cB557
voOOP
What happened here?
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Theres always
Ragnarok, but even then the items you get from summoning him arent great.
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Summons also are immune to being reflected, something which doesn't apply to regular magic. Still, it's much more effective to just cast regular spells than rely on the summons, so magictite ends up being more useful raising stats and teaching spells than any in-combat use.
No idea, but I fixed it.
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I mean, if you're a philistine who hates cool animations, sure.
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
At first I thought it was just the somewhat better graphics that made me notice the pieces of the Blackjack for the first time on that beach, but then I looked back at an SNES playthrough and saw that no, it was in fact a creation of the PR. That's a really cool touch they put in there.
And yeah, the new overworld theme is excellent. "New World Map" may not be an invention of this game but I think it is, bar none, the best implementation of it so far.
And yeah, the new overworld theme is excellent. "New World Map" may not be an invention of this game but I think it is, bar none, the best implementation of it so far.
Final Fantasy VI, Part 15: The Solitary Island
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
CW: Suicide. Yeah, it's gonna be one of those!
I am genuinely kind of floored, and as a result this update may be a little shorter than usual as I focus on one specific narrative beat.
So.
Celes and Cid are alone on a deserted island at the end of the world.
We can try to explore the island, but there's nothing to find - not even deadly monsters to fight. There's one recurring encounter there, and it's…
A handful of starving rodents.
How do I know they're starving? Well, they only have one HP, and they are inherently tagged with the Sap status. This means that, on their first round of battle, they automatically take one point of damage and die.
What an incredible way to use mechanics to represent the state of the world. They could have put deadly monsters as random encounters, but no - the deserted island is empty of life, even the beasts slowly withering and starving. There are no 'combat' encounters, just you stumbling upon a family of rodents who no longer have the strength to fight and just lay there dying.
And look at the combat background. That dry, cracked earth. That perpetually ochre sky, as if the world were trapped in perpetual dusk. God that's gorgeous.
Anyway, it turns out we can't find fish on the map - we have to leave the cabin area from the South, specifically, in order to reach a beach screen.
There's a lone seagull, who squawks when you interact with it and, to the left, fish, swimming in the sea. All we have to do is approach one and interact with it, and Celes grabs it.
Then we head back to the cabin, and serve it to Cid, who is lying in bed.
Unfortunately, that's not enough. Cid is still sick. All we can do is try and take care of him with what little means we have available, keeping him fed.
There's a curious thing, though - every time Celes enters the cabin, Cid is actually standing; he immediately moves to the bed and says nothing about it when we approach. Initially, I assume that is an odd bug in his animation, but the more it goes on, the more I realize it's meaningful - Cid isn't staying put. When Celes leaves, he leaves his bed, even though he's gravely ill, to do… something. And each time we get back, we catch him moment after hurrying back to bed. But because of the separation between information that's available to Celes and information that's available to the player, she doesn't realize this is happening.
And Cid is getting weaker.
We have to go back to the beach, and fetch more fish, and feed him. But as time goes on, his dialogue deteriorates.
In gameplay terms, all of this takes only a few minutes. But it's very obviously a timelapse of days spent taking care of Cid, Celes fishing and cooking and feeding him, and it just… not doing anything. That feeling of just… Going back and forth between the cabin and the beach, with nothing but the sound of wind and waves, only to watch a relative growing steadily sicker, without being able to do anything about it - just watching them helplessly deteriorate, it's… It's a lot, man.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Then, eventually, he no longer speaks at all.
Celes, stammering, asks Cid if he's okay, tells him he has to eat, but there's no response - Cid is gone.
Then, the musicless soundtrack of waves crashing in is for the first time replaced by something else - Celes's theme, very obviously, very recognizably the tune from the opera, with the very same melody underlying Maria's lines when she calls out to her beloved Draco whom she thinks might be lost forever. It's going to be playing through the entirety of what comes next.
Celes steps back from the bed, staggering, crying. She protests, he'd promised he'd stay with her. She cries, begs him to answer her to tell her it's just a joke, but nothing. She weeps, the game playing a unique animation for it with her 'injured' sprite and a trail of tears, as if she'd been struck a literal, physical blow - the metaphor for grief made physical.
And then… She runs out. She runs out of the tower, still controlled by the game, across a stretch of the overworld, to the North.
Earlier, in one line of dialogue, Cid mentioned there used to be other people on the island - but one by one, overcome by despair, they flung themselves from the cliff to the north. And that's where Celes is going.
That's where we regain control of Celes. At the foot of the cliff. We can move, we can even leave, we can stop there, but… There's nothing else to do. But we still have to choose to go up there.
The great irony of this place is that it's the only one we've found, ever since we woke up, this is the closest to look like the old world. The mountain is more heavily covered in grass than previous areas, and here, the light of the dusky sky is close enough to normal that the sea looks blue, rather than red. This place looks almost alright. Almost beautiful.
There's a bird at the top of the cliff - probably that very same bird who was there on the beach, every time we went there. Who died, just like Cid, because the fish weren't enough. Withering away like the rest of the world. That bird is the interactive prompt here - it's looking at that white bird, that dead symbol of hope, that causes Celes to reflect on the people who were there, before she woke up, who one by one took the jump.
There's no one and nothing left for Celes in this world, and so, like everyone but Cid before, she makes the last decision she feels she can.
…
But it's not over, of course. It can't end like this.
Whether by luck, or perhaps more likely because she's Cid's 'granddaughter' - the Magitek Knight, whose body was suffused with power since her birth - that fall doesn't kill her.
She washes up on the beach, alone, and still alive.
As she slowly wakes up from her unconsciousness, she is greeted by that bird. She asks if it was watching over her, and why it would care to help someone like her - someone who's already given hope.
Then, she notices one thing. That bird was injured - and somebody bandaged its wound. Bandaged it with a familiar bandana.
