This, and I suppose your musings on the subject beforehand, sent a chill down my spine. In a good way. A feeling of Awe, a feeling of- I don't know. My own feelings are, as ever, mysterious. Awe, Respect, maybe, Hope. Hope that these last remnants, of a dead race, can redeem themselves through action. Right their wrongs. By facing the one mimicking their history, but immeasurably worse. And raining upon him the Judgement of Their Kind. The Judgement of The Magi.
For an accurate emulation of my experience though, please add an extra twenty minutes running back and forth through the Narshe Mines because I didn't realize I was supposed to walk up to the cliff so I was fruitlessly looking for another opening elsewhere.
Same but hilariously worse for me. I got frustrated enough to look at a guide, still walked past it and had to escalate to checking a video Let's Play.
Out of curiosity, did you find a chest with a monster in a box encounter in this dungeon? Because for that specific encounter, said enemy has only a percent chance to drop one of the best armor sets in the game for Terra and Celes, the Minerva Bustier, so figured it was relevant to mention.
See, this is where the Let's Play format is helpful to me as well, because it forces me to take frequent breaks and sit with what I just played through for a while. My immediate take from Doma Castle was "kinda mid and the fact that Elayne and Owain's ghosts came back bothers me for some reason I can't quite identify, it feels like it defeats the point of the Phantom Train sequence," it's only after I had to sit and write about it that it all clicked together and I realized "oh, they aren't ghosts at all!"
With that out of the way...The very last piece of advice I have is to go wander around Triangle Island until a Certain Enemy shows up and Does a Certain Thing. If you need directions, Triangle Island is the island shaped like a triangle.
Zona Eater's Bizarre Fish Tour of Hell got cut because I was midway through gathering party members, went 'I don't have time for this' and reloaded so I could get back on track, and then I cut it for space so I could address it in full when I commit to it. Very funny gag though.
I'll give it this at least, Omi is a lot more lenient with spoilers than some similar threads are, in that as long as we at least put it in spoiler blocks at most we get a jab or two for filling half a page of posts with nothing but said spoiler blocks.
On the other hand, I do occasionally wish it was enforced a bit better because it eventually leads to people just flat out openly going "YEAH SO OMI MAKE SURE YOU GET SPECIFIC ITEM CALLED THIS IN NEXT AREA YOU'LL VISIT, IT LETS YOU DO SPECIFIC THING I WILL NOW FULLY DETAIL" and it's like... come on, is it that hard to wait for him to bring it up himself? Or at least wait until he's gone through said area with the item and ask "did you find any kind of cool thing here, or do you need to re-search?" without actually naming said item and its effects. And it's often repeat offenders, so a few temporary threadbans or bonks of some kind might hopefully calm it down. Heck, I'll take my lumps for crossing the line if Omi thinks I did at some point too.
I am a pretty non-confrontational kind of person and as a result I'm more prone to shrugging things off than calling people out for stuff, especially because I want this to be a fun place and most people's spoiler sins are born of an excess of enthusiasm rather than malice. I probably should be a bit more strict, and will perhaps be in the future, but it's not something that comes easily to me.
That said: There's, like, a vibe where you can tell apart "Hey you missed a cool item in Cave X you might wanna go back and check" and "Hey you should definitely go get Item Y in Cave Z it will be important for Event µ" and if I start reading the latter post I'll just disengage and stop reading. Like, sorry if you're reading this and you wrote a post pre-emptively telling me to do a specific thing that you think I'm going to miss but there are very strong odds I never finished reading your post and already forgot you wrote it.
I remember playing the SNES version, but that was a long time ago, but the old man who thought Sabin and Cyan were there to fix a clock when the first arrived to the Veldt, is he still around in the World of Ruin?
He has a minor cutscene if Gau is in the party that seems to suggest I might want to do something Rage-related, but as that requires engaging with the Rage system, I have not followed up on it and thus cut it out for space since it didn't lead anywhere in my update.
Actually if you check the picture you'll find that the font is different because I grabbed that picture of the wiki because I was too lazy to open FFVI just to grab an extra screenshot
I do know how to get to Deathgaze though, I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
So that the original thread doesn't end up one long series of boxes and black bars~ Completed: FFI to VIII Current: Tactics Omi has already played (to some extent): FFIX (vaguely remembers), FFXIV Please do not directly quote Omicron in this thread, though quoting in a way that doesn't ping...
I am a pretty non-confrontational kind of person and as a result I'm more prone to shrugging things off than calling people out for stuff, especially because I want this to be a fun place and most people's spoiler sins are born of an excess of enthusiasm rather than malice. I probably should be a bit more strict, and will perhaps be in the future, but it's not something that comes easily to me.
