Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song lets you voluntarily do something like that on a second playthrough by taking the mystical MacGuffins you've been spending the game trying to keep away from the villains so they can't use them to empower their evil god, and using them to power said god up yourself just for the sake of a harder fight.
(Of course, The Last Remnant is basically a SaGa game in all but name anyway so it shouldn't be surprising that there's a similarity there.)
Funnily enough, the first thing that came to mind was actually MegaMan Battle Network 4, in which one of the final bosses is made exponentially harder depending on how often you used a certain mechanic/instant win button.
Of course there was the slight issue of the game being by far the worst in the series, but that specific idea was very cool, and while not an exact match, is decently close.
It's time go back. Back to the past. Back… to Final Fantasy III.
This is the nature of Kain's big midgame twist: Golbez's plans are not complete, because he needs more than the four Light Crystals of this world - he also need the four Dark Crystals found in the Underworld, and so we still have a chance of keeping him from enacting his plans if we get to the Dark Crystals soon enough. This time, though, the Dark Crystals aren't in an alternate dimension of darkness - the Underworld is, quite literally, 'under' us.
The moon, uh.
This was of course foreshadowed by the strange findings of the Agart observatory, finding strange signs of activity on the smaller, reddish moon, as seen below:
View from the telescope.
So the 'moon trip' twist isn't wholly out of left field; it's foreshadowed in a couple of places. Nonetheless, even without knowing ahead of time that it happens, I think at this stage of the game it would become obvious to the average player that it's where the endgame is happening. Exciting!
The 'Key' Kain handed to us is extremely funny. It's called the 'magma stone,' and it's a rock. He knows that it opens the path to the underworld… somehow… But not where. Or how. Everyone asks him excitedly where to go and he's like 'sorry I just carry the thing :x' but Cid said, no problem, they'll just fly around over the entire world until they eventually find it.
Thankfully I can do better than this. I've already been to Agart, whose inhabitants describe themselves as descending from dwarves that came from another world whose sun is called 'Magma' (I was suspecting that this was an oblique reference to living deep underground and using magma as their main source of heat and light), and they have a mysterious deep well that shows an item prompt when interacting with it.
Everyone is like 'but we left the airship at the Tower of Zot!' to which Cid says not to worry, his ship has autopilot and will find its way back to them, which, I'm sorry, compels me to imagine the ship as, like, a big, friendly dog made of wood and iron. The others are like "wow, what would we do without you, Cid," and Cid basks in their praise. He's just a fun character.
Before everyone goes to rest, Cecil wonders aloud why Golbez didn't finish him off at the Tower, but finds no answer. Then it's morning, and time to head out.
Not before getting the lady some clothes, though.
Now, before any further plot development, I go back to that mysterious ruined castle in the southwest and finally finish exploring it, slaying every chest monster and getting some neat item like a stronger sword. And then after that, I go back to rummaging around Baron Castle - I probably forgot to mention this back during the raid because I was running out of picture space, but down in the Baron basement there was a mysterious invisible wall I couldn't cross, and having finally remembered that, I now have a direction to follow:
A mysterious hidden throne room in the basement? Intriguing!
And then, a voice echoes as visual warping effects go through the room, and…
That is all the King - or perhaps his ghost, or an apparition of him, has to say, but Cecil, ever loyal, immediately answers in the affirmative.
Too bad I have no fucking clue what or where the 'Land of Summons' is, so it's not gonna be our next destination. Instead, we'll simply head to our next destination, Agart!
After a quick look around town to make sure there wasn't any new dialogue (none; Agart is an isolated island nation and appears oblivious to the world conflict happening further north), we head for the well…
Now, I want to state something on the record.
We are trying to enter an underground world full of magma. Our way of doing this is to locate an incredibly deep well, and then drop a stone "with the power of magma" locked within. I'm not an idiot. I realize that the effects are going to be, shall we say, dramatic. I mean, Rings of Power episode 6 aired like a month ago. The only person completely oblivious to the consequences of his own actions here is Cecil, God forgive him.
