FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Well shit. Better get busy writing about Dancing Madly.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
And I've got that one I intended to do about the Ultima Weapon boss music, as well as end-of-game thoughts, but I've had a crazy couple of weeks. >.<
Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
Genealogy had an early version of the support system, but it wasn't properly refined until Binding Blade. Prior to that point, it was basically just "if you glue this male and female character together, they can get married, and maybe they'll have a conversation along the way that helps them get married faster", which Binding Blade combined with a system in prior games that was basically "if you have two characters who are friends or siblings or a married couple or whatever, then they get statboosts if you put them next to each other."
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- Location
- Texas
Ah, Fire Emblem. Remember, eugenics is wrong until you need Super Babies of DoomTM to fight the apocalypse.
"Ambulatory Lockpick" sound like a skill tree from an indie classless rpg game.
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
So...we won't be watching you fight 1,000 Dinosaurs in the Dinosaur Forest so you can resurrect General Leo?
I wonder if this name "Shadow Bandits" changed if you rename Shadow. In the SNES version it seemed to be based on whatever you named him (because it would be the all-caps SHADOW in some playthroughs I saw where people didn't bother) but I wonder if that was actually the case or not.
Because it'd be kind of funny if you named him something silly.
Like 'Wet'
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Or make it very clear which of them is in charge of the duo, if you do the cheeky thing and make his pseudonym "Clyde".So...we won't be watching you fight 1,000 Dinosaurs in the Dinosaur Forest so you can resurrect General Leo?
I wonder if this name "Shadow Bandits" changed if you rename Shadow. In the SNES version it seemed to be based on whatever you named him (because it would be the all-caps SHADOW in some playthroughs I saw where people didn't bother) but I wonder if that was actually the case or not.
Because it'd be kind of funny if you named him something silly.
Like 'Wet'
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Time for another edition of The Music of Final Fantasy! This one is a bit more self-indulgent than usual. Today I'll be covering one of my favorite tracks and its minor key companion, Locke's Theme and Forever Rachel.
Locke's Theme. Original. Remaster.
Locke's Theme is a great example of how brass and strings, together, are the voices of heroism in an orchestra. As a general rule, strings are a bit more romantic sounding and generally more responsive and nimble. Brass, OTOH, is bold, reverential, and - above all - powerful. If you're at all unsure about what brass brings to the table despite my constant yammering about it post after post, please listen to the first minute of this video, which is the brass chorale from Mahler's 2nd. It's...not wrong to think of brass as basically a human voice that can kick ass and take names. It's not all that we can do, not by a longshot, but it's definitely one of the areas where we excel (there's a reason the best adaptations of Biebl's Ave Maria are trombone choir and brass ensemble.)
So the original version of Locke's Theme is already pretty fleshed out in terms of orchestration. It's got a full string section for body and depth, snare and timpani for rhythmic energy, french horn for big solo energy, and the frankenstein double reed sample for textural contrast in the B section. The big thing to note here is how Uematsu uses the horn to bring out the melody in the texture at the start, and really sells the theme as a heroic melody.
The remaster updates the samples, and I really love how they play around with the textures from phrase to phrase. The first phrase is as you hear it in the original, but the 2nd time through there's some very subtle alterations to the mix. Personally I hear a little flute added in and the strings being much more subdued. It's subtle, and I love it. B section is also an updated version of the original, although the 2nd phrase also gives us our first substantial change in instrumentation - the brief addition of a trumpet sample. The next phrase is a great example of just how much warmth you can get out of modern string samples, love this passage.
But the remaster isn't content to just let that be the end of it. It's been a bit of a trend that it'll follow the original faithfully the first time and then get creative on the repeat, this track is no exception. What we're treated to is a much more fleshed out brass and woodwind section. They're not playing anything revolutionary, but they add a lot to the texture and their little dramatic flourishes make this much more exciting to listen to the 2nd time. I'm…not 100% sold on the trumpet arpeggios but whatever. It's a good track, and an outstanding improvement on what was already one of the best bits of the OST. Great job all around.
Forever Rachel. Original. Remaster.
It's Locke's Theme but sad! Game composers love taking a theme and putting it in a minor key (and usually slower) in order to convey sad moments and Uematsu is no exception. I will give him this though, he actually fleshes the track out a lot more than when he did this in previous games which is a nice touch here. The original version is a great example of how even using the old 16 bit samples you could still get a lot of contrast in the different woodwind samples. The remaster really leans into these textural differences, giving us a call and two responses to a motif from Locke's Theme - first with english horn, then flute, and finally oboe. Important note, at least some of this track is using live instruments! These are live people playing this and the reason you can tell is because you can hear the flute sneak a breath in between phrases. I'm not sure if they did this as a full ensemble recording or if they recorded all the voices separately. My assumption is that they saved money by having a double reed player do both the english horn and oboe parts because it's cheaper to pay a doubling fee than to hire two people to cover both parts, which in turn points me towards this being recorded in booths separately because it'd be a pain in the ass for the player to swap between horns quickly.
Now, as for why this update is self-indulgent: there exists an arrangement/remix of Locke's Theme plus a bit of Forever Rachel for brass quintet, and I have played it. The remix is pretty good but definitely wasn't written in mind to be played by actual humans. As an example, the moving 16ths in this track are just downright mean and for the trombone they're just on the border of being literally unplayable. It took a lot of work to get into the realm of possible, but I think my quintet made a solid showing of it all things considered. I can't believe it's been almost 13 years since I recorded this beast, I actually kind of miss playing it despite the massive amount of work it took getting it into a playable state. I still can't get over how much the end sounds like a shameless ripoff of Tchaik's Nutcracker (pay no attention to me mildly whiffing the low G at the end)
Cheers
Locke's Theme. Original. Remaster.
Locke's Theme is a great example of how brass and strings, together, are the voices of heroism in an orchestra. As a general rule, strings are a bit more romantic sounding and generally more responsive and nimble. Brass, OTOH, is bold, reverential, and - above all - powerful. If you're at all unsure about what brass brings to the table despite my constant yammering about it post after post, please listen to the first minute of this video, which is the brass chorale from Mahler's 2nd. It's...not wrong to think of brass as basically a human voice that can kick ass and take names. It's not all that we can do, not by a longshot, but it's definitely one of the areas where we excel (there's a reason the best adaptations of Biebl's Ave Maria are trombone choir and brass ensemble.)
So the original version of Locke's Theme is already pretty fleshed out in terms of orchestration. It's got a full string section for body and depth, snare and timpani for rhythmic energy, french horn for big solo energy, and the frankenstein double reed sample for textural contrast in the B section. The big thing to note here is how Uematsu uses the horn to bring out the melody in the texture at the start, and really sells the theme as a heroic melody.
The remaster updates the samples, and I really love how they play around with the textures from phrase to phrase. The first phrase is as you hear it in the original, but the 2nd time through there's some very subtle alterations to the mix. Personally I hear a little flute added in and the strings being much more subdued. It's subtle, and I love it. B section is also an updated version of the original, although the 2nd phrase also gives us our first substantial change in instrumentation - the brief addition of a trumpet sample. The next phrase is a great example of just how much warmth you can get out of modern string samples, love this passage.
But the remaster isn't content to just let that be the end of it. It's been a bit of a trend that it'll follow the original faithfully the first time and then get creative on the repeat, this track is no exception. What we're treated to is a much more fleshed out brass and woodwind section. They're not playing anything revolutionary, but they add a lot to the texture and their little dramatic flourishes make this much more exciting to listen to the 2nd time. I'm…not 100% sold on the trumpet arpeggios but whatever. It's a good track, and an outstanding improvement on what was already one of the best bits of the OST. Great job all around.
Forever Rachel. Original. Remaster.
It's Locke's Theme but sad! Game composers love taking a theme and putting it in a minor key (and usually slower) in order to convey sad moments and Uematsu is no exception. I will give him this though, he actually fleshes the track out a lot more than when he did this in previous games which is a nice touch here. The original version is a great example of how even using the old 16 bit samples you could still get a lot of contrast in the different woodwind samples. The remaster really leans into these textural differences, giving us a call and two responses to a motif from Locke's Theme - first with english horn, then flute, and finally oboe. Important note, at least some of this track is using live instruments! These are live people playing this and the reason you can tell is because you can hear the flute sneak a breath in between phrases. I'm not sure if they did this as a full ensemble recording or if they recorded all the voices separately. My assumption is that they saved money by having a double reed player do both the english horn and oboe parts because it's cheaper to pay a doubling fee than to hire two people to cover both parts, which in turn points me towards this being recorded in booths separately because it'd be a pain in the ass for the player to swap between horns quickly.