Wait until Omi finds out that it's canon that the entirety of FFIV post-bomb-release is Cecil's dying hallucination of how he wishes things should have gone after he's killed by the weapon he unwittingly deployed! /s a billion times, obviously
Wait until Omi finds out that it's canon that the entirety of FFIV post-bomb-release is Cecil's dying hallucination of how he wishes things should have gone after he's killed by the weapon he unwittingly deployed! /s a billion times, obviously
This, and I suppose your musings on the subject beforehand, sent a chill down my spine. In a good way. A feeling of Awe, a feeling of- I don't know. My own feelings are, as ever, mysterious. Awe, Respect, maybe, Hope. Hope that these last remnants, of a dead race, can redeem themselves through action. Right their wrongs. By facing the one mimicking their history, but immeasurably worse. And raining upon him the Judgement of Their Kind. The Judgement of The Magi.
He has a minor cutscene if Gau is in the party that seems to suggest I might want to do something Rage-related, but as that requires engaging with the Rage system, I have not followed up on it and thus cut it out for space since it didn't lead anywhere in my update.
You do not have to engage with the Rage, but it is just a minor bit of story telling involving Gau. No equipment, magicite, or other unlocks, just a bit of narrative.
Reason I didn't make it earlier is because I wanted to know you were okay with it beforehand, so when you liked the post where I propsed it I took it as a sign of approval
In less jokey commentary, I think this bit still falls flat for me, and I think it's another symptom of trying for an 'ensemble cast' game. Cyan gets the castle where he's introduced, the train almost immediately afterwards, and then IIRC basically nothing all the way up until this bit, so we don't really see him still struggling with his pain and grief and anger over what happened; the idea he still has any is significantly undercut, in fact, by the way he (doesn't) act when you are in the imperial capital.
Yeah, the Final Fantasy series doesn't do the whole "ensemble cast" all that well. You almost always have one main character, and a cast of supporting characters. FFVI was their big attempt at an ensemble cast, and as a result some get more screentime than others, effectively resulting in a few becoming more "main characters" than the others.
To put it bluntly, my experience of actually playing through the sequence was 'meh.' Then once I sat down, and thought through what was presented, I ended up putting together a number of cue that landed on 'I think there's depth and textual complexity and rich meaning to this bit of the story,' but like, as an in-the-moment video game experience it left me lukewarm.
Sometimes things have a lot to dig up from them that makes them interesting to talk about but still fail in their purpose as a story. There are layers to be excavated here but it's a 'cold' process done after the actual emotional landing of the piece failed.
Not gonna lie, a Magitek party member who was like... a straight up cyborg or robot showing the other side of Imperial Magitek design would be pretty dope.
We're getting increasingly close to the endgame. There are barely any 'true' dungeons left, but plenty of small things to go after here and there (several of whom I would have beelined for if I wasn't trying to do this mostly blind; this too is the lot of the Let's Player).
So we're basically in the 'clean-up' phase.
First off, let's pay a visit to Ol' Grandpa.
Unfortunately, even with a party comprising Celes and Locke, all Cid does is repeat the same canned line of dialogue without acknowledging that we left or came back. Really giving that 'the possibility of my survival was a last-minute addition' vibe. Thankfully, there's more to find if we examine the beach and its hateful, hateful fish.
A Magicite washed ashore!
And not any Magicite, either. This is 'Quetzalli', a bird-type esper whose summoned ability has the somewhat comical (but surprisingly deadly) effect of causing the entire party to Jump all at once; more importantly, it teaches Hastega and its stat-up is +1 Speed. It's the first Speed-enhancing Magicite I've found in the game and damn, if I had known I would have dropped by way earlier. I mean, Speed is…
Well…
Hrm.
I Hate The ATB System More Than I Ever Did: Final Fantasy VI Edition
I have a confession to make. This entire time, for the past 20 updates, something has been bugging me. Like an itch at the back of my brain, something in the combat system felt bad. Not any one specific mechanic, but like everything was being shrouded in some kind of smoke or fog that made it all feel clunkier and erratic in ways V wasn't. And now I know.
Here is what happens in a combat encounter in FFV. ATB gauges fill up. When a gauge is full, a character's command menu pops up, and I select an action. Because I use the 'Wait' function, the game pauses while I am in that menu. Then the character takes action, and the game looks like this:
As you can see, Krile has a yellow (full) ATB gauge, and is taking action, casting Hastega. The game is, effectively, on pause during that action. The ATB gauges for Bartz, Lena and Faris, which you can see here at differing levels of completion, are frozen. The animation for whatever action I pick, whether that's a short one (a single attack) or a long one (summoning Bahamut), is cosmetic - it has no gameplay relevance. The entire game is on hold waiting for the animation to proceed before the ATB gauge resumes its gain. While Krile is casting Flare, I can take a look at the screen and know that Lenna will act nearly immediately after, Faris will take a bit longer, and Bartz acted before Krile and so it'll be a while; in all this, I have a clear idea of when the enemy will attack - Lenna will definitely go first, but they will probably go before Faris or Bartz.