I'm not quite prepared for the scale of the results, though.
I would like to apologize for Yellowstoning the world.
Jesus christ. This isn't your average tuesday morning volcanic eruption. This a supervolcano. This is a verneshot. We just accidentally most of the atmosphere! Look at that plume! It's going all the way up to space! Welcome to the Year Without Summer, everybody!
But I guess the game has no time for that and will not be considering any of the implications here. This eruption is meant to just look cool, not like Cecil did a Cecil again by inadvertently bringing untold destruction upon the world. Even though, like, when it's other, it looks like this:
There was a mountain range there. It's gone. We just fucking blew up Vesuvius and opened a path to Tartarus.
Well, I suppose we might as well head in, then. Let's flee forward from the consequences of our action into a brand new world!
Hot diggity.
You can see the foundations of those giant towers from the surface!
The Underworld literally has seas of magma, oh my god. Wait. Wait!
THEY BAMBOOZLED ME WITH A NEW WORLD MAP YET AGAIN
Goddamn that's good. Look at the shapes of these continents - they didn't just swap the colors; they also drew the Underworld continents with much sharper, jagged edges, more aggressive curves, feeling less like a natural continent and more like angry cuts in woodboard. It's great.
Now, this is a cutscene - the ship is moving on its own, rather than just dropping us into the Underworld and telling us to find our way. And as our party searches for some kind of sign or landmark to investigate in search of the Dark Crystals…
Wait. Are those tanks?
Oh my god they are. The native population of the Underworld is fighting off a Red Wing attack with actual straight-up tanks, with cannons and everything. Astounding.
From now on, any fantasy setting which has dwarves without giving these dwarves main battle tanks is officially written by cowards.
Yang wonders aloud how the Red Wings beat us here, which is a fair question - I think the game was anticipating this to be the bit where I go around and so some exploring and castle raiding, rather than knowing where I was supposed to go and going there… nearly… immediately… Look ignore the part where I got sidetracked by that castle, it's nothing, but anyway, it does feel a little abrupt, and it's about to feel a lot more so. Of course, our most pressing concern here is being caught in the crossfire of two advanced fighting forces.
This does not go over very well.
Thankfully, as you can see, our crash-landing occurred in front of this conveniently placed castle, so we can immediately seek help and counsel. Which is good, because I'm not exactly feeling super confident about walking around in a place where the (sea)floor is literally lava.
The dwarves are back, and with them their traditional greeting. They seem friendly enough; some show suspicion due to us being surface people, but we don't look like Golbez and so they extend their trust. And, incidentally, they know Golbez by name and talk about him as a known adversary rather than some random asshole who just showed up, which is concerning.
The dwarves mostly share this sprite above with the horned helmet and the Black Mage-style obscured faces with yellow eyes - which is to say it's using a slightly altered version of the Viking sprite from FF3 NES. Now, ostensibly, this is just because the dwarves' helms obscure their faces, and isn't meant to carry any greater implications… at least until the game decides that it wants to have a dwarf child involved in the plot in a minor capacity, but for some reason the game decides to double down on the dwarves' faces being completely obscured no matter what, resulting in this hilarious sprite:
I don't experience any kind of sinister chill hearing this, nor any traumlatic memories whatsoever.
THE NO-FACE CHILD. I CAN SEE HER IN MY NIGHTMARES.
So yeah, no, sorry, I guess this establishes that the dwarves canonically do in fact have yawning black voids for faces with unblinking yellow stars for eyes. Outstanding fantasy race resign, no notes, D&D please sit up and pay attention.
Finally, we meet with the King:
I cannot express how funny it is to me that Cecil finds a castle, chad-strides into it, barges into the throne room, walks straight up to the actual throne with a dude in a crown sitting on it, and the first words that leave his mouth are "Who the fuck are you?" Least socially awkward Final Fantasy protagonist, love it.
