's heavily guarded, and we can't just waltz in. Luckily, we meet an old man hiding near the entrance to the facility who reveals he's part of the Returners and he's been waiting for us to help us make our entrance by providing a distraction, using the classic gambit of "obnoxious drunk has no sense of boundaries."
While he distracts them, we jump up onto that crate here, then onto the steel beams above, crawl up past the guards, jump down, and enter the facility.
The Magitek Factory is reminiscent of the Fire-Powered Ship in the previous game, a gargantuan place full of machinery and treadmills, but with an even more industrial angle; we can see entire suits of Magitek armor moving along factory chains, massive machinery, a huge amount of verticality across the factory…
It's a huge pain to navigate because we have to move into some of the pipes onto the treadmills, which take us a large distance across the factory in relatively unpredictable directions, and the factory screens are massive. As for opponents, we're fighting soldiers and dogs as usual, but the factory has its own model of Magitek armor and an unexpected FFIII reference:
Here you can see Edgar put on the Jason Voorhees hockey mask, signifying that Chainsaw is using its instant death mode.
Yeah I guess we're fighting the Orphans of Ur today.
Okay, I don't think the Onion Knights are meant to actually be child soldiers that are thrown at us en masse, I think they're just small robots. I sure hope so, because while they have low HP and a weakness to Thunder, one of their favorite moves is self-destruct, blowing themselves up for medium damage to one character, which at 5 knights a screen can hurt pretty bad. They can also use Imp, which is actually cause for me to have to just drop an entire run.
You see, unlike most status effect, Imp carries across death. The character affected loses their special abilities and has significantly reduced attack power, and if they get KOd and you raise them, they're still affected, making them largely worthless for this run. When I realize this and run out of status items, I have little other choice than to teleport out of the facility, go resupply somewhere else, and come back, with the old dude obligingly doing the drunk routine again. Fairly annoying.
Loot found across the Factory includes Flametongue, Icebrand, the Golden Armor and Helm, and the Dragoon Boots, a relic which allows the equipped character to Jump. I'm not sure how much use it'll be given the Jump ability's track record in these games, but we'll see.
Once we get far enough into the factory, a cutscene plays out, featuring the return of everybody's favorite evil jester:
Kefka declares that he will find more espers, drain their power, and then 'revive the Warring Triad,' whatever the hell that's supposed to be. He then grabs Shiva and Ifrit, who are visibly too exhausted to defend themselves, and tosses them down a treadmill into a dark pit.
So I guess that's what they do with espers they've drained of their power - literally throw them away like garbage. It's impressively callous. The treadmill leading down has no visible way up, so it looks like it'll be a one-way trip, but we clearly have to go after the two espers. And when we do, we find them surrounded by the bones of other espers that have been thrown away before.
It's a shockingly effective bit of, I struggle to call it 'horror' because it's not scary, but of visually representing the horrifying cost and evil of the Empire's actions.
Unfortunately, they react to our approach by blindly attacking what is no doubt more humans come to hurt them, knocking us back and initiating battle.
This is a battle in two phases, in which we fight first Ifrit, then Shiva. The first attempt goes very poorly for me - I've been leveling my characters with espers attached so they now all have some degree of magic and somewhat better stats, but teaching Celes Thundara takes forever and so I am still stuck on lv 1 spells which are really starting to show their age by this point (not that it would have helped, they're immune to Lightning), and Locke has Flametongue equipped which means all his attacks are regenerating Ifrit and he has no alternative offensive commands so he's stuck on item duty.
Also, for all that Sabin's Meteor Strike is cool and strong, it seems to have a surprisingly high number of immune enemies - not just flying opponents, which sorta make sense as being immune to a suplex I guess, but a bunch of bosses, including Ifrit and Shiva. They're also Between accidental healing, missed turns, and powerful attacks I'm not quite prepared for, the first go is a wipe. Thankfully, once I try again with a strategy firmly in mind (ie 'turn Locke into a healbot'), it goes much easier and we win with full HP.
Ifrit and Shiva explain that they are Ramuh's siblings, each born with their own elemental power, which is a nice way of representing the elemental triangle as an actual familial relationship. Unfortunately, it's too late for them, they've been drained of their power in 'the capsules' along with countless other espers, many of which now lie as bone at our feet. All of them are running out of time, and so Ifrit and Shiva give us their power by turning into magicite; they don't even seem to hope that we can rescue the others, merely that we can reach them and they too will give us their power to fight the Empire before they run out of time and die.
