I'm going back to this, because while I'm sure it's been fixed for the Pixel Remaster it was an "easy" way to deal with this encounter and get a cool 10AP, which is great for magic grinding.
All you need is a character who can cast Confuse - easy enough since one of your first Espers teaches it - and a supply of Smoke Bombs, which IIRC the shopkeep on the Blackjack sells, conveniently enough. You would make sure that you have two characters with the ATB bars full and have one cast Confuse on the second, while you wait in the Item menu on that second character. As the Confuse casting animation begins, you quickly select a Smoke Bomb and confirm. Once that character gets Confuse status, they'll throw out a Smoke Bomb as commanded - except because they're Confused, they'll toss it at Intangir. This will result in a retaliatory Meteor cast, but only at the Confused character. Everybody else gets to live. Rotate out who gets sacrificed and you could fairly quickly max out all the Magic you can learn in the WOB.
Meanwhile, in the SNES version, this was the best Magic AP farming spot in the WoB.
This is due to the infamous Vanish-Doom glitch, where the Vanish (Invisibility) status set the hit% of magic used on afflicted targets to 100% and bypasses immunities. Yeah that includes Death. Intangirs come already invisible and asleep to boot, it was just a simple matter to cast Doom (or Snare off the Mu Rage) and reap 10 Magic AP. Intangir was also the most common encounter on Triangle Island, so the grind was fast.
Our party has snuck onto the ferry to South Figaro to follow 'Gerad' and his thieves to Figaro.
Celes, no! That thief is staring straight at you! This is a terrible place to hide!
South Figaro is doing… okay-ish? The town is mostly intact except for the color shading shift that affects the whole world. Some NPCs have vanished but most of them are fine. There are even these Figaro soldiers who, from their sprite, seem to be… Okay they're either robbing this house or doing repair work:
To the right, an abandoned suit of Magitek armor. To the left, a guy who says that at least the thieves are working towards a goal, and we could learn from that.
Side note: That rich guy who dined with General Leo and sold South Figaro out to the Empire by letting the soldiers in, and who had a double secret basement dungeon where Imperials kept Celes? I can still find him in his house, musing that "Just when we thought we'd be able to rest easier with the Empire gone… now we have Kefka to worry about!" While I can still go and explore his dungeon basement.
He got away with it all, and now he's acting like an upstanding citizen who was always against the Empire. Incredible. There really is no justice for the rich.
Anyway, South Figaro clearly has been spared more than most places, and that's visible even in the attitude of people here - they enthusiastically say things like "if the Light of Judgement burns down our town a hundred times, we'll rebuild it two hundred times!" Which is… Definitely at odds with what we've seen on the continents closer to Kefka's tower. You can't "rebuild" when your entire adult population has been wiped out. They come across as less hopeful, and more sheltered - for them, life has been able to at least in part go on as normal.
Gerad is staying at the inn, and if we try to talk to him…
He is so obvious, my God. Celes once again point blank asks him if he's Edgar, but then one of the thieves barges in to say everything's ready, Gerad says 'Case of mistaken identity, my dear!' and leaves.
Yeah. As if.
Now we're heading out towards the caves to Figaro.
God, even the forest backgrounds are fucked up and evil. This one is actually a straight recolor of the old forest background (I would post more comparative screenshot but space is limited), which was long enough ago that it might go unnoticed by the player; but the use of washed out colors and that harsh, blinding light from within is just, incredible. Also fish are walking on land now?
And from there, we find our way to the South Figaro Cave - the same place we went through to go from South Figaro to Narshe and fought the Magitek Tunneler, if you'll remember. There, we find someone unexpected.
That's… Siegfried, right? I had nearly completely forgotten that guy existed, I'd assumed we'd be seeing more of this after his initial intro in the Phantom Train, when he grabbed some loot and ran away, but I guess not. And we have Sabin in the group, who should recognize him - but I guess because Sabin is technically missable, he can't be included in the dialogue. Baffling way to handle these things.
Anyway, I don't know why Siegrief is here, or why he's offering to clear the path of monsters, but sure. Not that this actually means we get to skip the random encounters, lmao.
Jesus these monsters are horrifying. Ffffun fact: That huge twisted mass of flesh is called 'Cruller.' A cruller is a fried pastry made of dough that is pulled and twisted 'over and through itself.' That thing looks like it's made of flesh. So… have fun with the mental image of how that monster came to be, everyone.
(For the most part Sabin's Rising Phoenix wipes every encounter and Celes can pick off anything that survived.)
We eventually track the group to the end of the South Figaro Cave - if you'll recall, this is the part where the Magitek Tunneler came out of the wall, after which we left the cave - but now the exit is collapsed, and anyway we're trying to reach the sandworm tunnels, not the exit.
The answer, it turns out (which was hinted at by a child singing back in South Figaro) is one of the thiefs approaching the water, where a turtle has been hanging out ever since the first time we went through here, and drawing it with 'yummy food for a good turtle' (as the turtle approaches, one the thieves muses about how he used to have a pet turtle, which is a funny touch of humanity to give them). And then…
…everyone uses the turtle as a skipping stone to cross to the other side. Ooch.
Immediately after the whole group of thieves has left, Siegrif appears from a hiding spot and does the same, and then, we can come out of our hiding spot and add to the suffering of the poor chelonian.
As if to drive home the point that we're following after a bunch of thieves, we go through a winding sandworm-dug corridors full of chests... all of which are, of course, empty, having already been looted. Soon, we're out of the sandworm tunnel and enter through a hole in the wall in into one of the cells in which the thieves were once prisoners; they've moved on ahead, but we can catch sight of 'Gerad' checking that a guard lying prone is still alive.
Looks like we've made it alive, but only barely. Figaro's population is still alive, but having been trapped underground for days, perhaps even weeks, they're running out of oxygen - we see several guards on our ways and all of them are barely conscious, lying on the ground and unable to do more than mutter "C-Can't…b-breathe…" It looks like we have to act quickly if we are to save them.