A different music starts to play then, cutting in from Celes's Theme - one I can't quite recognize even though I'm pretty sure it's been played before in the game, and which is definitely not Locke's theme, but still changes the tenor of the scene to something more like hope. The bird, of course, has no answer - Celes isn't Krile, and doesn't know how to talk to animals. It simply flies away - but now Celes is convinced of it: Locke is still alive. He's out there, beyond that sea. And that means there are more than him. This island can't have been the only place left.
When we return to the cabin, we find something left behind by Cid that Celes hadn't noticed earlier - a letter.
"The road to your freedom awaits.
Love, Granddad."
And now, stairs, which we couldn't access before, can be reached on the other side of the room. We go down, and…
A raft.
That's what Cid was doing every day while Celes was on the beach fishing for him. The reason why we found him standing and hurrying into bed every time we went back.
He was building a raft for her, so that when he died, she could escape. And when he fell the last of his strength leave him, he left her a letter.
But he didn't tell her. Or he died before he had time. And because of that, tragedy almost struck. Because of that, Celes almost died - she was fully overwhelmed by despair, and survived only through a stroke of luck. Why? Was he afraid she'd tell him to stop working out of concern for his health? Did he want it to be a beautiful surprise he could use to celebrate his getting better? Was he afraid of giving her hope if in the end it didn't work out, and so he took it upon himself to do it all so that if the raft didn't work, she'd never face the disappointment of having thought it might?
If there wasn't this trick of the sprite, this bit of motion with Cid sliding into bed whenever we come in, I would be thinking something very different. I would be thinking that maybe the raft was there the entire time - that Cid knew about it, but was, at the end, too afraid to lose the last person he loved to tell her about it. That in a last act of perhaps sympathetic but awful control, he'd kept it to himself until his last moments out of fear that she might leave him to die alone - and that in this selfishness, he almost killed her as well.
And I'd think, perhaps, the impossible coincidence of Cid and Celes washing up on the same desert island out of an entire world might be less a coincidence, and more that raft having already seen use, in one old man carrying his comatose adoptive grandchild away from a world in ruins.
But no. Not here.
It's impossible to escape the conclusion that this, in the end, is what killed him. Not the sickly, dying fish. Not the illness he couldn't shake off. But his insistence on working in secret, every day, to give his granddaughter a way out - to atone for everything he'd done wrong, with the espers, with her upbringing as a weapon of war, to give his life so she'd have a chance at one of her own.
There's a character who commits suicide in this scene, but it's not really Celes.
Celes swears that she will make Cid proud, drags the raft out to sea, and launches herself into the waves.
A raft of logs bound together is not a good skiff. There is no steering, no sails, nothing at all to it - the only thing it is is a life jacket made large, a floatation device to hang onto for the hours or days it takes you to be tossed about by the waves, until you reach whatever destination the current takes you to - and in Celes's case, losing the raft altogether, and washing up on another beach, on another shore.
But this is no deserted island.This is one of the main broken continents of the World of Ruin, and there is life there still.
There, a short distance away, we'll find what remains of Albrook, that port city of the southern continent, once ruled by the Empire.
…
Jesus Fucking Christ.
This is…
It's hard for me to really describe this scene. Nothing in Final Fantasy has been like it (which is something I find myself saying a lot about FFVI).
This is the hardest, most harrowing, most poignant scene I've seen in any Final Fantasy game I can remember and, frankly? If one accounts for the fact that pixel art inherently makes it so much harder to directly blast feelings in your face the way a 3D mocapped character with a professional voice performance can by just hijacking the empathy buttons in your brain, it ranks up there among most games, period. Just… the way it captures the pain, the repetitive hopelessness of caring for a dying loved one and being powerless to help them. And the incessant, incessant sound of wind and waves without any music whatsoever.
And just, that intimate, deeply sad vignette of the last two people at the end of the world (which it might not be, but how would they know? How would they escape?), watching death slowly ebb in, and that peak of despair that you have to actively choose to walk to, using the game's interactivity to make you walk to its inevitable conclusion.
And then, at the end of that, hope. Found at the end of another's life, and found in something so small as Celes finding a bandana and literally tossing herself onto the waves and hoping that somewhere, out there, there's something. Anything.
The inevitable logic of it, the way it all ties together into tragedy, Cid's sickness not getting better because he's spending his strength working on a way for Celes to make it out, having already written off his life in favor of the granddaughter he's only just now found, and with whom he'll never get to have that peaceful life, alone together, but she'll have something better, maybe. Just maybe.
It's, genuinely, heart-wrenching. And it is a scene where I would genuinely think twice about recommending the game knowing that someone has to go through it, because I know it could be way more emotionally taxing to someone else than it might have been even for me.
…
If you are a newcomer to this, like me, making your way through one of gaming's most iconic entries for the first time, I'd like you to take a moment with me here to sit with that. Take it in. Let it pass through you. Take a breath.
…
Okay?
Okay.
Or you could feed Cid the right fish.
Remember Shadow from earlier?
I just want to do a quick detour here. I know I have readers who only follow threadmark updates/read in reader mode rather than read the thread (and more power to them, that's totally fair), so I want to say for the record that it's been brought to my attention that I misread the Shadow situation last update.
You see, when Shadow said "Go one! I'll find my way! Trust me!" I figured it's one of two things - either Shadow will disappear, 'left for dead' again, or else he's actually making a heroic sacrifice and lying to us so we don't wait for him, and he will die by plot.
I was wrong. Shadow's survival here is entirely dependent on player action.