…
So like, if "Espers are summons," "magicite is how you unlock esper powers," and "magicite is when espers die," then every esper that gives us power is going to die, right? I was expecting this going into the Facility but holding off on talking about it, but that's kind of the grim reality of this gameplay/story integration. There doesn't seem to be a way for us to gain an esper's power without them dying and becoming magicite, so efforts to save them seem… almost futile, at least in the Factory? If we later encounter Bahamut in the same way the games have been using so far, 'you have to beat him up before he joins you as a summon', are we also going to have to effectively murder him?
That's grim.
As for magicite powers, Shiva provides Blizzard/Blizzara/Osmose/Cure, a fairly solid base for a character to have, while Ifrit grants Fire/Fira/Drain and Strength +1, continuing the theme of better magic espers not providing stats.
…this is unfortunately where we run into one of the limitations that I suspect is going to make ability shuffling a real pain in the ass: a character can only have one Magicite equipped. It's Ramuh or Cait Sith. It's Ifrit or Shiva. So at this stage, our characters have six espers, and two of them have to sit in the back seats.
I'm sure it'll be fine but it's a little frustration at first.
Heading deeper into the facility, things are starting to change in one respect.
So far, the game has kept a fairly simple distinction of opponents, which is notably very novel for a Final Fantasy game: Monsters are wildlife, Imperial troops are humans, robots and animals. This is actually pretty remarkable! Both the Empire in FF2 and Baron in FFIV used monsters as an integral part of their army. But here, the Gestahlian Empire only uses soldiers in Magitek, robots, and dogs bred for war… Until now. As we venture away from the Factory, where the Magitek was produced, into the Research Labs, where the espers are being experimented on, the Empire deploys monsters of its own.
Oh also 'Rising Phoenix' is a new move Sabin unlocked at lv 15 which deals massive fire damage to the whole enemy party and outdamages anything my party is capable of throwing at multiple encounters. How is Sabin not the strongest character in this game? I've been leveling up his Stamina but that was stupid, I should have been leveling him up for Magic, he's clearly a better fit for it than Celes or Terra.
Anyway, here's a classic:
Ominous giant vats that might contain entire bodies, now standing suspiciously empty.
This is extremely aesthetic.
We have to climb a bunch of stairs, at the end of which we run into this guy guarding the final level of the research labs:
"Number 024" suggests that he himself is part of a series of experiments - and notably given his appearance, experiments performed on humans. Perhaps an even more radical version of the process which created Kefka and Celes, resulting in a fighter who can't be used as a general but must remain in the facility as its silent guardian? Notably, he has no dialogue lines, and may not be fully self-aware. As a boss, he's a 'Barrier Change' type boss with magical attacks; he has a bunch of unexpected status weakness that can trivialize him like Sleep and Imp, but as usual with these, I am coming at the game without prior knowledge and I don't open a wiki the moment the battle starts, so I can't rely on knowing that and have to beat him with brute strength. It's not too hard, though, he is soon dispatched and we move on to the heart of the facility.
"You wish to help us… But… We haven't long to live."
Oof. A unicorn, a whale… is that Catoblepas? That's definitely Carbuncle there… All floating helpless in the vats, already doomed. As expected, we're too late to save them. Each of these six espers willingly follows the example of Ramuh, and turn themselves to Magicite - shortly before Cid arrives, demanding to know who the hell we are and what we're doing here, before looking around and taking on what just happened to all his research subjects.
But why did they give him such a funny outfit though.
No I'm sorry it's just. This fucking yellow hoodie with the extra-tall headpiece? What is going on. I think this may be meant to evoke a hazmat suit, maybe? I don't fucking know.
In any case, Cid looks at the Magicite and immediately identifies its nature, and that it is 'hundreds of times' greater than the power the Empire has been forcibly extracting; while he does so, the magicites fly to us in a circle, Chaos Emeralds-style, and the message 'Obtained magicite!' plays; then the group unfolds to talk to Cid, as Celes seems to believe she can reach out to him; Cid appears unaware of her betrayal of the Empire, asking if we are her subordinates, but before she can explain, he drops this bomb:
Well!