Monsters from the tunnels have spilled into the underlevels of Castle Figaro, making it technically a dungeon, but it's a very short one. The thieves gunned straight for the vault with the castle's most valuable treasures, so we can still find some loot out of the way - including the Royal Crown, a unique headgear that boosts all stats but can only be worn by 'those of royal blood.' Which, hey, guess what we have in our party?
YOU CAN ESCAPE THE CROWN BUT IT WILL ALWAYS FIND YOU, ROYAL BOY, JUST LIKE THE NATIONAL RAZOR WILL.
There's also a Gravity Rod, which has a 25% chance of casting Graviga when attacking with it and which you can break to cast Graviga, consumables, and not much else. Very quickly, we follow everyone into the engine room - where we find out the true reason the castle is stuck underground, and it's nothing so simple as running into a particularly big rock.
A swarm of tentacles have the engines completely gummed up. Their origin and nature is unclear, but they're fully tangled with the mechanisms, and lashing out at everyone. 'Gerad' tells the thieves to go on ahead; they tell him it's too dangerous, but he insists, and they finally turn around and head into the treasure room.
Which is all that Edgar had been waiting for to drop the paper-thin pretense.
Cheeky fuck. Like we didn't see right through you from the start. Points for playing off how bad his disguise is so casually, though, by not even trying to act like we were fooled.
And with this, the battle starts - the fate of Castle Figaro is in our hands.
God, what fantastic scenery. The dungeon sprite had a handful of wimpy tentacles sticking out of the machinery, but this makes it clear that we're looking at a goddamned motherlode of tentacles, carpeting the entire room until there's no where to step that isn't, itself, the tentacles. And look in the background at these ghostly purple auras around the distant ones! It's like they're ready to bust out their Stand, I love it.
So, tentacle boss fight. This should be easy, right?
What I immediately learn upon throwing a Phoenix Dance at them is that each tentacle has individual elemental strengths and weaknesses and that most absorb one type of damage. In this case, the lower left tentacle absorbs fire. This means I need to work out ahead of time which tentacles to target with which attack, and I need to avoid elemental attacks that hit the full screen. Easy, right?
As for the Tentacles' own attacks, their primary offensive moves are a physical attack, Bio which deals heavy poison-type damage, and Poison, which deals less damage but causes the Poison status effect. They also have the Entwine and Stun move, which inflict Slow upon my characters. And a problem is that because this is a Side attack battle, I can't heal all my characters at once, only one side of the screen. Plus, four tentacles and only three characters means a lot of attacks per turn - but my damage output is still considerable, so it should be fine, right? Each individual Tentacle has low HP, so I only need to focus fire them.
Well…
Check out the distortion effect on that tentacle grabbing Sabin.
The Tentacles' signature move is Grab. It seizes a character, incapacitating it and draining its HP at a rapid rate (about 60 HP per tick, with ticks coming fast, several times a turn), then releasing them after dealing hundreds of damage and healing itself for as much. Now, just in terms of math, that's not so bad. "Enemy has a powerful drain effect that can hit for a few hundred damage" isn't, on its own, a fight-ender. The problem is, a character in a Grab is incapacitated. No action, they just sit there dead while taking massive damage. And there are more Tentacles than there are characters. The inevitable lopsided result…
There are many obvious jokes I could make for this fight and all of them have been done ten thousand times about ten thousand bad anime before, so I shan't.
All three characters are grabbed, their full ATB gauges useless as I just sit there watching them take a shitton of damage that the Tentacles heal from, before being spat out at low HP with barely enough time before the next attack to do anything but the most rudimentary heal, and then…
*
Party wipe.
Well, that was refreshing, in a way. Been a while since I got owned that hard by something that wasn't a trick encounter like Intangir.
Now, looking at this, my immediate thought is "There's no way the Grab is as uncontested as it looks like at first glance. This just feels to awful to play against. There's a counter." Which turns out to be correct, but my initial guesses are misplaced.
First thought, a classic: the enemy will drop my character if I hit them while they're grabbing them. Seems like a good way to make the Grab threatening and force players to adjust tactics on the fly with their pressure while still leaving them manageable. My new tactic is simple, instead of trying to keep the focus on killing the Tentacles one by one, the moment a Tentacle grabs a party member I hit it with something.
It doesn't work. That 'grey' effect you can see on my character, by the way, is the Slow inflicted by Entwine/Stun, which makes it even harder to adapt my tactics on the fly as characters become very slow to act and react. Combined with the fact that the Tentacles do not, in fact, release characters when they're hit, this experiment is a failure.
I go for a third try giving up anything but the focus on absolute, overwhelming offense. The idea is simple: if I kill the Tentacles fast enough, I can invert the numbers game and make it so I don't have my whole party entangled.
That's another wipe. There is simply no way to make up for the sheer neutralizing power of every Tentacle being able to Grab a character and there being more characters than Tentacles. I can't even kill a single one of them before the whole party is entangled and then I just watch and wait as they get drained to death, and then it's a wipe.
So.
This is the toughest fight in the game by far, so far. But it feels brutally unfair, and like there is a solution that I just don't know about. So I go to the Wiki to look up the Tentacles.
Here's the thing: A character cannot be both Hasted and Slowed. And the Slow effect from Stun/Entwine is a prerequisite for a Grab move. Within the fiction of the game, the Tentacles first need to stun, slow, or get a hold onto someone for them to be vulnerable to a grab, otherwise they can presumably just dodge it. The Tentacles can only take hold of characters it has made vulnerable to it.
And the Hermes Shoes grant the Haste status automatically. What I didn't realize was that either because of a feature of the Haste spell itself or because of the relic's own effect, this grants immunity to Slow.
Now, Edgar only joins the party when the battle opens, and so cannot be equipped with Relics. But Celes and Sabin can. Which means I can make them both immune to Grab. At which point…
Knowing each Tentacle's elemental weakness and resistance is useful, but no longer necessary. With only Bio and Poison in their arsenal and both Sabin and Celes having access to Cura and Poisona, I can just whale on them with whatever magic works until they die. Edgar is still vulnerable to Grab and so I just Let Him Die, but other than that this is easy.