The key here is that when we approach the airship, we are given a choice to jump for it or not. At first, there doesn't seem to be any reason not to jump, but if you do choose to wait, then the second time you approach the ship, the pop-up gets more explicit:
What we have to do here is wait until five seconds before the timer runs out, and then go for it. If we do that…
Shadow gives us a cool one-liner about how he's totally still an assassin who is only pulling this act of last-second escape because he can't just die without getting his pay. Then we jump, he jumps, and he is with us on the ship when it breaks apart and tosses everyone across the world.
And then we're back at the isolated island and yada yada.
So here's the thing about Celes and Cid on the Solitary Island:
Everything that just happened is the Bad End for a minigame you might not even know you're playing.
When I played through that scene the first time, I had absolutely no idea anything was but what it seemed. I played through it, and felt through it, in complete earnestness. This seems logical to me. It seemed tragic, but right. I saw what the game was going for, and I was genuinely impressed with it. And these are my earnest thoughts. I left the island, having absolutely no idea I was leaving any unsolved problem behind.
But the thing is?
Every time you go on that beach, some of the fish move slowly, and some move quickly. I noticed that, but I assumed it was just the game using variation in speed to make the whole scene a little more varied/dynamic. No. If you go into your inventory upon picking the fish, you'll find they have different descriptions. The slow fish are sickly, the fast fish are healthy. And, parallel to that, Cid has a hidden counter which ticks down every second of gameplay time, and the lower that counter, the worse he gets, until he dies - but every fish you bring him adds 'points' to the counter, and if you manage to bring him enough healthy fish fast enough, the counter raises faster than it can lower until it reaches its maximum value, and then:
Cid is cured. He's fine.
And then, he reveals what we otherwise only find out from his letter, opening a secret door and leading us down the stairs to show up 'the little project he's been working on at night' (while we were trying to save him, the absolute fuck), and shows Celes the raft. She turns to him, clearly knowing what this means but reluctant to leave him, and he tells her she has to leave this place:
"You bring that Locke fellow too, now, you hear?" he adds - and Celes nods. A Together, they bring the raft to the beach, and Celes waves to her grandfather before dragging the raft out to sea. A new music plays out, which I wouldn't exactly describe as 'happy' but is definitely more low-key, more resolute than any other theme playing on the island, a tune that is looking forward to the future.
Then she leaves, and, just as before, is tossed about on the waves and washes up near Albrook.
That scene is completely upbeat, ten times shorter than the bad end, and is literally just Celes succeeding in curing Cid, Cid thanking her and telling her she needs to go out looking for her friends now, and she leaves happily full of good hope and resolve.
It is jarring watching that scene after going through Cid's death. It's like I'm looking at a version of the game performed by aliens.
…
I'm a sap at heart. I want happy endings. And, frankly, I like to win. And I like characters to live. So obviously, I'm going to go with this save, not just for the sake of not missing future character beats, but because why would I, when presented with the choice between a Bad End and a Good End, not choose the Good End?
But this is night and day. One of these two scenes is harrowing, poignant, and layered, dealing with the heights of hope and despair and grief, and resolves Cid's character arc in a tragic, if sympathetic and flawed way. And the other has you taking the correct actions to keep that from happening and everyone being okay and happy and going off onto your next adventure, accomplished by zooming across the beach with Sprint Shoes to gather the best fish as fast as humanly possible.
One of these scenes has pathos, and the other has the satisfaction of winning. And I feel like the one where we lose is a much, much stronger piece of video game writing.
But man.
First Shadow, then this? All in a row?
No wonder people spent years sharing rumors about Mewtwo under the truck or, more relevantly, about how a combination of actions would totally allow you to save that major character in FFVII. This is literally what FFVI does. This game has hidden minigames that you might completely miss resolving the fate of characters. I could be going into the next stretch of the game with Shadow and Cid both death having no idea it was ever possible to save them at all.
God.
I'm going to need to sit with that for a bit. Even so this was really quite a short bit of gameplay, we'll end this here for tonight.
Thank you for reading.
I am genuinely kind of floored, and as a result this update may be a little shorter than usual as I focus on one specific narrative beat.
So.
Celes and Cid are alone on a deserted island at the end of the world.
We can try to explore the island, but there's nothing to find - not even deadly monsters to fight. There's one recurring encounter there, and it's…
A handful of starving rodents.
How do I know they're starving? Well, they only have one HP, and they are inherently tagged with the Sap status. This means that, on their first round of battle, they automatically take one point of damage and die.
What an incredible way to use mechanics to represent the state of the world. They could have put deadly monsters as random encounters, but no - the deserted island is empty of life, even the beasts slowly withering and starving. There are no 'combat' encounters, just you stumbling upon a family of rodents who no longer have the strength to fight and just lay there dying.
And look at the combat background. That dry, cracked earth. That perpetually ochre sky, as if the world were trapped in perpetual dusk. God that's gorgeous.
Anyway, it turns out we can't find fish on the map - we have to leave the cabin area from the South, specifically, in order to reach a beach screen.
There's a lone seagull, who squawks when you interact with it and, to the left, fish, swimming in the sea. All we have to do is approach one and interact with it, and Celes grabs it.
Then we head back to the cabin, and serve it to Cid, who is lying in bed.
Unfortunately, that's not enough. Cid is still sick. All we can do is try and take care of him with what little means we have available, keeping him fed.
There's a curious thing, though - every time Celes enters the cabin, Cid is actually standing; he immediately moves to the bed and says nothing about it when we approach. Initially, I assume that is an odd bug in his animation, but the more it goes on, the more I realize it's meaningful - Cid isn't staying put. When Celes leaves, he leaves his bed, even though he's gravely ill, to do… something. And each time we get back, we catch him moment after hurrying back to bed. But because of the separation between information that's available to Celes and information that's available to the player, she doesn't realize this is happening.
And Cid is getting weaker.
We have to go back to the beach, and fetch more fish, and feed him. But as time goes on, his dialogue deteriorates.