Well.
This scene is one that has got me doing the 🤔 emoji a bit. If Celes was actually a plant, then you'd expect to actually reveal herself and do an evil laugh when told that she can drop the act, but she doesn't do that, and in fact immediately protests that she's not a spy at all. So it would seem like this entire thing is a cheap ploy by Kefka to sow dissent among the group (and in fact I would really struggle to believe that the way we found Celes by accident in South Figaro would make sense as a setup), but it works exactly as Kefka meant it, with Locke being struck with doubt, Celes weakly arguing her case, and then Kefka has Magitek robots just come in and push everybody's shit in.
Yeah, I think I can buy this working, in that it's all very in-the-moment - Kefka only needs the group to be distracted by sudden suspicion for thirty seconds so he can drop the armors on them, it doesn't require anyone to be too dumb to fall for it, even if it's a bit aggravating. I did for a moment wonder if Kefka was going to reveal he had some kind of Manchurian Candidate style sleeper agent protocol installed in Celes, so that she didn't think herself a spy but could be mind-controlled into betraying the group, since after all mind-control is the first thing we see the Empire doing in the game, with Terra; it looks like it was just good old social engineering, though.
Celes, seeing the group in grave danger and feeling the pain of not being trusted by her friends, decides to take radical action and reverse the roles. "Locke, let me protect you for once… And then… Maybe you'll believe me." She climbs up from the bit of railing she was hanging from after the armor knocked her there, faces Kefka, and I think… Teleports them away?
Kefka plays out his SurprisedPikachu.jpg sprite, and both characters disappear, pulled directly upwards into the air. Not teleportation - gravity reversal? 'We'll both fall into the sky'? Just a giant blast of energy that knocks everyone into the sky Team Rocket-style?
I'm not sure if this is meant to be a suicide move on Celes's part that she'll somehow recover from, or just a temporary measure; it's just not clear exactly what she is intending to do here and what the result is beyond 'Kefka, Celes and the Magitek armor* are no longer present on the scene.' But it succeeds in that, and Locke gets up with a mournful 'Celes…' and a sad expression.
*The etymology corner
I find the use of the term 'Magitek armor' really interesting because it is so modern. If you told me that in a fantasy game I was about to see 'magitek armor,' what I would expect to see is personal armor. That is to say, the same kind of magic power armor which Garlean officers wear in FFXIV - a suit of full plate with mechanical and magical integrated components. But that's not how Final Fantasy VI uses it; no, FFVI universally uses 'Magitek armor' to describe vehicles. Not even 'body' mechs that are piloted by body movements, but effectively walking tanks piloted from a cockpit. Effectively, it's using the term 'armor' in the same sense that modern military lingo uses it to mean armored vehicles. When someone talking about a modern war says 'their armor is getting wrecked' they don't mean that their ballistic vests are underperforming, they mean their tank divisions are getting pummeled. It's just such an interestingly modern phrasing to use.
Back to the plot, unfortunately, we have no time to stand around and assess the situation; as Cid says in a panic, 'that blast reversed the flux in the extraction chambers' (love some technobabble), and we must flee at once on this tiny elevator.
"There's no excuse for it, no matter how much Kefka may have threatened me… Draining the energy of espers just to make people stronger… You've helped me come to a decision. I'm going to talk to the emperor and make him realize how foolish this whole war is!"
So, Cid wasn't a fully willing participant in all this, but he wasn't so unwilling that he sabotaged the process or resisted in risk for his life. And indeed, he still seems to hold to the belief that Emperor Gestahl is a reasonable man with reasonable goals who can be reasoned with, and if that his chief researcher talks to him, he can convince him to put a stop to his conquests.
…
It's interesting that we haven't met Gestahl yet. At this point, the game is fully cognizant of the use and potential of flashbacks and side-scenes, of moving us to a different location to reveal stuff about characters, and so on. So it has to be a deliberate choice that we only saw Gestahl once, in his address to the Imperial army, and never again, not in private or anything, with Kefka serving as the main face of the Empire this whole time. Now, he's even talking as if he were the one making the big strategic decisions, with his plan to 'acquire more espers' and 'revive the Warring Triad' (and what happened to Leo?).