Now, as for why this update is self-indulgent: there exists an arrangement/remix of Locke's Theme plus a bit of Forever Rachel for brass quintet, and I have played it. The remix is pretty good but definitely wasn't written in mind to be played by actual humans. As an example, the moving 16ths in this track are just downright mean and for the trombone they're just on the border of being literally unplayable. It took a lot of work to get into the realm of possible, but I think my quintet made a solid showing of it all things considered. I can't believe it's been almost 13 years since I recorded this beast, I actually kind of miss playing it despite the massive amount of work it took getting it into a playable state. I still can't get over how much the end sounds like a shameless ripoff of Tchaik's Nutcracker (pay no attention to me mildly whiffing the low G at the end)
Cheers
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
That's as bad as naming Red XIII 'Nanaki'
Or Darth Revan Darth Revan.
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I used to mix up their existing names because my brothers kept playing my saves. Then when they inevitable fucked up my save some how, I'd start over and switch the names around differently. If they did it often enough I'd write out sentences using multiple characters names and then make sure the party was arranged to get my message across. I remember one time in FF9 after they ruined my Excalibur 2 attempt the new save looked something like:Or Darth Revan Darth Revan[/i].
STAYTHE 9999/9999 999/999
FUCKOFF 9999/9999 999/999
MYGAMES 9999/9999 999/999
SHITHEAD 9999/9999 999/999
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Given the fact they ruined an Excalibur 2 run, I'm honestly impressed that you're not doing time for murder. (Secondary joke: no jury would convict
)
Well, since you are done, I'll talk about the Next Bonus Boss in Advance. If you kill 10 Cactuars in the Maranda Desert, landing of one tile of the Desert will earn you a battle with Gigantaur. It's attack pattern is simple; 1st turn, 1000 Needles twice, 2nd turn, 1000 Needles twice, 3rd turn, 1000 Needles four times and repeat that pattern. It has a 66% chance to counter any attack with Knockdown, A hard hitting physical attack. Oh, and if you kill it, it casts 1000 Needle's 10 times. So you need to have enough health to survive that.
Or, you can do what I did one time and just last long enough to have Gigantaur cast 1000 Needles 90 times. Then he runs out of MP and is fucked.
Killing Gigantaur nets you the Cactaur Magicite. It gives +2 Speed, and Summons, Cactaur to use 1000 Needles to do 1000 Damage to all enemies, ore sometimes Summons Gigantaur who casts 10, 000 Needles? which deals 9999 to all enemies. It teaches Teleport at x20, Vanish at x10 and Hastaga at x5.
I feel like telling you something now. There are 4 special pieces of equipment that you can gain from enemies. Saucer, Reed Cloak, Tortoise Shield, and the Impartisan. They are nearly useless, but if you are Imped, they become among the most powerful equipment. The Impartisan is special. The throw command bypasses this rule, making them easily the best throwable weapon for Shadow to have, and they have a surprisingly high drop rate from the Tyrannosaur.
One more fun fact; Remember the Elemental shields? Use them as an item and they cast a defense piercing Ga spell. Not worth using up the shield.
Or, you can do what I did one time and just last long enough to have Gigantaur cast 1000 Needles 90 times. Then he runs out of MP and is fucked.
Killing Gigantaur nets you the Cactaur Magicite. It gives +2 Speed, and Summons, Cactaur to use 1000 Needles to do 1000 Damage to all enemies, ore sometimes Summons Gigantaur who casts 10, 000 Needles? which deals 9999 to all enemies. It teaches Teleport at x20, Vanish at x10 and Hastaga at x5.
I feel like telling you something now. There are 4 special pieces of equipment that you can gain from enemies. Saucer, Reed Cloak, Tortoise Shield, and the Impartisan. They are nearly useless, but if you are Imped, they become among the most powerful equipment. The Impartisan is special. The throw command bypasses this rule, making them easily the best throwable weapon for Shadow to have, and they have a surprisingly high drop rate from the Tyrannosaur.
One more fun fact; Remember the Elemental shields? Use them as an item and they cast a defense piercing Ga spell. Not worth using up the shield.
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I've used the Imp build on Setzer with Fixed Dice. He doesn't care about stats, he doesn't really need access to Slots, and it's very funny.
Gigantaur is GBA/mobile port only.
The Imp build is a hilarious way to turn any useless character into a dragoon. Impartisan is the only spear that everyone can use, after all, so it means anyone can get the 2x damage while jumping.
It does unfortunately block you from using the other half of the dragoon strat, namely the dragoon being a backup healer, but that's a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
It does unfortunately block you from using the other half of the dragoon strat, namely the dragoon being a backup healer, but that's a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things.
Final Fantasy VI, Part 24: Kefka's Tower
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Endgame.
Let's go.
Three parties of four, leaving two characters out. Terra and Celes are my powerhouses, so I divide them between two groups; a combination of Locke's white magic and Strago's offensive power should hopefully see the third party through mandatory encounters that they can't avoid altogether from Molulu's Charm. Gogo and Umaro will sit this one out.
Before taking the final plunge, the group takes a moment to ponder the consequences of their next moves - in a piece of dialogue I already saw when I made that joke 'fake run' with four characters hours ago.
They're worried - to defeat Kefka, they must kill the gods of the Warring Triad, whose power the madman is using to wreak havoc on the world. But if they die, espers and magic itself might vanish from the world - and then, what would happen to Terra?
Terra doesn't answer this, though she looks down somberly. There's no choice, anyway. It's the only way to end Kefka's reign of madness.
Hmm. I have opinions on that, but let's put a pin in it. For now, it's time - hours of game after first unlocking the airship and the theoretical ability to reach the endgame, we've come back stronger, with a full roster of characters, an armory of legendary weapons, and the most powerful magic in the world.
Nothing can stand before us.
So. Kefka's Tower.
As far as final dungeons go, it's a fascinating departure from the style of the old games. We're not delving into another dimension here, not reaching the heart of the moon, not entering the world of darkness. Nothing so grand or cosmic would befit Kefka. No, the madman's tower is grungy, haphazard, a mess. We were told that debris gathered from all over the world to form the tower, and indeed its outer levels are nothing more or less than a gigantic scrap heap, metal and concrete thrown and fused together in large mounds, with surprisingly intact escalators and conveyor belts moving us between areas. But as we go deeper, it grows more and more obvious that the skeleton off which that scrapyard shell hangs is Vector itself:
Entire rooms and halls of the Imperial Palace and the Magitek Research Facility were brought together and fused as the heart of the Tower, still looking much the same as they ever did, and still full of deadly imperial machinery - though none man-operated; there's no Magitek Armor anymore, only roaming robots killing on sight.
Kefka's Tower is a reflection of the man himself, a broken, chaotic thing made of the smashed-together remnants of more broken things, a hideous creation built on a frame of imperial technology and suffering, powered, at its heart, by the power of bound espers.
Mechanically, the Phoenix Cave was essentially a preparatory course for this final dungeon, which takes the same gimmick but on a bigger scale. Each of the three parties has its own path forward, and as they advance, they meet switches which they can activate to open the path to another party - by swapping between each party, the player opens the path progressively for each other.
Thematically, the way this represents the group's mutual reliance, the way they depend on each other's aid to make it through to the end… Yes, I see what it's going for, and I dig it.
And it's much less of a pain than the Phoenix Cave - mainly because, well…
Despite being called 'Primeval Dragons' and using the same sprites, these creatures are less dangerous than Brachiosaur.
…we have the ultimate power.
There's one thing that shouldn't be expected here: this final dungeon is not difficult. Even with the vast cost of Ultima, we have 99 Ethers and 99 Hi-Potions, so resource attrition is barely a factor. Random encounters just fold in half before our overwhelming might - not that I mind. It's going to make the bosses something of a letdown, but I was expecting this going in.