In gameplay terms, all of this takes only a few minutes. But it's very obviously a timelapse of days spent taking care of Cid, Celes fishing and cooking and feeding him, and it just… not doing anything. That feeling of just… Going back and forth between the cabin and the beach, with nothing but the sound of wind and waves, only to watch a relative growing steadily sicker, without being able to do anything about it - just watching them helplessly deteriorate, it's… It's a lot, man.
Back and forth, back and forth.
Then, eventually, he no longer speaks at all.
Celes, stammering, asks Cid if he's okay, tells him he has to eat, but there's no response - Cid is gone.
Then, the musicless soundtrack of waves crashing in is for the first time replaced by something else - Celes's theme, very obviously, very recognizably the tune from the opera, with the very same melody underlying Maria's lines when she calls out to her beloved Draco whom she thinks might be lost forever. It's going to be playing through the entirety of what comes next.
Celes steps back from the bed, staggering, crying. She protests, he'd promised he'd stay with her. She cries, begs him to answer her to tell her it's just a joke, but nothing. She weeps, the game playing a unique animation for it with her 'injured' sprite and a trail of tears, as if she'd been struck a literal, physical blow - the metaphor for grief made physical.
And then… She runs out. She runs out of the tower, still controlled by the game, across a stretch of the overworld, to the North.
Earlier, in one line of dialogue, Cid mentioned there used to be other people on the island - but one by one, overcome by despair, they flung themselves from the cliff to the north. And that's where Celes is going.
That's where we regain control of Celes. At the foot of the cliff. We can move, we can even leave, we can stop there, but… There's nothing else to do. But we still have to choose to go up there.
The great irony of this place is that it's the only one we've found, ever since we woke up, this is the closest to look like the old world. The mountain is more heavily covered in grass than previous areas, and here, the light of the dusky sky is close enough to normal that the sea looks blue, rather than red. This place looks almost alright. Almost beautiful.
There's a bird at the top of the cliff - probably that very same bird who was there on the beach, every time we went there. Who died, just like Cid, because the fish weren't enough. Withering away like the rest of the world. That bird is the interactive prompt here - it's looking at that white bird, that dead symbol of hope, that causes Celes to reflect on the people who were there, before she woke up, who one by one took the jump.
There's no one and nothing left for Celes in this world, and so, like everyone but Cid before, she makes the last decision she feels she can.
…
But it's not over, of course. It can't end like this.
Whether by luck, or perhaps more likely because she's Cid's 'granddaughter' - the Magitek Knight, whose body was suffused with power since her birth - that fall doesn't kill her.
She washes up on the beach, alone, and still alive.
As she slowly wakes up from her unconsciousness, she is greeted by that bird. She asks if it was watching over her, and why it would care to help someone like her - someone who's already given hope.
Then, she notices one thing. That bird was injured - and somebody bandaged its wound. Bandaged it with a familiar bandana.
A different music starts to play then, cutting in from Celes's Theme - one I can't quite recognize even though I'm pretty sure it's been played before in the game, and which is definitely not Locke's theme, but still changes the tenor of the scene to something more like hope. The bird, of course, has no answer - Celes isn't Krile, and doesn't know how to talk to animals. It simply flies away - but now Celes is convinced of it: Locke is still alive. He's out there, beyond that sea. And that means there are more than him. This island can't have been the only place left.
When we return to the cabin, we find something left behind by Cid that Celes hadn't noticed earlier - a letter.
"The road to your freedom awaits.
Love, Granddad."
And now, stairs, which we couldn't access before, can be reached on the other side of the room. We go down, and…
A raft.
That's what Cid was doing every day while Celes was on the beach fishing for him. The reason why we found him standing and hurrying into bed every time we went back.
He was building a raft for her, so that when he died, she could escape. And when he fell the last of his strength leave him, he left her a letter.
But he didn't tell her. Or he died before he had time. And because of that, tragedy almost struck. Because of that, Celes almost died - she was fully overwhelmed by despair, and survived only through a stroke of luck. Why? Was he afraid she'd tell him to stop working out of concern for his health? Did he want it to be a beautiful surprise he could use to celebrate his getting better? Was he afraid of giving her hope if in the end it didn't work out, and so he took it upon himself to do it all so that if the raft didn't work, she'd never face the disappointment of having thought it might?
If there wasn't this trick of the sprite, this bit of motion with Cid sliding into bed whenever we come in, I would be thinking something very different. I would be thinking that maybe the raft was there the entire time - that Cid knew about it, but was, at the end, too afraid to lose the last person he loved to tell her about it. That in a last act of perhaps sympathetic but awful control, he'd kept it to himself until his last moments out of fear that she might leave him to die alone - and that in this selfishness, he almost killed her as well.
And I'd think, perhaps, the impossible coincidence of Cid and Celes washing up on the same desert island out of an entire world might be less a coincidence, and more that raft having already seen use, in one old man carrying his comatose adoptive grandchild away from a world in ruins.
But no. Not here.
It's impossible to escape the conclusion that this, in the end, is what killed him. Not the sickly, dying fish. Not the illness he couldn't shake off. But his insistence on working in secret, every day, to give his granddaughter a way out - to atone for everything he'd done wrong, with the espers, with her upbringing as a weapon of war, to give his life so she'd have a chance at one of her own.
There's a character who commits suicide in this scene, but it's not really Celes.
Celes swears that she will make Cid proud, drags the raft out to sea, and launches herself into the waves.
A raft of logs bound together is not a good skiff. There is no steering, no sails, nothing at all to it - the only thing it is is a life jacket made large, a floatation device to hang onto for the hours or days it takes you to be tossed about by the waves, until you reach whatever destination the current takes you to - and in Celes's case, losing the raft altogether, and washing up on another beach, on another shore.
But this is no deserted island.This is one of the main broken continents of the World of Ruin, and there is life there still.
