I suspect data limits on how much they could change town maps between pre and post apocalypse within the tech limits of the day have as much to do with it as lack of thought does
I suspect data limits on how much they could change town maps between pre and post apocalypse within the tech limits of the day have as much to do with it as lack of thought does
When I said 'lack of thought' I was more talking about settings that get called 'cozy catastrophes' in general, not the FF6 devs specifically, since yeah they were working with the SNES.
Though Chrono Trigger was on the same console and had a much more consistent post-apocalypse setting in 2300 AD, but I guess it's not really fair to compare that with the WoR as it was only one time period among many in the game, rather than the whole second half. So the WoR has to provide options for the players that 2300 AD didn't need to, as there's no going back to the past like in CT
...Now I bring it up, why does Chrono Trigger even use BC and AD anyway, it's not even set on Earth? I presume there is some lore reason, that or it's a translation flub
I imagine so that it'd be easier for players to get the gist of it being a separation of eras. At least, I'd expect that from the localized version; that'd be consistent with the usual dumbing down of translations being the default back then, no matter the intention of the devs.
Though Chrono Trigger was on the same console and had a much more consistent post-apocalypse setting in 2300 AD, but I guess it's not really fair to compare that with the WoR as it was only one time period among many in the game, rather than the whole second half. So the WoR has to provide options for the players that 2300 AD didn't need to, as there's no going back to the past like in CT
I didn't want to bring it up but yeah. Despite only coming out in the subsequent year, Chrono Trigger's 2300AD blows FF6's World of Ruin out of the water. But yes, I think it's because 2300AD is complimentary to many other time settings of the game, whereas I think a big part of the reason why WOR doesn't hold up as well is because it needs to sustain all the character dynamics and sidequests of the second half of the game, and while even 2300AD isn't without its spots of hope, a WOR modeled on it would be a brutal slog.
...Now I bring it up, why does Chrono Trigger even use BC and AD anyway, it's not even set on Earth? I presume there is some lore reason, that or it's a translation flub
Gonna be honest I just held down the run buttons for 99% of that dungeon, some of the encounters are fairly obnoxious with an underleveled party.
And just think: This is only a small taste of what you have coming up eventually in Kefka's Tower, where you have to balance out three parties instead of two, and most likely have to actually send each party to fight bosses or something (I wouldn't know for sure I've never actually finished Kefka's Tower).
For those of you who haven't played the game/watched or read an LP, the wildlife of Mt. Zozo have access to the !Steal command. To borrow a turn of phrase from the Woolieversus LP: Before the City, there was the Mountain.
Socioeconomics? State-Non state conflict? Nah man, extended proximity to Mt. Zozo just turns people and animals into crooks.
There's an idea, maybe Mt. Zozo is FF6's version of Exdeath. Some leftover from the War of the Magi or earlier that never caused enough of a problem to deal with while people still knew what it was.
Re: WoR disappointment. Yeah, I agree with the general sentiment. The World of Ruin has a really, really great atmospheric opening, both in the cutscene and the Celes sequence, but the more you explore it, the more clear it becomes that Cid just managed to find the shittiest rock in the entire world.
Like, Cid's illness, the dying rodents and slow fish have nothing to do with the world ending, there's just probably nuclear magicite buried under the island or something.
I didn't want to bring it up but yeah. Despite only coming out in the subsequent year, Chrono Trigger's 2300AD blows FF6's World of Ruin out of the water. But yes, I think it's because 2300AD is complimentary to many other time settings of the game, whereas I think a big part of the reason why WOR doesn't hold up as well is because it needs to sustain all the character dynamics and sidequests of the second half of the game, and while even 2300AD isn't without its spots of hope, a WOR modeled on it would be a brutal slog.
To be fair, the way CT did their Overworld was quite a bit different, though the fact they created the whole new shelters rather than re-colored towns does help.
Re: WoR disappointment. Yeah, I agree with the general sentiment. The World of Ruin has a really, really great atmospheric opening, both in the cutscene and the Celes sequence, but the more you explore it, the more clear it becomes that Cid just managed to find the shittiest rock in the entire world.
Like, Cid's illness, the dying rodents and slow fish have nothing to do with the world ending, there's just probably nuclear magicite buried under the island or something.
I don't think it's too bad, though they could have done more. Like okay, maybe data limits prevented whole new town maps, but even something simple like just...deleting a few of the NPCs? I mean, imagine if instead of that one bartender reminiscing about the "good old days" perhaps he's just not there and that empty, quiet bar stands on its own.
That being said I do think there's enough. The flashback in Kohlingen along with the little flower thing; the destroyed mansion in Tzen; Mobliz in its entirety; Narshe being deserted and overrun with monsters (the implication that everyone is dead?). It's not just a palette swap of the WOB towns, there are some scars we see beyond the changed Overworld.
Still, they might have found ways to sell it a little better, but what's there doesn't - for me at least - register as a disappointment.
The two parties rappelling down the airship from a crane hook is a really neat touch.
So, the way this works is that, for this dungeon, we have two parties that need to work together to reach the end. How does that work? Mostly like this:
As before, we control one party at a time, and can swap between the two at any time by pressing Z. The way this dungeon works is that there are multiple switches which do things like lower spikes blocking the path, or raise up rocks that we can jump between. However, the switches only work while we're standing on them. This means that for instance, in the picture above, I have to maneuvre Celes onto that switch so that I can then swap to Terra and have her cross the now-lowered spikes and walk up to the next switch, which she steps on, lowering another spiked floor, whereupon I swap to Celes, etc.
The Phoenix Cave is only two levels deep, but thanks to that gimmick, it is one of the longest dungeon I've been through in a while. The upper level is just a normal cave area, while the lower level is a magma chamber:
Here, Terra is standing on a switch that is raising rocks so that Celes can jump across.