This is not the case in FFVI. To illustrate, allow me to show you four screenshots taken in quick succession:
This is a single use of a Magicite Shard randomly summoning Alexander and blasting the enemy with Divine Judgement. And as you can see, Terra's ATB gauge is filling up the entire time.
This means a few things. For one, animations are no longer cosmetic. In fact, because I use a lot of magic, animations are now the defining factor of battle pacing. For the most part, when I input a character's Command, by the time they finish performing that action, everyone's ATB gauges are full. Also, the same is happening to the enemy. So speed of input in menus is more important than it's ever been, and at the same time, everything feels clumsy and chaotic. FFV at least gave me a sense of the battle pacing itself according to individual character speed and with a clearly legible character flow where I could chart out my next actions. This is just noise. It's ironically returned to something closer to a true turn-by-turn (since all actions are queued up because all ATB gauges are full by the time an action finishes performing), but worse in every way.
Also it means the Speed stat is probably worthless. There's no point trying to make a fast character who can take 'more actions per turn' than the others because it all grinds down in animation speed.
Thanks, I hate it.
Alright, well. I'll still spend some level-ups increasing Speed for marginal benefits, I guess.
With this disappointing conclusion to the Solitary Island saga, I have a new objective: chasing Deathgaze, the monster roaming the high skies. Now, you might ask, how do we find Deathgaze?
Well, I hope you like podcasts and audiobooks.
Okay, okay, the process is not that long, with the modern convenience of the Pixel Remaster the whole thing is like… Half an hour, tops. Here's the thing:
Deathgaze spawned in a random, invisible tile of the entire sky.
Thus, the way to locate and confront the beast is to scour the entire sky until we randomly bump into him.
In practice, this means, like, checking every grid coordinate in the world. The most efficient way to do this is to set the airship on a course just slightly askew East or West of the meridian, and then pushing enter and, just. Flying in an endlessly looping circuit that will eventually cover the entire globe.
To be clear, I would never have figured that out on my own and absolutely needed someone to tell me how to find Deathgaze. This is a typical 'read the guide' moment because, well - if Deathgaze spawned once, and then you just went there and fought it, that'd be one thing, but no.
Deathgaze can be seen here brutalizing my secondary party. He opens the fight with lv 5 Death, and then anything that survived gets to eat Blizzaga and Aero. It's immediately obvious this was the wrong team for the job, but the thing is, we don't die. No.
If you can make it three turns against Deathgaze, it runs away.
Now, as we were told by a nice townsfolk hours ago, Deathgaze has the unique property of retaining its HP between battles. You're meant to find it, deal as much damage as possible while surviving its onslaught, and then repeat the process.
Except it has respawned on a new random tile of the sky.
Which means finding it again.
Allow me a creative expression of my feelings regarding this whole concept:
9,999 damage.
Anyway. It's fine. I'm doing this now, instead of five levels ago before unlocking my highest-tier attacks. Ultima, Firaga and Phantom Rush all several thousands of damage, and once I have the proper party lined up, it only takes two encounters to kill the fiend, for a total of three if we count that failed first run where I dealt 0 damage and nearly died.
All of this is worth it(?) for the reward, which is…
…the Bahamut Magicite. It teaches Flare at a x2 rate and grants +50% HP growth on level-up, as well as, well, summoning Bahamut.
I don't know how much use I'm actually going to get out of this. Flare is powerful, but it's a single-target spell and I now have Ultima. Bahamut hits as hard as ever, but also summons are only once per fight.
Still, who can refuse the visceral satisfaction of Mega Flare?
Kefka one-shot this guy too, btw.
At least that's one task crossed off our list.
Now, let's investigate that triangle-shaped island in the northeastern corner of the map. If you'll recall, back in the World of Balance, it was home to an invisible monster with deadly attacks that I never bothered killing. Now, though, things are a little different.
This is the Zone Eater.It is a giant sandworm-like monster emerging from the ground, whose glowing mouth suggests some sort of magic. You may also notice that my party is currently inexplicably down to two members instead of four. This is because Zone Eater has two moves, Graviga, which is a percentage-based damage spell, and Inhale, which swallows characters whole. Now, because its only damaging attack is Graviga, Zone Eater cannot defeat the party through conventional damage (since the percentage eventually rounds down to 0 damage at 1 HP); however, if the entire party is swallowed whole…
…they wake up in the belly of the beast.
This is much less of a hurdle than it might seen, as we're not 'trapped' at all; simply heading for the light will allow us to leave this place at any time. Instead, it's an opportunity, as Zone Eater's Belly is a short dungeon with unique rewards.