There, a short distance away, we'll find what remains of Albrook, that port city of the southern continent, once ruled by the Empire.
…
Jesus Fucking Christ.
This is…
It's hard for me to really describe this scene. Nothing in Final Fantasy has been like it (which is something I find myself saying a lot about FFVI).
This is the hardest, most harrowing, most poignant scene I've seen in any Final Fantasy game I can remember and, frankly? If one accounts for the fact that pixel art inherently makes it so much harder to directly blast feelings in your face the way a 3D mocapped character with a professional voice performance can by just hijacking the empathy buttons in your brain, it ranks up there among most games, period. Just… the way it captures the pain, the repetitive hopelessness of caring for a dying loved one and being powerless to help them. And the incessant, incessant sound of wind and waves without any music whatsoever.
And just, that intimate, deeply sad vignette of the last two people at the end of the world (which it might not be, but how would they know? How would they escape?), watching death slowly ebb in, and that peak of despair that you have to actively choose to walk to, using the game's interactivity to make you walk to its inevitable conclusion.
And then, at the end of that, hope. Found at the end of another's life, and found in something so small as Celes finding a bandana and literally tossing herself onto the waves and hoping that somewhere, out there, there's something. Anything.
The inevitable logic of it, the way it all ties together into tragedy, Cid's sickness not getting better because he's spending his strength working on a way for Celes to make it out, having already written off his life in favor of the granddaughter he's only just now found, and with whom he'll never get to have that peaceful life, alone together, but she'll have something better, maybe. Just maybe.
It's, genuinely, heart-wrenching. And it is a scene where I would genuinely think twice about recommending the game knowing that someone has to go through it, because I know it could be way more emotionally taxing to someone else than it might have been even for me.
…
If you are a newcomer to this, like me, making your way through one of gaming's most iconic entries for the first time, I'd like you to take a moment with me here to sit with that. Take it in. Let it pass through you. Take a breath.
…
Okay?
Okay.
Or you could feed Cid the right fish.
Remember Shadow from earlier?
I just want to do a quick detour here. I know I have readers who only follow threadmark updates/read in reader mode rather than read the thread (and more power to them, that's totally fair), so I want to say for the record that it's been brought to my attention that I misread the Shadow situation last update.
You see, when Shadow said "Go one! I'll find my way! Trust me!" I figured it's one of two things - either Shadow will disappear, 'left for dead' again, or else he's actually making a heroic sacrifice and lying to us so we don't wait for him, and he will die by plot.
I was wrong. Shadow's survival here is entirely dependent on player action.
The key here is that when we approach the airship, we are given a choice to jump for it or not. At first, there doesn't seem to be any reason not to jump, but if you do choose to wait, then the second time you approach the ship, the pop-up gets more explicit:
What we have to do here is wait until five seconds before the timer runs out, and then go for it. If we do that…
Shadow gives us a cool one-liner about how he's totally still an assassin who is only pulling this act of last-second escape because he can't just die without getting his pay. Then we jump, he jumps, and he is with us on the ship when it breaks apart and tosses everyone across the world.
And then we're back at the isolated island and yada yada.
So here's the thing about Celes and Cid on the Solitary Island:
Everything that just happened is the Bad End for a minigame you might not even know you're playing.
When I played through that scene the first time, I had absolutely no idea anything was but what it seemed. I played through it, and felt through it, in complete earnestness. This seems logical to me. It seemed tragic, but right. I saw what the game was going for, and I was genuinely impressed with it. And these are my earnest thoughts. I left the island, having absolutely no idea I was leaving any unsolved problem behind.
But the thing is?
Every time you go on that beach, some of the fish move slowly, and some move quickly. I noticed that, but I assumed it was just the game using variation in speed to make the whole scene a little more varied/dynamic. No. If you go into your inventory upon picking the fish, you'll find they have different descriptions. The slow fish are sickly, the fast fish are healthy. And, parallel to that, Cid has a hidden counter which ticks down every second of gameplay time, and the lower that counter, the worse he gets, until he dies - but every fish you bring him adds 'points' to the counter, and if you manage to bring him enough healthy fish fast enough, the counter raises faster than it can lower until it reaches its maximum value, and then:
Cid is cured. He's fine.
And then, he reveals what we otherwise only find out from his letter, opening a secret door and leading us down the stairs to show up 'the little project he's been working on at night' (while we were trying to save him, the absolute fuck), and shows Celes the raft. She turns to him, clearly knowing what this means but reluctant to leave him, and he tells her she has to leave this place:
"You bring that Locke fellow too, now, you hear?" he adds - and Celes nods. A Together, they bring the raft to the beach, and Celes waves to her grandfather before dragging the raft out to sea. A new music plays out, which I wouldn't exactly describe as 'happy' but is definitely more low-key, more resolute than any other theme playing on the island, a tune that is looking forward to the future.
Then she leaves, and, just as before, is tossed about on the waves and washes up near Albrook.
That scene is completely upbeat, ten times shorter than the bad end, and is literally just Celes succeeding in curing Cid, Cid thanking her and telling her she needs to go out looking for her friends now, and she leaves happily full of good hope and resolve.
It is jarring watching that scene after going through Cid's death. It's like I'm looking at a version of the game performed by aliens.
…
I'm a sap at heart. I want happy endings. And, frankly, I like to win. And I like characters to live. So obviously, I'm going to go with this save, not just for the sake of not missing future character beats, but because why would I, when presented with the choice between a Bad End and a Good End, not choose the Good End?
But this is night and day. One of these two scenes is harrowing, poignant, and layered, dealing with the heights of hope and despair and grief, and resolves Cid's character arc in a tragic, if sympathetic and flawed way. And the other has you taking the correct actions to keep that from happening and everyone being okay and happy and going off onto your next adventure, accomplished by zooming across the beach with Sprint Shoes to gather the best fish as fast as humanly possible.