Conceptually, this is really neat and a really cool utilization of the game's massive character roster - it's forcing the player to form two balanced parties that are equally capable of facing the dungeon's encounters, it is making the swap between those two parties the core of the gameplay, and it is doing all that to create a navigation puzzle that no previous game could have pulled off. I really appreciate the degree of experimentation that's going on here.
In practice:
Pain.
Just ignore the fucked up rows, at some point my brain logged off.
My two parties are Terra/Relm/Gau/Cyan on the one hand, and Celes/Sabin/Strago/Setzer on the other. Edgar stayed home out of my misguided thinking that I would take advantage of this dungeon to level up the stragglers and get them so useful Magic, and that worked. Technically.
At the start of the dungeon, Relm, Gau, Cyan and Strago effectively have no usable magic worth shit (several of them, in fact, don't have any magic period). I spend multiple fights actually using Relm's Sketch command because she has jack shit to do, which is how I can confirm what others have said before: Sketch is garbage which misses more than half the time and doesn't do anything useful the rest of the time. For the entire time until she learns some actual magic, which takes forever, Relm is just trash. Gau at least I can set to Rage:Stray Cat and not think about him anymore, but he's not, like, good? For whatever reason he didn't share the other characters' "level up upon rejoining the party" mechanic, so he was lv 16 in a party of lv 27 characters when I got him back, which means he dies in one hit and can't do any damage. Now, that also means that he gains pretty much one level per fight, so I can slap him with the Bismarck magicite and have him rapidly escalate in Strength until he has Strength 90+. Which is fun, but even then, his damage doesn't raise above 'okay' - half the time Stray Cat just does a normal attack, and when he uses Cat Scratch it still doesn't hit harder than a Tier 2 spell from one of my good magic characters.
Cyan has new Bushido techniques, including Dragoon, a technique which drains HP and MP from the enemy and sounds like it would be really cool if it ever worked, but half the enemies seem immune to drain and so take 0 damage from it*. That means all this growth was for nothing and I just set him to use Fang, his basic technique, for pitiful damage.
*For reasons unknown to me, several of my party members are also immune to drain, and I can never figure what causes that; I don't seem to have "immunity to drain" items in my equipment.
Meanwhile, Strago is an under-used Blue Mage which means he still has his three starting spells and nothing else. He does learn 1000 Needles in the cave but that's far past the point where it would be useful.
Which means most of my damage comes from Terra, Celes, and Sabin. Tier 2 spells are starting to show their limits at this stage - even when I finally teach them to my backbenchers they don't deal enough damage to OHKO most enemies, but thankfully in the hands of my two powerhouses they still get the job done, while Sabin's Phantom Rush deletes every enemy it strikes. Still, I'm basically running with two half parties there, and it has some painful consequences.
These Necromancer guys here have an attack called Zombie Stick which turns a character into a zombie - that means it effectively instakills them and causes them to start attacking other party members. They have to be dispatched immediately or else what you see above happens - they take out two party members and then trample the rest. Once Gau has been set to Rage, he can't be commanded to do anything, and Relm here doesn't know Raise or Cura so she's effectively incapable of bringing the party back, so this is just a very slow way of getting to a party wipe. That's without getting into the Face that accompanies this group, as it is capable of using Stop and 1000 Needles - this encounter, right there, with these four guys, is the bane of my existence.
But there is more to the hatefulness of the Phoenix Cave. You see, this is a pretty tough and long late-game dungeon, and that means a lot of resources expended, a lot of tough fights, a few party wipes, but it also has to mean something else… Sick loot. Right?
Every treasure chest in the Phoenix Cave is empty.
It's just. They're positioned like normal chests. They're at the end of corridors. In hidden alcoves. You have to open the path to them. And EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. IS EMPTY.
It's like the game is playing a prank on me.
Cool trick on the dungeon's part though: you see that big lava area that we have to hop across? At one point, we pull a switch which drains an underground lake from the upper level to the lower level, and the result is…
…the lava lake cools down and can be walked across.
As with Mt Zozo before it, this dungeon doesn't have a 'proper' boss at the end, but rather an optional boss we can choose to confront in the form of the Red Dragon:
It… doesn't… go… great.
The Red Dragon's main attacks are Fira and Fireball, which are potent but manageable moves if you have access to proper healing magic, but upon reaching ⅓ of its HP it effectively enters Phase 2 and start casting Flare and Firaga - here Flare hits for 2k damage, instantly killing any given party member - in this case, Terra was the only survivor of previous onslaughts, and it's a party wipe.
With Gau only being capable of dealing effective damage through Rage, which locks him out of doing anything else, Relm having only just learned a handful of spells, and Cyan being kind of just mediocre, this is a rough fight. But hey, while I'm here with nothing else to do, why not try Magicite Shards?
Hi there, Alexander.
'Magicite Shards' are a consumable item which, when used, causes a random summon to manifest - any summon, even those we don't actually have. Here, though it goes unnamed, it would appear we summoned Alexander, an FF staple that typically manifests in the form of a walking castle/mecha combo. I love Alexander's aesthetic, but rolling him actually reminds me of one of my bugbears about this game, which is that, like…
The way summons work in FFVI is that there is no Summoner role; any character can have a summon, but only one, the esper they currently have equipped; that esper is frequently not all that useful, because you have it equipped for its Magic/Stat gain rather than because you value the summon; a summon can only be used once per fight; and they're tucked away in a corner of the menu that is easy to forget.
The net result is that, like… For the game in which the summons ostensibly have the most narrative integration, espers see the least use as actual summons in the series since they were introduced.
And that bums me out both because I like summons, and because the franchise is introducing a bunch of new summons that have weird/cool concept! Like Alexander the castle-mech right there! Or Bismarck, a giant white whale which is, for some reason, called Bismarck. This feels like things I would ordinarily comment in the meat of my updates instead of forgetting about them for hours.