If a slightly baffling one.
Each screen of the dungeon has a different puzzle of sorts, and there are three screens. The first one is…
…this series of bridges patrolled by an inexplicable group of kepi-wearing green-uniformed dudes. Their nature is a complete mystery; they endlessly go back and forth over the bridges, and if we make contact with it, we instantly drop down to the lower level, where we land on a rocky promontory amid some extra chests. The key to progressing is to time our jumps between each bridge so as to avoid running into the kepi dudes and dropping down and resetting our progress. It's just. Such a baffling thing. Who are they?? What are they doing here?? Why are they in military uniforms???
Anyway, we find a Magic Brush for Relm, the Genji Armor, and a unique Relic - the 'Fake Moustache,' 'once worn by a circus ringmaster,' which changes Relm's Sketch Command to Control. Intriguing! I might have had used for that, back when Relm was useless with Magic, but thankfully that time is past. Flare is her friend now.
Then there's a sequence with a wide platform of flat ground, where a huge rock plate crashes down from above onto the ground below repeatedly, and we have to use the safe spots to cross without getting crushed (which is an instant game over), probably representing the stomach or digestive system of Zone Eater squeezing together and grinding what's in it. After that, there is another bridge sequence where we must jump on a bunch of open chests in order to reach the other side.
And finally, at the heart of Zone-Eater's belly, we find…
…another goddamned playable character.
WHAT.
Okay, 'character' is a bit of a stretch. This guy right here is Gogo, whom you might remember as the name of the 'Famed Mimic' of FFV - and, indeed, Gogo here is a playable Mimic. This means he can equip other characters' abilities and Mimic their action but with very bad base stats that can't be improved and yada yada I don't care. Gogo has the following character dialogues:
"I am Gog, master of mimicry. It has been a long, long time since anyone visited me here… I have been idle for too many years… Perhaps I ought to mimic you. Tell me, what are you doing here? I see… So you seek to save the world. Then I guess that means that I shall save the world. Lead on! I will copy your every move."
And that's it. I'm pretty sure Gogo has no further dialogue. He's not a 'character' so much as he's a gameplay conceit for people who want to try it out for variety's sake, there's nothing else going on there. Still kind of a wild swerve to meet an extra optional character at the 11th hour like this - and we still haven't found Shadow again.
With this, we've covered Zone Eater's Belly. Time to leave and head back to Narshe, where I forgot to visit one of the houses earlier.
A dying old man gives us the Cursed Shield, a legendar(ily bad) item. Equipping it inflicts a -7 penalty to all stats, multiple elemental weaknesses, and pretty much every status effect known to man, including Berserk, so the character it's equipped on is pretty much a write-off. Equipping a Ribbon at the same time as the shield makes the character immune to most of the status effects, so they are 'merely' suffering multiple stat penalties and weaknesses.
The key here is that if we win an astounding 256 battles with the Cursed Shield, it turns into the Paladin's Shield, the best shield in the game - but it can only be equipped by the character who wore it for these 256 battles.
I am simply choosing not to bother. Life is too short.
What else, what else…
Oh, yes! Most of that session's playtime is spent just running around the Phoenix Cave until I find my first-ever Ribbon. This incidentally ends up being a good way to level up a few of my characters - Relm knows Flare now, Strago has Tier 3 elemental spells, Locke has learned Phoenix's White Magic spells, and so on. Progress is being made.
Now let's check out the Coliseum.
It's such a strange idea, that this guy would somehow literally be the last imperial soldier alive. This was a world-spanning army.
So!
The Coliseum.
It's a really interesting idea that's executed in an utterly baffling way.
As a matter of personal taste, I love coliseums. I love "here is an arena where your character can enter into a succession of tougher and tougher fights to gain prizes" as a concept. They're my jam.
So it takes some real effort to fuck it up for me.
Killer menu, btw.
The way the Coliseum works is that you pick an item you want to bet, then you pick a character from your party, and you're assigned an opponent and a prize depending on the item you're betting. So for instance, here, I bet an Elixir, and the game gives me a Rename Card (which lets me rename characters) as a prize, and Cactuar (another franchise staple in its first introduction that I almost missed!) as an opponent. If my character wins the fight, I lose my ante, but I gain the prize. If they lose the fight, I lose my ante and gain nothing. So here, no matter what happens, I lose the Elixir, but I may or may not gain the Rename Card.
Here's the thing, though. We don't control the fighting character. They are auto-battling - but not by Attacking every turn, or doing the last entered input repeatedly. They are picking from their abilities and spells at random.
