cB557
voOOP
I'm pretty sure you're serious when you say this, but given the thread so far I can't entirely be sure this isn't a joke and you're getting that parallel save going right now.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Fair, fair. And yeah, the attack command is mostly just... kinda there for the first half of the game especially, between infinite use commands that are just better for most characters, and magic for others. I think about the only times I used attack in the World of Balance were for Locke in the rare case he isn't robbing someone blind, and Cyan when I got two Kazekiri katanas and threw him a Genji Glove to go Wind God.
Depending on your relics, the attack command does become a bit more viable in the World of Ruin, though. A lot of special infinite use commands characters have run into scaling issues the farther you go, especially for characters like say Edgar who have piddling magic stats and little reason to raise it higher. Plus, weapons only get better and better - there's the aforementioned Dice for Setzer, but you've also already got the Ultima Weapon which scales with HP (meaning the farther in the game you get, the stronger it becomes), and a few others I can think of. We'll cross that bridge when you come across some of those weapons and relics, I suppose.
chibipoe
May I tell you of the glory that is Catradora?
- Location
- Astoria, Oregon
Just reverse the engines so the thing that goes down instead goes up. Very simple
This sounds like G1 Transformers technology, where you turn a giant rocket into an intake valve to suck off excess energy from the sun so it doesn't go nova. (this is after building a citybot from a
- Location
- Maryland
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Add to that, they get an additional multiplier - either x2 or x3 - if the dice all come up the same face. So, yeah. Incredibly swingy. Incredibly strong. And this isn't even their final form!
- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
Yeah, for example the Enhancer you can just buy is the best weapon for Terra and Celes if they use magic solely on the +7 Magic bonus.
Sometime Attack is useful (Cyan dual-wielding Kazekiris, Setzer dual-wielding Dice, a high-level character with Ultima Weapon) but it's build-dependent.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
The Enhancer is, in fact, so good that it's canonically the weapon Terra wields in any crossover appearances she makes. If you see a picture of Terra and she's wielding a rather distinctive slender curved sword, that's the Enhancer.
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I've personally never had trouble with the Tentacles. They just never did enough damage. Maybe there is something different about the Advance version.
This I need to talk about. As you know, this guy drops the Dragon Claws, and killing either the Shell or the head ends the fight and gives you only one. There is a way actually kill both and get two. It's the Banish spell. Using it, you can instantly kill both the head and the shell at the same time, getting two claws. Among doing other things. Banish doesn't work like other instant death attacks and does... interesting things. It's entirely possible for the spell to nail the head and miss the shell, leaving only it and having the battle continue. If this happens, you will have to kill the shell as well, despite that not usually being how the battle is supposed to happen. Doing this will also net you two claws.
The REAL fun is if Banish misses the head and nails the shell. The shell will leave the fight, leaving only the sprite of the head. If this happens, You can still kill the head for a second claw... if it's damaged enough. After being hit twice the head will retreat into the shell... which doesn't exist anymore. And with no more enemies on the screen, the game will declare you the winner of the fight, ending it instantly.
By the way the Advance version of the game has a bonus dungeon with special enemies. One is Neslug, a buffed version of the Angler Welk. It drops Mog's strongest spear, Gungnir. There is no killing the shell this time; it has the same invincibility the Guardian has. Oh, and the shell casts White Wind, healing the head for 9999.
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.
This I need to talk about. As you know, this guy drops the Dragon Claws, and killing either the Shell or the head ends the fight and gives you only one. There is a way actually kill both and get two. It's the Banish spell. Using it, you can instantly kill both the head and the shell at the same time, getting two claws. Among doing other things. Banish doesn't work like other instant death attacks and does... interesting things. It's entirely possible for the spell to nail the head and miss the shell, leaving only it and having the battle continue. If this happens, you will have to kill the shell as well, despite that not usually being how the battle is supposed to happen. Doing this will also net you two claws.
The REAL fun is if Banish misses the head and nails the shell. The shell will leave the fight, leaving only the sprite of the head. If this happens, You can still kill the head for a second claw... if it's damaged enough. After being hit twice the head will retreat into the shell... which doesn't exist anymore. And with no more enemies on the screen, the game will declare you the winner of the fight, ending it instantly.
By the way the Advance version of the game has a bonus dungeon with special enemies. One is Neslug, a buffed version of the Angler Welk. It drops Mog's strongest spear, Gungnir. There is no killing the shell this time; it has the same invincibility the Guardian has. Oh, and the shell casts White Wind, healing the head for 9999.
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Final Fantasy VI, Part 18: Terra and Relm
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And so!
We've unlocked the airship in the World of Ruin, and now the whole planet lies before us. We can go anywhere, and do anything.
So obviously I reload an earlier save to complete a puzzle I forgot to finish.
The tomb puzzle asks you a fairly simple task, you have four sets of four letters and you need to put them in order. The trick is that you're trying to write a sentence in reverse order - here, "THE WORLD IS SQUARE." Because these games were published by Squaresoft, get it? Doing so reveals a secret inscription which tells us that the 'Growth Egg' was hidden on a particular level of the Tomb, we go there, and that's how we get a new relic.
The Growth Egg… Doubles the XP rate of the character it's equipped to. Wow. That's pretty good. Only one egg to go around though, so it's likely to cause XP discrepancy issues unless regularly swapped around - but perhaps it is best use as an efficient way of 'catching up' those characters who are behind in level for whatever reason.
Speaking of!
Let's go back to Searching for Friends, both the quest we're tasked with and the absolutely fantastic music that accompany us as soon as we get the airship and replaces the previously overbearing, sorrowful organ piece that was the previous overworld tune, filling it with hope.
The bird we followed last time led us to Maranda. The main thing we learn there is that a "swordsman," with a "heart full of turmoil" and "speaking strangely," has been through - so Cyan was there not long ago, it seems. No immediate sign of where he is right now but, while I'm here, I figure I might as well pay a visit to the soldier's girlfriend - the one for whom we sent all these letters, and who is now fallen. I figure, if we are to be the bearer of bad news, at least she'll know what happened and why he went so silent.
Well.
The 'flowers' aren't true flowers - because the world is dying and there are no new flowers blooming, they're made of silk, which is a really beautiful and sad touch of worldbuilding. But, huh, more to the matter at end, what the fuck? Lola's boyfriend is dead, we know this. So who's sending the flowers? Well, she shows us one of the letters he sent along with them, and it reads…
"My beloved Lola,
Art thou well? We have rebuilt as much of the village as we could hope to. I believe I should be able to return to thy side before too long."
…
Cyan.
Dude. What the hell.
I guess… I guess he met that girl and he didn't have the heart to let her know her boyfriend was dead and then he started a whole impersonation scheme to keep her from finding out the truth and being sad? Maybe because he figured the world's going to end before she finds out so it doesn't matter? Between that and all the handcrafted flowers, though, it's like - that's not okay. You can't just craft lies like that for people to inhabit without their knowledge.
I know it comes from a good place, but… yeesh.
Lola has written a letter in answer, as well, and asks if we'd be so kind as to tie it to the carrier pigeon outside - which is our clue as to the next step of the journey, as doing so makes the camera follow the bird as it flies, allowing us to see its destination and therefore where Cyan most likely is. It's a clever device, I like it.
Looks like Zozo, if I'm not mistaken.