Ah, well.
…also Alexander ends up being what kills the Red Dragon.
1199 damage isn't all that much, but to be honest the bulk of the damage was done by Terra - the Red Dragon is vulnerable to Ice, and she can Trance and cast Blizzara for an easy 8k damage on an enemy with 30k HP.
Six dragons remain.
All in all the cave is long, tiresome, consumes a lot of resources (I end up having spend actual Elixirs because I've run out of Ethers and Hi-Ethers, plus X-Potions, valuable stuff), but we make it and it did forge the team in fire, granting everyone several levels, the stat boosts that come with it, and enough Magic to be fully functional. Eventually, the two 'routes' taken by our party converge and the reunite before the final door, a double switch which must have each party step on one simultaneously to lower a stone platform and unlock the path to the last section of the dungeon.
And there is Locke, as we were promised.
…looting a treasure chest.
LOCKE, YOU ASSHOLE, YOU'RE THE REASON WHY ALL THE CHESTS IN THE DUNGEON WERE EMPTY???
God I hate him a little now.
The phoenix 'turned itself to stone' - by which the legends meant, it turned itself into magicite. I wonder why. What would have led it to such a sacrifice? If the phoenix is truly a being of rebirth, then perhaps it did so out of love or affection for a mortal, or mortals in general - sacrificing its own existence to grant humanity the power to bring back the dead.
It's a tantalizing hint that there may have been more to the past than 'espers and humans can never live together, war happens.' We've been able to glimpse that ever since Ramuh explained the origins of magicite - where would such a power come from, if espers had not once been in such a position as to willingly give their power to humans? But Phoenix is an even deeper cut - there was an esper that sacrificed itself to give humans the power of rebirth, and it ended up sealed in a cave after the world was torn apart in war.
But it's nothing more than a hint, and it contributes to my frustration regarding the esper plotline. I've been waiting for… I don't know. To bump into espers, I guess? To encounter free espers in the World of Ruin? I've been waiting for a hint that Kefka didn't literally kill all the living espers and effectively just completely end that plotline, but it looks like that's it. All the espers have been cooked since Thamasa and we're never going to resume exploring them as people, as a culture and a history. It's all just magicite now.
It's frustrating.
Anyway, there is one problem with the Phoenix Magicite: it is filled with cracks, and Locke isn't sure it has the strength to perform miracles. I wonder if that's just age, or another hint - that it was used too much, perhaps, or that its power was abused, causing the Magicite more stress than it could handle, until a miracle stone that could have continued to endure as a power of resurrection if measured out carefully was on the verge of breaking apart and had to be hidden away before it was destroyed, humanity abusing its miracles until it lost them. No reason is given in the game, but I think that's what is most likely.
Locke explains that he failed Rachel, broke his promise to her and lost "the only thing that was real to me," and until he does what he'd said he'd do and 'restore his honor,' he is nothing but a liar. Even if the Phoenix Magicite is cracked, there's a chance it might still pull off one last miracle - and so the party is headed to Kohlingen.
I panicked when I realized that the game wasn't going to give me a chance to check I had fully looted the cave before teleporting me halfway across the world. Then I remembered the Phoenix Cave doesn't even have loot.
Locke produces the Magicite, and presents it to Rachel's body…
But nothing happens.
The old man laments that the Magicite has all these 'nasty cracks', and it's unlikely to call back any wayward spirit like that; Locke hangs his head in despair, saying nothing.
But then… The Magicite begins to glow… And as it rises into the air, the whole screen flashes with the shadow of the Phoenix.
This is cinema.
Then it shatters, and Rachel opens her eyes.
Locke, in shock, calls out her name, and she speaks, the Phoenix's aura surrounding her the entire time - a visual cue that all this is happening because of the Phoenix's power actively keeping her alive long enough to speak, and a hint that it won't last.
The Phoenix, she explains, is using the last of its power to give her some time, but she must leave again soon. Before she leaves again, there is something she wants to say to Locke:
He made her happy. In her last moments, when her memory returned, she drifted away thinking of him, and she was truly happy. Now she wants to say what she never had the chance to tell him, and thank him for making her happy.
Then the phoenix's shadow disappears, signifying her time running out, but she is satisfied. She asks only one thing of Locke, that he 'cut free the chains that bind his heart,' and allow himself to love the one who has Rachel's place in his heart now - to love her as he loved Rachel.
Then she tells the Phoenix to be reborn, and give his power to Locke; she rises up into the air, and disappears in a flash of light.
As a cutscene, this is pretty fantastic. The shadow of the Phoenix taking on substance and color as Rachel's spirit gives its strength to it, until the room seems to disappear behind its form, the way it looks half like a flame and half like a blood splatter, the shape of a bird only suggested in its outline - it's great.
Locke emerges from the basement, his expression heavy, and Celes follows after him, calling his name.
He doesn't openly acknowledge his love for Celes here - all he says is "Let's go! We have a job to do." Perhaps because he can't see a future for them until Kefka is defeated and peace restored to the world, or perhaps because their love doesn't need an acknowledgement. I don't know.
…
I'm torn on this resolution.
On the one hand, I get it. The fantasy it represents is a strong one - to have one last conversation with someone we lost, to close the page, to absolve the awful, awful void of having parted without closure, not knowing you were going to never see them again. And it's more than that; Locke can't truly embrace his feelings for Celes because of his guilt for 'failing' Rachel, and because Rachel isn't gone - he can't simply abandon his promise and his quest to bring her back, he has to see it through, he can't be with Celes until he does. It's strong stuff.
On the other hand it feels like the easiest resolution. It feels like every story I ever read about someone trying to bring back the dead is always, always about having to eventually accept that it's impossible and the best you can hope for is closure, that in a way the quest for resurrection was always a quest for closure that didn't know itself. It's been that way since Orpheus and Eurydice and, like, at some point I get tired of it. It's fantasy, you know? Why is 'your loved ones come back just long enough to tell you that you made them happy and shouldn't feel guilty over their fate' an acceptable impossible fantasy to fulfill in a story, but never 'actually bringing them back'?