This means that even the strongest of my characters is completely incompetent in the arena. Whether it's Terra or Celes, they are picking at random from a list of two dozen spells, arbitrarily casting Tier 1 spells that do no damage, buffs that are irrelevant to their opponent, healing spells while at full HP, and so on. Terra there above can't beat a single fucking Cactuar; she just gets murdered before casting any remotely useful spell. It's a baffling system and I hate it.
The good news is: that means we finally have a use case for Uramo, because Uramo is permanently in a Berserk state, so he can only ever attack, and does so with considerable attack power.
That still leaves the coliseum as a "need a guide" location where you need to know what prizes you want and what ante will grant them to you, and honestly I don't feel like it. There's another reason we're here, though. Elsewhere in the game, someone made a reference to a mysterious character competing in the coliseum in search of an item called "Itchy Getchy." Well, it turns out that in the Cave on the Veldt a while back, we found the Ichigeki. So let's try betting that and see who our opponent is…
There we go. It was pretty obvious in retrospect but I had to actually think about it after realizing I'd explored pretty much the whole WoR and go "oh, right."
Umaro hits Shadow for over a thousand damage per hit, securing an easy victory even at his low level, and we fade to the aftermath of the battle, where Shadow isn't holding any hard feelings.
Shadow: "The only thing I know how to do… Fighting."
Frontman: "Why don't you come with us?"
Shadow: "Perhaps I should… Alright. It's time to put my skills to the ultimate test.""
And there we go. Shadow has rejoined the group, without fanfare. And with this, we've completed the full roster of Final Fantasy VI playable characters:
…
I think it's worth looking at that and taking it in.
There are fourteen characters there, each with a unique mechanical gimmick, each with, ostensibly, a special role in the story. The reality of it, of course, is that we can grade these characters on a spectrum that starts with Terra/Celes and ends at Umaro/Gogo. And, frankly, either of these extremes are fine. It's fine that Gogo and Umaro are just mechanical gimmicks with a funky sidequest to unlock them that can fill a niche in your party if you're missing one. The real trouble lies in the middle part of the spectrum - in characters like Cyan, who enter the story with a bang and then proceed to just lie flat on the ground for twenty hours before suddenly remembering they're supposed to have a story, or with fucking Shadow, who I guess is Relm's dad??? Not that it's ever come up since that one flashback???
I'm gonna have to go sleep in every inn on the planet to check all the flashbacks so I can piece together an actual character from the fragments of Shadow that are given to us.
It's that middle portion that's the problem - those characters who ostensibly should have a prominent story role, should have real character arcs, should have drama to mine and interactions with other party members and who kinda just… Don't, or not enough, or too rarely, or only when you first recruit them and never again. In that category I would put Cyan, Shadow, Strago, Setzer, and Mog (on account of being the first playable moogle and the game completely dropping the ball on using that chance to explore anything about moogles and what they are and what happens to them in the apocalypse). Relm and Sabin both get a pass on account of being fun to be around, but they're still not really there.
Mechanically… Kefka's Tower will require us to form three parties. That means, out of these 14 characters, 12 are going to see actual use, and are going to need leveling up and being taught some magic. That's going to a pain, but I guess we'll see how much of one later. I think… Gogo and Umaro are the two most likely to stay home, I think, and then we'll try splitting the actually competent team members across each team to shore up the rest.
…
Anyway, Shadow. Now that he's in our party in a permanent fashion, we can maybe try to find out more about his past. Apparently, the way to do so is to sleep with him in inns while he's in the party - some of these dreams may have been missable, but most should still be available in the World of Ruins according to the Internet. So let's go for a sleeping session!
This is a dream we had by sleeping in Doma Castle - a mysterious figure (Shadow, we assume), addressed as 'Clyde' by a figure named 'Baram,' is being guilt tripped over failing to be with him for some reason, and the dream ends.
…
And that's it! That's the dreams done.
Okay, look, there are more. But I've tried "sleeping once in every inn on the map," I've tried "sleeping to rest in between grinding sessions for my less-advanced character," and I've tried "spamming resting at a cheap inn," and I've been an hour at this, and there hasn't been a single other dream. Either I somehow missed all the right inns or they have such a low probability of triggering I'll be at this another two hours.
So, fuck that. If Shadow's backstory wants to remain mysterious that badly, it can stay that way. I don't respect this character enough to treat his backstory as a reward worth working for rather than a chore the game is locking behind arbitrary bullshit.