One of these scenes has pathos, and the other has the satisfaction of winning. And I feel like the one where we lose is a much, much stronger piece of video game writing.
But man.
First Shadow, then this? All in a row?
No wonder people spent years sharing rumors about Mewtwo under the truck or, more relevantly, about how a combination of actions would totally allow you to save that major character in FFVII. This is literally what FFVI does. This game has hidden minigames that you might completely miss resolving the fate of characters. I could be going into the next stretch of the game with Shadow and Cid both death having no idea it was ever possible to save them at all.
God.
I'm going to need to sit with that for a bit. Even so this was really quite a short bit of gameplay, we'll end this here for tonight.
Thank you for reading.
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Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
According to the designers, saving Cid was intentionally meant to be something you wouldn't pull off. The mechanics are opaque, the whole affair is messy, and it's also luck-based: it's possible for the fast fish to just not spawn close enough for you to reach them, so even if you do know what's going on, it's very likely you will not rescue Cid. Nine times out of ten, he's going to die, and you don't even really get anything if he lives. And I suspect this was because the designers knew that, yes, Cid dying is much stronger from a storytelling perspective. Merely adding the possibility that he could be saved is there to make the failure all the sweeter.
NonSequtur
a body
Is it obvious to someone that he might be saved, though? Absent that I don't know if the possibility lands.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Mew actually, given Mewtwo's right there in Cerulean Cave. Weirdly I never heard about the Mew truck rumour as a kid, I guess because I already knew about the Nugget Bridge glitch that actually does land you with a Mew (Edit: Definitely remember the 'Hold B after throwing a PokeBall' one though.)
But yeah, fully agree with you on giving props to FF on actually going through with this sort of thing, as misleading as it can be on a first playthrough
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My first time ever playing FF6 I didn't wait for Shadow, and because I didn't know about the fish thing Cid died too. A few weeks later I lucked into Shadow surviving (very bad RNG for random encounters and my team was in horrid shape) but Cid still died.
I don't think I knew you could even save him until many years later. And I agree - Cid's death does give the game's story a far richer and deeper immersion than his survival.
But now it's time to explore the World of Ruin.
I don't think I knew you could even save him until many years later. And I agree - Cid's death does give the game's story a far richer and deeper immersion than his survival.
But now it's time to explore the World of Ruin.
This whole bit with Cid living or dying thanks to a hidden mini game really highlights that struggle between player agency and meaningful story telling.
On the whole I found it really lends a powerful dimension of player agency. That player decisions matter, not an unskippable cut scene that advances the story at the cost of the player choice. Even if it's hidden away and not directly stated you the player can determine if Cid (and Shadow) live or die.
Frankly it's a dimension I wished they kept for later games, because these aren't just epic movies playing out but games who should reward players successful choices vs yanking them away for plot.
On the whole I found it really lends a powerful dimension of player agency. That player decisions matter, not an unskippable cut scene that advances the story at the cost of the player choice. Even if it's hidden away and not directly stated you the player can determine if Cid (and Shadow) live or die.
Frankly it's a dimension I wished they kept for later games, because these aren't just epic movies playing out but games who should reward players successful choices vs yanking them away for plot.
- Location
- Back in the 90s (In a very famous TV show)
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Ve/Ver
My favorite scene in BoJack Horseman is when BoJack finally gets in contact with Herb, his former best friend, the man who made him a star, and the man who BoJack callously betrayed for the sake of his own career. He approaches Herb, who's currently dying of cancer, and Herb tells him when he tries to apologize that it doesn't matter. Herb isn't going to give the man who did so much damage to his vulnerable life as a gay man in the 1990s the satisfaction of an apology. BoJack is going to need to learn to live with what he did, before and after Herb finally passes away.
Then, of course, BoJack stands in a corner for five minutes and then hands Herb a tuna sandwich, thus allowing Herb to beat his cancer and forgive BoJack completely.
Such stellar writing.
Obviously, everything after the line "passes away" didn't happen in the show.
Then, of course, BoJack stands in a corner for five minutes and then hands Herb a tuna sandwich, thus allowing Herb to beat his cancer and forgive BoJack completely.
Such stellar writing.
Obviously, everything after the line "passes away" didn't happen in the show.
Looking back on it, it sounds more like a squabble with the metaphorical producers: the designers knew that saving cid led to a worse story, but the producers (or whoever was focused ) thought it would hurt sales, so the designers set it up to be technically possible, as a compromise, and then sabotaged the possibility of it occurring by chance.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Yeah, I agree. I think this is actually really good writing, at least in the framing of a videogame - impossible tasks to save characters who should die according to the narrative that you can only reasonably accomplish on a second playthrough after someone else has told you about it. Do the "good" endings take away from the writing if you get them instead of the "bad" endings? Yeah, probably, though saving Cid is a much larger detriment than saving Shadow. But you're almost certainly not going to be seeing them on your first runthrough, and that's what's important. They're replay value, secrets that make you wonder just how many other tragedies you could have averted if you did Y or X thing you'd have never known to do without foreknowledge. It'd be actually kinda neat if they took this further and let you foil Kefka at the Floating Continent, getting a premature ending and averting the entire World of Ruin.
I dunno, I'm just kind of a sucker for things like this. It's like beating Urizen in your first encounter as an armless Nero at the start of DMCV, I guess - a neat little bonus for replays.
NonSequtur
a body
I think the topic of agency in video games is really interesting, because that of the player and that of the character is often radically divorced, at least in the way I experience games. The player is ultimately only constrained by code and their own willingness to keep trying - random chance can be handled with repetition, skill with practice, and ignorance by research. The character, on the other hand, is imagined to be a human being subject to whatever amounts to human limits in their world, even if their behaviour is ultimately dictated by that same code.