For the most part, as I made my way through the game, I tried to avoid purposefully grinding unless it was to 'bring up the rear' - getting Gau back to the 30s after he was stranded below lv 20, yes, but I haven't been trying to get Celes to lv 45 with every spell in the game. Still, just using the tools as they are given to me allows access to multiple ways of breaking the game. I would need to actively disengage the part of my brain that sees available tools and wants to use them in order to keep the characters' stats from reaching into the stratosphere - in other words I would have to find ways to do a challenge run for myself, and I'm not doing that the first time I play a game. Even without deliberately maxing out all magic on all characters, though, there comes a point where Celes and Terra both have Ultima, and the Ragnarok Magicite is hanging out in my inventory, so why not give it to Relm? Why not just slap Bismarck on Gau and have him breach 100+ Strength when it costs nothing to do so?
Basically: in order to not break Final Fantasy VI, you need to take deliberate steps to reduce your engagement with the mechanics that are offered to you. Otherwise, the game basically breaks itself. And while I have no doubt a familiar player would know the break points to keep the game challenging without being unwinnable, I don't and am trying to fully engage with it since it's my first time, so the end result is that gameplay at the higher end devolves into Ultima spam.
I can definitely see the appeal of mods that would increase difficulty or tweak the gameplay experience, for these reasons.
So, like most endgame dungeons before it, Kefka's Tower is a boss gauntlet - but this time, the party split both increases and reduces the burden of multiple boss fights; increases, because we don't have a single full optimized party who can take on everything; reduces, because the weight is spread out over multiple parties. And the very first boss, whom we meet in what I'm pretty sure are the same cells Kefka was fake-imprisoned in back when the Emperor pretended to be looking for peace, is…
"Forged an eternity ago, I was placed here… and then forgotten in the mists of time. Long have I pondered what I should do… Long, long have I pondered… But now it seems I have an answer."
…the Ultima Weapon???
Okay, no, it's a harder version of the Ultim Weapon with different dialogue, but it uses the same sprite and the same kind of dialogue and is named 'Ultima Buster.' I have no idea what this means. Is this the true Ultima Weapon of the War of the Magi, with the first one in the Floating Continent being merely an ersatz or a prototype? Or is this the original, divine creature, after which the Ultima Weapon was modeled as a weaker copy? Perhaps Ultima Buster was forged by the Warring Triad in their conflict, sealed long ago, and the Magi built the Ultima Weapon from studying records of its might.
Hmm. Maybe, but no. Here's my take: This is the same Ultima we fought on the Floating Continent. When we first met it, it boasted of its 'power ancient and unrivaled' and that it 'did not bleed, for I am strength given form.' Then we kicked its ass, and prompted it to have an existential crisis. What was its purpose? What was its goal? What was even its nature, if it could be defeated? Its answer - to seek power to surpass us, who had defeated it, the challenge and pursuit of greater height giving it purpose - and then going on a training arc.
Anyway, we kick its ass again.
For the first time in this series, we can comfortably hit 9,999 damage on every hit, every turn, without needing to target elemental weaknesses, simply by casting Ultima. As was pointed out by someone else, this would mean, in theory, that the 'optimal' strategy for the endgame is to maximize multiple attacks per turn in order to bypass the hard limit of 9,999 damage for any single hit - four attacks per turn, each one dealing 4k damage, is stronger than a single spell cast dealing 10k damage.
However, such concerns are purely hypothetical. An endgame boss like Ultima Buster has 55,000 HP; it dies in five Ultima casts. And given that Quick exists, that's less than five turns. To add insult to injury, while Ultima Buster packs multiple powerful elemental attacks, at this stage of the game my party has a large array of elemental coverage even without changing their loadout for a given boss, so this is the result of UB's opening (fire-elemental) Southern Cross attack:
Between its inability to reliably deal damage and the power of Ultima, the Buster is quickly overwhelmed and perishes - revealing a hidden save point, which I choose to read as Ultima Buster acknowledging we've surpassed it once again, and using what remains of its power to aid us.
Celes does a victory pose.
Meanwhile, the Locke group are hanging out much more casually, with Molulu's Charm making random encounter a non-issue and allowing them to explore at will, with some nifty rewards.
Rolling up treadmills and crawling through pipes, this group is exploring the remains of the Magitek Factory, long empty of any armor and soldiers, but still haunted by powerful machines… Including the boss that is going to give us the most trouble in this sequence of the game, an upgraded version of Number 128, ambushing us from the beams above and jumping down.
I knew it was inevitable - we might be able to avoid all random encounters, but Locke's party still has to contend with mandatory bosses. Like Number 128 before him, Inferno is a three-part boss: his arms are independent entities which each have their own attacks, making him exceedingly aggressive when they're both intact, but they regenerate within a few turns of their destruction, making the prospect of destroying them a costly, time-expensive endeavour with limited rewards.
Inferno has lightning- and fire-elemental attacks, a Metal Cutter attack that deals heavy physical damage, and Delta Attack, a petrifying move.
The first attempt ends in abject failure. Most of my offensive potential here is in Strago's Grand Delta and Locke's Holy, but Locke is my only decent healer in the group. Mog with the turbo-dragoon setup can in theory deal heavy damage, but his Jump attacks land on randomized target, so much of his damage is wasted on the arms. Plus, Mog and Setzer both have abysmal HP for this level.
So I decide to make up for the group's lack of magic by bringing in the forgotten players of FFVI: the espers.
Multiple layers of protection - Shell, Earthen Wall, illusory duplicates, invisibility… It's not enough; Inferno reveals that it can cast Meteor, devastating the party even through their layered defenses.
God I love that animation.
There's much dungeon to be going through, and many more bosses than Inferno, even if he's the last one to give me actual trouble, so I will cut to end. After taking off Molulu's Charm, I run a bunch of random encounters to force Mog and Setzer to get enough HP to be more than mere canon fodder - but that's not what decides it. No, what does is that it turns out that enemy types are heavily dependent on which area of the Tower you're in, and in this room, they're all machines, and machines are heavily vulnerable to Thundaga, so I can spam Strago's Thundaga to easily take care of them and gain enough XP for him the party to gain a couple… of… levels…
Machines… are vulnerable… to Thundaga…
*stares off into the distance for a long time*
Comedic screenshotting aside, that win still required the espers to pull off, and I'm glad, in the end, I needed their help one last time.
Anyway.
Meanwhile Celes and Terra are fighting their way through the insides and outsides of the tower in order to reach both sides of a switch-activated platform:
So close, and yet so far.
This allows Terra to proceed on a moving platform through…
…the remains of the esper experimentation room, with its broken vats standing empty on each side of the corridor.
It's pure coincidence that I reached this area with Terra specifically, but it has a delightful callback feel to it - it really feels like we are revisiting the mangled distorted fragments of the place where all the evils that would eventually give rise to Kefka were born, including Terra's personal demons - her father was once in one of these vats.
Meanwhile, Celes's party find their first boss.
Interesting that this dragon is found in a place of honor, on a raised dais with a red imperial carpet and statues surrounding it - that suggests it has a particularly esteemed role, rather than being just a beast roaming the corridors.
I gotta say though, my years of D&D, in which gold dragons are sentient creature of tremendous magical power with great wings and a somewhat Asian-inspired aesthetic (but still very much Western dragons aesthetically) didn't prepare me for the gold dragon being just… like… A brontosaur.
Anyway, the Gold Dragon protects itself with Reflect, which makes Relm largely useless, but Gau's Cat Scratch hits for 6,666 damage and Celes's Ultima for 9,999 damage so between the two of them they pretty much annihilate it before it gets to do anything.
Only one dragon remains.
Past the dragon, Celes finds the end of her own route for now: the path to the Imperial Palace, requiring simultaneous switch pulls to open.
Picking up the Locke party after their battle against the Inferno, they run immediately into another boss - I clearly picked the wrong group to load with all my weakest characters. On a similar red-carpeted dais, we encounter a greenish dragon, the last of the height.
The skull dragon isn't a true undead, despite its appearance - rather, as each dragon represents one of the game's eight elements, it is the dragon of the poison element. Fittingly, it largely eschews damage and deals mostly in status effects, including Silence, Darkness, Confuse, and the one against which I do not have an easy equipment counter, Doom (the Lich Ring which makes characters undead would turn Doom into a free heal but at the cost of being undead). However, while this party lacks Ultima, the Skull Dragon is weak to the Holy element, and Mog is equipped with the Holy Lance, which deals holy-elemental damage and has a 25% chance of casting Holy on every hit, while Strago has access to Flare for not-insignificant damage. Setzer has a set of Fixed Dice and Dice, which use a random calculation for damage that I could try and abuse with a multi-attack setup, but honestly I'm fine leaving him as it is. Even without access to Ultima, the Skull Dragon is no match for the Holy Lance, Locke's Holy, and Flare.