Now, what's next…
Right, like Deathgaze, something else I probably wouldn't have figured out on my own (or perhaps yes; there is a hint given by a treasure hunter, but I only got it after that part, so I don't know if I would have worked it out myself): there is a secret location that can only be accessed by traveling with Castle Figaro again. This is not something we'd encounter in the course of 'natural' play without a hint, because once we've been to Kohlingen with the castle we unlock the Airship, which is a superior travel method in every way. However, if we do return to Figaro and ask it to travel back to South Figaro…
Well, how about we check out that mysterious obstacle, hm? First step is heading to the Figaro jail again, where the same hole is still open in the wall of one of the cells, no longer leading to a sandworm hole but instead to the Cave to the Ancient Castle. Spooky! It is, by itself, a completely standard cave complex, notable only for a couple things, like, hmm…
This is just a palette swap of the "Cruller" enemy, but, like.
'Enuo' was the name of the historical warlock who created the Void and was thus at the origin of all the events of Final Fantasy V. Why is that name being given to a random encounter in a cave system? I don't like that.
…and there it is, the Ancient Castle.
The moment we step in, we see a flashback play out - the camera pans up to the main body of the castle and the picture turns sepia, and guards come out as fire rains down on them, calling for the espers to be sent out to fight.
The War of the Magi, then. Not so different from what the world looks like today or from the conquests of the Gestahlian Empire. But there is one difference - here, the espers appear to be, on some level, cooperating with the humans willingly. Guards appear before an official-looking figure (though he doesn't seem like the King; he is using a Chancelor sprite) and they say that 'Lord Odin' is the only esper left to them, but he is severely injured from past battles. The man turns around and says that it doesn't matter, they have no choice - they must leave the 'final battle' in Odin's hands.
Inside the castle, Odin is making his stand, defeating a first group of Magi/espers with a single Zantetsuken cleaving them all in two. However, another enemy then enters the room, using the 'ghost' sprite - Odin uses his Zantetsuken, but it has no effect, a classic "use an established franchise big name and have him job against a new antagonist" move, except the enemy is using a generic sprite and has no given name, so we have no idea what it is. Then the ghost uses its own magic, and Odin is turned to stone.
Odin appears to retain some degree of sentience despite his petrification, but he is helpless - as we return to the present, we're left with the implication that with their last esper out of the way, the enemy army slaughtered everyone in the castle and left it as an empty ruin, with nothing but Odin's statue to helplessly watch the empty castle forever, until it was buried under the earth in the apocalypse. A grim fate. It endured as legend, though - the frontman character speaks of a legend that tells of 'an ancient battle between Odin and a powerful magus.'
There are monsters in the castle, of course, but they're just more of the samurai-type, dancer-type, and a bloated monster, nothing particularly remarkable. A 'samurai soul' is hidden in a box, with powerful throw commands that easily one-shot Terra with 5k damage shortly before it dies from my overwhelming spell, and it drops the Master's Scroll; a Relic which functions as the Rapid Fire command, allowing its bearer to attack four times per turn (and it does combo with the Genji Glove, so Dual-Wielding Rapid Fire is back on the menu). Beating up the soul of a master samurai in order to earn the scroll of its ultimate technique… Yeah, that's the kind of loot I'm here for.
There's more, however. Inside the hall, we find Odin's statue, seemingly intact after a thousand years.
Interacting with it causes the statue to blacken and crumble apart, leaving behind, what else, the Odin Magicite. It teaches the Meteor spell, which I would be more hype about if I didn't already have access to Ultima, which seems to make it redundant. Perhaps more importantly, though, its stat-up is a unique +2 Speed per level, which seems like it might be pretty good? Except for the issues I've raised before with Speed, hmm.
Well, anyway, it will turn out that we won't have to worry about that.
Investigating a lower chamber of the castle reveals a book encrusted with jewels - the diary of the castle's queen, revealing her shameful secret:
She was in love with Odin, an esper. She knew such a love was not allowed, yet "Every time I think of that noble man, my heart flutters, and fans the flames yet more! And who could rightly fault it?" She decided to confess her love after the fighting ended - something which, of course, she never got to do. Terra, reading this, reflects on how this is another example of love between a human and an esper, looking thoughtful.
There's more loot - the Gold Hairpin, which halves MP costs (it's funny how an item that would be an instant must-give to my spellcasters has me kinda reluctant just because of how many Relics there are and how we can only equip two - and the Blizzard Orb, which absorbs ice and negates fire damage but is also specifically called out as meant for Umaro - "Equip it on a Yeti and see what happens," the game says.
We'll think about it.
Rummaging around, we find more - there's a button which will unlock a secret stairway inside the queen's chambers. And there, a long corridor, in which awaits one of the eight legendary dragons - the Blue Dragon, aspected with water.
It's been said before that the eight legendary dragons were brought back after Kefka's apocalypse, but in the specific case of this one, considering the Ancient Castle's location, I think it's much more likely that this thing was always there - either left behind by the castle's enemies as a last spiteful gesture, a watchdog there to kill anyone who sought the graves of their enemies; or else a last-ditch weapon, unleashed too late, which could not save the castle but only slay or chase away its would-be masters and watch over an empty grave.