Fortunately, King Giott doesn't hold this against them, and in fact is remarkably helpful, quickly deducing that the group are not affiliated with Golbez. There are unfortunate news, however - Golbez has already acquired two of the four Dark Crystals held by the dwarven kingdom.
Damn, that sure was some blitz strategy he had going there, uh. It's actually a little bit annoying, but whatever. The dwarves have two crystals left, including one hidden in this very castle, their strongest bastion! Surely it's completely safe, right?
Well…
King Giott confirms that the tanks we saw on the way were his; unfortunately, airships are a new technology wholly unknown to the Underworld, and despite being able to fend off the Red Wings, the dwarven tanks took some severe damage. He asks if Cid could help them with his own airship, but Cid says he'll need to do some serious repairs before the Enterprise is skyworthy again - but more importantly, he needs to armor her in mithril so she can withstand the heat of the magma, and as a result Cid needs to temporarily leave us for the surface.
You damned well better, I seriously doubt that I'm going to find a magma-worthy ship down here-
Wait a minute, is this actually the first Final Fantasy game to not include a sailship? It is! We go directly from the hovercraft to the airship! I hadn't even noticed! Like, we do acquire a ship over the course of the plot… but it only exists long enough for a cutscene before Leviathan swallows it. That's interesting, they really changed up the world unlock design, didn't they?
What follows is a sequence so silly it's just genuinely funny. Cecil asks King Giott where is the crystal, which is kind of a bad idea considering Golbez has repeatedly been observed to have the ability of far-sight and talking/listening over vast distance, and the King immediately tells him that the Crystal is safely hidden behind his throne. Things go wrong instantly.
Instant karma.
A brief animation plays of some oddly small humanoid sprite moving in the dark space beyond the wall. Cecil tells Yang that maybe he's just imagining things, but Yang insists he sensed something, and honestly across the game mages/monks who Have A Bad Feeling About This have consistently proven right in some way or another; the King trusts his word and opens the secret hidden door to the crystal room.
So we follow…
Into the crystal chamber…
Following the tiny humanoid figure…
After that dwarven child told us that her dolls had disappeared.
Oh thank god it's gone. Let's never think about this again. And all it took was Kain dying. And my party spending half the fight turned against one another because of Calabrenas's Glare and its confuse status. It's all good. We're fine. I mean the group is severely injured but it's not like the game is going to throw another critical fight at us before giving us a chance to heal up, yeah? Yeah. It's fine. We're good. It's over.
Oh, right. Golbez can communicate over vast distances. I said so myself not five minutes ago.
Well, we're fucked.
Can he just… can he literally just teleport to any place he's aware of? Can he really just vanish and appear at will, any place he wants, as long as he's even vaguely aware of where it is? Jesus that's OP. Combined with his ability to see and hear like he owns a fucking Palantir, Golbez's reach is probably more of a factor in his string of victories than even his considerable personal power. There's essentially no way to keep him from reaching anything he wants beyond him not knowing about it and you never talking about it, which makes organizing any kind of defense against him quite difficult - and also means he is always, under any circumstances, faster than his enemies. He's already where you're headed; and if he's not there already, he'll arrive as soon as you do. There's almost no way to beat him to the chase. He's even closer to the Crystal than we are right now!
Well.
We've got one party member down, everyone else is wounded, we only have one mage.
There was a fairly average rpg on the PC that gave you different key items every new game plus based on the endings you got. You couldn't get rid of them and each one strengthened the final boss and enhanced or added new spells to him. For example the bad end gave an item that boosted the boss's opening move and gave him a unique lightning spell. Problem was, the items stacked. If you got the bad end 3 times that opening move became a full party wipe no matter what your stats or gear.
Outside of that one mechanic it was really generic. I think it was a fairly early rpgmaker game.
Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent. I am attacking.
Golbez's theme music kicks in after a moment of silence following the dolls' disappearance and shortly before he appears, because, everything else aside, the man knows how to make an entrance.
Golbez, you cheap bitch. I already know that! Kain told me! The only new information you're adding is "a power beyond our comprehension can be found there," and I could have guessed that! You're only admitting that you don't know what your own goal is, that you're following a legend without even knowing for sure the nature of the power you're pursuing!