Is Gestahl merely a puppet of his generals, as crazed as Kefka, unaware of his subordinate's actions but fine with the outcomes? I don't think we'll find out that the king was actually a reasonable man misled by his advisors this entire time, but people like Leo and Cid seem insistent on hanging on to the hope that the Emperor is, if not a good man, at least reasonable and with limits, despite the evidence of the Empire's bloody conquest. And I can't say they're wrong, because we simply haven't seen Gestahl enough yet. He's a cipher.
My hopes aren't exactly high, though. But I wonder if we're supposed to think that Kefka is the problem and that Cid is right that talking reason to Gestahl might solve the whole conflict, and I'm just more cynical about it than the game expects me to be because of my own biases regarding historical empires.
As we reach the bottom, Cid reveals something about himself and Celes - he is her surrogate father, or at least sees himself as such. He raised her nearly from birth, but he also forced her to become a Magitek Knight, and now he feels remorse.
Hmmm.
Celes grew up kinda fucked up, didn't she? Like she seems to be really struggling to find her own identity and relationship to others. She's clearly younger than 'general of the Empire' suggests, even if 18 is still bullshit and I simply don't buy that, and she's emotionally stunted in some ways. It makes sense, in a 'fiction logic' way that, that the very first experiments twenty years ago would have been done on people close to the ones setting them up, perhaps in hope that Cid's surrogate child might grow up powerful with access to magic from her birth, but it didn't do her all that much good, it looks like.
Then, things start rumbling, and Cid declares that Kefka is coming for us and shoves us into that cart over on the right, and then it's time for a pseudo-3D escape sequence!
This is more or less the same technology that gives the original Doom its 3D appearance. We are pursued by a number of monsters optimized for chasing us, weird mutants implanted with wheels in their limbs:
Once again, we can't pause or heal between fights, and we just lost Celes, so this sequence is rough on characters who end up the unlucky target of concentrated enemy attacks, such as Locke. Soon enough, the boss shows up:
'Number 128' directly parallels 'Number 024' in its naming scheme, strongly suggesting we're looking at the same kind of human experiments out of the same process or batch. This one has a mechanic where it has two arms that just regenerate when they are killed, so we want to focus on the central body for maximum effectiveness. Unfortunately, Locke's attacks are weak, and Sabin's attacks are random; the only way to guarantee that Sabin hits the central body (other than Attack, which is too weak to care about) is Rising Phoenix, which hits everything, and destroying both blades triggers the boss's Gale Cut move, punishing us with severe Wind damage. Still, with Locke as healbot to make up for the backlash, Sabin's Rising Phoenix and Edgar's Chainsaw targeting the main body, we eventually manage to tear through Number 128's considerable HP, whereupon our cart hits the end of the road and we are dumped back into the city.
As a sequence, 'cart chase sequence against specifically designed road-monsters riding at very high speed' is really cool conceptually. I was slightly confused by it because it felt like it was meant to one of those 'pick your direction at random' sequences that we've had twice already, but apparently it isn't, it is purely scripted with a set number of encounters.
Everyone in town seems to have gone indoors; the streets are empty and now full of random encounters, although we only go a few meters before Setzer drops in and tells us we were taking too long, so he got worried and came in with his airship - and asks where's Celes.
Am I supposed to think she's dead? I can never tell with these games.
Kefka, meanwhile, is mad as hell that we got away, and has decided to deploy heavy instrumental equipment to stop us.
Surprise! Setzer is actually in our party! And he has a specialty called 'Slots' which, as you can see, is literally a slot machine mechanic.
I can't tell how random it actually is. Sometimes I get all three slots different, in which case the ability that pops up is 'Mysidian Rabbit,' which casts a very minor heal on the party. Other times, it gets me all three slots identical, in which case the result differs between symbols; the diamonds, for instance, cast Prismatic Flash, a potent attack on every enemy, while the chocobos cast Chocobo Stampede, which does exactly what it suggests for strong damage to one enemy. I haven't gotten 'two of a kind,' so I suspect the results may be weighted in some way? I don't know. Depending on how random it actually is, Setzer might be my least favorite party member mechanically on top of making a terrible first impression narratively.