Intriguing! I wonder why Cyan would be in Zozo, of all place, but at least we have our next breadcrumb right there.
So anyway I just go to the Opera House instead.
Look.
I appreciate that FFVI does what no previous game really did and just goes open world in its last stretch, fully opening the map for you to tackle in any order. But that means I'm getting hit right in the ADHD. There is no way I can hope to keep a single track on anything.
Anyway, a dragon has taken over the opera - wild guess, it's one of those "eight dragons" that we have to defeat to find the "Crusader." So let's give it a shot! We need to find the utility room, pull a switch that drops us onto the stage, and then we face the beast.
The Earth Dragon opens with Quake and instantly hits my whole party for lethal damage.
To cut a long story short - I have access to Float, which means I can make the party immune to earth attacks like Quake, which at least let me work out how outmatched I am, and the answer is 'pretty.' The Earth Dragon has powerful attacks that can one-shot individual party members, and it likes to surprise me with a 50G ability that cancels Float and follow it up with Quake before I have time to reapply the buff. I decide to leave and come back once I have enough HP to be outside of the one-shot range.
Alright, so, next order of business - Terra. I am, frankly, much more interested in getting her back than I am Cyan, who's like, fine, but he's not my powerhouse with one of the most interesting storylines in the game.
So let's head back to Mobliz!
Wheeeere Terra is gone. As are Duane and Katarin. Huh. The children appear to be alone. And they have some… interesting comments to make.
…you know, it's not surprising that two 16 years old at the end of the world without any adult to give them advice would end up having to deal with a teen pregnancy they hadn't anticipated, but that's rough. Like… there's no midwife in Mobliz. Literally the only adult is Terra, and I'm not sure she even knows how babies are made, let alone how to safely guide a mother through childbirth. Which, considering how Final Fantasy loves mothers dying in childbirth as a trope, is… yeesh.
Also interestingly, this gives us a rough timeline for the game? Katarin showed no signs of being pregnant the last time we were there, which means events within the World of Ruin have to have covered at least a couple of months so far, if not more - which is a decent duration considering all the traveling and exploring we're doing even with magical transports, and better than some games trying to convince you that it all definitely fits within like, a week.
I try to find the others, but all I can find is Katarin and Duane's home, where Duane is moping about how he doesn't know what to do because Katarin is pregnant. Yeah, typically useless male teenage boyfriend unable to deal with life-changing news that need important decisions to be made.
So, in a fantastic case of overthinking things and making them more complicated for myself as well as taking children far too literally, I put two and two together and come up with five - the kids said Katarin ran away, Duane says he doesn't know what to do and Katarin isn't there, so my guess is she fled to one of the other towns in search of some kind of help. Which would be absolutely reckless in a world full of high-level monsters but it wouldn't be the first time this happens in an FF game.
So I grab the airship and I go investigate every nearby town looking for Katarin. All mostly fruitless, although an NPC dialogue does tell me that Deathgaze, a monster named alongside Humbaba and the eight dragons as one of the great beasts unleashed upon the world, is a flying foe who stays within the clouds, and who could only be found using an airship. Interesting!
In the process I get distracted and find a bunch of stuff that I'll get too later because I think I already did the 'this is what it's like playing an open world with ADHD' on FFV and I need to keep it fresh, so let's move on.
It turns out I massively overcomplicated everything, and Katarin and Terra were right there in the village all along, behind an inexplicable hidden door inside Duane's house.
Terra and Katarin explains that they found out Katarin is pregnant, and she couldn't be happier, but when she told Duane he suddenly turned cold. Yeah, that's just a classic boyfriend move. Just as she says this, Duane comes back into the room to apologize and say he didn't know how to handle the news, but now he's gotten over it and is ready to face this future together.
What do you mean, 'come back home'? SHE IS LITERALLY IN YOUR BASEMENT.
But then, before either of them can say anything, the earth shakes! Humbaba is back!
Terra begs us to protect the village, saying she still doesn't have the strength to fight, and we rush outside to confront the monster.
The Debilitator's animation looks sick, and has strong "Vegeta! What does the scooter say about his power level?!" vibes.
Humbaba is weak to poison and, after one use of the Debilitator, is randomly assigned a weakness to Fire, which given that all my characters have one or more of Poison/Bio/Fira, means we can hit the beast for massive damage - and very quickly hit a scripted gate whereupon Humbaba uses his breath to literally blow away half my party. No, really, he removes them from the fight completely.
But of course, that's a ploy - an excuse to change the party roster and leave enough room, so that Terra can come out and join us.
Terra joins the fight, and she is in permanent Trance. The green bar that's replaced her ATB gauge normally marks how much time Terra has left in Trance, and this time it's not emptying at all - she is at full power for the whole fight, which is just a fantastic way of portraying her reaching some kind of big character inflection moment and powering up from her resolve to save her friends.
…still, Trance Terra here is filling in for two characters, which mitigates the benefits of having such a powerhouse on our side, and Humbaba still has some fairly threatening move like 1000 Needles, which our character are no longer one-shotted by… Provided they are at full HP when it hits, which is never a guarantee.
Still, the fight is, if not a cakewalk, at least not too much trouble. A huge aspect of the esper system is that it lets us teach any magic to any character, and that means I have no real 'white mage' - everyone can serve as a backup healer. Edgar has the most white magic out of the group, but if he's done, either Sabin or Terra can flexibly step in to Raise him and heal the group; I can choose any one character to be my healbot based on who has the best offense for a given boss fight.
It's a huge boost in tactical flexibility that comes at the cost of the characters having clear mechanical identity - sure, I am still using Sabin's Blitz and Edgar's Tools more than I am their magic most of the time, but everyone has a solid basis in magic to fill in any gaps and it kind of smooths over my party comp, which is both a good and bad thing.
Today, it means Humbaba gets his shit pushed in.
As Humbaba is defeated, all the children gather in thanks - but then, Terra drifts down to the ground, still in Trance form, and they all scatter in fear.
More comments - "It's scary," "I'm afraid" - and Terra looks down sadly at the fear she's inspiring in the same people she wanted to save.
But then…
A young girl steps forward, saying "Mama… It's you, isn't it? I can tell…" And then, one by one, the other children realize who it is they're looking at and approach, until Terra is surrounded by children calling her Mama. As if overcome by a sudden realization, Terra blurts out: "I'll fight!"
That feeling that was rising inside her, she finally understands… was love.
"Children, Mama has to go away for a while to make the world a safer place for you to live! But I promise I'll be back as soon as I can!"
…
It took me a while to chew on this scene, because on the other hand yes, big emotional moment, on the other hand I struggled with like, the internal logic of what had actually happened.
But I guess it makes sense. Way back when he met Ramuh, one of the things he told is that Terra had lost control of herself because she was "afraid of what she is," and that it would subside once she understood her true nature. And when the young espers flew out of the Gate, they lost control of themselves and waged massive destruction which they immediately regretted, their true natures clearly being mostly non-violent. Espers are physically influenced by their emotions - as beings of magic, their anger literally manifests in destruction, their fear in flight, their anxiety over their nature in loss of control over themselves.
So because Terra struggled with understanding and accepting that she loved other people - the children under her care, the friends she made in the World of Balance - that love, that desire to protect, didn't at first result in greater strength, but in completely the opposite: a loss of power that came about because she couldn't understand her own feelings, and any emotion an esper doesn't understand or control risks causing them to lose control of their self and their magic. Any major personal emotional breakthrough an esper goes through means a chrysalis-like phase of powered-down turmoil before they emerge with a better understanding of themselves and their magic.