Either way, the Blue Dragon has the classic water attacks, Tsunami and Aqua Breath, plus a clever move in which it inflicts a number of debuffs like Slow on itself then uses Rippler, a move which exchanges the buffs/debuffs of him and a party member. That's neat!
Unfortunately we have Ultima.
Strago does learn Rippler from that fight though, so that's neat. And then we find what the dragon was guarding…
They didn't kill the Queen, it looks like. I guess such a fate was too kind. The mysterious ghost-like Magus turned her to stone, just like Odin, yet forever separated from him.
Until now.
As we approach the statue, a tear shines - after a thousand years apart, Odin and the Queen are finally reunited, and their love causes Odin's Magicite to "surge with renewed power," and to transform - Odin becomes Raiden.
Evolving summons, huh. I have a feeling we'll see more of that as the series goes on.
It's a sweet little story, although emphasis on 'little.' It's a tragic vignette, but very small - I would really like to have explored more of the fates of the people in this castle, their espers, and their bond with them. Was Odin a bound servant whose love for his Queen was made ambivalent by the nature of their dynamic of enslavement, or a willing ally who threw in with these humans for reasons unknown? I suppose we'll never know.
Raiden is presented as straightforwardly stronger than Odin, a more powerful, transformed version of himself, and as far as the summon goes, that's true. Shin-Zantetsuken's effect is the same as Zantetsuken (instant death on all enemies), but its accuracy is much higher, meaning instead of only working on like half the enemies in a given encounter (the issue that's made Zantetsuken mostly useless even at clearing trash in earlier games), it now fairly reliably wipes full encounters of enemies who aren't death-immune.
As a Magicite, it's a different question. Raiden's stat-up bonus is +2 Strength, which I could already get from Bismarck, so it's not nearly as exciting as the biggest Speed bonus in the game. And it doesn't teach Meteor, which means we'll never have that spell - a shame but, again, we have Ultima and I am not going for a completionist run. Instead, Raiden teaches Quick. Which you may remember as that spell that lets you cast two spells in a row back in FFV, the apex of Time Magic.
So. That goes on Terra then Celes immediately. This may be one of the best pieces of loot I've gotten in the game.
…
You know it strikes me that we almost never fight espers in this game?
The way it's worked since III is that first you hear the legend of Odin/Leviathan/Bahamut/other, then you must find them, then you must beat them, and then you can summon them. It's a robust system that worked solidly for three games in a row - but I guess they wanted to change it up, which I guess is fair enough. So in this game, Magicite is either pried loose from the jaws of some other, unrelated monster, or found in a ruin on the petrified corpse of an esper.
I guess it makes sense that the game which establishes that Magicite comes from dead espers would be the one in which we don't have to beat them up to obtain Magicite, because that would be killing them instead of the mutual relationship of "you beat Bahamut and thus he respects your power and will lend you his own."
Alright.
One last dungeon.
We're back at the Cultists' Tower.
As a dungeon it is the most boring there's ever been. It's making a point though, I guess; there are 39 stories to this tower, and you just gotta climb every single one of them. As explained before, the Tower's gimmick is that we can only use Magic and Items climbing it, no Attacks and no character commands.
Thankfully that's not too much of a problem.
Spoilers: the rest of the game is looking solidly like me casting Ultima every turn of every battle, forever.
Not that the enemies aren't threatening. Level 90 Magic has access to Meteor and Flare, both of which are capable of OHKOs, and is protected by Reflect, which -
Right. Reflect. It's pretty common among enemies in this tower, and I imagine that's part of the intended challenge - you can't just spam -aga spells at everything or they risk bouncing, you have to strategize, use spell volleyball, so on.
However Ultima ignores Reflect and annihilates all opponents.
The Holy Dragon is hiding in one of the towers' treasure rooms, so we kill it with Ultima (two dragons remaining) and get the Holy Lance off his body (that's gonna go to Mog, I think).
Finally, we reach the peak of the tower, and there, a small little shrine, in which is stored the Cult's most precious artifact…
The Soul of Thamasa, a Relic which changes the Magic command to Dualcast.
Yeah, they really took all the Greatest Hits of the job system and then turned them into a mix of character-specific skills and Relics locked behind various dungeons and story developments, huh? It's an… interesting approach.
Of course, this great ascent would not be complete without a final challenge. Just as we exit the tower…
All the cultists gather, chanting, demanding we return the treasure, and moments after, a ghost(?) attacks, revealing itself as the Magic Master.
…
It seems a fairly natural conclusion to draw that this is the mage which petrified Odin. It's not explicit in the text, but they both use the Ghost sprite, the one who petrified Odin is referred to as a 'powerful magus' and this is the 'Magic Master,' I think it's a fairly natural conclusion to draw that Kefka unearthed some ancient spirit/resurrected a mage from the War of the Magi to serve him.