The issue with averting Cid's death, in my opinion, is it's tying something on the player's side - ignorance of the minigame, rng fish catching - to the failure of a granddaughter to save her grandfather at the end of the world, when these two evoke very different emotional reactions. If Celes couldn't reasonably know her grandfather needs X Number Of Healthy Fish, then the act of making her sprint through the surf for the fast fish goes from desperate effort to the bizarre intervention of a clairvoyant god. Even presuming she should, from the item descriptions, realize he needs healthy fish, the RNG element you can grind away at again, turns from a character beat of her diving into the surf again and again into the player reaching down with their divine power and unbalancing the scales, presumably grumbling frustratedly about 'bad fish RNG'. Which is very not what Celes would be feeling and thinking.
Edit: Insofar as this is a minigame that needs to have a win condition, I think letting Cid tell her about the raft rather than the suicide route is probably good enough? Earn a... better sort of goodbye. It doesn't need to have a mechanical benefit. Cid living doesn't have a mechanical benefit, as far as I know.
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- Location
- Somewhere on Earth
Damn, that's… that's legitimately intense. It's minor in the grand scheme of things, but when I was young I tried to care for a small animal that had been seriously injured. I tried my best, but at some point I had to leave, and when I got back… I can't deny that that experience has haunted me sometimes, thinking about my family and what I'd have to do for them if they got so sick. I dunno if I could handle such… banal grief, as I watch them fade away.
WHAT
I respect the hell out of the decision to take the fact that games are interactive and give the player a chance to save him, even though they deliberately put a thumb on the scale by refusing to tell you the rules.
If this was a movie then obviously the scene would be Cid dying for all the reasons you gave. The fact that this is a video game, and therefore player agency should matter, makes the scene all the stronger - how much would we care if it was just a cutscene of Cid slowly withering away? By having us actively working on helping him, paired with the desolation and grim silence, we feel some of the same despair that ultimately leads to Celes' attempt at suicide.
Honestly, I struggle to think of how this could possibly be improved from a design perspective. There needs to be a reward for "winning" the minigame, because that's how minigames work, but we also clearly want Cid to die because it's a much better cutscene. Maybe if Cid lives longer he's able to gather some items in addition to the raft and the player is rewarded with a pile of healing items or something? But would that cheapen the emotional impact of learning Cid worked himself to death making the raft? I dunno.
It's a hell of a scene.
If this was a movie then obviously the scene would be Cid dying for all the reasons you gave. The fact that this is a video game, and therefore player agency should matter, makes the scene all the stronger - how much would we care if it was just a cutscene of Cid slowly withering away? By having us actively working on helping him, paired with the desolation and grim silence, we feel some of the same despair that ultimately leads to Celes' attempt at suicide.
Honestly, I struggle to think of how this could possibly be improved from a design perspective. There needs to be a reward for "winning" the minigame, because that's how minigames work, but we also clearly want Cid to die because it's a much better cutscene. Maybe if Cid lives longer he's able to gather some items in addition to the raft and the player is rewarded with a pile of healing items or something? But would that cheapen the emotional impact of learning Cid worked himself to death making the raft? I dunno.
It's a hell of a scene.
- Location
- Not your place of residence
Yeah, this is it in my opinion. This is the peak. This is the best scene in the game, the best scene in the franchise, the death scene I was thinking of when I said there was one other thing that gave Galuf a run for his money.
I think it's actually made stronger, or at least isn't that undercut, by being the failstate of an extremely hard minigame, one that's obtuse and difficult to win if you don't know what's going on. Because this is what has been going on all over the world for everyone who survived the apocalypse. Everyone is going through their own survival minigame; everyone has someone who their entire world rests upon and needs to feel like they can keep going on.
Galuf's death scene is great, but it's about his courage, his perseverance, his willingness to do what's necessary even at the cost of his life. Cid's death and Celes' suicide attempt has absolutely none of that, because it shouldn't. It's about grief, the feeling of loss and loneliness, and, partly because it's so good at showing those emotions, it hits all the harder for a person like me, who has felt suicidal in the past. It's to a level that, like Omicron, I don't necessarily feel comfortable recommending this to a random person on the street.
The Cid fish minigame is a tug of war between life and death, between gameplay and story, and while generally I find gameplay more important than story, I appreciate that all of the power in this section is in the much more likely to get bad ending to the minigame.
I think it's actually made stronger, or at least isn't that undercut, by being the failstate of an extremely hard minigame, one that's obtuse and difficult to win if you don't know what's going on. Because this is what has been going on all over the world for everyone who survived the apocalypse. Everyone is going through their own survival minigame; everyone has someone who their entire world rests upon and needs to feel like they can keep going on.
Galuf's death scene is great, but it's about his courage, his perseverance, his willingness to do what's necessary even at the cost of his life. Cid's death and Celes' suicide attempt has absolutely none of that, because it shouldn't. It's about grief, the feeling of loss and loneliness, and, partly because it's so good at showing those emotions, it hits all the harder for a person like me, who has felt suicidal in the past. It's to a level that, like Omicron, I don't necessarily feel comfortable recommending this to a random person on the street.
The Cid fish minigame is a tug of war between life and death, between gameplay and story, and while generally I find gameplay more important than story, I appreciate that all of the power in this section is in the much more likely to get bad ending to the minigame.
- Location
- Nunya, Arizona
So kid frumple didn't figure out the minigame, didn't even realize it existed, and that scene was the first time (and one of the very, very few times at all) a videogame ever brought me to tears. Second time I played that far into FF6, I knew what was up and (... iirc, after a couple savestate reloads, because knowing and accomplishing the survival condition is not the same thing) kept ol' cid alive, but it's something that's never really left me and, barring dementia or memory loss, I may never forget.