Which… I guess… might be why Kefka managed to beat all the espers at once? As ridiculous a plot development as this was, in light of this, if we consider that the young espers were temporarily magically crippled by their guilt and fear over the destruction they'd just wrought, then suddenly it means Kefka was just lucky, he got a sneaky move on them precisely when they were completely open and vulnerable. Doesn't explain why the older espers had the same issue, or what was that nullification magic Kefka used and where he got it from, or how he turned them all to magicite, but it's… something. It helps a little with that plot point, although baffling twists that only kinda make sense in retrospect are one of the worst kinds of twist.
But for Terra, I think it works. It's part of her growing more in touch with her own humanity - both on the human side, and on the esper side, because we've long since learned that espers are fundamentally just… people, with all the feelings and weaknesses and virtues thereof. There is no reason why being a human-esper hybrid should make Terra some kind of emotionless creature incapable of love; rather her emotions are blunted by trauma, by mind control, by being raised in captivity to the Empire to be used as a weapon of war, allowed even less humanity than Celes was. But she is capable of caring, of love, and of dedicating herself to others. She was capable of it all along, only it was buried under layers of trauma and Imperial conditioning. She was raised to be nothing but a weapon, a mindless tool of war to wage destruction without a single feeling, not even the sadistic pleasure Kefka took in it.
And now she's grown beyond it.
And what I deeply appreciate is that this love isn't romantic in nature. It's something that's kinda loomed over this plotline in the past - Terra typically has her ponderings over her own nature when faced with stuff like Edgar's flirtation or Celes and Locke's will-they-won't-they psychodrama, but in the end, her revelation has nothing to do with falling in love with someone. It has to do with learning to love the world that raised her in nothing but hurt, and loving the weakest and most vulnerable of all people, children - that they might get a chance to grow in peace the way she didn't.
It's more than that, though, it's, hm.
When Terra starts the game, she has literally no agency whatsoever. With the slave crown on her brow, she is a puppet to be ordered around by other soldiers, and controlled by the player in battle. She is incapable of making a decision. Then, she's found by other, friendlier people - but she has no drive, no motive force; whether it's to get her to safety or to try to use her magic for the benefit of the rebellion, she's being led around by others left and right at every turn. Only slowly does she start to regain something like agency, until it culminates here - instead of her friends coming to her, asking her to follow them, and her simply agreeing, Terra at first has to refuse, sort out her own priority, her feelings, her choices, and here, right now, make the decision to go fight Kefka for her own reasons, out of her own will.
It's good stuff, even if I'm always on the defensive when confronted with arcs about female characters becoming mother figures and getting depowered for a while and choosing to act to save their (surrogate) children.
Although, now that I think about it…
Surrogate parent-child relationship…
Post-apocalyptic setting…
The adult needs to protect the child from monsters roaming this world…
Fuck.
Credit to Icarus for this war crime.
We will not be interrogating these parallels any further.
Anyway, Terra affirms her resolve to save the world, rejoins the group, we regain control, and about six months pass during the fade screen.
Well okay no it's more that I misjudged the timeline, but Katarin's baby is kicking and she is already at the point where she is spending most of her time in bed waiting for the baby to come, so it looks more like the initial "find Mobliz" to "defeat Humbaba" period lasted longer than I had first thought - we've been wandering the World of Ruin for months now, which makes some sense given the distances involved before we get the airship.
Well, hopefully we can miraculously return basic sanitation to the world before her due date.
Fun fact: Terra is still higher-level than all my other characters.
Also Celes and Setzer both got booted out of the group for the entire post-Humbaba sequence but I'm not reloading just to find out if Celes has unique dialogue for that bit.
Now that we've recruited Terra, it's time to head to another one of the locations our friends have disappeared at. Like Zozo, to find Cyan. Or maybe trying to find Locke's trail. Or maybe checking out the Coliseum. Or seeing if we can now defeat the Earth Dragon…
Yeah no we're going to Jidoor.
Look, don't @ me, I'm like a dog, I do things arbitrarily.
The painting of the Emperor is actually why I thought it worth mentioning I went to the Coliseum - there's a soldier there who cryptically told us that if we saw the Emperor, we should greet him twice, which will be relevant shortly.
There's also that guy who gives us the secret to defeating Deathgaze - the monster can be fought repeatedly to winnow its health. Neat! Might have been better if we'd already met the damned thing but hey, at least we'll know whenever that meeting happens.
More importantly, some of the Jidoor citizens tell us that Owzer - the owner of the massive mansion in the rich district of the city, whom you might remember for his extensive collection of paintings - "found a skilled young artist and brought her back to his mansion to paint for him." Looks like we have a lead on Relm! Let's check out the shops, rest at the inn, and head for Owzer's mansion.
Immediately it becomes apparent that something is wrong. Not only is Relm not anywhere we can find, but neither is Owzer - in fact, the whole house is empty, but filled with a strange and possibly sinister blue light. And as soon as we attempt to climb the stairs, we are pushed back by some kind of presence…
That force pushes us back down the stairs - but, just as it does, something appears on the previously empty desk below: a diary. Owzer's diary.
Oh I see. We are doing a horror sequence!
…or at least one that borrows some visual and storytelling tropes from horror. It's definitely no longer scary, if it ever was, but I'm curious if my readers who played the game while young found it spooky. It's definitely angling for that with the diary, which tells us that Owzer spent a small fortune on a new painting, too large to be displayed on the first floor; then goes through a few artists which he met day after day, testing their work and finding them worthless, and that after his lamp broke, he bought a new one - one that was a 'tad pricey, but now everything's bright and cheery at the flip of a switch'. He started feeling strange then, and hearing strange sounds coming from his cellar - and the diary ends there. Classic stuff.
The lamp appears to play a key role in the spell put upon the house, and indeed once we find it and turn off the switch, the blue light goes away and we can ascend the stairs.
Interacting twice with this painting reveals the 'Emperor's Letter,' which I suppose was hidden in the portrait by the Emperor himself?? Which reveals that 'the legendary treasure sleeps where the mountains form a star.' The game is kinda vague with what its 'legendary treasures' are in any given reference (pretty sure Gestahl has used it to refer to the Warring Triad), but assuming this means the legendary treasure Locke has been looking for, let's keep this in mind for later.
There is no obvious path forward, but interacting with the painting of a beautiful woman causes us to be attacked by the painting itself, come to life!
These 'Misty' opponents aren't too tough to deal with, but like most of the house's more annoying inhabitants, they have high magic resistance, which makes them annoying to deal with considering most of my damage output is magic. Once defeated, we go through the painting and are dropped into…
…the spooky cellar basement.
This is one of the most high-production value dungeons in the game so far. While its basic framework is unexceptional, being just a house, this is the canvas (get it) on which it paints its attempt at a confusing, surreal, and spooky environment. The place is decorated with paintings, some of which are perfectly harmless, some of which are hostile, and some of which hide secret passageways necessary for progress. There are doors slamming on their own, portraits that move while you're not looking at them, and a variety of similar tricks. For instance, when we pass in front of this harmless seeming painting of a chair:
Our party is pulled up into the air, and then the figure of an old woman appears at the back of the painting, as if literally walking into the frame from the darkness inside, and initiating battle.