I guess the reason I'm saying this is because I can glimpse a story there, in which Rachel does come back, and Locke has to actually face and accept the fact that the person he shook heaven and earth for and literally brought back from the dead… isn't the one he loves anymore. That he did all this to fulfill a promise, to make up for not being there when he might have saved Rachel, but that while she was gone, he changed. It's been years, and now he sees that he did what he did out of a sense of duty, of responsibility, of remorse, but no longer of love, because he is in love with someone else now.
And that's in some ways a sadder story, but one I think I might like more. Was it the one I ever expected the game to give me? I don't know. It was probably overthinking it to except any conclusion than the one we got, but it feels… too easy to have all these efforts pay off in Rachel coming back just long enough to say "Don't feel bad, I'm okay with my death and I wish you the best, go love someone else."
It's definitely one of the storylines where FFVI is really grasping at something great and I feel it falls short. The game is ambitious in its storytelling in a way far beyond any of the previous games, and as much as it worked for Terra and Celes, for Locke I feel frustrated even though I even cal it bad - it was an okay resolution, but I feel like it's missing something.
Anyway. That was Locke's arc, and the Phoenix Cave done. And now before we head on with the rest of the story, Locke has a not-so-surprise for us…
…all the treasure from the Phoenix Cave, which he looted before we got there, offered in a one-time package. Goddammit, Locke. I was expecting this, but still.
They're mostly high-end consumables and two pieces of gear, the Flame Shield and the Valiant Knife (that Flame Shield sure would have come in handy against the Red Dragon…). The Valiant Knife is a Locke-specific item which deals more damage the lower his HP is, so it looks like it might be useful, maybe? Locke is one of the few characters I end up using the Attack command on because I've mostly only taught him white magic and he isn't always needed for healing, so I slap Genji Gloves on him and he does a decent job as a physical attacker.
Speaking of magic, though…
The Phoenix Magicite is pretty fucking strong. It teaches us the highest levels of spells - Arise, which resurrects a character with Full HP, Reraise, which provides a buff that causes a character to automatically revive upon their next KO, Curaga and Firaga. This is some serious, endgame level of power.
…and, because of the way Magicite works, I can't use any of it. I have to grind dozens of Magic AP in order to actually unlock those.
Which we'll do soon. But first, we need more Magicite - there's only one Phoenix and it can only be equipped on one character. We need to find more, and I know just where to look.
It's time to head back to Narshe and resolve the dangling 'frozen esper' plot thread we've had since the literal first scene of the entire game.
With Locke in the party, we can unlock doors. For the most part this turns out to be completely useless: The shopkeeper clearly had time to pack their stuff before leaving, and there is no chest full of unsold swords and armors lying around. That is, until we unlock the door to the weapons shop, where we find not a discarded piece of loot, but the store owner himself, who locked himself in to be safe from the monster that have overrun the town - and also to wait for us with a particular present…
…the Ragnarok Magicite.
Yeah, Ragnarok is back, but this time as a Magicite… or a sword. The choice is ours; the shopkeeper explains that he could grind the Magicite down into the form of a blade, or give it to us as Magicite. As a sword, Ragnarok would be one of the most powerful weapons in the game - but, as Magicite, it would teach its wielder the ultimate spell, Ultima.
That's a fiendish choice. I'm genuinely not sure which is best - a powerful weapon might actually make physical attacking worthwhile, but it's not equippable by all characters, and the ultimate spell is tempting. Hmmm.
I'm going to pick the Magicite option and equip it on Terra, but I'll leave a save at the entrance of the room so that I can go back if I change my mind after posting this update.
For now, it's time to head for the town's other main prize, by going through the Narshe Mines.
Incidentally some of the Magitek Research Facility's artificial monsters appear to have escaped and found a home in Narshe. Good for them?
We run into another of the eight legendary dragons, the Ice Dragon. As you might guess from its tiny stunted sprite, it's kind of the runt of the litter - we were clearly meant to tackle Narshe before the Phoenix Cave and come back for Ragnarok later, and as a result it's fairly easily dealt with.
RIP Locke, though.
Three down, five to go.
Then, there is nothing standing between us and the frozen esper, Valigarmanda.
The game is doing something that I think is pretty clever here - this 'boss battle' isn't truly against the esper itself, but against its prison. Valigarmanda has high defense but is vulnerable to Fire, and its attacks are Rasp and Ice-type spells - essentially, the unconscious esper is lashing out reflexively to defend itself by draining magic from everyone and using it to blast ice attacks from its prison, and we win the 'fight' by melting it down, upon which the big bird is free.
"I suppose that's of little consequence. But what of this devastation that fills the air? Could the War of the Magi have lasted a thousand years? That foolish, unending war… Hmm? You would seek to put an end to it? Then I shall put my trust in you…"
And with this, Valigarmanda turns itself to Magicite.
…
Okay, seriously? That's the payoff?
I don't know what I was expecting. A reason why that esper was sealed in ice? Some insight about the War of the Magi and the espers' history for a being that was alive for it? Some secret about the nature of Magicite that blunts the 'oh you need my help lemme just quickly commit suicide' aspect of that scene? Like… at least some kind of ribbon to tie off the whole 'esper history and nature' side of the plot that kinda went away after Kefka showed up at Thamasa.
I don't know. Something.
With Valigarmanda's Magicite in our possession, there's a screen-shaking effect and a rumbling sound, indicating that somewhere within Narshe, something has changed in the environment - probably a new path opening. And we know from Lone Wolf's ramblings when he left the town that Mog is in here somewhere - so our next step will be finding the furry critter.