…honestly for the two last dragons in the last dungeon these two were kind of pushovers. I take it that it would be feasible to do early runs of Kefka's Tower just to kill those two and unlock their rewards early, wouldn't it? The Gold Dragon drops the Crystal Orb, which boosts MP by 50%, while the Skull Dragon drops the Muscle Belt, which boosts maximum HP by 50%; the latter seems like the best of the two and a significant boost to most characters' survivability.
Plus, killing the height dragons is its own reward. Or, rather, grants a reward of its own. Although it's more of a bragging rights kind of thing.
With the message "All eight dragons have been defeated… The eightfold seal is broken!" the screen flashes red and trembles, and then…
…okay, I'm actually kind of surprised; I expected 'Crusader' to at least be an extra boss, or appear with some kind of fanfare, but no. Simply by killing the eight dragons, the magicite somehow materializes in our possession.
It makes sense that we don't have to fight an extra boss for it, though. Because the Crusader magicite is already the bosses we are about to fight. Or at least I'm pretty sure, look:
Two masculine figure, and one feminine, appearing in a triangular formation and unleashing devastating power that hurts everyone - Crusader's big thing is that it indiscriminately targets enemies and allies alike - taking the form of three successive attacks, an explosion, a barrage of light beams, and a flurry of arcing cuts.
Yeah, this is the power of the Warring Triad. Or at least an echo of it. I do not know what the relationship between the dragons and the Triad is, but there must be one, because by killing the eight legendary dragons we've unlocked some fraction of the same power Kefka is using to rule the world.
…unfortunately it's largely useless to us. Because the Crusader summon hits friend and foe alike it's strictly inferior to, say, Bahamut; its stat-up is MP+50%, which is neat but unremarkable in a game that is already giving us more MP than we could possibly need; and the two spells it teaches are Meltdown and Meteor, and while both are strong, they're made obsolete by, say it with me now, Ultima.
A disappointing prize on a mechanical level, though I do love that we're now wielding the power of the Triad ourselves - and doing so shortly before confronting them in their full power.
Before that, though…
Locke's party move past the Skull Dragon's dais, and into another switch corridor which parallels Celes's own on the other side of the raised platform. With both in position, they open the path for Terra's party to enter what remains of the Imperial Palace.
From there, the goal is to push one of these cartoonish 4 tons weight which Ultros was hoping to squish Celes with in order to push the switches permanently 'on' and open the path for the other characters to follow into the inner chambers of the tower.
This promptly causes Celes to run into the Guardian.
The Guardian, if you'll recall, was the Imperial Palace's static defense system, a machine with enormous firepower that we previously couldn't defeat. But that was all the way back in the World of Balance - this time we're back and armed to the teeth.
The Guardian has a really interesting gimmick - it loads 'Battle Programs' which are the movesets of previously encountered bosses, of varying strength. It starts off with a 'default program' which uses standard Magitek attacks like lasers, missiles and atomic ray, then loads either the Ultros battle program, of all things, or Dadaluma (that rogue monk from Zozo), or Air Force, or finally the Ultima Weapon program, which has Flare and Meteor.
Anyway, we blow it up.
Relm knows Ultima now.
I dig the concept, but unfortunately even without Ultima I would be hitting it with Thundaga for max damage regardless, and it wouldn't make it past three turns.
That's all the 'lesser' bosses out of the way. Oddly enough, Terra's party hasn't encountered a single boss - I was expecting Party 1 to be the one running into the most opposition, but the opposite is true; Celes's and Locke's party both have to confront two bosses before reaching their respective members of the Warring Triad, whereas Terra's party only has their path obstructed by switches for the other parties to pull.
So it's time. The statues of the gods stand at three peaks, and when we confront them, they emerge in their full glory as truly enormous sprites that are easily a match for the final bosses of any previous game.
…
It would be a lie to say that I expected some characterization from the Triad, but I'm still a little disappointed. Not a single line of dialogue?
I guess I'm suffering from the Time Warp here - you see, in FFXIV, the Warring Triad are introduced as part of the Heavensward expansion. Without getting too far into the weeds, while they receive very little characterization, they are still given a little individuality, names, and a divine portfolio - for instance, 'Fiend' is 'Sephirot, the Fiend,' a deity once worshipped by a plant-like race and with powers over nature and fertility. It's a little disappointing to find out that even that much individuality isn't there to be found here; the Fiend has no characterization beyond what can be glimpsed from his mechanics. Which, considering that he is one of the three gods of magic who created the espers and almost destroyed the world, whose death could cause the vanishing of all magic, feels a little… Like, c'mon. At least give me a boast or something.
Ah, well.
As far as spectacles go, the way a circle of darkness hemmed in black flame opens up and the Fiend's sprite emerges in a reverse-effect of boss disintegration is top-tier. This is some final boss stuff the game is pulling off for these guys.
The Fiend is an ice-type foe, wielding Blizzaga for massive single target damage, Absolute Zero for medium omni-target damage, and Southern Cross to Freeze party members. Thankfully, this is where Setzer having a dogshit magic score comes in handy:
He can cast Fira at his own party to free them from the frost.
Strago's Flare deals most of the damage, with 5k a hit, while Locke serves as backup with Holy and physical attacks and Mog, when he's not frozen, uses his Jump to good effect - Setzer is mostly relegated to either incinerating his own teammates for their own good or casting Curaga every turn, or like, being dead, most of the time.
Partway through the fight, though, things take a turn for the worse. The message "Fiend's aura is trembling violently!" starts to appear, and while the game doesn't tell me what it means until I find out the hard way, the boss just buffed itself with Haste, Image, and Reflect. This means Stago's next Flare bounces and hits us right in the kisser.
The FIend then proceeds to start spamming Force Field, a spell which grants it random elemental immunities every turn. It then starts using 'Targeting,' a set-up move which means a character will next be hit by Fiendish Rage for 9,999 damage. With half of my party KO and most of my spells incapable of hitting the Fiend, it seems grim at first - but the Force Field ends up wasting much of its turns on giving it immunities to things I don't care about, and Targeting fails when it targets Mog before he jumps off screen. With these two mitigating factors, I manage to raise Lock, who can then use Arise to bring any KO'd party member instantly back to full health, and from there we can use Reflect on our characters to volley-ball spells back past Fiend's Reflect, and…
…Victory with the whole party at full HP. This went from a clutch with half of the party dead and the rest injured to a total victory. This is the good Final Fantasy, when proper tactics and adjustment in the heat of battle lead to sudden reversals of outcome and pulling victories out of the jaws of defeat. I love it.
After its defeat, the Fiend's statue flashes red and black, then vanishes, opening the day deeper into the tower for Locke.
Meanwhile, Celes's party confront their own foe - the Demon.
I haven't really commented on it before, but Tetsuya Nomura, who was already involved in FFV's monster sprite design, is back in an even more prominent role in FFVI, and his style is really starting to pop off in the endgame with these baroque, intricate monsters that take up half the screen. The FFXIV names for the Triad were taken from his concept art notes, incidentally, though never used in FFVI itself.
In FFXIV, the Demon, Zurvan, was worshipped by a race of centaur-like beings as an incarnation of inevitable victory.
The Demon isn't an elemental foe, rather he has powerful physical attacks like Metal Cutter and Tyrfing, its special move, a single-target physical attack; it also uses Stop, and when a character suffers from its effects, targets them with Blaster, which kills them instantly - I like that better than most death effects; the way it's a 1-2 setup you can see coming feels better than random instant death. He hits Gau, which isn't as bad as it could be but still a loss to our DPS. When brought down to low enough HP, the Demon unlocks a variety of new, powerful group-wide attacks like Meteor and Flare Star.
Unfortunately, by the time it reaches that point, it's already too late.
We got Gau back up, Celes is the only significantly injured party member, and she and Relm brought down the beast with superior fire power.
Only one member of the Warring Triad remains. This whole time, Terra's party has been waltzing through the tower, tearing through everything in her path with trivial ease without encountering so much as a single boss. But now, at last, something stands in their way that they can't ignore. The last (and only visibly female) member of the Warring Triad - the Goddess.
Of note is that the Goddess is the only god who is found in a shrine-like place of honor, with carpet, banners, statue and dais.