The Coeurl Cat are harmless. The Blade Dancer is what makes up 90% of the difficulty of the house. She is included in every type of random encounter I've rolled in the manor, and she has high HP, high magic resistance, responds to every attack with a 'Soul Dance' counter which drains 500-600 HP from one character, and her attack is to throw knives of increasing power every turn. I end up suffering several KOs due to her bullshit.
Among the house's prizes are the Moogle Suit (a piece of armor for Relm) and the Lich Ring, which functions like FFV's Bone Mail in that it turns the wearer undead - dunno that I have any use for it though, given that it doesn't seem to come with the Bone Mail's "also the best armor in the game" appeal to compensate for how annoying the undead status makes characters to heal.
And then there's this bullshit:
This room contains four floating chests; moving to the right tile causes one of the chests to float down and open, springing us with another Blade Dancer + Cats encounter. There are four of those in a row, and all of them are garbage. Seriously, they give out 293 gil, a potion, an ether and a gold needle. Absolute bullshit.
Also hey! That's a picture of Maria right there!
It also changes based on how we move, despite having no other properties and not being interactive. Spooooky. Also we have to go through a bunch of teleporting doors which drop us at seemingly random places of the dungeon - all in all it's not particularly difficult but it's disorienting, and the Blade Dancers are waging a war of attrition against us.
But, after a fight with a Stiif Life painting, we finally make our way to the cellar of the house, where the masterpiece has been stored with a full room to its full glory.
Look at this painting. A naked female figure, embraced by a robed, shadowy figure - we are in classic Eros/Thanatos tradition here, "The Maiden and Death," iterated upon in countless works of the Renaissance and used by Freud in his questionable analysis of human psychology. I love it when my humanities studies are relevant to video game bullshit.
Owzer, struggling to speak, tells us that a monster is possessing his 'prized goddess painting', and is hiding within the canvas. Relm, who does not seem fully in control of her actions (she doesn't talk to us or face us, but appears to be simply tending to the painting in some way) lets out a cry of disgust and strikes the painting, to Owzer's horror - he tells her that attacking the picture will only make matters worse; just then, the demon possessing the painting laughs, and declares that he won't let anyone get between him and his prize, 'the best painting he's had in a long time' - and attacks!
Judging from Chadarnook's dialogue, he's a demon that specifically possesses paintings, and he treats them as having a kind of reality of their own, saying 'the girl in the picture is mine' and clearly having some ability to make paintings come to life. He's clearly responsible for the events in the house, and fittingly, lightning flashes from the windows behind, landing the scene an air of spooky dynamism - it has some real Halloween children's cartoon energy, I love it.
Mechanically it's a straightforward fight. Chadarnook has two forms, his demon form and the goddess in the picture (whom we'll later learn is named Lakshmi), the goddess. They each have their own HP track, and Lakshmi is invincible, can Charm and inflict Doom, and counters every attack with a special move that inflicts an incurable HP drain over time effect (so there is absolutely no reason to attack her); the demon has 30k HP, is vulnerable to Fire, and attacks with powerful Lightning-elemental spells and attacks.
Even going in blind and not knowing it's pointless to attack Lakshmi though, my first move is to buff all characters with Regen, which ends up countering the HP drain effect, and every character is capable of casting both Fira and Cura, meaning I can sustain a steady barrage of weakness-targeting spells while keeping the party fully topped up. It's a bit of a drag because I'm not making any progress during the Lakshmi turns, but in the end it's a fairly easy battle.
Relm: "My work here is done."
Sabin: "But you didn't do anything."
Relm: *pulls her cape around and vanishes*
Now that the demon has been cast out, Owzer is overflowing with thanks - mostly not for saving his life though, but for saving the painting, which is more precious in his eyes than anything. He explains that he found a stone at the auction house (no prize for guessing this turns out to be the Magicite of the goddess/esper Lakshmi), and ever since looking at it, he's been overcome by the desire to have a portrait of Lakshmi painted (which I guess means Magicite can have mind-altering effects on humans around it, interesting). All the trash painters he went through described in his diary were ones he tried to have paint the goddess for him, but none found grace in his eyes - until Relm. He heard about her and had her brought to him, and she painted the goddess, until the demon came and possessed the painting.
…
Relm literally made the boss fight for this dungeon. She has magic that makes paintings come alive, we know that, and half of the fight is the demon hiding behind the invincible goddess painting which Relm created!
…waaait a minute.
How sure are we that the 'demon possessing paintings' isn't a backstory which Relm made up for the monster she deliberately painted alongside the goddess with her magic, as a prank?
I wouldn't put it past her.
Owzer tells us that, whatever the stone is, he doesn't need it anymore, and we pick up the Lakshmi Magicite, whereupon Relm tells Owzer she has to go now, but she'll be back to finish that painting - presumably after saving the world, and we all teleport out of the house.
And that's the Owzer Mansion complete. Honestly? Its owner ended up a surprisingly nice guy. Especially with his visual design frankly reminiscent of a more human Jabba the Hutt, he just seems like a decent dude who suffered a bad case of demonic incursion. And possibly evil child pranksters. Jury's still out on that one.
All in all? Owzer Mansion is kind of annoying on a mechanical level (tough, repetitive enemy encounters, mostly bad loot until the final reward, nobody likes getting lost in circles in teleporting doorways) but I respect it a lot for its presentation and taking a shot at being a spooky Halloween House sequence. It's a fun story beat, and our reward at the end is the Lakshmi Magicite which teaches the Curaga spell, our first Tier 3 spell! It was a nice, low-stakes capstone to the big heavy beat that was Terra's arc in this update.
Next up… Maybe we should check out Narshe? That frozen esper is definitely gonna be available now, and it'll only have taken the entire game.
We've unlocked the airship in the World of Ruin, and now the whole planet lies before us. We can go anywhere, and do anything.
So obviously I reload an earlier save to complete a puzzle I forgot to finish.
The tomb puzzle asks you a fairly simple task, you have four sets of four letters and you need to put them in order. The trick is that you're trying to write a sentence in reverse order - here, "THE WORLD IS SQUARE." Because these games were published by Squaresoft, get it? Doing so reveals a secret inscription which tells us that the 'Growth Egg' was hidden on a particular level of the Tomb, we go there, and that's how we get a new relic.
The Growth Egg… Doubles the XP rate of the character it's equipped to. Wow. That's pretty good. Only one egg to go around though, so it's likely to cause XP discrepancy issues unless regularly swapped around - but perhaps it is best use as an efficient way of 'catching up' those characters who are behind in level for whatever reason.
Speaking of!
Let's go back to Searching for Friends, both the quest we're tasked with and the absolutely fantastic music that accompany us as soon as we get the airship and replaces the previously overbearing, sorrowful organ piece that was the previous overworld tune, filling it with hope.
The bird we followed last time led us to Maranda. The main thing we learn there is that a "swordsman," with a "heart full of turmoil" and "speaking strangely," has been through - so Cyan was there not long ago, it seems. No immediate sign of where he is right now but, while I'm here, I figure I might as well pay a visit to the soldier's girlfriend - the one for whom we sent all these letters, and who is now fallen. I figure, if we are to be the bearer of bad news, at least she'll know what happened and why he went so silent.