Man, I am not a fan of the 'look it up in a guide' school of boss design. I mean, I guess I could/should have figured that out myself eventually? Maybe the challenge of the game is in working these things out rather than get frustrated after three attempts and looking it up? But for one thing I don't respect a boss called 'Tentacle' enough for that, and furthermore, I'm not a 12-year old anymore who could just spend two hours every day after school running at a boss over and over until I somehow worked it out weeks later and won.
These days I reserve that energy for FromSoft games.
Edgar explains what we'd all already guessed: he needed to help rescue Figaro, but he had no idea how to get to the castle until he heard those thieves talk about their escapes; since they'd just escaped from his prisons, approaching them as King of Figaro seemed like a bad idea, so he cooked up the persona of Gerad the bandit. Just as Sabin scolds him for not telling them,* there's noise - the thieves are coming back!
*There's a neat touch there in that, if you look closely, Edgar didn't just do this solely to be a dick; every time the characters confront him about his identity, they are either in public or with thieves nearby, so he can't afford to tell them even if he wanted to.
And here we get a really neat bit of Edgar characterization:
"That monster must have gotten him…"
"Poor boss… Didn't even last as long as the last boss…"
"Oh well… Let's go."
Edgar tells everyone to hide, and allows the thieves to leave with all their treasure. When Celes raises this after the thieves are gone, Edgar tells her that he couldn't care less about treasure, what they need to worry about is Kefka, and the thieves haven't even done anything wrong, really. Which… I'm not sure I agree with; if these guys were entering a castle in which everyone had already actually died to pick up buried treasure, I certainly wouldn't find fault in their action, but the population of Figaro is still barely alive and they didn't seem to pause to help them. That, in my books, is a darker shade than gray.
Still, putting aside… other issues with Edgar… that he doesn't care about the treasure after these guys, in effect, helped him save his entire people (even though that's not what they knew they were doing) speaks well of him, I think. A king allowing his nation's treasure to be pillaged would be rather more questionable in circumstances where normal issues of politics and warfare apply, but, well.
It's the end of the world and we're trying to kill God. Let's focus on what matters.
Celes, picking up the implicit message in that 'we need to worry about stopping Kefka,' asks Edgar if that means he's willing to come along with them, and Edgar enthusiastically tell her it's time to 'shake things up.'
And thus, we're up to three party members! Slowly working our way up towards a full party, although I wonder how/when we'll find the secondary ones - like what even is Gau doing right now.
Also, while the thieves were able to abscond with most of the treasure, they didn't think to check if the sword held by the central statue in that room was more than just ornamental - this 'Soul Saber' is a sword that "drains MP and may cast Death upon striking an enemy." Scary! Don't know how useful it actually is, though.
And with the engines now working again, it's time to pull Figaro and its inhabitants from the brink.
And so once again the day is saved, thanks to the Powerpuff Girls.
Aside from expressing relief at having air again and some slightly updated dialogue, things in Figaro are mostly normal - although one of the women says that several members have left the castle to join the Cult of Kefka, and she suggests that if a 'loved one' went and pleaded with them they might return, so… Put a pin in that, I guess? We'll keep an eye out. We can also buy the Debilitator, a Tool for Edgar which inflicts a random elemental weakness on an enemy. Could be useful? Depends on if it works on bosses, I guess.
Once that's all done, we go to the old guy who works the engines, and we move Figaro away from this continent and across the sea, to Kohlingen.
Notice that Narshe guard? He's here to tell us that the town has been overrun by monsters, and all survivors of Narshe had to leave the city. Damn. And here I was thinking maybe I could finally get that frozen esper (I probably will, just after powering through a whole dungeon's worth of gribblies). First notes about Kohlingen: more sadness. There's an old woman having a flashback about when the town was thriving and doves flew overhead, and a mother-and-daughter pair tending to flower seeds even while saying that all plants have stopped sprouting, as if they'd 'lost their will to live.'
We could have hoped that Locke would be in Kohlingen, what with his dead girlfriend being there, but no such luck. Looks like he's still looking for that elusive legendary treasure. Girlfriend's doing fine, though. Or as 'fine' as you can do while dead/in a coma without your soul.
"So, in other words… You find where that treasure's hidden, and that's where you'll find Locke!"
Also, the brother of that guy up north who was building a coliseum back before the apocalypse has shifted his tune from "my brother, this wacko, is doing some nonsense up north" to "some men still have VISION like my BROTHER who built JUST WHAT WE NEED FOR A WORLD LIKE THIS," which is just. Great hypocritical comedy. We'll have to check out that coliseum soon. First though, let's check out the pub…
Heavy sigh.
Well, we need an airship engineer if we are to ever be able to range across the whole world to pick up the rest of our party, I guess.
Setzer, unfortunately, is being a sadsack. When the group tells him to come with them to fight Kefka, he rejects it out of hand - he's lost the drive to do dramatic heroics.
"Not anymore. I feel like the weight of this world is crushing me. It's just too much to bear…"
Oh, you little bitch. Everyone everywhere is facing the same existential despair, but they still find the strength to fight on, but not you, no, you're moping in a bar.
Celes insists that he fought with all his heart before, even when he was up against the whole Empire, but Setzer dismisses it - he had dreams then, but not anymore. Which, actually Setzer, I distinctly seem to remember that you didn't have dreams, you were just whiling away the days with gambling and empty theatrics because of the hole where your rival pilot used to be. You were just as much of an empty shell, you just hid it better, didn't you?
And sure enough, when Celes tells him that what he needs is just a new dream to chase after, and what's bigger than 'literally saving the world,' Setzer immediately goes "you know what, you might be right."
That dude's problem is that he completely lacks intrinsic motivation. He is completely dependent on there being someone else to set out an explicit goal for him to pursue, and if he's left to his own devices he just vegetates.