In FFXIV, the Goddess is called Sophia, and she presided over a multicultural nation who were bound in harmony by the 'perfect equilibrium' granted by their goddess; how much of that was literal mind-control is up to interpretation.
The battle opens as a Side Attack, with party members on each side, restricting healing. The Goddess is not a conventional attacker; though she has low HP, she is automatically buffed with Shell and Haste and uses that speed to turn the party against itself, forces characters to take physical damage for her and uses Entice, a Confuse-like status that can't be healed normally - basically, she is using her divine charms and mind control to turn the party against one another. Like the other Triad members, she has a 'phase 2' mechanic triggering after suffering enough attacks, Cloudy Heavens, which curses the battlefield so that any party member who dies for any reason rises as a zombie.
It's probably the coolest boss mechanic in the game, conceptually, although the whole 'turn everyone against each other' shtick could potentially be very frustrating.
It doesn't matter.
The Goddess is the first boss who doesn't even get to reach Phase 2 because she dies so fast.
The Goddess has 44,000 HP. By using Quick into Dualcast/Dualcast, Terra can cast Ultima four times in a row. Due to the odd way ATB works in this game, the Goddess actually ends up attacking in-between some of these effects, but the net result is that she takes 4 Ultimas for 39,996 damage. Sabin follows up with a Tempest, dealing the remainder 5,000 damage required to seal the deal. The Goddess is dead before Cyan and Shadow even got to act.
There are gods, and then there is Terra Branford.
The Warring Triad has fallen. But of course, if our heroes thought this alone would be enough to end Kefka's reign of terror, they were mistaken. Terra turns around and wonders why the power of magic isn't fading…
Kefka, she concludes, must have extracted the very source of magic from them. Which I guess would explain why these three gods who once held the whole world in thrall and threatened to destroy it could be defeated by a band of plucky heroes, but the how is left unexplained - it's just one of those things Kefka does.
The Warring Triad also drop some of the best loot in the game, including the sword Excalibur which could be placed in a particularly deadly combo for Locke but -
At this point you'll forgive me for not really bothering to adjust and tweak my equipment before the final fight, I hope. That fate is already written.
This concludes Kefka's Tower as a dungeon - all that's left is the final confrontation with the mad mage. I am writing most of this update in one go, straight from start to finish, but it is going to end up more than 8k words in total and likely over 100 pictures, so this seems a good point to break this off here and post this segment - I did break up the endgame of FFV in several chunks, after all.
Kefka's Tower is… fun. I enjoyed it. It wasn't very challenging but, to my frustration, I cannot find the same fun in a difficult FF dungeon experience than I might find getting my shit pushed in in Elden Ring, thirty years of action RPG development later - hard fights against bosses in these games are fun, but hard fights against random encounters that are mostly challenging through resource attrition are merely tedious. In that regard, I am glad for Ultima making the journey easier, even if it trivialized the bosses, because as a result of trivializing the random encounters I enjoyed navigating the multi-party setup and switch-based puzzles more freely.
Perhaps a version of the game in which I can turn off random encounters entirely, like the console PR ports, and then restricting myself to a lower level might get me a better experience out of it.
Aesthetically, it's an ugly dungeon. It's ugly on purpose, though - does that make it being ugly a good choice? I'm not sure; I've seen takes on the World of Darkness, the Moon, and the Interdimensional Rift in FFXIV, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like Kefka's Tower - it's not an aesthetic that they felt worth revisiting. But it fits here, it's appropriate, and the aesthetic payoff at the end of that journey -
Well. We'll see in the next update.
I don't know if the final stretch will be posted today, or tomorrow, but see you then.
Let's go.
Three parties of four, leaving two characters out. Terra and Celes are my powerhouses, so I divide them between two groups; a combination of Locke's white magic and Strago's offensive power should hopefully see the third party through mandatory encounters that they can't avoid altogether from Molulu's Charm. Gogo and Umaro will sit this one out.
Before taking the final plunge, the group takes a moment to ponder the consequences of their next moves - in a piece of dialogue I already saw when I made that joke 'fake run' with four characters hours ago.
They're worried - to defeat Kefka, they must kill the gods of the Warring Triad, whose power the madman is using to wreak havoc on the world. But if they die, espers and magic itself might vanish from the world - and then, what would happen to Terra?
Terra doesn't answer this, though she looks down somberly. There's no choice, anyway. It's the only way to end Kefka's reign of madness.
Hmm. I have opinions on that, but let's put a pin in it. For now, it's time - hours of game after first unlocking the airship and the theoretical ability to reach the endgame, we've come back stronger, with a full roster of characters, an armory of legendary weapons, and the most powerful magic in the world.
Nothing can stand before us.
So. Kefka's Tower.
As far as final dungeons go, it's a fascinating departure from the style of the old games. We're not delving into another dimension here, not reaching the heart of the moon, not entering the world of darkness. Nothing so grand or cosmic would befit Kefka. No, the madman's tower is grungy, haphazard, a mess. We were told that debris gathered from all over the world to form the tower, and indeed its outer levels are nothing more or less than a gigantic scrap heap, metal and concrete thrown and fused together in large mounds, with surprisingly intact escalators and conveyor belts moving us between areas. But as we go deeper, it grows more and more obvious that the skeleton off which that scrapyard shell hangs is Vector itself:
Entire rooms and halls of the Imperial Palace and the Magitek Research Facility were brought together and fused as the heart of the Tower, still looking much the same as they ever did, and still full of deadly imperial machinery - though none man-operated; there's no Magitek Armor anymore, only roaming robots killing on sight.
Kefka's Tower is a reflection of the man himself, a broken, chaotic thing made of the smashed-together remnants of more broken things, a hideous creation built on a frame of imperial technology and suffering, powered, at its heart, by the power of bound espers.
Mechanically, the Phoenix Cave was essentially a preparatory course for this final dungeon, which takes the same gimmick but on a bigger scale. Each of the three parties has its own path forward, and as they advance, they meet switches which they can activate to open the path to another party - by swapping between each party, the player opens the path progressively for each other.
Thematically, the way this represents the group's mutual reliance, the way they depend on each other's aid to make it through to the end… Yes, I see what it's going for, and I dig it.
And it's much less of a pain than the Phoenix Cave - mainly because, well…
Despite being called 'Primeval Dragons' and using the same sprites, these creatures are less dangerous than Brachiosaur.
…we have the ultimate power.
There's one thing that shouldn't be expected here: this final dungeon is not difficult. Even with the vast cost of Ultima, we have 99 Ethers and 99 Hi-Potions, so resource attrition is barely a factor. Random encounters just fold in half before our overwhelming might - not that I mind. It's going to make the bosses something of a letdown, but I was expecting this going in.
For the most part, as I made my way through the game, I tried to avoid purposefully grinding unless it was to 'bring up the rear' - getting Gau back to the 30s after he was stranded below lv 20, yes, but I haven't been trying to get Celes to lv 45 with every spell in the game. Still, just using the tools as they are given to me allows access to multiple ways of breaking the game. I would need to actively disengage the part of my brain that sees available tools and wants to use them in order to keep the characters' stats from reaching into the stratosphere - in other words I would have to find ways to do a challenge run for myself, and I'm not doing that the first time I play a game. Even without deliberately maxing out all magic on all characters, though, there comes a point where Celes and Terra both have Ultima, and the Ragnarok Magicite is hanging out in my inventory, so why not give it to Relm? Why not just slap Bismarck on Gau and have him breach 100+ Strength when it costs nothing to do so?
Basically: in order to not break Final Fantasy VI, you need to take deliberate steps to reduce your engagement with the mechanics that are offered to you. Otherwise, the game basically breaks itself. And while I have no doubt a familiar player would know the break points to keep the game challenging without being unwinnable, I don't and am trying to fully engage with it since it's my first time, so the end result is that gameplay at the higher end devolves into Ultima spam.
I can definitely see the appeal of mods that would increase difficulty or tweak the gameplay experience, for these reasons.
So, like most endgame dungeons before it, Kefka's Tower is a boss gauntlet - but this time, the party split both increases and reduces the burden of multiple boss fights; increases, because we don't have a single full optimized party who can take on everything; reduces, because the weight is spread out over multiple parties. And the very first boss, whom we meet in what I'm pretty sure are the same cells Kefka was fake-imprisoned in back when the Emperor pretended to be looking for peace, is…
"Forged an eternity ago, I was placed here… and then forgotten in the mists of time. Long have I pondered what I should do… Long, long have I pondered… But now it seems I have an answer."