Some other time, though. I've done enough random encountering for one day. And we made some progress in acquiring the power required to tackle the game's final challenges…
Valigarmanda looks like it's going to be the key to our endgame offensive magic, at least until we get Flare, as it teaches all three Tier 3 elemental spells as well as providing a sizeable +2 Magic boost per level-up. Nice. So right now, our group looks like…
Dunno if I should give Terra Ragnarok or Valigarmanda, to be honest. Celes is my generalist mage, so I give her Phoenix so she can have Arise, Curaga and Firaga, Locke is a healer so I give him Lakshmi to learn Curaga and then Phoenix when Celes is done with it, and then Terra will get the most offensive options.
Hmmm.
The way the World of Ruins is as fascinating as it is frustrating to me. It started off incredibly strong, but as time goes on, that impact gets blunted as it turns out a lot of the world is doing… weirdly okay? The Solitary Island, the devastated town of Mobliz, the collapsing house in Tzen are front-loaded, but the farther away you get from Kefka's Tower the more you're just revisiting the same towns and wrapping up the same arcs as before the apocalypse, and weirdly enough, Locke's arc is one of the issues there, because Kohlingen is just… fine. It's there. Locke's girlfriend is still there in a coma, the creepy old dude tending to her is still doing fine, we just pick up the arc about the Legendary Treasure right where we left it with a dungeon run.
The concept of picking up party members as we go after each one went off on their own way during the one-year timeskip is really strong, unfortunately this is also tied into the game then making us actually use those teammates, which is painful. Final Fantasy's combat system isn't deep enough to make long series of random encounters fun, and that gets worse when we're saddled with under-built characters who need to learn magic on the fly because their custom mechanics aren't cutting it.
Which actually ties into another frustration - I just got through the Owzer Mansion, the Phoenix Cave, and Narshe, acquiring the Magicites of legendary espers Lakshmi, Phoenix, Valigarmanda and Ragnarok… And right now that hasn't actually improved my capabilities in any way. What Magicites grant is not magic, it is the right to start learning magic. Valigarmanda's spells are all rated x1, meaning I will need a hundred AP to learn them. Unless I go and do a grinding session on the Veldt or something like that, it might be several hours before I can actually use any of these spells.
All in all… Very ambivalent about this update. Some very strong ideas at work (double dungeon, new magic, Ragnarok as a 'choose one of two boons', finally resolving two major plot threads that were introduced in the opening hours of the game), mixed with some questionable and frustrating execution and resolution.
But we've unlocked some real firepower and one of the tougher dungeons of the World of Ruin is behind us, so we've made real progress.
It's been that way since Orpheus and Eurydice and, like, at some point I get tired of it. It's fantasy, you know? Why is 'your loved ones come back just long enough to tell you that you made them happy and shouldn't feel guilty over their fate' an acceptable impossible fantasy to fulfill in a story, but never 'actually bringing them back'?
To bring up Doctor Who again, there's an episode (Hell Bent) in which just bringing them back is exactly what happens... and it's one the show's most hated episodes. A lot of that's due to there being no real consequences for bringing back the dead, beyond a bit of memory loss (and even that later got undone) and that the resurrected character eventually has to return to their time of death... but the emphasis is very much on 'eventually'.
Not helped by the guy who wrote it already having a massive habit of undoing or sugarcoating character deaths.
I think that gets to why 'bringing your dead loved ones back' stories are that rare, because they can risk making death look cheap, like a minor inconvenience even. If you are doing a story where a dead loved one is brought back, I'd say what's important to do is emphasise that resurrection still has consequences and hurdles
There actually are two or three chests in the Phoenix Cave that Locke didn't get to first. It's actually kind of a neat touch because they're in the harder to get areas, like on the islands in that magma chamber. One of them has a Ribbon, if memory serves.
I have to admit, I was shocked at seeing Alexander…
As for his location…Hrm.
Also big frozen bird is called Tritoch in my childhood. Woolyism again, and this new name isn't likely to replace it frankly.
The Locke/Rachel/Phoenix thing was, of course, heavily referenced by the lvl 1-50 Alchemist questline in FFXIV.
Also, the Ragnarok esper has a unique effect when you use it - instead of doing damage, it turns enemies into items, auto-killing them (and netting you the items); naturally this is of mixed utility, given every enemy has a different chance of being auto-killed by this, and while there are definitely some enemies that can be farmed for endgame equipment, the number who turn into actually useful stuff is limited (and every enemy has a set of four items with 25% chance of turning into each, meaning you might not even get the one you want).
Between the farming possibilities and Ultima I always pick the esper; well, that and turning a guy's corpse into a sword seems kinda disrespectful
The magicite is definitely the better pick for a low level run, since it can teach Ultima to all of your conventional party members with little fuss. You can also use the Ragnaroks summon to acquire more genji gloves if used against a particular monster, which is in itself a very nice thing if you didn't spend a ridiculous amount of time stealing genji gloves on the floating continent.
However of course you're locked out of obtaining the Ragnarok and also the Light Bringer sword for the rest of the game. They are with one caveat, the best swords in the game.
However if you go for the sword instead, you'll lose the Ragnarok summon and the easiest means of obtaining the Ultima spell. The only other way to get Ultima is obtaining a shield that's also in Narshe. However the shield is cursed as the worst shield in the game. It penalizes your stats and inflicts just about every status effect on you when worn. So you need to equip a ribbon on top of the shield for that character to remain functional if diminished.
HOWEVER if you grind out and win 256 battles with that shield equipped, it turns into the Paladin Shield. The absolute best shield in the game that also teaches the Ultima spell. It boosts stats, has great elemental defense bonuses and can be worn by anyone. A big investment but well worth it... if you weren't going for a low level run.
Going for the Ragnarok will also give you the opportunity to trade that sword in for the Light Bringer later on.