Golbez tells us it's time for settle this for good, that we have been a "great aid," and to "prepare for our final reward," and then it's on.
For some reason I appear to have failed to take screenshots of the first leg of the fight, but it's a rapid scramble to bring my team back to speed, raising Kain and healing him to full, healing Cecil up, preparing some buffs…
…all of which is completely pointless.
The Shadow Dragon's 'Black Fangs' attack is an instakill against every member of the party. In the end, only Cecil remains, paralyzed by the Ice Binding, about to face the same fate. It looks completely hopeless.
This - this doesn't feel earned. As fucked as the situation seemed legitimately dire, someone saying something stupid aloud and Golbez just teleporting right there, TPKing the party and taking the crystal? That's bullshit. There is only so far you can push that kind of 'the enemy is so overwhelming he just keeps winning' before it gets stale. Right? This is the third time the game pulls this on us -
Except.
Just as I resign myself to another forced loss with a bullshit excuse for why the group somehow survived.
The heroine appears.
My screenshots have been acting up and I couldn't manage a shot of the actual dragon, but it's the exact same one as the one we defeated in the Mist Cave at the beginning of the game, and it destroys the Shadow Dragon instantly.
RYDIA?!
RYDIA IS BACK?
And she went through the hyperbolic time chamber and grew like two feet and several years?!
Oh, baby, now we're cooking with gas. Because this is a real fight - and it doesn't come with a free heal for everyone. We have Cecil, lightly injured; Rydia, who takes an offensive spell to the face as soon as she shows up for her trouble; and three KO party members, while up against the most powerful foe we've faced so far.
Rydia appears to have lost her ability to use White Magic, which is extremely inconvenient for us right now, because it means our only healer is Cecil. On the other hand, her catalogue of Summons now include Shiva, Ifrit, Titan, and the Mist Dragon, while she sports a robust Black Magic list. The next few turn are a race to get everyone up while maintaining maximum damage on Golbez; Rydia has a huge MP pool so I just spam Summons every turn Cecil rezzes Rosa with a Phoenix Down, then the both of them tag-team to bring our main attackers back on their feet and at full health and immediately jumping back into the fray.
Eat shit, Golbez.
And it fucking works.
We… we did it?
We did!
We defeated Golbez!
It's not going to be that easy, I can tell, but we did legitimately just stomp him. We started at a baseline of 'everyone is dead except Cecil,' and then we staged a total come back of a complete, full-health party taking turns kicking him in the dick, with no tricks or narrative contrivances beyond Rydia's timely arrival, and she's 'just' an extremely powerful sorceress. I genuinely wasn't expecting that until the endgame. The game put Golbez over with an ominous off-screen introduction, then a great on-screen entrance, a well-sold scripted victory, then deliberately put a notch in his armor with Tellah landing a real blow on him and forcing him to retreat - and just as it seems the game will go out of its way to make him roll over the protagonists, they actually beat his ass.
What follows is… mildly confusing. In two different ways.
First is Rydia's explanation of what happened to her: Leviathan was actually helping out. I don't know if he wrecked our ship on purpose, or if he just realized his mistake after the fact, but apparently, he didn't eat Rydia, he just… transported her. To the 'Land of Summons' the King of Baron talked about, which is "the world of the monsters that Rydia can summon." And then she and Leviathan became friends? And then she lost her ability to perform white magic but grew strong as a summoner? Like, did it just fall off? Did she drop her white magic on the way somewhere? And also time passes differently in the Land of Summons so she aged several years in these past few days/weeks?
What?
This is such a wild plot point to throw in, I don't feel qualified to really discuss it much until we've learned more.
Okay, we're on sturdier grounds here. A powerful mystical entity knows of a great evil at work in secret, that has yet to be defeated - it looks, then, like Golbez may have been the pawn of a greater force. Rydia joins the party, and our heroes, confident in their victory, turn around and ready to leave the room. A fatal mistake.