I can't say I don't relate; this is the entire reason why this Let's Play exists. But what do you know? Familiarity breeds contempt, I guess.
Now that Setzer has a goal again, he immediately suggests we go visit the tomb of Darill, his old rival/friend/possibly lover, which I'm guessing is where we'll find a new airship. Shame about my theory that Darill had actually ventured into outer space.
He could have done this the entire time. Literally the only thing he was missing was a pretty woman asking him to do it.
All we gotta do is head a little ways south, and there…
"Yeah… She really was something. The world could turn inside out and she'd never even flinch."
Setzer pushes a hidden button, and the side of the mound slides away, revealing hidden stairs. All we gotta do now is head down into Darill's Tomb, which turns out to be rather more than just one person's grave.
It's a mausoleum, full of bones and the undead.
The Tomb is home to valuable loot, like the Genji Helm and Crystal Armor, as well as the 'Regal Gown' a - powerful piece of gear 'designed to protect a princess' that none of my current character can equip. I… don't think any of the expanded party member cast are princesses? Maybe it's for Terra? I don't know.
The tomb has a nice environmental design, with ghostly blue flames shining in dark alcoves, and rooms alternating between red and blue in tone; it is also home to a recurring Final Fantasy enemy…
…the Malboro and its Bad Breath are back, although thankfully we still overpower most enemies with relative ease so it's not too much of an obstacle. The main issue is that I never equipped Setzer with a Magicite, so he has no Magic, only his basic attack and Slots, which gives shit results 100% of the time. Dude's pretty useless.
The tomb's central gimmick is a water-based puzzle. Essentially, there are several hidden doors and levers along with large pits with turtles in them; using the turtle jump we saw earlier when getting into Figaro, we need to fill the various pits with water and ride the turtles to the hidden doors after opening them from separate rooms. Simple, but actually unusually engaging for an FF puzzle, probably because of the cute factor.
Wheeee!
There is an optional puzzle in the tomb - in one room, there's a tombstone with a blank space where we can carve a name, and in another room there are four individual tombstones which each bear a different nonsensical set of four letters (ERAU, QSSI, WEHT, DLRO). I'll leave that for now and get back to it later, though, right now I want to focus on getting that airship. There's also a cute interaction on the 'mimic' concept in the form of the Angler Whelk, a monster-in-a-box miniboss that has a chest in its mouth to lure in adventurers.
It's not an easy fight and ends with two characters petrified and most of them on the verge of death.
Soon enough, we find the central piece of the mausoleum, the place of honor - a tomb or casket draped in purple, still adorned with flowers (which would seem to suggest Setzer is a frequent visitor? Or else the flowers are magical; hard to frequently visit a tomb at the heart of a monster-filled mausoleum). Unfortunately, as soon as we approach…
Boss fight.
Dullahan is no joke. It has first strike and always opens the fight with Lv. ? Holy before anyone can act, which deals 900+ damage to everyone it hits (though it appears to consistently miss Celes and Sabin, and I'm not sure why; it must be a piece of their equipment, but I'm not aware of them having a Holy-immune effect). Dullahan is overall an extremely aggressive attacker, attacking often with Holy and Ice-based spells and its Morning Star physical attack, dealing heavy damage at a rapid clip. In addition to Blizzara, Holy, and Absolute Zero (which freezes the whole screen for heavy damage), it also has the special Northern Cross attack, which causes every affected character to be frozen, a new status effect and one of the most problematic to deal with:
Amazing sprite, though.
Frozen characters are incapacitated as if under the effects of Stop, unable to act, but still taking full damage from any attack (unlike Petrify), and furthermore, frozen is not treated as a normal status effect - meaning it is not cured by Esuna or Remedy. This means my only options are to wait for it to wear off, which in a case like the above where ¾ of my party are frozen almost certainly means death, or else…
The internal logic of an old school JRPG can be hard to follow sometimes, but when you are on the same frequency it is quite gratifying. The solution comes to me intuitively and I immediately try it: a fire-elemental spell aimed at frozen characters instantly cures the status.
Unfortunately, it also causes the normal damage, and in the above case Ceres doesn't know Fire, only Fira, meaning she has to go FULL POWER on her own team, dealing severe damage. This is unfortunately enough to leave them within range of a party kill on Dullahan's next few turns.
There's an extra problem - I'm carrying a weight in the form of Setzer, who hasn't had time to learn any magic since starting the dungeon and is therefore relegated to using items or his Slots command every turn, which returns useless stuff most of the time. Still, he can throw potions at people, so that's something, but this fight would go way faster if he knew Cura and Thundara.
I won't stretch this out for hours - Dullahan is a hard, but clean fight. It attacks fast, it attacks relentlessly, and it has one status effect with a costly counter. It's all about staying on the ball with rapid, intense healing while dealing as much damage as possible. Unfortunately Dullahan's Magic resistance is very high and even Aura Cannon or second-tier spells struggle to pass 1,000 damage unless cast by Sabin, meaning this is also a long fight. It takes time, resources (several X-Potions and an Elixir), and luck, but after a few wipes, we barely squeak past the finish line.
It wasn't pretty, but we made it. And it felt nice having a boss that was a proper challenge for once. Apparently you can kill it faster by draining its MP to 0 if you have the right spells for it but I'm not sure I do and hey, this worked!
Behind the tomb, a doorway opens. We venture inside, and the perspective changes to 2D as Setzer and Celes go down the stairs.
THE USE OF NEGATIVE PACE??? THE BLANK DARKNESS WHICH CREATES THE SPACE FOR A MEMORY BUBBLE OMG? This game's blocking is so good
Ahem.
We see Setzer and Darill back in older, better days - Setzer, ironically, being the cautious one warning Darill against recklessly pushing her ship past its limits. Darill tells him that, should anything happen to her, she wants him to inherit the Falcon, and he plays it off - the only way he'd accept the Falcon is if he beat it out of her in a fair race.
Then we see them racing over the World of Balance, exchanging friendly barbs.