Omi. Doesn't the PR have convenience speed cheats? Have you considered doing some basic grinding to learn basic spells? You should have plenty of magicites with 10, 20 or at least 5 rates.
I see your point about summons. I think the intention was the player would eventually distribute among the parties in Kefka's tower to plug weaknesses and strengths as needed, once you've learned all you wanted. For me it works seeing the system like that, but I get the frustration if you're a summoner stan.
To this day, I'm still not sure whats the better choice; most times I take the sword (there's another way for Ultima), but Ragnarok as magicite is certainly convenient.
As before, we control one party at a time, and can swap between the two at any time by pressing Z. The way this dungeon works is that there are multiple switches which do things like lower spikes blocking the path, or raise up rocks that we can jump between. However, the switches only work while we're standing on them. This means that for instance, in the picture above, I have to maneuvre Celes onto that switch so that I can then swap to Terra and have her cross the now-lowered spikes and walk up to the next switch, which she steps on, lowering another spiked floor, whereupon I swap to Celes, etc.
Fun fact, you can totally skip over those spikes and just have a party walk through them. They do a ton of damage, sure, but nothing a few cure spells won't fix on the other side. Speeds up the dungeon slightly, at least.
At the start of the dungeon, Relm, Gau, Cyan and Strago effectively have no usable magic worth shit (several of them, in fact, don't have any magic period). I spend multiple fights actually using Relm's Sketch command because she has jack shit to do, which is how I can confirm what others have said before: Sketch is garbage which misses more than half the time and doesn't do anything useful the rest of the time. For the entire time until she learns some actual magic, which takes forever, Relm is just trash. Gau at least I can set to Rage:Stray Cat and not think about him anymore, but he's not, like, good? For whatever reason he didn't share the other characters' "level up upon rejoining the party" mechanic, so he was lv 16 in a party of lv 27 characters when I got him back, which means he dies in one hit and can't do any damage. Now, that also means that he gains pretty much one level per fight, so I can slap him with the Bismarck magicite and have him rapidly escalate in Strength until he has Strength 90+. Which is fun, but even then, his damage doesn't raise above 'okay' - half the time Stray Cat just does a normal attack, and when he uses Cat Scratch it still doesn't hit harder than a Tier 2 spell from one of my good magic characters.
Yeah, this is kind of the problem with the gave actively forcing you to use such a large cast of characters, in a game where to make them stronger you have to actively raise them (for Esper stat bonuses and learning magic) rather than just say... FFVIII where if you're forced to use a character you haven't leveled you can just slap a combination of GFs on them, transfer over some spells to junction, and oh look Zell is flare-punching people for 5000 damage a round. Most of these characters in FFVI have a niche somewhere that makes them useful... but ones like Relm, Gau, and Strago need to be trained to make use of that niche (Relm's high magic stat, Gau's Rages, and Strago's Lores respectively).
Meanwhile some of the earlier characters in the game like Edgar and Sabin are fire and forget missiles - it's trivally easy to get Edgar's Tools, Sabin just learns new Blitzes by leveling up or in WoR, visiting a random cabin to get the ability to fart out 5000 damage a turn on command.
Cyan has new Bushido techniques, including Dragoon, a technique which drains HP and MP from the enemy and sounds like it would be really cool if it ever worked, but half the enemies seem immune to drain and so take 0 damage from it*. That means all this growth was for nothing and I just set him to use Fang, his basic technique, for pitiful damage.
*For reasons unknown to me, several of my party members are also immune to drain, and I can never figure what causes that; I don't seem to have "immunity to drain" items in my equipment.
So as far as I've been able to tell, in FFVI Drain/Osmose abilities can only restore you based on how much HP/MP you're missing. So if Cyan is at full HP and MP, then he doesn't do any damage because he can't drain anything. If a party member is at full MP, then Osmose is useless compared to Rasp for reducing enemy MP (though on that note, I don't think I've touched Ethers since getting most everyone a quick round of Zona Seeker to learn Osmose.) And in the same vein? If an enemy has a drain attack like Lifeshaver, it's either the most terrifyingly dangerous thing ever when they're close to death that instantly eats thousands of HP, or a joke because you haven't bothered slapping that enemy yet.
These Necromancer guys here have an attack called Zombie Stick which turns a character into a zombie - that means it effectively instakills them and causes them to start attacking other party members.
God, Zombie is such an obnoxiously annoying status effect, especially since there aren't any easy accessories or equipment to deal with it. At least FFV had things like the Genji armor having weird assorted immunities. I just bought 99 Holy Waters at some point and never looked back.
And as long as I'm talking about Holy Water, can I just say one of the most small annoying things about the inventory system in FFV/FFVI Remasters is that there's no "sort inventory" button? I'm pretty sure the GBA versions let you click a quick sort that arranged everything nicely by weapon/armor class and consumables, but if I want to find specific things like tents or holy water in the field menu I have to scroll through a bunch of nonsense.
It's just. They're positioned like normal chests. They're at the end of corridors. In hidden alcoves. You have to open the path to them. And EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. IS EMPTY.
The Red Dragon's main attacks are Fira and Fireball, which are potent but manageable moves if you have access to proper healing magic, but upon reaching ⅓ of its HP it effectively enters Phase 2 and start casting Flare and Firaga - here Flare hits for 2k damage, instantly killing any given party member - in this case, Terra was the only survivor of previous onslaughts, and it's a party wipe.
Like a lot of big boss fights in FFVI, this fight can kind of depend on if you gear up for it in advance. Do something like slap Fire Shields or Red Jacket (Though that's Edgar/Sabin only) on your characters, and fire does nothing to them. Throw on Reflect Rings and you just have to worry about outdamaging the Dragon as you bounce everything back and heal it.
If not, oh boy hope you got quick access to shell or something to reduce the magic damage.