He…
He turned himself into the Thing from Addams Family?
Oh my god he really did. There's an actual chase scene of Cecil running after he disembodied hand as it clampers up the stairs to the Dark Earth Crystal! Funniest shit you've ever seen!
In the end, Golbez does manage to abscond with the crystal. But he does so defeated - diminished, in the most literal sense - a broken figure inexplicably turning into only a portion of himself and making a desperate run for the object of his desire before teleporting away. Once again, his bizarre abilities and power to ignore distance and constraints prove more key to his success than any amount of raw power.
Does the fact that Golbez still makes it out with the Crystal frustrate me? A little, but only a little. The important thing is that he lost, in a true and meaningful sense, even if he managed to achieve his operational objective. He's no longer the invincible dark lord that can be hardly imagined to be fought without Meteor, at least not until he undergoes a classic Final Fantasy Escalation into some monster form. Tellah bought us time - and with that time, we gained the strength to achieve victory.
Now I'm curious. Golbez bears an aesthetic similarity to the Dark Knights. In extra material for this game, it's apparently made clear that Dark Knights are fused to their armor and cannot willingly take it off, although that is not made explicit in the game. In FF3, the sprite designer had this idea that Dark Knights are bounded to their cursed armor in such a way that, when they die, their bodies vanish, leaving behind only the armor with its magical spells.
…is there even a man inside Golbez's armor? Or just the shadows of one, a dark knight of such power and such evil as to have transcended into a being of steel and malevolence alone? Is that why even after seeming slain, part of his armor could detach and move on its own, crawling to its goal?
*squints*
Does that mean there could be a Golbez redemption arc? Seems like a stretch, but at this point he's been first sent running by Tellah, then defeated in combat by the protagonists - his threat, has such, has been significantly blunted. The obvious next move is to follow in the footsteps of FF2 again and have him undergo transformation into an even more powerful entity, but Rydia just suggested that there was a greater evil at work behind Golbez, and Golbez strongly implied that he had no idea what the ultimate power he's looking for on the moon actually is, and is only guided by legend, so… I could see the path towards the true final threat being one that has no need for Golbez, or that Golbez himself finds repugnant, leading to him turning against it at the last moment.
That would make him more Darth Vader than Palpatine. But if he is, or was once, a Dark Knight, rather than simply borrowing the aesthetics of one, then the question of sin and atonement is going to have to come up at least once - even if it's only for him to laugh in the heroes' faces and double down saying that's never been in the cards.
Hmmm. Much to think about.
For now, though, our main concern is keeping him from getting his hands on the last crystal.
Or rather, that would be our main concern if we were going with the obvious path, trying a reactive strategy that has failed us every single time we've attempted it so far - but the dwarven king has a much better plan in store for us! When the heroes present themselves before the King, begging forgiveness for their failure, he takes it in stride. The last crystal is in a sealed cave to which Golbez does not have the key (not that it stopped him before, but we'll take what we can get), and so the last thing he wants is opening the door for us to get in and leave the way open for Golbez. No, instead…
Oooh yeah baby.
I love this plan because it has "Fuck you" written all over it. While Golbez is making his play for the final crystal, at the far end of the map, we're taking all our forces and attacking the place he's been storing every other crystal at while he's gone, so that when he comes back holding the final crystal, thinking his victory safe in his hands, he finds out he's been completely defeated while he wasn't even looking. We're angling for that scene in the Namek Arc of DBZ where Vegeta thinks he's got all (or most?) of the Dragon Balls and is bringing the last ones back home only to find out that while he had his back turned, the weakling earthlings just swooped in and stole his entire stash.
Will it work?
No. I mean, let's be real. At this point, even if I wasn't spoiled on that plot point, there is 0 chance we're not going to the moon, and collecting all eight crystals is how you open the path to the moon, so the chances that there isn't someone who collects all the Chaos Emeralds and does it are basically nil.