…the Ultima Weapon???
Okay, no, it's a harder version of the Ultim Weapon with different dialogue, but it uses the same sprite and the same kind of dialogue and is named 'Ultima Buster.' I have no idea what this means. Is this the true Ultima Weapon of the War of the Magi, with the first one in the Floating Continent being merely an ersatz or a prototype? Or is this the original, divine creature, after which the Ultima Weapon was modeled as a weaker copy? Perhaps Ultima Buster was forged by the Warring Triad in their conflict, sealed long ago, and the Magi built the Ultima Weapon from studying records of its might.
Hmm. Maybe, but no. Here's my take: This is the same Ultima we fought on the Floating Continent. When we first met it, it boasted of its 'power ancient and unrivaled' and that it 'did not bleed, for I am strength given form.' Then we kicked its ass, and prompted it to have an existential crisis. What was its purpose? What was its goal? What was even its nature, if it could be defeated? Its answer - to seek power to surpass us, who had defeated it, the challenge and pursuit of greater height giving it purpose - and then going on a training arc.
Anyway, we kick its ass again.
For the first time in this series, we can comfortably hit 9,999 damage on every hit, every turn, without needing to target elemental weaknesses, simply by casting Ultima. As was pointed out by someone else, this would mean, in theory, that the 'optimal' strategy for the endgame is to maximize multiple attacks per turn in order to bypass the hard limit of 9,999 damage for any single hit - four attacks per turn, each one dealing 4k damage, is stronger than a single spell cast dealing 10k damage.
However, such concerns are purely hypothetical. An endgame boss like Ultima Buster has 55,000 HP; it dies in five Ultima casts. And given that Quick exists, that's less than five turns. To add insult to injury, while Ultima Buster packs multiple powerful elemental attacks, at this stage of the game my party has a large array of elemental coverage even without changing their loadout for a given boss, so this is the result of UB's opening (fire-elemental) Southern Cross attack:
Between its inability to reliably deal damage and the power of Ultima, the Buster is quickly overwhelmed and perishes - revealing a hidden save point, which I choose to read as Ultima Buster acknowledging we've surpassed it once again, and using what remains of its power to aid us.
Celes does a victory pose.
Meanwhile, the Locke group are hanging out much more casually, with Molulu's Charm making random encounter a non-issue and allowing them to explore at will, with some nifty rewards.
Rolling up treadmills and crawling through pipes, this group is exploring the remains of the Magitek Factory, long empty of any armor and soldiers, but still haunted by powerful machines… Including the boss that is going to give us the most trouble in this sequence of the game, an upgraded version of Number 128, ambushing us from the beams above and jumping down.
I knew it was inevitable - we might be able to avoid all random encounters, but Locke's party still has to contend with mandatory bosses. Like Number 128 before him, Inferno is a three-part boss: his arms are independent entities which each have their own attacks, making him exceedingly aggressive when they're both intact, but they regenerate within a few turns of their destruction, making the prospect of destroying them a costly, time-expensive endeavour with limited rewards.
Inferno has lightning- and fire-elemental attacks, a Metal Cutter attack that deals heavy physical damage, and Delta Attack, a petrifying move.
The first attempt ends in abject failure. Most of my offensive potential here is in Strago's Grand Delta and Locke's Holy, but Locke is my only decent healer in the group. Mog with the turbo-dragoon setup can in theory deal heavy damage, but his Jump attacks land on randomized target, so much of his damage is wasted on the arms. Plus, Mog and Setzer both have abysmal HP for this level.
So I decide to make up for the group's lack of magic by bringing in the forgotten players of FFVI: the espers.
Multiple layers of protection - Shell, Earthen Wall, illusory duplicates, invisibility… It's not enough; Inferno reveals that it can cast Meteor, devastating the party even through their layered defenses.
God I love that animation.
There's much dungeon to be going through, and many more bosses than Inferno, even if he's the last one to give me actual trouble, so I will cut to end. After taking off Molulu's Charm, I run a bunch of random encounters to force Mog and Setzer to get enough HP to be more than mere canon fodder - but that's not what decides it. No, what does is that it turns out that enemy types are heavily dependent on which area of the Tower you're in, and in this room, they're all machines, and machines are heavily vulnerable to Thundaga, so I can spam Strago's Thundaga to easily take care of them and gain enough XP for him the party to gain a couple… of… levels…
Machines… are vulnerable… to Thundaga…
*stares off into the distance for a long time*
Comedic screenshotting aside, that win still required the espers to pull off, and I'm glad, in the end, I needed their help one last time.
Anyway.
Meanwhile Celes and Terra are fighting their way through the insides and outsides of the tower in order to reach both sides of a switch-activated platform:
So close, and yet so far.
This allows Terra to proceed on a moving platform through…
…the remains of the esper experimentation room, with its broken vats standing empty on each side of the corridor.
It's pure coincidence that I reached this area with Terra specifically, but it has a delightful callback feel to it - it really feels like we are revisiting the mangled distorted fragments of the place where all the evils that would eventually give rise to Kefka were born, including Terra's personal demons - her father was once in one of these vats.
Meanwhile, Celes's party find their first boss.
Interesting that this dragon is found in a place of honor, on a raised dais with a red imperial carpet and statues surrounding it - that suggests it has a particularly esteemed role, rather than being just a beast roaming the corridors.
I gotta say though, my years of D&D, in which gold dragons are sentient creature of tremendous magical power with great wings and a somewhat Asian-inspired aesthetic (but still very much Western dragons aesthetically) didn't prepare me for the gold dragon being just… like… A brontosaur.
Anyway, the Gold Dragon protects itself with Reflect, which makes Relm largely useless, but Gau's Cat Scratch hits for 6,666 damage and Celes's Ultima for 9,999 damage so between the two of them they pretty much annihilate it before it gets to do anything.
Only one dragon remains.
Past the dragon, Celes finds the end of her own route for now: the path to the Imperial Palace, requiring simultaneous switch pulls to open.
Picking up the Locke party after their battle against the Inferno, they run immediately into another boss - I clearly picked the wrong group to load with all my weakest characters. On a similar red-carpeted dais, we encounter a greenish dragon, the last of the height.
The skull dragon isn't a true undead, despite its appearance - rather, as each dragon represents one of the game's eight elements, it is the dragon of the poison element. Fittingly, it largely eschews damage and deals mostly in status effects, including Silence, Darkness, Confuse, and the one against which I do not have an easy equipment counter, Doom (the Lich Ring which makes characters undead would turn Doom into a free heal but at the cost of being undead). However, while this party lacks Ultima, the Skull Dragon is weak to the Holy element, and Mog is equipped with the Holy Lance, which deals holy-elemental damage and has a 25% chance of casting Holy on every hit, while Strago has access to Flare for not-insignificant damage. Setzer has a set of Fixed Dice and Dice, which use a random calculation for damage that I could try and abuse with a multi-attack setup, but honestly I'm fine leaving him as it is. Even without access to Ultima, the Skull Dragon is no match for the Holy Lance, Locke's Holy, and Flare.
…honestly for the two last dragons in the last dungeon these two were kind of pushovers. I take it that it would be feasible to do early runs of Kefka's Tower just to kill those two and unlock their rewards early, wouldn't it? The Gold Dragon drops the Crystal Orb, which boosts MP by 50%, while the Skull Dragon drops the Muscle Belt, which boosts maximum HP by 50%; the latter seems like the best of the two and a significant boost to most characters' survivability.
Plus, killing the height dragons is its own reward. Or, rather, grants a reward of its own. Although it's more of a bragging rights kind of thing.
With the message "All eight dragons have been defeated… The eightfold seal is broken!" the screen flashes red and trembles, and then…
…okay, I'm actually kind of surprised; I expected 'Crusader' to at least be an extra boss, or appear with some kind of fanfare, but no. Simply by killing the eight dragons, the magicite somehow materializes in our possession.
It makes sense that we don't have to fight an extra boss for it, though. Because the Crusader magicite is already the bosses we are about to fight. Or at least I'm pretty sure, look:
Two masculine figure, and one feminine, appearing in a triangular formation and unleashing devastating power that hurts everyone - Crusader's big thing is that it indiscriminately targets enemies and allies alike - taking the form of three successive attacks, an explosion, a barrage of light beams, and a flurry of arcing cuts.