Now, as a fight…
The Magic Master is fairly brutal. He is a Barrier Changing enemy, but he spams the hell out of Barrier Change, pretty much after every attack, while attacking us with high-level spells that are beefed by some unholy magic stat that lets him one-shot my characters even when protected by Shell. We're still limited to Magic, making any elemental spells liable to smack into Barrier Change really hard, and he has 50,000 HP, so the task of defeating him is not trivial…
…without Ultima. It deals full damage through Barrier Shift, and I have equipped Terra with the Soul of Thamasa, allowing her to deal 19,998 damage per turn. This should make the fight trivial.
Just one problem.
Motherfucker knows it too.
The last thing Magic Master does upon losing its last HP is cast Ultima, hitting the party for more damage than I will ever be able to survive in the course of this whole game. He dies, but we die too, and in Final Fantasy a draw is still a Game Over.
So.
That's a pickle.
It's not like the fight is easy even without that dead man's trigger, I wiped once before from the sheer offensive power of his spells. But if he's just going to throw Ultima at me the moment he dies then it doesn't matter, there's nothing I can do.
…except…
We have Reraise.
Reraise is the highest-tier spell taught by the Phoenix Magicite, and its effect is that it 'pre-loads' a Raise on the character it's cast upon. Meaning that when that character next dies, they are immediately and automatically resurrected. Which means…
…we accept Ultima, and let it kill us, and then simply allow Reraise to bring us back.
Brilliant.
(it's still a very dicey fight, as you can see from the fact that only Terra and Celes made it - I tried to have everyone alive and Reraised going into the final round, but even abusing Reflect to throw everything back at Magic Master, I still barely made it).
The Megalixir, incidentally, is itself a huge reward - it's an item which, used in combat, will fully heal the HP and MP of the whole party. So that's pretty good.
Aaand that's it for today!
I think we've done pretty much everything that I didn't consider too tedious to bother. We've gotten the last party members, explored the Zone Eater's Belly, Ancient Castle and the Cultists' Tower, killed the Deathgaze, grabbed any Magicite I could find… We didn't go for unique special rewards from the Coliseum or cleansing the Cursed Shield, but I'm mostly okay with that, I think. I guess maybe I'll find a podcast episode and just spam bedrest until I have Shadow's dreams, I guess.
Barring a couple of spots that I might have missed and which I'm sure the thread will be quick to point out (this is your cue to say that you can now point me to stuff I've missed), I think we're ready to tackle Kefka's Tower and the endgame.
So, fun fact, as you established, Reraise is the most straightforward way of beating the Magic Master.
But there's an alternative for tryhards.
Namely, that you Osmose him until he runs out of MP.
If you don't have Ultima to spam to delete him either, I think I can recall you can neuter him by casting Berserk on him, which means he can only use physical attacks. I don't know if that also shuts down his Ultima Death Cast, but yeah, he's definitely intended as a puzzle boss, which breaks because Ultima is stupid and anyone who's going to climb that tower is probably going to have it.
As you've established by now, Ultima breaks the power curve of the game in half. There is no response to it, if you can use it, you just Win. And the question is how fast you can Win, which is made easier by things like the Relic you just got, and Quick, and whatnot.
Thus, the way to locate and confront the beast is to scour the entire sky until we randomly bump into him.
In practice, this means, like, checking every grid coordinate in the world. The most efficient way to do this is to set the airship on a course just slightly askew East or West of the meridian, and then pushing enter and, just. Flying in an endlessly looping circuit that will eventually cover the entire globe.
To be clear, I would never have figured that out on my own and absolutely needed someone to tell me how to find Deathgaze. This is a typical 'read the guide' moment because, well - if Deathgaze spawned once, and then you just went there and fought it, that'd be one thing, but no.
So, the thing about Deathgaze is that the Remaster kind of fucked it up. The original SNES version had like, 256 possible coordinates in the airship? Or 256*256. Something like that. It was basically inevitable that you'd run into Deathgaze eventually as you flew around the world because of this relatively limited space, and the intention is that every once in a while as you explored the World of Ruin you'd run into it until you eventually kill it.
The Remaster fucked that all up because there's now a zillion possible map coordinates instead of only several thousand and you have to be precisely on top of Deathgaze to trigger the encounter instead of just being kind of in the same area, so you have to get really precise with it instead of just needing to be in the general area. This means you have to explicitly go out of your way to find the damn thing instead of it just kind of happening naturally.
The Cursed Shield, incidentally, isn't that hard to grind out, since while it does require you to have 256 battles, it doesn't matter what battles they are. The island-dwelling rats that kill themselves is just as valid as the Brachiosaurs.