Beyond that, the Cranes are a tough fight. Each one is themed to lightning and fire respectively, and using the wrong element on them will cause them to reply with extremely powerful party-wide attack, they charge up over time with a 'THERMAL ENERGY LEVEL' or 'ELECTRIFICATION LEVEL' which end in brutal Thundaga/Firaga attack, and they can heal each other. I still have Locke equipped with that dumb Flametongue, which was a terrible mistake because it keeps propping the fire reaction. Sabin's Blitzes still have the same targeting issue, and for some reason being 'surrounded' seems to prevent me from using a spell on my whole party so Locke can't heal everyone at once with Cure/Cura.
I wipe to these assholes three times before, fitting to the first fight involving Setzer, I win by chance by winning at the slot machine and unleashing multiple Prismatic Flashes in the same fight.
Brutal.
And now free of the cranes, the airship can fly away, and we head back to Zozo to finally check on Terra. Setzer asks who the hell is Terra, and Locke says he'll explain everything on the way, thereby entering Setzer as a full party member.
Damn, that was a gauntlet. I don't think FF has ever thrown that many bosses in a single, unbroken linear sequence before. It's novel. It's also painful, and my evasive, low-level, low-money playstyle so far really struggled with it.
But hey! We now have like twice as many espers as we did before! Maduin, Bismarck, Carbuncle, Catoblepas… Okay that's too many. That is too much at once.
We'll pick up with Terra back in Zozo next session. Thanks for reading!
I think you missed an interesting encounter in Vector. There's an old woman who asks you to swear fealty to Gestahl, but it seems she's a Returner, or at least some sort of resistance. Refuse to serve the Empire, and she'll force you to fight a couple of low-level Guards - the kind defending Narshe at the start of the game - presumably as some kind of test. Beat them, and she'll heal you for free.
I think you missed an interesting encounter in Vector. There's an old woman who asks you to swear fealty to Gestahl, but it seems she's a Returner, or at least some sort of resistance. Refuse to serve the Empire, and she'll force you to fight a couple of low-level Guards - the kind defending Narshe at the start of the game - presumably as some kind of test. Beat them, and she'll heal you for free.
Oh, yeah, that one fell into the "trying to write down the whole thing in a single sequence and forgetting some of my post-it notes" hole, but I did meet her.
Since you brought the map up, one thing I find weird about it is how it has two straits, both at the eastern triangle-shaped ends of each continent. Makes me remember a YT video which said that you should never have rivers go coast to coast when designing a world map... only for the same guy to later admit that's what straits are in real life
Though the clear candidate for Most WTF RPG World Map AFAIK still has to go to Lunar 2:
I find the use of the term 'Magitek armor' really interesting because it is so modern. If you told me that in a fantasy game I was about to see 'magitek armor,' what I would expect to see is personal armor. That is to say, the same kind of magic power armor which Garlean officers wear in FFXIV - a suit of full plate with mechanical and magical integrated components. But that's not how Final Fantasy VI uses it; no, FFVI universally uses 'Magitek armor' to describe vehicles. Not even 'body' mechs that are piloted by body movements, but effectively walking tanks piloted from a cockpit. Effectively, it's using the term 'armor' in the same sense that modern military lingo uses it to mean armored vehicles. When someone talking about a modern war says 'their armor is getting wrecked' they don't mean that their ballistic vests are underperforming, they mean their tank divisions are getting pummeled. It's just such an interestingly modern phrasing to use.
Myself, I've always figured this magitek armor meant armor like personal armor. Vehicles don't seem super common in the setting, and the ones that do exist seem pretty unlike magitek armor. The magitek armor itself is sorta humanoid, it's got two legs and two arms; and it protects and augments just a single user. So, I figured rather than being thought of as a vehicle purposed towards war, it was thought of as like an evolution of plate armor. But then again I first heard of magitek armor before I knew of armor being used to refer to vehicles so maybe I only intrepreted it like that because that was the best way I could make sense of it.
"There's no excuse for it, no matter how much Kefka may have threatened me… Draining the energy of espers just to make people stronger… You've helped me come to a decision. I'm going to talk to the emperor and make him realize how foolish this whole war is!"
Maybe I've become overly cynical in my age, but - having tromped past any number of the dead and dying espers, and fighting all manner of experimentation subjects - man oh man does this line come off as less "Cid comes to his senses" and more "Cid starts angling for inclusion in Operation Paperclip."