Yeah, this is the power of the Warring Triad. Or at least an echo of it. I do not know what the relationship between the dragons and the Triad is, but there must be one, because by killing the eight legendary dragons we've unlocked some fraction of the same power Kefka is using to rule the world.
…unfortunately it's largely useless to us. Because the Crusader summon hits friend and foe alike it's strictly inferior to, say, Bahamut; its stat-up is MP+50%, which is neat but unremarkable in a game that is already giving us more MP than we could possibly need; and the two spells it teaches are Meltdown and Meteor, and while both are strong, they're made obsolete by, say it with me now, Ultima.
A disappointing prize on a mechanical level, though I do love that we're now wielding the power of the Triad ourselves - and doing so shortly before confronting them in their full power.
Before that, though…
Locke's party move past the Skull Dragon's dais, and into another switch corridor which parallels Celes's own on the other side of the raised platform. With both in position, they open the path for Terra's party to enter what remains of the Imperial Palace.
From there, the goal is to push one of these cartoonish 4 tons weight which Ultros was hoping to squish Celes with in order to push the switches permanently 'on' and open the path for the other characters to follow into the inner chambers of the tower.
This promptly causes Celes to run into the Guardian.
The Guardian, if you'll recall, was the Imperial Palace's static defense system, a machine with enormous firepower that we previously couldn't defeat. But that was all the way back in the World of Balance - this time we're back and armed to the teeth.
The Guardian has a really interesting gimmick - it loads 'Battle Programs' which are the movesets of previously encountered bosses, of varying strength. It starts off with a 'default program' which uses standard Magitek attacks like lasers, missiles and atomic ray, then loads either the Ultros battle program, of all things, or Dadaluma (that rogue monk from Zozo), or Air Force, or finally the Ultima Weapon program, which has Flare and Meteor.
Anyway, we blow it up.
Relm knows Ultima now.
I dig the concept, but unfortunately even without Ultima I would be hitting it with Thundaga for max damage regardless, and it wouldn't make it past three turns.
That's all the 'lesser' bosses out of the way. Oddly enough, Terra's party hasn't encountered a single boss - I was expecting Party 1 to be the one running into the most opposition, but the opposite is true; Celes's and Locke's party both have to confront two bosses before reaching their respective members of the Warring Triad, whereas Terra's party only has their path obstructed by switches for the other parties to pull.
So it's time. The statues of the gods stand at three peaks, and when we confront them, they emerge in their full glory as truly enormous sprites that are easily a match for the final bosses of any previous game.
…
It would be a lie to say that I expected some characterization from the Triad, but I'm still a little disappointed. Not a single line of dialogue?
I guess I'm suffering from the Time Warp here - you see, in FFXIV, the Warring Triad are introduced as part of the Heavensward expansion. Without getting too far into the weeds, while they receive very little characterization, they are still given a little individuality, names, and a divine portfolio - for instance, 'Fiend' is 'Sephirot, the Fiend,' a deity once worshipped by a plant-like race and with powers over nature and fertility. It's a little disappointing to find out that even that much individuality isn't there to be found here; the Fiend has no characterization beyond what can be glimpsed from his mechanics. Which, considering that he is one of the three gods of magic who created the espers and almost destroyed the world, whose death could cause the vanishing of all magic, feels a little… Like, c'mon. At least give me a boast or something.
Ah, well.
As far as spectacles go, the way a circle of darkness hemmed in black flame opens up and the Fiend's sprite emerges in a reverse-effect of boss disintegration is top-tier. This is some final boss stuff the game is pulling off for these guys.
The Fiend is an ice-type foe, wielding Blizzaga for massive single target damage, Absolute Zero for medium omni-target damage, and Southern Cross to Freeze party members. Thankfully, this is where Setzer having a dogshit magic score comes in handy:
He can cast Fira at his own party to free them from the frost.
Strago's Flare deals most of the damage, with 5k a hit, while Locke serves as backup with Holy and physical attacks and Mog, when he's not frozen, uses his Jump to good effect - Setzer is mostly relegated to either incinerating his own teammates for their own good or casting Curaga every turn, or like, being dead, most of the time.
Partway through the fight, though, things take a turn for the worse. The message "Fiend's aura is trembling violently!" starts to appear, and while the game doesn't tell me what it means until I find out the hard way, the boss just buffed itself with Haste, Image, and Reflect. This means Stago's next Flare bounces and hits us right in the kisser.
The FIend then proceeds to start spamming Force Field, a spell which grants it random elemental immunities every turn. It then starts using 'Targeting,' a set-up move which means a character will next be hit by Fiendish Rage for 9,999 damage. With half of my party KO and most of my spells incapable of hitting the Fiend, it seems grim at first - but the Force Field ends up wasting much of its turns on giving it immunities to things I don't care about, and Targeting fails when it targets Mog before he jumps off screen. With these two mitigating factors, I manage to raise Lock, who can then use Arise to bring any KO'd party member instantly back to full health, and from there we can use Reflect on our characters to volley-ball spells back past Fiend's Reflect, and…
…Victory with the whole party at full HP. This went from a clutch with half of the party dead and the rest injured to a total victory. This is the good Final Fantasy, when proper tactics and adjustment in the heat of battle lead to sudden reversals of outcome and pulling victories out of the jaws of defeat. I love it.
After its defeat, the Fiend's statue flashes red and black, then vanishes, opening the day deeper into the tower for Locke.
Meanwhile, Celes's party confront their own foe - the Demon.
I haven't really commented on it before, but Tetsuya Nomura, who was already involved in FFV's monster sprite design, is back in an even more prominent role in FFVI, and his style is really starting to pop off in the endgame with these baroque, intricate monsters that take up half the screen. The FFXIV names for the Triad were taken from his concept art notes, incidentally, though never used in FFVI itself.
In FFXIV, the Demon, Zurvan, was worshipped by a race of centaur-like beings as an incarnation of inevitable victory.
The Demon isn't an elemental foe, rather he has powerful physical attacks like Metal Cutter and Tyrfing, its special move, a single-target physical attack; it also uses Stop, and when a character suffers from its effects, targets them with Blaster, which kills them instantly - I like that better than most death effects; the way it's a 1-2 setup you can see coming feels better than random instant death. He hits Gau, which isn't as bad as it could be but still a loss to our DPS. When brought down to low enough HP, the Demon unlocks a variety of new, powerful group-wide attacks like Meteor and Flare Star.
Unfortunately, by the time it reaches that point, it's already too late.
We got Gau back up, Celes is the only significantly injured party member, and she and Relm brought down the beast with superior fire power.
Only one member of the Warring Triad remains. This whole time, Terra's party has been waltzing through the tower, tearing through everything in her path with trivial ease without encountering so much as a single boss. But now, at last, something stands in their way that they can't ignore. The last (and only visibly female) member of the Warring Triad - the Goddess.
Of note is that the Goddess is the only god who is found in a shrine-like place of honor, with carpet, banners, statue and dais.
In FFXIV, the Goddess is called Sophia, and she presided over a multicultural nation who were bound in harmony by the 'perfect equilibrium' granted by their goddess; how much of that was literal mind-control is up to interpretation.
The battle opens as a Side Attack, with party members on each side, restricting healing. The Goddess is not a conventional attacker; though she has low HP, she is automatically buffed with Shell and Haste and uses that speed to turn the party against itself, forces characters to take physical damage for her and uses Entice, a Confuse-like status that can't be healed normally - basically, she is using her divine charms and mind control to turn the party against one another. Like the other Triad members, she has a 'phase 2' mechanic triggering after suffering enough attacks, Cloudy Heavens, which curses the battlefield so that any party member who dies for any reason rises as a zombie.
It's probably the coolest boss mechanic in the game, conceptually, although the whole 'turn everyone against each other' shtick could potentially be very frustrating.
It doesn't matter.
The Goddess is the first boss who doesn't even get to reach Phase 2 because she dies so fast.
The Goddess has 44,000 HP. By using Quick into Dualcast/Dualcast, Terra can cast Ultima four times in a row. Due to the odd way ATB works in this game, the Goddess actually ends up attacking in-between some of these effects, but the net result is that she takes 4 Ultimas for 39,996 damage. Sabin follows up with a Tempest, dealing the remainder 5,000 damage required to seal the deal. The Goddess is dead before Cyan and Shadow even got to act.
There are gods, and then there is Terra Branford.