But the way we get to that point might yet reserves us twists and surprises! And either way, it's going to involve a massive attack by our new Underworld friends and their army of Dwarven tanks! This is some real climactic setpiece stuff. Love it.
Next time on Final Fantasy: We attack the Tower of Babel.
Specifically, Rydia didn't 'Lose the ability to cast White Magic', she just didn't have time to explore that when mastering her Summoning Powers (And her Black Magic, which is similar in scope and has a lot of teachers there), and so she just doesn't bother to cast them because she never learned anything beyond the elementary stuff she could use as a child and at this point it's weaksauce compared to her hilarious offensive magic.
Dunno what the fuck's going with the hand, but I can confirm that Golbez was there, and he genuinely got his shit pushed in. Leviathan also knew you couldn't win for a good reason, which I can mention now that you've got Kain back.
The mind control stuff Golbez uses works by amplifying latent negative feelings and causing them to supplant all of your more noble traits until you've been flanderized into an easily manipulated thug. This was exactly why Leviathan intervened, sending everyone where they Needed to Be. Because if Dark Knight Cecil reached Baron, they were all going to fucking die, because a Dark Knight is catnip for Golbez' sorcery--and the only reason he didn't bother to use it earlier was because he genuinely didn't consider Cecil an obstacle because he was--in short--a solved problem. He just wasn't a useful minion because Cecil's darkness was his self-loathing, and amplifying that wouldn't have gotten him anything useful compared to amplifying Kain's jealousy.
Rydia is brought to the Land of Summons, Cecil is sent to Mysidia, Yang is sent ahead to Baron to link up with Cecil once he finishes his training, and Edward is sent to Troia where he can be in place to counter the Dark Elf. Each of them plays a role in the events that are to come, buying time until Rydia can be fully trained and returned as a sorceress capable of balking even Golbez's dark magic.
Leviathan is straight up one of the biggest 4D chess players in this game.
Rydia is brought to the Land of Summons, Cecil is sent to Mysidia, Yang is sent ahead to Baron, and Edward is sent to Troia. Each of them plays a role in the events that are to come, buying time until Rydia can be fully trained and returned as a sorceress capable of balking even Golbez's dark magic.
Another version translation difference here - the DS translation used "Eidolons" like in IX rather than "summons", and called their home the "Feymarch" rather than the more mundane sounding "Land of Summons".
Also , if you haven't already, be sure to speak to the dwarves near the fat chocobo summon place - there's a reason I giggled when you speculated on first seeing Fat Chocobo.
also also, the dwarves aren't actually faceless. I have no idea what the fuck is going on with them, but they can turn the faceless void thing off, even if none of them bother to do so until the sequel (the skin under the void is still dark, but a human-realistic shade of dark skin).
The sequel also has one each Calca and Brina doll join your party; they have combination attacks where they combine into Calcobrena.
Also we see again the patented Final Fantasy Subtlety, where the passage to the Underworld is located in Literally Agartha.
Also every time the 'Dark Knights are bonded to their armour' thing comes up I'm reminded of that companion from Tyranny (Barik) who always smells like rotting shit because he too is bonded to his armour and the consequences of not being able to take the fucking stuff off are horrendous. Significantly less glamorous an evil bonded to their armour than the Dark Knight is supposed to be, I suspect.
Specifically, Rydia didn't 'Lose the ability to cast White Magic', she just didn't have time to explore that when mastering her Summoning Powers (And her Black Magic, which is similar in scope and has a lot of teachers there), and so she just doesn't bother to cast them because she never learned anything beyond the elementary stuff she could use as a child and at this point it's weaksauce compared to her hilarious offensive magic.
Dunno what the fuck's going with the hand, but I can confirm that Golbez was there, and he genuinely got his shit pushed in. Leviathan also knew you couldn't win for a good reason, which I can mention now that you've got Kain back.