The way summons work in FFVI is that there is no Summoner role; any character can have a summon, but only one, the esper they currently have equipped; that esper is frequently not all that useful, because you have it equipped for its Magic/Stat gain rather than because you value the summon; a summon can only be used once per fight; and they're tucked away in a corner of the menu that is easy to forget.
The net result is that, like… For the game in which the summons ostensibly have the most narrative integration, espers see the least use as actual summons in the series since they were introduced.
And that bums me out both because I like summons, and because the franchise is introducing a bunch of new summons that have weird/cool concept! Like Alexander the castle-mech right there! Or Bismarck, a giant white whale which is, for some reason, called Bismarck. This feels like things I would ordinarily comment in the meat of my updates instead of forgetting about them for hours.
I'm honestly pretty sure that despite this playthrough being like, the third or fourth time I've gone through the World of Ruin? I've never actually used Espers before this. It's as you say, the single use, obscure part of your menu, tied to magic learning and stat bonuses part just means you never actually use them. A real shame, can't deny it.
Also there's a bit of extra dialogue in this scene if Celes is in the party that meets with Locke in the Phoenix Cave, if you still have a save around there and want to check it out.
I panicked when I realized that the game wasn't going to give me a chance to check I had fully looted the cave before teleporting me halfway across the world. Then I remembered the Phoenix Cave doesn't even have loot.
Well, if you care about numbers on its map entry/the "get all chests" achievement, you still have to open all those empty chests. Plus, there's a Ribbon in there somewhere if you missed it.
Totally get if you'd rather come back and stomp it 15 levels later though.
They're mostly high-end consumables and two pieces of gear, the Flame Shield and the Valiant Knife (that Flame Shield sure would have come in handy against the Red Dragon…). The Valiant Knife is a Locke-specific item which deals more damage the lower his HP is, so it looks like it might be useful, maybe? Locke is one of the few characters I end up using the Attack command on because I've mostly only taught him white magic and he isn't always needed for healing, so I slap Genji Gloves on him and he does a decent job as a physical attacker.
Locke is a physical attacker, through and through. Good strength, not the best magic, and a strong equipment set since alongside Celes, Terra and Edgar he's the only one who can equip a lot of the bigger awesomer swords up to and including Ultima Weapon. Throw in unique options like the Valiant Knife and his ranged boomerang weapons letting him be a back row physical fighter. Plus, Steal/Mug, of course.
So, for grinding Magic AP since it has to happen at some point, there's a few options which are all available to you at this point in the game.
There is of course the Veldt, which has the bonus option of bringing Gau to stack him with better rages if you plan to make much use of him later.
Surprisingly, there's Zozo the town, where a lot of enemy formations are piss easy at this point in the game and still give 2-3 AP a fight.
And this isn't really spoilers since it's just a specific spot on the world map you can already run around but I'll stick it under one just in case:
There's a small desert near Maranda which only has two random encounters: Slagworms (which are vulnerable to the Death spell and give a buttload of EXP), and Cactars (which give no EXP but 10000 Gil and 10 AP per fight, and die instantly to anything they can't dodge since they have 3 HP).
Yeah, Ragnarok is back, but this time as a Magicite… or a sword. The choice is ours; the shopkeeper explains that he could grind the Magicite down into the form of a blade, or give it to us as Magicite. As a sword, Ragnarok would be one of the most powerful weapons in the game - but, as Magicite, it would teach its wielder the ultimate spell, Ultima.
That's a fiendish choice. I'm genuinely not sure which is best - a powerful weapon might actually make physical attacking worthwhile, but it's not equippable by all characters, and the ultimate spell is tempting. Hmmm.
I'm going to pick the Magicite option and equip it on Terra, but I'll leave a save at the entrance of the room so that I can go back if I change my mind after posting this update.
Objectively? The sword is the better option, as it's both one of the strongest weapons in the game, and can be bet at the arena to win the actual strongest weapon in the game, while the Esper just teaches a spell that can still be gotten elsewhere (though with some tedium involved) and nothing Metamorphose gets you is unique, only again more tediuous without). Unless you're playing the GBA version, where you can steal Ragnarok from the final boss and keep it in a Game Cleared file (similar to how you can steal endgame equipment from Neo Exdeath).
Subjectively, having a permanent empty slot in your Esper menu is annoying, and only one person at a time can use the sword anyways while the Esper can teach everyone Ultima, and again, takes away some tedium from the other method. So, up to you in the end.
I don't know what I was expecting. A reason why that esper was sealed in ice? Some insight about the War of the Magi and the espers' history for a being that was alive for it? Some secret about the nature of Magicite that blunts the 'oh you need my help lemme just quickly commit suicide' aspect of that scene? Like… at least some kind of ribbon to tie off the whole 'esper history and nature' side of the plot that kinda went away after Kefka showed up at Thamasa.
It's certainly one of the hiccups of the FFVI storyline. Espers are built up to be this super important element, with their own world and everything, and then... Kefka just kind of poofs them all out of the plot. Sometimes with bits like this I wonder if the "Espers die to become Magicite" bit wasn't always how it worked, so it would be less strange to see things like bird bro here immediately offing himself for the party's sake.
The way the World of Ruins is as fascinating as it is frustrating to me. It started off incredibly strong, but as time goes on, that impact gets blunted as it turns out a lot of the world is doing… weirdly okay? The Solitary Island, the devastated town of Mobliz, the collapsing house in Tzen are front-loaded, but the farther away you get from Kefka's Tower the more you're just revisiting the same towns and wrapping up the same arcs as before the apocalypse, and weirdly enough, Locke's arc is one of the issues there, because Kohlingen is just… fine. It's there. Locke's girlfriend is still there in a coma, the creepy old dude tending to her is still doing fine, we just pick up the arc about the Legendary Treasure right where we left it with a dungeon run.