Well.
The 'flowers' aren't true flowers - because the world is dying and there are no new flowers blooming, they're made of silk, which is a really beautiful and sad touch of worldbuilding. But, huh, more to the matter at end, what the fuck? Lola's boyfriend is dead, we know this. So who's sending the flowers? Well, she shows us one of the letters he sent along with them, and it reads…
"My beloved Lola,
Art thou well? We have rebuilt as much of the village as we could hope to. I believe I should be able to return to thy side before too long."
…
Cyan.
Dude. What the hell.
I guess… I guess he met that girl and he didn't have the heart to let her know her boyfriend was dead and then he started a whole impersonation scheme to keep her from finding out the truth and being sad? Maybe because he figured the world's going to end before she finds out so it doesn't matter? Between that and all the handcrafted flowers, though, it's like - that's not okay. You can't just craft lies like that for people to inhabit without their knowledge.
I know it comes from a good place, but… yeesh.
Lola has written a letter in answer, as well, and asks if we'd be so kind as to tie it to the carrier pigeon outside - which is our clue as to the next step of the journey, as doing so makes the camera follow the bird as it flies, allowing us to see its destination and therefore where Cyan most likely is. It's a clever device, I like it.
Looks like Zozo, if I'm not mistaken.
Intriguing! I wonder why Cyan would be in Zozo, of all place, but at least we have our next breadcrumb right there.
So anyway I just go to the Opera House instead.
Look.
I appreciate that FFVI does what no previous game really did and just goes open world in its last stretch, fully opening the map for you to tackle in any order. But that means I'm getting hit right in the ADHD. There is no way I can hope to keep a single track on anything.
Anyway, a dragon has taken over the opera - wild guess, it's one of those "eight dragons" that we have to defeat to find the "Crusader." So let's give it a shot! We need to find the utility room, pull a switch that drops us onto the stage, and then we face the beast.
To cut a long story short - I have access to Float, which means I can make the party immune to earth attacks like Quake, which at least let me work out how outmatched I am, and the answer is 'pretty.' The Earth Dragon has powerful attacks that can one-shot individual party members, and it likes to surprise me with a 50G ability that cancels Float and follow it up with Quake before I have time to reapply the buff. I decide to leave and come back once I have enough HP to be outside of the one-shot range.
Alright, so, next order of business - Terra. I am, frankly, much more interested in getting her back than I am Cyan, who's like, fine, but he's not my powerhouse with one of the most interesting storylines in the game.
So let's head back to Mobliz!
Wheeeere Terra is gone. As are Duane and Katarin. Huh. The children appear to be alone. And they have some… interesting comments to make.
…you know, it's not surprising that two 16 years old at the end of the world without any adult to give them advice would end up having to deal with a teen pregnancy they hadn't anticipated, but that's rough. Like… there's no midwife in Mobliz. Literally the only adult is Terra, and I'm not sure she even knows how babies are made, let alone how to safely guide a mother through childbirth. Which, considering how Final Fantasy loves mothers dying in childbirth as a trope, is… yeesh.
Also interestingly, this gives us a rough timeline for the game? Katarin showed no signs of being pregnant the last time we were there, which means events within the World of Ruin have to have covered at least a couple of months so far, if not more - which is a decent duration considering all the traveling and exploring we're doing even with magical transports, and better than some games trying to convince you that it all definitely fits within like, a week.
I try to find the others, but all I can find is Katarin and Duane's home, where Duane is moping about how he doesn't know what to do because Katarin is pregnant. Yeah, typically useless male teenage boyfriend unable to deal with life-changing news that need important decisions to be made.
So, in a fantastic case of overthinking things and making them more complicated for myself as well as taking children far too literally, I put two and two together and come up with five - the kids said Katarin ran away, Duane says he doesn't know what to do and Katarin isn't there, so my guess is she fled to one of the other towns in search of some kind of help. Which would be absolutely reckless in a world full of high-level monsters but it wouldn't be the first time this happens in an FF game.
So I grab the airship and I go investigate every nearby town looking for Katarin. All mostly fruitless, although an NPC dialogue does tell me that Deathgaze, a monster named alongside Humbaba and the eight dragons as one of the great beasts unleashed upon the world, is a flying foe who stays within the clouds, and who could only be found using an airship. Interesting!
In the process I get distracted and find a bunch of stuff that I'll get too later because I think I already did the 'this is what it's like playing an open world with ADHD' on FFV and I need to keep it fresh, so let's move on.
It turns out I massively overcomplicated everything, and Katarin and Terra were right there in the village all along, behind an inexplicable hidden door inside Duane's house.
Terra and Katarin explains that they found out Katarin is pregnant, and she couldn't be happier, but when she told Duane he suddenly turned cold. Yeah, that's just a classic boyfriend move. Just as she says this, Duane comes back into the room to apologize and say he didn't know how to handle the news, but now he's gotten over it and is ready to face this future together.
What do you mean, 'come back home'? SHE IS LITERALLY IN YOUR BASEMENT.
But then, before either of them can say anything, the earth shakes! Humbaba is back!
Terra begs us to protect the village, saying she still doesn't have the strength to fight, and we rush outside to confront the monster.
The Debilitator's animation looks sick, and has strong "Vegeta! What does the scooter say about his power level?!" vibes.
Humbaba is weak to poison and, after one use of the Debilitator, is randomly assigned a weakness to Fire, which given that all my characters have one or more of Poison/Bio/Fira, means we can hit the beast for massive damage - and very quickly hit a scripted gate whereupon Humbaba uses his breath to literally blow away half my party. No, really, he removes them from the fight completely.
But of course, that's a ploy - an excuse to change the party roster and leave enough room, so that Terra can come out and join us.
Terra joins the fight, and she is in permanent Trance. The green bar that's replaced her ATB gauge normally marks how much time Terra has left in Trance, and this time it's not emptying at all - she is at full power for the whole fight, which is just a fantastic way of portraying her reaching some kind of big character inflection moment and powering up from her resolve to save her friends.
…still, Trance Terra here is filling in for two characters, which mitigates the benefits of having such a powerhouse on our side, and Humbaba still has some fairly threatening move like 1000 Needles, which our character are no longer one-shotted by… Provided they are at full HP when it hits, which is never a guarantee.
Still, the fight is, if not a cakewalk, at least not too much trouble. A huge aspect of the esper system is that it lets us teach any magic to any character, and that means I have no real 'white mage' - everyone can serve as a backup healer. Edgar has the most white magic out of the group, but if he's done, either Sabin or Terra can flexibly step in to Raise him and heal the group; I can choose any one character to be my healbot based on who has the best offense for a given boss fight.
It's a huge boost in tactical flexibility that comes at the cost of the characters having clear mechanical identity - sure, I am still using Sabin's Blitz and Edgar's Tools more than I am their magic most of the time, but everyone has a solid basis in magic to fill in any gaps and it kind of smooths over my party comp, which is both a good and bad thing.
Today, it means Humbaba gets his shit pushed in.
As Humbaba is defeated, all the children gather in thanks - but then, Terra drifts down to the ground, still in Trance form, and they all scatter in fear.
More comments - "It's scary," "I'm afraid" - and Terra looks down sadly at the fear she's inspiring in the same people she wanted to save.