The mind control stuff Golbez uses works by amplifying latent negative feelings and causing them to supplant all of your more noble traits until you've been flanderized into an easily manipulated thug. This was exactly why Leviathan intervened, sending everyone where they Needed to Be. Because if Dark Knight Cecil reached Baron, they were all going to fucking die, because a Dark Knight is catnip for Golbez' sorcery--and the only reason he didn't bother to use it earlier was because he genuinely didn't consider Cecil an obstacle because he was--in short--a solved problem. He just wasn't a useful minion because Cecil's darkness was his self-loathing, and amplifying that wouldn't have gotten him anything useful compared to amplifying Kain's jealousy.
Rydia is brought to the Land of Summons, Cecil is sent to Mysidia, Yang is sent ahead to Baron to link up with Cecil once he finishes his training, and Edward is sent to Troia where he can be in place to counter the Dark Elf. Each of them plays a role in the events that are to come, buying time until Rydia can be fully trained and returned as a sorceress capable of balking even Golbez's dark magic.
Leviathan is straight up one of the biggest 4D chess players in this game.
Oh thank god it's gone. Let's never think about this again. And all it took was Kain dying. And my party spending half the fight turned against one another because of Calabrenas's Glare and its confuse status. It's all good. We're fine. I mean the group is severely injured but it's not like the game is going to throw another critical fight at us before giving us a chance to heal up, yeah? Yeah. It's fine. We're good. It's over.
Fortunately, King Giott doesn't hold this against them, and in fact is remarkably helpful, quickly deducing that the group are not affiliated with Golbez. There are unfortunate news, however - Golbez has already acquired two of the four Dark Crystals held by the dwarven kingdom.
Damn, that sure was some blitz strategy he had going there, uh. It's actually a little bit annoying, but whatever. The dwarves have two crystals left, including one hidden in this very castle, their strongest bastion! Surely it's completely safe, right?
It is something of a hindrance to the overall vibe of the plot that there's no way to escalate the plot to a satisfactory conclusion without Golbez's plan actually succeeding so that requires the heroes to lose constantly. Hell they even upgraded Golbez's required win tally from four to eight and gave him two offscreen this update!
Just as I resign myself to another forced loss with a bullshit excuse for why the group somehow survived.
The heroine appears.
My screenshots have been acting up and I couldn't manage a shot of the actual dragon, but it's the exact same one as the one we defeated in the Mist Cave at the beginning of the game, and it destroys the Shadow Dragon instantly.
RYDIA?!
RYDIA IS BACK?
And she went through the hyperbolic time chamber and grew like two feet and several years?!
Oh, baby, now we're cooking with gas. Because this is a real fight - and it doesn't come with a free heal for everyone. We have Cecil, lightly injured; Rydia, who takes an offensive spell to the face as soon as she shows up for her trouble; and three KO party members, while up against the most powerful foe we've faced so far.
Rydia appears to have lost her ability to use White Magic, which is extremely inconvenient for us right now, because it means our only healer is Cecil. On the other hand, her catalogue of Summons now include Shiva, Ifrit, Titan, and the Mist Dragon, while she sports a robust Black Magic list. The next few turn are a race to get everyone up while maintaining maximum damage on Golbez; Rydia has a huge MP pool so I just spam Summons every turn Cecil rezzes Rosa with a Phoenix Down, then the both of them tag-team to bring our main attackers back on their feet and at full health and immediately jumping back into the fray.
Eat shit, Golbez.
And it fucking works.
We… we did it?
We did!
We defeated Golbez!
It's not going to be that easy, I can tell, but we did legitimately just stomp him. We started at a baseline of 'everyone is dead except Cecil,' and then we staged a total come back of a complete, full-health party taking turns kicking him in the dick, with no tricks or narrative contrivances beyond Rydia's timely arrival, and she's 'just' an extremely powerful sorceress. I genuinely wasn't expecting that until the endgame. The game put Golbez over with an ominous off-screen introduction, then a great on-screen entrance, a well-sold scripted victory, then deliberately put a notch in his armor with Tellah landing a real blow on him and forcing him to retreat - and just as it seems the game will go out of its way to make him roll over the protagonists, they actually beat his ass.