These two are definitely fuckin'.
Then Darill tells him it's time - she'll break all records, sail above the clouds, and get closer to the stars than anyone ever has. Setzer, entranced by her audacity, believes it - he tells her he'll wait for her at sunset, 'on our hill.'
A year's disappearance, before he found the wreck… That can't have been easy, not knowing - and then, all of a sudden, knowing for sure. Maybe she did it, in the end. A world which had only two airships can't have had an advanced understanding of atmospheric composition - it could have been as simple as her not being prepared for the thin, cold air of the utmost heights, the violent winds at high altitude, or even as simple as the thinning atmosphere creating a pressure differential which made her balloon explode, sending the whole thing crashing down. Maybe she did go that far, and that's what killed her.
That scene does a lot to humanize Setzer, a character I never really cared for even if I understood his deal.
Setzer restored the ship, and brought it down here, hidden at the bottom of this mausoleum. And now…
It's time for the Falcon to soar again.
Right you are, Celes, Edgar. Right you are.
Now that we have the Falcon and our full party of heroes and have fully explored the World of Ruin and completed its side quests, nothing stands in the way of our attacking Kefka's tower! The Summer Game Fest just ran their trailer for Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, and it got me in a mood to finally get to FFVII. Thankfully, we've just now completed all the story and gameplay that FFVI has to offer - time for the endgame!
Let's just do it and be legends.
At a breezy 18 hours, this was one of the shorter FF games, but I'm glad the conclusion is near! Tune in next update for us defeating Kefka!
Now that we have the Falcon and our full party of heroes and have fully explored the World of Ruin and completed its side quests, nothing stands in the way of our attacking Kefka's tower! The Summer Game Fest just ran their trailer for Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, and it got me in a mood to finally get to FFVII. Thankfully, we've just now completed all the story and gameplay that FFVI has to offer - time for the endgame!
Lv. 9 Holy before anyone can act, which deals 900+ damage to everyone it hits (though it appears to consistently miss Celes and Sabin, and I'm not sure why; it must be a piece of their equipment, but I'm not aware of them having a Holy-immune effect).
There's a perfect example during the early game. You can find a Thunder Rod in the Figaro Cave (if you don't mind losing on a Hero Ring later), and you can use it on the Tunneler during Locke and Celes' scenario back to Narshe for a one hit kill. A common thing to do in a low level run.
Actually it's Lv. ?, not 9. This one follows a funny formula. It takes the last digit of the party's current money, then uses it as its multiplier to decide if a target suffers damage. If the digit is 1 or 0, all targets are hit.
When the letters are put together correctly, it says a phrase backwards with no spaces. Once you get it correct it'll tell you where a certain relic is.
Now that we have the Falcon and our full party of heroes and have fully explored the World of Ruin and completed its side quests, nothing stands in the way of our attacking Kefka's tower!
Yeah, so keeping in mind that Sabin is optional, you can, technically, face the final dungeon with only Celes, Edgar and Setzer. Did you ever expect something like that, or for those three in particular to be the ones who'd be picked as mandatory party members by the game, rather than optional ones you could simply not have with you while facing the final boss?
I do think this is a very strong argument against saying that Terra is the game's protagonist: she misses about a third of the World of Balance (half of that by not being in Sabin's team on the team split, half of it by having her breakdown + coma), and then is optional in the World of Ruin.
In any case, I find it interesting that FFVI manages to do something that, while being a very traditional trope for films and other forms of narratives, is rare in videogames - pulling out a "putting the team back together" plot. And, in a unique twist, it lets you know the team before it was broken up, giving greater weight to the work that goes in pulling them back together.
On the other hand, it does means that, right now, you're already in the "preparing for the final dungeon" phase of the game, even if in Final Fantasy VI part of the preparation is buffing up your team to the full 14 characters available, making it one of the longer ones ever. The Word of Ruin has plenty of stuff to do, but the fact that it's theoretically almost all optional (practically, going into the tower with less than nine characters is going to make things challenging) is one of those things that, I feel, ought to warrant some discussion, although I can concede that it'll be better had once you know all that is to be found among that potentially optional content.
It would be very funny if Sabin were the only one qualified to wear the princess dress, as the closest thing to a princess in your party; Edgar doesn't qualify, he's a king, and Terra isn't a princess as far as we know and even if she was at some point in the past there's no kingdom or people left for her to be princess to. So Sabin has to wear the crown he sprinted away from and gets a kickin' rad dress and then goes to punch Kefka in the face repeatedly.
Otherwise it goes to... Relm, maybe? I think she's the only other female party member who you don't have with you? Or Shadow, who's been doing the Batman Voice (TM) and is actually the princess of, uh, Doma I guess, in this re-imagining?
It would be very funny if Sabin were the only one qualified to wear the princess dress, as the closest thing to a princess in your party; Edgar doesn't qualify, he's a king, and Terra isn't a princess as far as we know and even if she was at some point in the past there's no kingdom or people left for her to be princess to. So Sabin has to wear the crown he sprinted away from and gets a kickin' rad dress and then goes to punch Kefka in the face repeatedly.
Otherwise it goes to... Relm, maybe? I think she's the only other female party member who you don't have with you? Or Shadow, who's been doing the Batman Voice (TM) and is actually the princess of, uh, Doma I guess, in this re-imagining?
Just noting it here but if it turns out Shadow is a woman under his disguise I will be completely unsurprised. The game is cooking some kind of twist with him and if it doesn't I will be disappointed.
Just noting it here but if it turns out Shadow is a woman under his disguise I will be completely unsurprised. The game is cooking some kind of twist with him and if it doesn't I will be disappointed.
Speaking of Shadow, I hope you kept a backup save of the path where you let him to die? There's some dialogues that are different if he's dead rather than alive that might be worth checking out, once you know how to see them with a minimum of fuss.
Or you could just look those out on a playthrough or wiki, I guess, but that's not as satisfying as experiencing the difference yourself.