I really want to put a pin in the Kefka-Joker comparison; there's a lot to talk about once the game is over, but suffice to say that the Joker DNA, at least on surface level, covers Kefka from head to toe. General looks, general actions, general personality...
As far as Cid goes, let's just say that I very much agree that he feels like Leo, only on the man of science side rather than the military man side. I did think that the experiment pair of bosses wasn't human experiments, though; if nothing else Number 128 looked to me distinctly inhuman and considering we have seen multiple human looking espers already, I thought they were both espers personally. Don't think that makes the experimentation better or worse, though, especially considering we already know of multiple human experimentation cases prior.
The game does allow you to switch weapons and shields in the middle of a battle, if you find yourself with a suboptimal equip.
Use the item command in battle and press up. You should see your equipped weapon and shield, also a button prompt to change out your weapon. You can do this all in the same turn and still act.
Also you can use the shoulder buttons on a controller to target your whole party with a cure/cura spell when you're surrounded.
I really want to put a pin in the Kefka-Joker comparison; there's a lot to talk about once the game is over, but suffice to say that the Joker DNA, at least on surface level, covers Kefka from head to toe. General looks, general actions, general personality...
Also, just like the Joker, he reminds me of myself: intelligent, nihilistic, and with a wicked sense of humor. Childhood is when you idolize Terra, adulthood is when you realize Kefka makes more sense.
Cid having a hazmat suit makes way more sense; I always just thought he was wearing a really phallic-headed raincoat. Indoors.
You can tell he's Celes' dad by the moustache. That is a stache that can only be worn by fathers and porn stars and aint no way he's a porn star in that outfit.
Maybe I've become overly cynical in my age, but - having tromped past any number of the dead and dying espers, and fighting all manner of experimentation subjects - man oh man does this line come off as less "Cid comes to his senses" and more "Cid starts angling for inclusion in Operation Paperclip."
Yeah, the Espers are clearly sapient and can speak and Cid's been killing them slowly. He claims Kefka threatened him but Cid's been running these labs for years and Kefka is a result of the Empire's experiments. Odds are Cid created Kefka.
The game does allow you to switch weapons and shields in the middle of a battle, if you find yourself with a suboptimal equip.
Use the item command in battle and press up. You should see your equipped weapon and shield, also a button prompt to change out your weapon. You can do this all in the same turn and still act.
Also you can use the shoulder buttons on a controller to target your whole party with a cure/cura spell when you're surrounded.
See, these are the kind of weird mechanical interactions that most players will never figure out on their own that should really be included into some kind of in-game tutorial. Or better yet, just remove the weird 'being surrounded' issue altogether instead of making players remember a specific button for just that situation.
We also learn about the 'Guardian,' an imperial weapon/defense system that is static but overwhelmingly powerful, and which we should flee if encountered.
I mean, I don't mean he was right in anything he actually did or said, but he was right in his interpretation of the Empire. Whatever General Leo believes, or whatever pre-turncoat Celes believed about the Empire, it's only interested in naked power and ruthless resource extraction. It does not build up, it does not integrate its conquests, it doesn't even have the pretense of doing that, its only concern is ensuring the prosperity and safety of its core population through the subjugation of all other nations. In that lens, wiping out an entire country in an act of genocide is preferable to accepting graceful defeat or victory after a long, hard-won struggle. Gestahl's Empire is a solipsistic endeavor which accepts no challenge, and Kefka is the purest expression of that philosophy.
It's certainly a view up close of the "evil empire" trope that we haven't really gotten since FFII, with the occupied cities and direct interactions with both civilians and soldiers. And yeah, absolutely an Empire going for a naked power grab of "we have power world should be ours".
Okay, so we have this game's Cid. And it looks like we're going back to FFIV (once again, Final Fantasy games often iterate in odds and evens), with Cid working for the Empire and being a crucial part of its technical advantage. But also - here's a child who now has the power to heal, granted to him by the Empire's Magitek. Who wouldn't find that kind of power seductive? The ability to grant the power of life and death to anyone.
The Guardian is so powerful none of our attacks can put a dent in it. Luckily, as hinted at in Tzen, it is also a static defense system, not a walking mech as its sprite might seem to indicate; therefore, it is completely possible to flee the encounter.