But then…
A young girl steps forward, saying "Mama… It's you, isn't it? I can tell…" And then, one by one, the other children realize who it is they're looking at and approach, until Terra is surrounded by children calling her Mama. As if overcome by a sudden realization, Terra blurts out: "I'll fight!"
That feeling that was rising inside her, she finally understands… was love.
"Children, Mama has to go away for a while to make the world a safer place for you to live! But I promise I'll be back as soon as I can!"
…
It took me a while to chew on this scene, because on the other hand yes, big emotional moment, on the other hand I struggled with like, the internal logic of what had actually happened.
But I guess it makes sense. Way back when he met Ramuh, one of the things he told is that Terra had lost control of herself because she was "afraid of what she is," and that it would subside once she understood her true nature. And when the young espers flew out of the Gate, they lost control of themselves and waged massive destruction which they immediately regretted, their true natures clearly being mostly non-violent. Espers are physically influenced by their emotions - as beings of magic, their anger literally manifests in destruction, their fear in flight, their anxiety over their nature in loss of control over themselves.
So because Terra struggled with understanding and accepting that she loved other people - the children under her care, the friends she made in the World of Balance - that love, that desire to protect, didn't at first result in greater strength, but in completely the opposite: a loss of power that came about because she couldn't understand her own feelings, and any emotion an esper doesn't understand or control risks causing them to lose control of their self and their magic. Any major personal emotional breakthrough an esper goes through means a chrysalis-like phase of powered-down turmoil before they emerge with a better understanding of themselves and their magic.
Which… I guess… might be why Kefka managed to beat all the espers at once? As ridiculous a plot development as this was, in light of this, if we consider that the young espers were temporarily magically crippled by their guilt and fear over the destruction they'd just wrought, then suddenly it means Kefka was just lucky, he got a sneaky move on them precisely when they were completely open and vulnerable. Doesn't explain why the older espers had the same issue, or what was that nullification magic Kefka used and where he got it from, or how he turned them all to magicite, but it's… something. It helps a little with that plot point, although baffling twists that only kinda make sense in retrospect are one of the worst kinds of twist.
But for Terra, I think it works. It's part of her growing more in touch with her own humanity - both on the human side, and on the esper side, because we've long since learned that espers are fundamentally just… people, with all the feelings and weaknesses and virtues thereof. There is no reason why being a human-esper hybrid should make Terra some kind of emotionless creature incapable of love; rather her emotions are blunted by trauma, by mind control, by being raised in captivity to the Empire to be used as a weapon of war, allowed even less humanity than Celes was. But she is capable of caring, of love, and of dedicating herself to others. She was capable of it all along, only it was buried under layers of trauma and Imperial conditioning. She was raised to be nothing but a weapon, a mindless tool of war to wage destruction without a single feeling, not even the sadistic pleasure Kefka took in it.
And now she's grown beyond it.
And what I deeply appreciate is that this love isn't romantic in nature. It's something that's kinda loomed over this plotline in the past - Terra typically has her ponderings over her own nature when faced with stuff like Edgar's flirtation or Celes and Locke's will-they-won't-they psychodrama, but in the end, her revelation has nothing to do with falling in love with someone. It has to do with learning to love the world that raised her in nothing but hurt, and loving the weakest and most vulnerable of all people, children - that they might get a chance to grow in peace the way she didn't.
It's more than that, though, it's, hm.
When Terra starts the game, she has literally no agency whatsoever. With the slave crown on her brow, she is a puppet to be ordered around by other soldiers, and controlled by the player in battle. She is incapable of making a decision. Then, she's found by other, friendlier people - but she has no drive, no motive force; whether it's to get her to safety or to try to use her magic for the benefit of the rebellion, she's being led around by others left and right at every turn. Only slowly does she start to regain something like agency, until it culminates here - instead of her friends coming to her, asking her to follow them, and her simply agreeing, Terra at first has to refuse, sort out her own priority, her feelings, her choices, and here, right now, make the decision to go fight Kefka for her own reasons, out of her own will.
It's good stuff, even if I'm always on the defensive when confronted with arcs about female characters becoming mother figures and getting depowered for a while and choosing to act to save their (surrogate) children.
Although, now that I think about it…
Surrogate parent-child relationship…
Post-apocalyptic setting…
The adult needs to protect the child from monsters roaming this world…
Fuck.
Credit to Icarus for this war crime.
We will not be interrogating these parallels any further.
Anyway, Terra affirms her resolve to save the world, rejoins the group, we regain control, and about six months pass during the fade screen.
Well okay no it's more that I misjudged the timeline, but Katarin's baby is kicking and she is already at the point where she is spending most of her time in bed waiting for the baby to come, so it looks more like the initial "find Mobliz" to "defeat Humbaba" period lasted longer than I had first thought - we've been wandering the World of Ruin for months now, which makes some sense given the distances involved before we get the airship.
Well, hopefully we can miraculously return basic sanitation to the world before her due date.
Fun fact: Terra is still higher-level than all my other characters.
Also Celes and Setzer both got booted out of the group for the entire post-Humbaba sequence but I'm not reloading just to find out if Celes has unique dialogue for that bit.
Now that we've recruited Terra, it's time to head to another one of the locations our friends have disappeared at. Like Zozo, to find Cyan. Or maybe trying to find Locke's trail. Or maybe checking out the Coliseum. Or seeing if we can now defeat the Earth Dragon…
Yeah no we're going to Jidoor.
Look, don't @ me, I'm like a dog, I do things arbitrarily.
The painting of the Emperor is actually why I thought it worth mentioning I went to the Coliseum - there's a soldier there who cryptically told us that if we saw the Emperor, we should greet him twice, which will be relevant shortly.
More importantly, some of the Jidoor citizens tell us that Owzer - the owner of the massive mansion in the rich district of the city, whom you might remember for his extensive collection of paintings - "found a skilled young artist and brought her back to his mansion to paint for him." Looks like we have a lead on Relm! Let's check out the shops, rest at the inn, and head for Owzer's mansion.
Immediately it becomes apparent that something is wrong. Not only is Relm not anywhere we can find, but neither is Owzer - in fact, the whole house is empty, but filled with a strange and possibly sinister blue light. And as soon as we attempt to climb the stairs, we are pushed back by some kind of presence…
That force pushes us back down the stairs - but, just as it does, something appears on the previously empty desk below: a diary. Owzer's diary.
Oh I see. We are doing a horror sequence!
…or at least one that borrows some visual and storytelling tropes from horror. It's definitely no longer scary, if it ever was, but I'm curious if my readers who played the game while young found it spooky. It's definitely angling for that with the diary, which tells us that Owzer spent a small fortune on a new painting, too large to be displayed on the first floor; then goes through a few artists which he met day after day, testing their work and finding them worthless, and that after his lamp broke, he bought a new one - one that was a 'tad pricey, but now everything's bright and cheery at the flip of a switch'. He started feeling strange then, and hearing strange sounds coming from his cellar - and the diary ends there. Classic stuff.
The lamp appears to play a key role in the spell put upon the house, and indeed once we find it and turn off the switch, the blue light goes away and we can ascend the stairs.
Interacting twice with this painting reveals the 'Emperor's Letter,' which I suppose was hidden in the portrait by the Emperor himself?? Which reveals that 'the legendary treasure sleeps where the mountains form a star.' The game is kinda vague with what its 'legendary treasures' are in any given reference (pretty sure Gestahl has used it to refer to the Warring Triad), but assuming this means the legendary treasure Locke has been looking for, let's keep this in mind for later.