Reminds me that the fun thing to do in games where you name the characters is give everyone the same name as the villain. Like calling everyone Sephiroth when we get to FF7 ~
Although it would no doubt be very funny, I will not, in fact, be attempting to run Kefka's tower, even this were possible at this stage.
For the sake of humour though, let's run you through what happen if I do try it:
I run into a Great Malboro, a Vector Lythos, and a Great Behemoth as my first random encounter. Now, these enemies mostly use physical attacks - they have nasty special moves, but they don't use them every turn, focusing on physical attacks that only deal 100-200 damage, which even outnumbered 3 to 1 is surprisingly manageable. I only have second tier spell, but as long as I can identify the right elemental weaknesses…
I can hit enemies for 4k damage, less if they don't have a weakness; even considering these are endgame enemies with massive health bars, I can still kill a Great Malboro in two hits, before it has time to use Bad Breath if I'm lucky.
By alternating Cura and offensive spells, I can take out the enemies one at a time, even surviving a Fireball from the Vector Lythos.
At least until…
Meteor acts as the 'you must be this tall to ride' bar, and Celes goes down.
Still, if I were very persistent, and very lucky, it's conceivable that I could slowly make my way through this area, at least using Celes, my strongest character.
With that said.
I'm not going to do that. That would be insane.
So let's travel back in time.
The actual dialogue which plays out once we get the Falcon goes like this:
"With this," Edgar says, "I think we just might have a chance…"
Celes adds, "Now we'll be able to get up to the top of Kefka's tower!"
"If we land up there," Edgar continues, "we should be able to get inside and launch our assault."
Setzer chimes in: "And we'll be able to look for the rest of our friends…"
Just as he says this, a white bird flies past the party, and Celes has an expression of surprise - does she recognize that bird?
I need to pencil in 'white birds as a symbol of hope' when I talk about this game's use of recurring symbols.
As the bird flies away, Celes asks Setzer to follow it, a hunch telling her this will be where they find their friend.
Setzer complies, and the ship heads on its own towards the next step of our journey - an unassuming town to the southwest.
And there we are, in front of the town of… Actually I don't know, I haven't gone there yet.
The game is doing something really interesting here: it is putting the next step of the journey right in front of us, but it's leaving us the choice of whether to go there. But we have control of the Falcon; we can, if we so choose, pull up, fly away, and head to any of the dozen of grey dots still on the. We can seemingly tackle this world in any order we wish, although what reason would we have to not head to where we're pointed at first? After all, our party is woefully incomplete, made up only 4 characters out of 12 we've recruited before the apocalypse.
But.
When Celes and Edgar say we can make our landing at Kefka's tower and launch our final attack to save the world?
We can actually do that. The game lets us.
I have deliberately omitted a huge chunk of dialogue in my excerpt of this sequence earlier.
We can just. Go and fight the final boss. Right now.*
*Theoretically the game could still put a barrier that says 'okay but please come back later' halfway through this dungeon, but I asked to check and yeah, that's it.
Earlier in the thread I said it would be very funny when we got to see what exactly is the minimum mandatory party for the endgame, and there it is: because you can technically skip Sabin in Tzen, the only characters that are strictly necessary are: Celes, because you start with her on the Solitary Island and play as her while recruiting the other two; Edgar, because his story beat unlocks Castle Figaro's underground travel which you need to get to Kohlingen; and Setzer, because only he can unlock the path to the airship. Coincidentally, it's most likely that the reason why three characters specifically is the minimum is because the game asks you to split into three parties for the Tower raid.
The only mandatory characters to beat Final Fantasy VI are Celes, Edgar and Setzer.
Of all people.
Now, I'm not going to relitigate the moral virtues and cool factor of Edgar or Setzer, at this point I think everyone has come to their own decisions on whether they think these are cool dudes or not. But, hmm.
FFVI is an ensemble game, rather than a game with a true main protagonist, but it also very obviously has a 'main cast' and secondary characters/hangers-on. Of all characters, Celes is one of those with the best claim to being the 'main character' of the game, I think. Edgar was very important early on and remains, clearly, important throughout, even if in the background. Setzer is… He's a keymaster; he exists to gate off certain parts of the plot based on your access to his airship, but he has otherwise very little core involvement in the plot and no strong relationship to other characters.
In fact, none of these three characters have a meaningful relationship to one another beyond Setzer having once attempted to kidnap Celes and her tricking him on a coin-toss. Celes and Edgar are neither particularly close nor strongly adversarial, and Edgar and Setzer have no displayed feelings towards one another.
On a narrative level, as a cast for the finale, this absolutely doesn't work.
Which is totally fine! It's good, even! It's obvious that this should not be how we approach the endgame, at all. It's being offered here as a cheeky option, but everything, from the mechanical to the narrative level, is saying 'DO NOT DO THIS STUPID THING.'
But you can try it and that's fascinating to me.
Because let's take Mass Effect 2, for instance, a game made many years later, in a different era of gaming, when ideas about what you can get away with as a developer (and let your player get away with) had changed. Mass Effect 2 famously concludes with a 'suicide mission' in which you take every character you've recruited in the game and do a raid on an evil (space) tower from which your character do not expect to return alive (but most likely will unless you were deliberately very lazy). And Mass Effect 2 lets you skip some characters out of its roster… But only 2. You still need to recruit 8 characters out of the 10 maximum (12 with DLC) before you can attempt the suicide mission. The game isn't confident enough (probably with good reason!) to let you just try and smash your face into the Collector Base with a team made up of literally just Shepard, Miranda and Jacob, three people who basically didn't know each other until five minutes ago.
Cowards. Look at the way Final Fantasy VI does it. Final Fantasy VI lets you try it with three people.
Incidentally - in theory, if Celes, Edgar, and Setzer had been my favorite pre-apocalypse characters, maybe I could try and tough it out mechanically, even if they only have second-tier spells and low levels for endgame content.
Except the game splits them into three parties. So if I approach the endgame with my current team, the maximum size of any party is going to be two characters, with the other two having only one.