You see, unlike most status effect, Imp carries across death. The character affected loses their special abilities and has significantly reduced attack power, and if they get KOd and you raise them, they're still affected, making them largely worthless for this run. When I realize this and run out of status items, I have little other choice than to teleport out of the facility, go resupply somewhere else, and come back, with the old dude obligingly doing the drunk routine again. Fairly annoying.
Celes actually learns Imp naturally at level 13, which can also be used to remove the status (even if she's been turned into an imp as well). But yes, it's as annoying of a status as Toad was in previous games
Also, for all that Sabin's Meteor Strike is cool and strong, it seems to have a surprisingly high number of immune enemies - not just flying opponents, which sorta make sense as being immune to a suplex I guess, but a bunch of bosses, including Ifrit and Shiva.
How is Sabin not the strongest character in this game? I've been leveling up his Stamina but that was stupid, I should have been leveling him up for Magic, he's clearly a better fit for it than Celes or Terra.
Sabin and Edgar are absolutely cracked for the first half of the game, entirely because of things like this. It levels off eventually, but resource-free AoE and the like is pretty ridiculous.
And yes, this is one of the reasons it's worth bumping up Sabin's Magic stat.
I do appreciate that it's clearly meant only to sow temporary doubt, personally. Doesn't have some dumb over the top whole party no longer trusts Celes for the next ten hours or anything.
'Number 128' directly parallels 'Number 024' in its naming scheme, strongly suggesting we're looking at the same kind of human experiments out of the same process or batch. This one has a mechanic where it has two arms that just regenerate when they are killed, so we want to focus on the central body for maximum effectiveness. Unfortunately, Locke's attacks are weak, and Sabin's attacks are random; the only way to guarantee that Sabin hits the central body (other than Attack, which is too weak to care about) is Rising Phoenix, which hits everything, and destroying both blades triggers the boss's Gale Cut move, punishing us with severe Wind damage. Still, with Locke as healbot to make up for the backlash, Sabin's Rising Phoenix and Edgar's Chainsaw targeting the main body, we eventually manage to tear through Number 128's considerable HP, whereupon our cart hits the end of the road and we are dumped back into the city.
Oh yeah, this guy has a rare steal for the record: A katana for Cyan that randomly casts Wind Slash, and is part of a meme build for him where you pump up his magic.
I can't tell how random it actually is. Sometimes I get all three slots different, in which case the ability that pops up is 'Mysidian Rabbit,' which casts a very minor heal on the party. Other times, it gets me all three slots identical, in which case the result differs between symbols; the diamonds, for instance, cast Prismatic Flash, a potent attack on every enemy, while the chocobos cast Chocobo Stampede, which does exactly what it suggests for strong damage to one enemy. I haven't gotten 'two of a kind,' so I suspect the results may be weighted in some way? I don't know. Depending on how random it actually is, Setzer might be my least favorite party member mechanically on top of making a terrible first impression narratively.
The comparison between the Gestahlian Empire with the later Garlean Empire got me thinking if there was an evil empire way back in the olden RPG days portrayed as relatively more complex. First thing I thought of was Blackthorn's Britannia back in Ultima V (a fitting series to bring up since the Ultima Weapon was introduced last update*) where their whole thing was taking the whole moral doctrine the player helped establish in the previous game and going as hardline with it as they could.
*And y'know, the Ultima series being the origin of like every JRPG and WRPG ever
I really want to put a pin in the Kefka-Joker comparison; there's a lot to talk about once the game is over, but suffice to say that the Joker DNA, at least on surface level, covers Kefka from head to toe. General looks, general actions, general personality...
To be fair, Phantasy Star's Numans are basically genetically engineered constructs that basically are either born adults from a cloning tank or have really fast aging when they're created (not born, mind you).
I don't want to get into a huge digression about Phantasy Star here 'cause this is a FF thread (although I would encourage people to play PSIV in particular if they're interested in classic 2D JRPGs) but even though that's true, a. it still feels weird and b. disregarding Rika, Chaz's given age is 16 and he doesn't have that explanation .
), but especially on the high end I am hearing something reedy there, but I think it might be an oboe instead of a clarinet? You're right that it's hard to place. Which, honestly, is a pretty high complement to their blend.