The Warring Triad has fallen. But of course, if our heroes thought this alone would be enough to end Kefka's reign of terror, they were mistaken. Terra turns around and wonders why the power of magic isn't fading…
Kefka, she concludes, must have extracted the very source of magic from them. Which I guess would explain why these three gods who once held the whole world in thrall and threatened to destroy it could be defeated by a band of plucky heroes, but the how is left unexplained - it's just one of those things Kefka does.
The Warring Triad also drop some of the best loot in the game, including the sword Excalibur which could be placed in a particularly deadly combo for Locke but -
At this point you'll forgive me for not really bothering to adjust and tweak my equipment before the final fight, I hope. That fate is already written.
This concludes Kefka's Tower as a dungeon - all that's left is the final confrontation with the mad mage. I am writing most of this update in one go, straight from start to finish, but it is going to end up more than 8k words in total and likely over 100 pictures, so this seems a good point to break this off here and post this segment - I did break up the endgame of FFV in several chunks, after all.
Kefka's Tower is… fun. I enjoyed it. It wasn't very challenging but, to my frustration, I cannot find the same fun in a difficult FF dungeon experience than I might find getting my shit pushed in in Elden Ring, thirty years of action RPG development later - hard fights against bosses in these games are fun, but hard fights against random encounters that are mostly challenging through resource attrition are merely tedious. In that regard, I am glad for Ultima making the journey easier, even if it trivialized the bosses, because as a result of trivializing the random encounters I enjoyed navigating the multi-party setup and switch-based puzzles more freely.
Perhaps a version of the game in which I can turn off random encounters entirely, like the console PR ports, and then restricting myself to a lower level might get me a better experience out of it.
Aesthetically, it's an ugly dungeon. It's ugly on purpose, though - does that make it being ugly a good choice? I'm not sure; I've seen takes on the World of Darkness, the Moon, and the Interdimensional Rift in FFXIV, but I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything like Kefka's Tower - it's not an aesthetic that they felt worth revisiting. But it fits here, it's appropriate, and the aesthetic payoff at the end of that journey -
Well. We'll see in the next update.
I don't know if the final stretch will be posted today, or tomorrow, but see you then.
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Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
This is where we westeners are reminded that the Japanese word for dinosaur (
... Of course, a Brontosaurus-based design (and it's the 90s, they were definitely thinking of Brontosaurus) should've been used for the Lightning Element dragon for obvious reasons.
For all that you only get Meltdown far too late for it to be particularly useful, it's still my favourite spell in FF6. Because it hits the entire screen for fire damage, and flame shields are easy to get, you've got a single spell that smashes the enemy and heals your entire party at once.
Meltdown strats are hilarious.
Meltdown strats are hilarious.
Quake does a similar thing with Gaia Gear, and has the bonus of being available way earlier, but needs specific party compositions to work due to equipment restrictions.
Mister Bad Guy
Mr Mercury to friends
- Location
- Bay Area
There is some pretty heavy evidence there was supposed to be a bigger reward for taking down all eight dragons: this guy.
Buried in the game's code is a fellow named Kaiser Dragon, whose stats, unfinished as they are, suggest he was meant to be a superboss. He even has a battle-starting line of dialogue, and got a name in the English version (CzarDragon). Said line, translated by a Woolsey who probably just thought it was supposed to be in the game, is:
"Mwa, ha, ha.... Humans and their desires! I'm free at last! I bring you destruction... I bring you terror... I am Czar! Prepare yourselves!"
The GBA version, and most future versions, would implement him in full as a superboss who you can fight in a special bonus dungeon on a completed save file, and said version also fleshes him out a bit more, confirming that he is indeed meant to be Dragon #9.
"Humans and your insatiable greed... Your lust for power leads always to a lust for blood... This place is a sanctuary for wayward souls... What business have you filthy creatures here? You slaughter my brethren, and befoul their rest with the profanity of your continued existence... You should not have come here. In the name of all dragonkind, I shall grant you the death you desire. I am the dealer of destruction... I am the font from which fear springs... I am Kaiser... And your time is at an end."
Which is, admittedly, mostly just a longer version of his pre-battle dialogue in the original.
Buried in the game's code is a fellow named Kaiser Dragon, whose stats, unfinished as they are, suggest he was meant to be a superboss. He even has a battle-starting line of dialogue, and got a name in the English version (CzarDragon). Said line, translated by a Woolsey who probably just thought it was supposed to be in the game, is:
"Mwa, ha, ha.... Humans and their desires! I'm free at last! I bring you destruction... I bring you terror... I am Czar! Prepare yourselves!"
The GBA version, and most future versions, would implement him in full as a superboss who you can fight in a special bonus dungeon on a completed save file, and said version also fleshes him out a bit more, confirming that he is indeed meant to be Dragon #9.
"Humans and your insatiable greed... Your lust for power leads always to a lust for blood... This place is a sanctuary for wayward souls... What business have you filthy creatures here? You slaughter my brethren, and befoul their rest with the profanity of your continued existence... You should not have come here. In the name of all dragonkind, I shall grant you the death you desire. I am the dealer of destruction... I am the font from which fear springs... I am Kaiser... And your time is at an end."
Which is, admittedly, mostly just a longer version of his pre-battle dialogue in the original.
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Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Kefka's Tower's aesthetic hasn't been used in FFXIV YET. They still might draw on it eventually for vague inspiration the way 6.0 did FF4 without any FF4 bosses or characters
Meltdown is actually better than Ultima with a particular setup. See, it hits everyone on screen, enemies and allies alike, but unlike Cleansing, it's Fire-aspected, which means you can absorb damage with Flame Shields. You can get two of them normally and nullify fire damage with Minerva Busier/Ice Shield/some other stuff, or just get an unlimited number of Flame Shields from the Coliseum.
The end result is that it's a spell dealing heavy damage to enemies and fully healing at least half the party.
The problem with Crusader is that with two dragons being located in Kefka's tower, one pretty deep at that, you only obtain it near the end in a normal play, and then you'd need to sit there and grind before you can actually use the spell. So, yeah, you could do that, and there are benefits to it, but, like, why even bother at this point? It would make your battles easier, but not easier enough to pause the final stretch of the game for a grinding session.
Once again, just allowing you to use spells from the equipped espers right away and only requiring to master them to gain permanent access would be a superior mechanic because then you could have equipped Crusader on Terra and started blasting indiscriminate nuclear fire as Gods intended.
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- Location
- Not your place of residence
That's another thing that makes FFVI arguably the easiest in the series; it's the only numbered game without any superbosses after they were first introduced in V. Kaiser Dragon was almost definitely intended to be one, but they didn't put him in, probably for Running Out Of Time/Development Space reasons, there are hard encounters like DeathGaze or the Brachiosaur (though the Brachiosaur probably could have been a superboss TBH), but there's nothing that has the pomp and circumstance that says "You see that guy? You know how he's the final boss? Well, that's because he's not coming down to face ME!"
I'd also point out that we've only seen the Warring Triad as statues at this point, in FFVI that is. Characterization in a later MMO notwithstanding, they're perfectly functional as just a final dungeon boss rush as degraded versions of their former selves. Could they have received characterization? Yeah, probably. But they're not really necessary to characterize. Considering you've finished the game at this point, you know what they were saving the characterization for.
I'd also point out that we've only seen the Warring Triad as statues at this point, in FFVI that is. Characterization in a later MMO notwithstanding, they're perfectly functional as just a final dungeon boss rush as degraded versions of their former selves. Could they have received characterization? Yeah, probably. But they're not really necessary to characterize. Considering you've finished the game at this point, you know what they were saving the characterization for.
MiskWisk
Hoot
- Location
- Somewhere devoid of wit
- Pronouns
- He
As an aside, I'm hoping a future expansion for XIV expands on the Triad. The hints we got for them were interesting and I'd love to see them properly fleshed out. Much of what people picked up for Sophia and Sephirot is from their theme songs (Sophia telling a follower praying for help to kill her abusive mother, then telling said follower to kill herself for committing matricide; Sephirot being an incarnation of nature in both it's lifegiving aspect but also the random cruelty (Necessity is an inventive mother, promising sanctum that she cannot provide. She is the hand, that rocks the cradle; the wind that breaks the bough and leaves you to die.))
More on topic though, considering this is my first proper experience with the game... the frequent, "Kefka does something because the plot says so," is getting kind of annoying.