As seen earlier, I would obviously get annihilated.
Which is a very good mechanical reason to go out looking for every lost party members, not just my four favorite to cram into one party and faceroll the game with.
…which I have mixed feelings about.
Because it means, as I predicted ages ago, that I will need to use all available characters to form three parties for the final dungeon. Even the ones I don't really care about the mechanics of, or the ones I didn't bother training with Magicites back in the World of Balance. And as much as I understand wanting to make the player use all your beautiful characters that you've lovingly crafted for them for the big finale… The very idea of fitting Gau, Relm, Mog and Setzer in a broader party comp makes me tired to think about.
But hey, plus side?
We don't have to think about that for several hours yet. And we have plenty of time to give those characters some leveling up and Magicite-based stats and magics.
Reminds me that the fun thing to do in games where you name the characters is give everyone the same name as the villain. Like calling everyone Sephiroth when we get to FF7 ~
So, Kefka's Tower. This is the reason certain characters become really good, actually, and not just "I mean, they're alright, but the party limit is four, so..."
Like, there are plenty of characters who become fully functional with only a bit of gear and some levels for HP, maybe a spell or two. Toss Mog and Setzer on a party with two other people and you've got something halfway workable. Gau and Relm plus two others is the same. Then you have a main party of the people who you regularly use.
Side note: That rich guy who dined with General Leo and sold South Figaro out to the Empire by letting the soldiers in, and who had a double secret basement dungeon where Imperials kept Celes? I can still find him in his house, musing that "Just when we thought we'd be able to rest easier with the Empire gone… now we have Kefka to worry about!" While I can still go and explore his dungeon basement.
Fun fact: said dungeon basement is one of only two areas in the entire World of Ruin (excluding the Veldt which just has everything) where you can still encounter World of Balance enemies. The other area kind of makes sense, but this one... for whatever reason, the basement still has the entire escape area accessible, filled with Vector Hounds and Imperial Soldiers.
World's most dedicated Imperials wandering around down there, that's for sure.
That's… Siegfried, right? I had nearly completely forgotten that guy existed, I'd assumed we'd be seeing more of this after his initial intro in the Phantom Train, when he grabbed some loot and ran away, but I guess not. And we have Sabin in the group, who should recognize him - but I guess because Sabin is technically missable, he can't be included in the dialogue. Baffling way to handle these things.
Siegfried is kind of weird, honestly. Feels like a cut-content Gilgamesh type guy who was supposed to show up more in the game, but... nope, this is it, two whole appearances despite having a unique sprite and everything. Just vanishes off into wherever after this bit. Hell, doesn't even show up in Castle Figaro proper with the rest of the thieves.
As if to drive home the point that we're following after a bunch of thieves, we go through a winding sandworm-dug corridors full of chests... all of which are, of course, empty, having already been looted.
I do honestly love small touches like these in dungeons, where you go through an area that was already looted before you got there. Double points for there being the occasional slightly more hidden treasure like the Soul Saber later that the thieves missed. FFV actually had a bit like this with the Skull Eater cave, iirc - releasing Lone Wolf means he loots several of the chests, but not the ones deeper in the cave guarded by said Skull Eaters.
The thieves gunned straight for the vault with the castle's most valuable treasures, so we can still find some loot out of the way - including the Royal Crown, a unique headgear that boosts all stats but can only be worn by 'those of royal blood.' Which, hey, guess what we have in our party?
Oh hey, one of the best helms for Sabin and Edgar get. Just... laying right there. Hell, I almost thought there was a second one shortly after this in Darril's Tomb (though it turned out to be me misreading Regal Gown when I played, whoops).
This is the toughest fight in the game by far, so far. But it feels brutally unfair, and like there is a solution that I just don't know about. So I go to the Wiki to look up the Tentacles.
Here's the thing: A character cannot be both Hasted and Slowed. And the Slow effect from Stun/Entwine is a prerequisite for a Grab move. Within the fiction of the game, the Tentacles first need to stun, slow, or get a hold onto someone for them to be vulnerable to a grab, otherwise they can presumably just dodge it. The Tentacles can only take hold of characters it has made vulnerable to it.
And the Hermes Shoes grant the Haste status automatically. What I didn't realize was that either because of a feature of the Haste spell itself or because of the relic's own effect, this grants immunity to Slow.
...Yeah, as you discovered. If you know what you're doing with Hermes Sandals (which admittedly are a pretty useful relic all on their own anyways), it's a piece of cake. Without? No idea how I beat it back in the day.
Edgar tells everyone to hide, and allows the thieves to leave with all their treasure. When Celes raises this after the thieves are gone, Edgar tells her that he couldn't care less about treasure, what they need to worry about is Kefka, and the thieves haven't even done anything wrong, really. Which… I'm not sure I agree with; if these guys were entering a castle in which everyone had already actually died to pick up buried treasure, I certainly wouldn't find fault in their action, but the population of Figaro is still barely alive and they didn't seem to pause to help them. That, in my books, is a darker shade than gray.
Still, putting aside… other issues with Edgar… that he doesn't care about the treasure after these guys, in effect, helped him save his entire people (even though that's not what they knew they were doing) speaks well of him, I think. A king allowing his nation's treasure to be pillaged would be rather more questionable in circumstances where normal issues of politics and warfare apply, but, well.
It's the end of the world and we're trying to kill God. Let's focus on what matters.
I've said it before, but throw out the one... admittedly quite large hiccup of his brief interaction with Relm, and I think Edgar makes for a nice, well rounded character, especially if you compare him to the last flirtatious prince we got in Edge back in FFIV. There's still those character flaws of him hitting on anything that moves, but he's both able to use that to his advantage at times (getting the group out of Vector ahead of the Emperor's trap because he seduced the serving staff), and has a clear love and loyalty of his kingdom and his subjects, with everything from this to intentionally tricking Sabin to take the crown and let his brother be free to forcing shop owners in Figaro Castle to take his money.