The concept of picking up party members as we go after each one went off on their own way during the one-year timeskip is really strong, unfortunately this is also tied into the game then making us actually use those teammates, which is painful. Final Fantasy's combat system isn't deep enough to make long series of random encounters fun, and that gets worse when we're saddled with under-built characters who need to learn magic on the fly because their custom mechanics aren't cutting it.
Which actually ties into another frustration - I just got through the Owzer Mansion, the Phoenix Cave, and Narshe, acquiring the Magicites of legendary espers Lakshmi, Phoenix, Valigarmanda and Ragnarok… And right now that hasn't actually improved my capabilities in any way. What Magicites grant is not magic, it is the right to start learning magic. Valigarmanda's spells are all rated x1, meaning I will need a hundred AP to learn them. Unless I go and do a grinding session on the Veldt or something like that, it might be several hours before I can actually use any of these spells.
All in all… Very ambivalent about this update. Some very strong ideas at work (double dungeon, new magic, Ragnarok as a 'choose one of two boons', finally resolving two major plot threads that were introduced in the opening hours of the game), mixed with some questionable and frustrating execution and resolution.
But we've unlocked some real firepower and one of the tougher dungeons of the World of Ruin is behind us, so we've made real progress.
World of Ruin peaks early, there's really no denying it. Personally I'm not so tied up over the "world doesn't seem broken enough" part, but the open-ended exploration and picking up party members feels like they spread the net too wide. Probably should have taken longer to get the Falcon, or had more party members by the time you reach Setzer, I don't know. Something that would keep the party getting a bit more characterization and trying to figure out how to get around in this re-arranged world, instead of just "hey guys found the backup airship".
As for the grinding AP issue, addressed some solutions for that up above. Still a game design issue though.
Omi. Doesn't the PR have convenience speed cheats? Have you considered doing some basic grinding to learn basic spells? You should have plenty of magicites with 10, 20 or at least 5 rates.
Sadly, PC versions of the Pixel Remasters didn't get the cheats the Switch versions did, for whatever reason. Granted there's probably mods or something, but I've always felt modding kind of defeats the purpose of a first playthrough unless it's like... Bethesda games with their "we refuse to patch decade old glitches despite constantly re-releasing the game because the fans will do it for us".
Omi. Doesn't the PR have convenience speed cheats? Have you considered doing some basic grinding to learn basic spells? You should have plenty of magicites with 10, 20 or at least 5 rates.
And with this, Valigarmanda turns itself to Magicite.
…
Okay, seriously? That's the payoff?
I don't know what I was expecting. A reason why that esper was sealed in ice? Some insight about the War of the Magi and the espers' history for a being that was alive for it? Some secret about the nature of Magicite that blunts the 'oh you need my help lemme just quickly commit suicide' aspect of that scene? Like… at least some kind of ribbon to tie off the whole 'esper history and nature' side of the plot that kinda went away after Kefka showed up at Thamasa.
I headcanon that Tritoch (...never gonna get that vali-whatsit right in my head, so many childhood memories) wouldn't have been alive long anyway.
Frozen in ice during the War of the Magi a thousand years ago, power waning in a desperate attempt to stay alive... and espers aren't immortal.
We freed Tritoch, but espers seem to have a firm sense of just when their death is about to hit. And with Tritoch's right around the corner, and espers being at least somewhat telepathic in my book, Tritoch was aware of what the world was facing and choose to pass on the power in hopes of fixing things.
To bring up Doctor Who again, there's an episode (Hell Bent) in which just bringing them back is exactly what happens... and it's one the show's most hated episodes. A lot of that's due to there being no real consequences for bringing back the dead, beyond a bit of memory loss (and even that later got undone) and that the resurrected character eventually has to return to their time of death... but the emphasis is very much on 'eventually'.
Not helped by the guy who wrote it already having a massive habit of undoing or sugarcoating character deaths.
I think that gets to why 'bringing your dead loved ones back' stories are that rare, because they can risk making death look cheap, like a minor inconvenience even. If you are doing a story where a dead loved one is brought back, I'd say what's important to do is emphasise that resurrection still has consequences and hurdles
Yeah, I've seen a couple of games that tried to tread that line (I remember when Open Sourcery tried to Unbury its Gays which all it cost was an important stat number going down which made me roll my eyes) and I've actually never seen it executed on well and I always get frustrated whenever I see even a hint of it. There's probably a way to do it but I think the sacrifice is is that it has to take up way too much space than is normally afforded by the amount of space writers have to work in and you kind of need the entire story to be about that resurrection if you do it well.
It doesn't help that while, yeah, its fantasy, the certainty and permanence of death in people's lives make it an very eye-rolling kind of fantasy unless you nail it, which, as discussed, is harder than it looks.
Which actually ties into another frustration - I just got through the Owzer Mansion, the Phoenix Cave, and Narshe, acquiring the Magicites of legendary espers Lakshmi, Phoenix, Valigarmanda and Ragnarok… And right now that hasn't actually improved my capabilities in any way. What Magicites grant is not magic, it is the right to start learning magic. Valigarmanda's spells are all rated x1, meaning I will need a hundred AP to learn them. Unless I go and do a grinding session on the Veldt or something like that, it might be several hours before I can actually use any of these spells.
When I did my first playthrough recently using the Switch-version, I just set that modifier to the max and it only felt slightly overkill. Țhere were times where like Celes and Edgar had acquired every spell available and were just walking around with a stat-focused magicite, but that did not even feel like some unnatural unfun state like being overleveled.
Bit of a late reply, but this has now reminded me of how Yahtzee Croshaw once said that, while he could think of a bunch of 'grizzled dad protag' games (e.g., TLOU), he couldn't really think of a 'grizzled mum protag' one. Except Bayonetta... debatably.
Of course, nobody would ever call Terra 'grizzled' (except maybe some drawings of her Trance form), so yeah, not gonna be interrogating these parallels any further~