... older frumple was the primary caregiver for their maternal grandparents, both of which passed away last year, one of them at home on their deathbed for weeks. When I noticed the LP series, and it getting closer to FF6, I kinda' considered giving the thing one more playthrough, maybe actually beat it this time instead of stalling out at the final boss again, but.
I didn't consider it long, because I remembered this scene, and let me tell you, the one thing that hits harder than that scene being dropped on an unsuspecting kid, is contemplating experiencing it again after having basically experienced it in real life within the last handful of months. Bloody game's too damn real to play these days, ha.
... older frumple was the primary caregiver for their maternal grandparents, both of which passed away last year, one of them at home on their deathbed for weeks. When I noticed the LP series, and it getting closer to FF6, I kinda' considered giving the thing one more playthrough, maybe actually beat it this time instead of stalling out at the final boss again, but.
I didn't consider it long, because I remembered this scene, and let me tell you, the one thing that hits harder than that scene being dropped on an unsuspecting kid, is contemplating experiencing it again after having basically experienced it in real life within the last handful of months. Bloody game's too damn real to play these days, ha.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That sort of puts me in mind of Chrono Trigger's NG+ options, which basically let you explore exactly that kind of What If scenario.
The Sandman
So Zetta Slowpoke
- Location
- Wherever I am, which isn't where I'm not
For my part, I'm thinking about Chrono Trigger, and how that game handles player agency.
Also, I suspect Chrono Trigger helped create the rumors about FFVII and that one character in it almost as much as the avoidable deaths of FFVI did.
Also, I suspect Chrono Trigger helped create the rumors about FFVII and that one character in it almost as much as the avoidable deaths of FFVI did.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
That is exactly what I was thinking of.
Very understandable, considering the content of this update. Really, the entire transition into the World of Ruin and Cid's fate is an absolute doozy, and probably one of the high points of FFVI's writing as a whole, which is funny because it comes right on the heels of one of the low points with Kefka's Esper Killing Plot Armor.
This is one of those things that flew right over my head on my first playthrough, but understanding it later really adds to the whole "deserted island where everything is dying" feeling, for sure.
It's a strong, character defining moment for Cid, I think. For a character who really hasn't gotten much screentime, and particularly in this LP hasn't exactly gotten a lot of sympathy (granted, understandably), the fact that here at the end of the world he's willing to legitimately work himself to death in the hopes of giving his surrogate granddaughter who he's failed again and again, who he turned into a magitek experiment and stood aside unable to do anything when she was slated for execution... it says something about Cid, it really does.
I'm sure there's a fair few people in the thread who wanted Cid to get some kind of comeuppance for everything he's done with the Empire, but man watching him wither away bit by bit in front of one of the main characters this way, one that legitimately views him as a father figure despite all his flaws...
I can't recall if it came up before this point in the game, but the whole Opera sequence absolutely left its mark on Celes, because her theme is permanently changed afterwards to incorporate bits of Maria's theming from the Opera.
And speaking of the opera, I also want to point out something I noticed on my playthrough of this bit - the shape of the cliff as you walk up it is... a bit vaguely, so I might be stretching it, but it's shaped similarly to the actual section of the opera that Celes walks up from dancing with Draco's spirit to throwing the flowers off the upper balcony.
And from the lowest point of her entire life (and probably the entire game), to that small, uplifting bit of hope. The world has ended... but does that mean the people in the world have ended too?
Though I'll admit, I always interpreted this scene as that being an entirely different bird from the one that was up on the cliff. Figured the one up top was dead or dying, and this one was some other bird with Locke's headband that happened to fly to the island. After all, it would be... kind of odd if Locke apparently showed up just to wrap this one bird, then fucked off back to the mainland? Would he not have noticed the shack with a dead Cid laying in there, or potentially Celes washing up on the shore?
Death is Redemption, in a lot of media. And I don't know if I'd necessarily say Cid was redeemed for the evils he's done in the past... but he certainly put forth that effort to help Celes, even at the cost of his own health and eventually life.
Said it already, but this is probably one of the strongest scenes in all of FFVI, possibly the entire series. I don't know, there might be some greater ones later on, I don't remember every detail of the later games. But for something that doesn't get brought up the way "Kefka destroys the world" and "Opera" does, I do think Celes attempted suicide stands as a very powerful scene in FFVI... though as you say, it also might make me think twice about recommending the game to some people on account of how well done it is.
Orrrrr we can take the other option, throw all that emotional impact in the trash and save our banana-suited Esper-experimenting grandpappy!
Honestly, I still chose to let Cid die on my current playthrough, just because hoo boy the emotional impact of that scene and what it does for Celes' character going forward just feels way stronger, you know?
Plus I already knew you don't get anything out of saving Cid, sooooo-
And now you know exactly why things like the "how you can save General Leo!" rumors persisted for years on end. And that's not even getting into later Final Fantasy games, because now? The door has been opened. Maybe every single character who dies can actually secretly be saved, maybe every single cool side character you meet is secretly recruitable like Mog!
Man Chrono Trigger NG+ is just absolutely nuts because you can basically sit down at any point in the overarching plot and go "you know what if I just like, went and finished the game right now?" And then do it. Maybe this is an odd comparison, but it's like how in Breath of the Wild you've got all these major important quests about taking back the Divine Beasts and retrieving the Master Sword and gearing up for the big battle with Calamity Ganon... or Link can run straight to the final boss with no pants, beat the shit out of the final boss, and scream "HYRULE IS SAVED" and that's it that's the end of game.
Similarly, Chrono Trigger NG+ you can just go "yeah I could go save all these people and stuff, or I could just go kick the big bad's butthole and call it a day!" Heck, there's a dev room you can unlock if you do it at the right time (though beats me if I remember exactly when that time was, it's been a long while since I replayed Chrono Trigger).