Also, while the thieves were able to abscond with most of the treasure, they didn't think to check if the sword held by the central statue in that room was more than just ornamental - this 'Soul Saber' is a sword that "drains MP and may cast Death upon striking an enemy." Scary! Don't know how useful it actually is, though.
Not particularly useful, I think. Especially considering the very next town you'll visit has a similar weapon with the same effect that doesn't cost MP, even if it's Setzer exclusive.
We can also buy the Debilitator, a Tool for Edgar which inflicts a random elemental weakness on an enemy. Could be useful? Depends on if it works on bosses, I guess.
Debilitator does, in fact, work on bosses. Don't know if it works on all bosses, mind you, but it's a pretty handy tool to have in Edgar's back pocket.
The main issue is that I never equipped Setzer with a Magicite, so he has no Magic, only his basic attack and Slots, which gives shit results 100% of the time. Dude's pretty useless.
But yeah, despite his uselessness in terms of magic if you didn't previously raise him, I was able to scrape a pretty useful build out of Setzer for this dungeon by just loading him up with a Genji Glove and two sets of Dice. Because you see, his Dice weapon has a very interesting special effect - it rolls for damage, instead of being affected by stats. He rolls two six sided dice, and does more damage the higher he rolls. This could be as piddling as one hundred... or in my case, rolling high against Dullahan and dealing over 5000 damage in one go.
There's also a cute interaction on the 'mimic' concept in the form of the Angler Whelk, a monster-in-a-box miniboss that has a chest in its mouth to lure in adventurers.
Fun fact, if either the head or the shell of Angler Whelk dies, it drops a claw for Sabin. So, if you kill both parts at once somehow... you get two claws. And this is the only way to get two of these claws, which are iirc one of the best weapons Sabin can get.
Not particularly relevant unless you plan on dual wielding with Sabin, but still.
Dullahan is no joke. It has first strike and always opens the fight with Lv. ? Holy before anyone can act, which deals 900+ damage to everyone it hits (though it appears to consistently miss Celes and Sabin, and I'm not sure why; it must be a piece of their equipment, but I'm not aware of them having a Holy-immune effect).
Unfortunately, it also causes the normal damage, and in the above case Ceres doesn't know Fire, only Fira, meaning she has to go FULL POWER on her own team, dealing severe damage.
You know, I'm honestly kind of surprised that your Celes doesn't have the basic Fire spell by this point in the game? She had a chance to learn it from Ifrit way back in the Magitek Facility, and later in the game you have Bismark who I basically rotate on everyone for the sake of "learns Fire/Blizzard/Thunder in just 5 AP". Guess that's just me, though.
I do think this is a very strong argument against saying that Terra is the game's protagonist: she misses about a third of the World of Balance (half of that by not being in Sabin's team on the team split, half of it by having her breakdown + coma), and then is optional in the World of Ruin.
Really, FFVI doesn't have a main-main character. There's certainly characters who get more screentime and focus than others - just compare Terra, Celes, or Edgar to someone like Shadow, Gau, or god forbid the optional Mog - but I think the ensemble cast is just a part of what makes the game so enjoyable. It fumbles on this sometimes, don't get me wrong, Cyan is peak "powerful character arc then sits in the back of the party for a dozen hours", but I do like how the game goes out of its way to try and give every character a bit of focus. Double so now that Omi is in the World of Ruin, and most characters have a little something or other in terms of additional story beats and quests.
Waiting with baited breath for the "Let's Play Every Zelda Game In Order Of Release" Thread. Zelda II is a personal favorite that I am sure won't frustrate anyone ever.
Still, if I were very persistent, and very lucky, it's conceivable that I could slowly make my way through this area, at least using Celes, my strongest character.
And there we are, in front of the town of… Actually I don't know, I haven't gone there yet.
The game is doing something really interesting here: it is putting the next step of the journey right in front of us, but it's leaving us the choice of whether to go there. But we have control of the Falcon; we can, if we so choose, pull up, fly away, and head to any of the dozen of grey dots still on the. We can seemingly tackle this world in any order we wish, although what reason would we have to not head to where we're pointed at first? After all, our party is woefully incomplete, made up only 4 characters out of 12 we've recruited before the apocalypse.
But.
When Celes and Edgar say we can make our landing at Kefka's tower and launch our final attack to save the world?
Yup, from this point forward? The World of Ruin is almost entirely open world. Sure, there's a couple areas or events I can think of that require a different one to be completed first, but you pretty much have free reign to wander where you will, and can pick up characters in whatever order if you know where they are. Personally I'm already up to six characters, and know where a number of others are.
As soon as I get over the brainrot and just bother leveling my party so they can actually take on some of the threats on the way.
Because it means, as I predicted ages ago, that I will need to use all available characters to form three parties for the final dungeon. Even the ones I don't really care about the mechanics of, or the ones I didn't bother training with Magicites back in the World of Balance. And as much as I understand wanting to make the player use all your beautiful characters that you've lovingly crafted for them for the big finale… The very idea of fitting Gau, Relm, Mog and Setzer in a broader party comp makes me tired to think about.
Eh, for a lot of these characters you can just slap on a couple high level magicite and drop them in a more competent party for a little bit, and they'll be ready to go.
That said? I can't deny that while this open world part of the World of Ruin is pretty cool... it's also part of the reason that I've never actually finished a full run of FFVI. I tend to just sort of run out of gas during the final preparations arc where I'm going "okay gotta train everybody up to be viable in Kefka's Tower since I can bring 12 people."
Siegfried is kind of weird, honestly. Feels like a cut-content Gilgamesh type guy who was supposed to show up more in the game, but... nope, this is it, two who appearances despite having a unique sprite and everything. Just vanishes off into wherever after this bit. Hell, doesn't even show up in Castle Figaro proper with the rest of the thieves.
The other area kind of makes sense, but this one... for whatever reason, the basement still has the entire escape area accessible, filled with Vector Hounds and Imperial Soldiers.
World's most dedicated Imperials wandering around down there, that's for sure.
*