There is no obvious path forward, but interacting with the painting of a beautiful woman causes us to be attacked by the painting itself, come to life!
These 'Misty' opponents aren't too tough to deal with, but like most of the house's more annoying inhabitants, they have high magic resistance, which makes them annoying to deal with considering most of my damage output is magic. Once defeated, we go through the painting and are dropped into…
…the spooky cellar basement.
This is one of the most high-production value dungeons in the game so far. While its basic framework is unexceptional, being just a house, this is the canvas (get it) on which it paints its attempt at a confusing, surreal, and spooky environment. The place is decorated with paintings, some of which are perfectly harmless, some of which are hostile, and some of which hide secret passageways necessary for progress. There are doors slamming on their own, portraits that move while you're not looking at them, and a variety of similar tricks. For instance, when we pass in front of this harmless seeming painting of a chair:
Our party is pulled up into the air, and then the figure of an old woman appears at the back of the painting, as if literally walking into the frame from the darkness inside, and initiating battle.
The Coeurl Cat are harmless. The Blade Dancer is what makes up 90% of the difficulty of the house. She is included in every type of random encounter I've rolled in the manor, and she has high HP, high magic resistance, responds to every attack with a 'Soul Dance' counter which drains 500-600 HP from one character, and her attack is to throw knives of increasing power every turn. I end up suffering several KOs due to her bullshit.
Among the house's prizes are the Moogle Suit (a piece of armor for Relm) and the Lich Ring, which functions like FFV's Bone Mail in that it turns the wearer undead - dunno that I have any use for it though, given that it doesn't seem to come with the Bone Mail's "also the best armor in the game" appeal to compensate for how annoying the undead status makes characters to heal.
And then there's this bullshit:
This room contains four floating chests; moving to the right tile causes one of the chests to float down and open, springing us with another Blade Dancer + Cats encounter. There are four of those in a row, and all of them are garbage. Seriously, they give out 293 gil, a potion, an ether and a gold needle. Absolute bullshit.
Also hey! That's a picture of Maria right there!
It also changes based on how we move, despite having no other properties and not being interactive. Spooooky. Also we have to go through a bunch of teleporting doors which drop us at seemingly random places of the dungeon - all in all it's not particularly difficult but it's disorienting, and the Blade Dancers are waging a war of attrition against us.
But, after a fight with a Stiif Life painting, we finally make our way to the cellar of the house, where the masterpiece has been stored with a full room to its full glory.
Look at this painting. A naked female figure, embraced by a robed, shadowy figure - we are in classic Eros/Thanatos tradition here, "The Maiden and Death," iterated upon in countless works of the Renaissance and used by Freud in his questionable analysis of human psychology. I love it when my humanities studies are relevant to video game bullshit.
Owzer, struggling to speak, tells us that a monster is possessing his 'prized goddess painting', and is hiding within the canvas. Relm, who does not seem fully in control of her actions (she doesn't talk to us or face us, but appears to be simply tending to the painting in some way) lets out a cry of disgust and strikes the painting, to Owzer's horror - he tells her that attacking the picture will only make matters worse; just then, the demon possessing the painting laughs, and declares that he won't let anyone get between him and his prize, 'the best painting he's had in a long time' - and attacks!
Judging from Chadarnook's dialogue, he's a demon that specifically possesses paintings, and he treats them as having a kind of reality of their own, saying 'the girl in the picture is mine' and clearly having some ability to make paintings come to life. He's clearly responsible for the events in the house, and fittingly, lightning flashes from the windows behind, landing the scene an air of spooky dynamism - it has some real Halloween children's cartoon energy, I love it.
Mechanically it's a straightforward fight. Chadarnook has two forms, his demon form and the goddess in the picture (whom we'll later learn is named Lakshmi), the goddess. They each have their own HP track, and Lakshmi is invincible, can Charm and inflict Doom, and counters every attack with a special move that inflicts an incurable HP drain over time effect (so there is absolutely no reason to attack her); the demon has 30k HP, is vulnerable to Fire, and attacks with powerful Lightning-elemental spells and attacks.
Even going in blind and not knowing it's pointless to attack Lakshmi though, my first move is to buff all characters with Regen, which ends up countering the HP drain effect, and every character is capable of casting both Fira and Cura, meaning I can sustain a steady barrage of weakness-targeting spells while keeping the party fully topped up. It's a bit of a drag because I'm not making any progress during the Lakshmi turns, but in the end it's a fairly easy battle.
Relm: "My work here is done."
Sabin: "But you didn't do anything."
Relm: *pulls her cape around and vanishes*
Now that the demon has been cast out, Owzer is overflowing with thanks - mostly not for saving his life though, but for saving the painting, which is more precious in his eyes than anything. He explains that he found a stone at the auction house (no prize for guessing this turns out to be the Magicite of the goddess/esper Lakshmi), and ever since looking at it, he's been overcome by the desire to have a portrait of Lakshmi painted (which I guess means Magicite can have mind-altering effects on humans around it, interesting). All the trash painters he went through described in his diary were ones he tried to have paint the goddess for him, but none found grace in his eyes - until Relm. He heard about her and had her brought to him, and she painted the goddess, until the demon came and possessed the painting.
…
Relm literally made the boss fight for this dungeon. She has magic that makes paintings come alive, we know that, and half of the fight is the demon hiding behind the invincible goddess painting which Relm created!
…waaait a minute.
How sure are we that the 'demon possessing paintings' isn't a backstory which Relm made up for the monster she deliberately painted alongside the goddess with her magic, as a prank?
I wouldn't put it past her.
Owzer tells us that, whatever the stone is, he doesn't need it anymore, and we pick up the Lakshmi Magicite, whereupon Relm tells Owzer she has to go now, but she'll be back to finish that painting - presumably after saving the world, and we all teleport out of the house.
And that's the Owzer Mansion complete. Honestly? Its owner ended up a surprisingly nice guy. Especially with his visual design frankly reminiscent of a more human Jabba the Hutt, he just seems like a decent dude who suffered a bad case of demonic incursion. And possibly evil child pranksters. Jury's still out on that one.
All in all? Owzer Mansion is kind of annoying on a mechanical level (tough, repetitive enemy encounters, mostly bad loot until the final reward, nobody likes getting lost in circles in teleporting doorways) but I respect it a lot for its presentation and taking a shot at being a spooky Halloween House sequence. It's a fun story beat, and our reward at the end is the Lakshmi Magicite which teaches the Curaga spell, our first Tier 3 spell! It was a nice, low-stakes capstone to the big heavy beat that was Terra's arc in this update.
Next up… Maybe we should check out Narshe? That frozen esper is definitely gonna be available now, and it'll only have taken the entire game.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And now you see why we were so agreeable when you concluded that Terra was aro-ace early on - it actually fits her later arc quite well. We stan an ace queen.
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- Location
- PA
Sooo uhh. I'm pretty sure Jidoor in the original didn't get the 'ruin' recolor on the SNES.
I'm also amused at seeing you mention a dragon in the opera house and a part of me went: wait, that's the Quake Dragon and Omi levels as little as possible. Uh-oh!
Uselessly I don't recall anything about the other dragon locations.
Also as far as horror in the Mansion?
For me it was Owzer. I uhh…
I did not realize he was meant to be just a fat guy on a couch. I imagined him as getting warped by the painting in to this…Fat crab-thing. And that Relm was…
Well. Younger me probably encountered a Woolyism there. I think.
I'm also amused at seeing you mention a dragon in the opera house and a part of me went: wait, that's the Quake Dragon and Omi levels as little as possible. Uh-oh!
Uselessly I don't recall anything about the other dragon locations.
Also as far as horror in the Mansion?
For me it was Owzer. I uhh…
I did not realize he was meant to be just a fat guy on a couch. I imagined him as getting warped by the painting in to this…Fat crab-thing. And that Relm was…
Well. Younger me probably encountered a Woolyism there. I think.
Ah, the World of Ruin free roam experience.
Ah, also the World of Ruin free roam experience. I may have beelined for the non-Kefka tower on the map near Mobliz myself, and uh... discovered just how underleveled I was to try to even loot an early chest and bail.
Look Omi, these are two very different basements, you know? The one they're in now can't be designated at as a post-apocalyptic home, it needs at least one bed, Fallout 4 taught me that!
Would that permanent Trance Terra were an option going forward in other fights. Alas, Omi, you'll have to settle for her having doubled uptime on Trance for the rest of the game.
Which is still pretty good honestly, back against Ultima Weapon I was able to squeeze out 4-5 turns of Trance, 9-10 is probably enough to pound any boss to dust.
Terra 2 Stronk.
Especially Trance Terra, with things like those juicy 6000+ damage Bio spells for me. Girl be ridiculous when it comes to damage output.
I guess that works as an actually maybe accurate to the game headcanon, but it's still a low point of the game's story, that's for sure.
Well, as you yourself said allll the way back in the very first update: "We stan an ace queen."
Really it's not something I quite noticed before this playthrough since it's been a long while since I played FFVI, and even though I remembered "oh yes a major character arc for Terra is trying to learn how to love/what love is", I'd forgotten that it's still, 100% disconnected from romantic love across all that. And that's great, honestly, that a game from well over 20 years ago could have a lead character be ace like that? Most other named characters in the series with any actual character have had some hint or another of such a thing, but not Terra.
Yeah, for being the type of storyline that might normally throw up some flags, it's surprisingly well executed. Which, hey, FFVI does have its moments of good character writing when it wants to. It's just keeping those characters relevant afterwards it sometimes struggles on.
And all is right in the world, as Best Girl returns to the party and immediately reestablishes her dominance.
I'll just confirm this now, since it came up as far back as the original run of Zozo when you first got to customize your party. In general? If party members are optional for a sequence, they are extraordinarily unlikely to say anything unique in FFVI, rather than just have some lump sum of dialogue meant to cover the entire group. Unfortunately, FFVI doesn't really have that thing a lot of later RPGs (and possibly some sooner ones, though I don't know if party dialogue was in the original Dragon Quest 4 and 5 or was added in remakes) where discussions will have a check for which party members you currently have and give them a specific line or two.
On the plus side, this means I'm not playing every sequence in the game multiple times just to hear every single unique line of dialogue like in say, Paper Mario, so hey.
Or, you could do none of those things and wander off in a random direction.
Yeah, it has a niche use I guess for if you run into a boss that likes to abuse drain and death spells or something, but that's about it outside of a particular possibility.
...You know, I really wouldn't put it past her either, the little shit.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Given I've been bringing up Doctor Who in this thread, yeah, I know what you mean. A creepy obsession with motherhood, coupled with some anti-childfree leanings thrown in there, was one of the issues that show had for quite some time.
Also, whenever somebody brings up that painting trope (including a few later FF games), my mind instantly goes to this song:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P96cFKd4irY
So.... something you might remember? That time Cyan talked to a lady and was 'offended' by her flirting with him? Way back in the World of Balance?
If memory serves, if you put Cyan in the front of the party and talk to her again.... Cyan decides to flirt back. And pretty well, at that - switching the person in front and talking to her again has her comment on Cyan being pretty suave. That's right - Cyan's got game.
Actually, the more I think about it, Relm reminds me of Kosuzu from Touhou Project - a girl who has an unhealthy fascination with youkai books and, in her enthusiasm to collect them, tends to unintentionally empower them to wreak havoc. Replace demon books with demon paintings, and you've got Relm.
Yeah, unfortunately this is much more of an issue in the World of Ruin than the World of Balance just due to the overall structure. I love the ambition of experimenting with a sandbox style, but the dialogue issues are a compromise solution that works more or less okay when you're a kid playing it, but poking at it with a critical lens reveals the cracks almost immediately.
FFVI accomplishes an impressive amount of characterization with what are ultimately relatively few bits of character specific dialogue once you split them up among each member of the cast. In between the gaps left by the dialogue, most players fill them with a headcanon that's a mad alchemy of the nonspecific party dialogue, vibes, and each character's mechanics and sprite work. There's been a lot said about hypothetical FFVI remakes in this thread, and to my mind this is the single biggest barrier to such a project. Everyone who's played this game basically has a bespoke version of the cast living in their heads and any serious remake project would be priced into trying to write expanded dialogue to somehow be everything to everyone. I don't think it would be impossible - I certainly would love a version that went to the Trails in the Sky devs and let them go hog fuckin' wild with another like five books (the script for just the second game in this trilogy came out to 716,401 words) of worldbuilding text - but it does offer an explanation for why they'd go for lower hanging fruit.
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Yeah, those are pretty meaty games, aren't they? Honestly kinda impressive.
I could have shaved multiple hours off each of my playthroughs if I just stopped talking to all the NPCs who each have shit going on in their lives that isn't your main plot. But like, is the shopkeep's mom gonna succeed in meddling in his love life enough to hook him up with anyone? Inquiring minds have to know!
Yeah, most of the dialogue is optional, but like, you gotta know, ya know?
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Grandia games (and from memory the Lunar games, made by the same company) also had surprisingly extensive NPC dialogue. Like in Grandia 2 I believe you could come across full-on dialogue trees with people you didn't need to talk to in the first town
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Yeah, it comes off as creepy, since he's basically lying to someone about their beloved coming home eventually.
Though remember what you said about Cyan's character arc being rather abruptly over when he says what happened at Doma wasn't Leo's fault? This was during the Imperial Banquet, mind (wow, imagine that bit of the game only being a couple hours ago...)
Yeeeaaaahhh. He's not over it. He's reeeeaaally not. He's just overly stoic, but as this shows it's creeping through
Yeeeaaaahhh. He's not over it. He's reeeeaaally not. He's just overly stoic, but as this shows it's creeping through
Terra's emotional recovery is cathartic, and your assessment of Terra's state of mind is pretty spot-on. For the first time she's the author of her own fate, and she's actually scared of what to do about it, especially now that the Imperial conditioning is finally wearing off. She's found something she cares about, and didn't want to ruin it by revealing who or what she was.
The little girl recognizing Terra is a bit cliche, but I'd say it's a cliche that works just to avoid Terra losing all she cared for. I mean, to be fair to the kids Terra's Esper artwork concept is... kind of fucking terrifying.
Grandia 2 otoh I would say very much used the party members as being _the plot_ instead of witnessing the plot
Especially compared to how they made it worse by making it sexy in the modern versions as @Omicron noted elsewhere and most likely has now prepared a argument about.