Oh yeah baby that's the stuff. FF4 lets its magic-users eat and man was I ever happy to see Rydia again after so long. Especially since I uh... didn't even get everyone up again. She rejoins the party having learned, among other things, Bio. And Bio is really, really fucking strong against tough enemies. I only managed to get Rosa up again before Rydia simply extended her hand and pulled out Golbez's spine for me.
At least Golbez knows how to take an L once in a while, huh? The Addams Family routine is pretty goofy but at least it's a visible, tangible sign of the fact Rydia just tore him limb from limb.
Adult Rydia is... popular. Like, the single most fanarted and cosplayed and porned thing in the game popular. That outfit and her main weapon being whips probably helps that popularity.
I'm actually kinda impressed you managed to avoid being spoiled on her age-up.
Also we see again the patented Final Fantasy Subtlety, where the passage to the Underworld is located in Literally Agartha.
Also every time the 'Dark Knights are bonded to their armour' thing comes up I'm reminded of that companion from Tyranny (Barik) who always smells like rotting shit because he too is bonded to his armour and the consequences of not being able to take the fucking stuff off are horrendous. Significantly less glamorous an evil bonded to their armour than the Dark Knight is supposed to be, I suspect.
Tyranny, uh. Started that game a couple years ago but never finished it. It was cool, but it suffered from the same problem a lot of games have on my computer, which is that running them is just annoying enough, the download screens just long enough, the occasional slowdown in graphics or gameplay just frequent enough, that I manage to get 5-10 hours into them before giving up forever.
It is something of a hindrance to the overall vibe of the plot that there's no way to escalate the plot to a satisfactory conclusion without Golbez's plan actually succeeding so that requires the heroes to lose constantly. Hell they even upgraded Golbez's required win tally from four to eight and gave him two offscreen this update!
Oh yeah baby that's the stuff. FF4 lets its magic-users eat and man was I ever happy to see Rydia again after so long. Especially since I uh... didn't even get everyone up again. She rejoins the party having learned, among other things, Bio. And Bio is really, really fucking strong against tough enemies. I only managed to get Rosa up again before Rydia simply extended her hand and pulled out Golbez's spine for me.
At least Golbez knows how to take an L once in a while, huh? The Addams Family routine is pretty goofy but at least it's a visible, tangible sign of the fact Rydia just tore him limb from limb.
No. I realize this is confusing, but they're separate structure. I don't know yet if they're connected by lore in any way, but I assume the Tower of Babel is the giant superstructure we've been seeing poking out of the world this whole time.
Perhaps in recognition of this little bit of weirdness, in FFXIV (drink!), the Tower of Zot and the Tower of Babil (slightly altered spelling) are part of the same group of superstructures, which share a purpose and an architectural style and are visited at different times.
Adult Rydia is... popular. Like, the single most fanarted and cosplayed and porned thing in the game popular. That outfit and her main weapon being whips probably helps that popularity.
I'm actually kinda impressed you managed to avoid being spoiled on her age-up.
I didn't, not really. I knew an Adult Rydia model was going to show up at some point, I just had no context for it. When Cecil was on Mysidia I actually wondered if he was actually going to have to go through a time skip training as a Paladin and that would have been the explanation, but that seemed far-fetched, so I tried Not To Think About it and letting the game surprise me.
After that dwarven child told us that her dolls had disappeared.
Oh.
Oh no.
NO, I REFUSE
FUCK YOU
IT'S THEM
SCORCHED EARTH. SCORCHED. EARTH.
MAXIMUM ATTACKING POWER-
NO
AAAAAAAAAH
GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY
Oh thank god it's gone. Let's never think about this again. And all it took was Kain dying. And my party spending half the fight turned against one another because of Calabrenas's Glare and its confuse status. It's all good. We're fine. I mean the group is severely injured but it's not like the game is going to throw another critical fight at us before giving us a chance to heal up, yeah? Yeah. It's fine. We're good. It's over.
Perhaps in recognition of this little bit of weirdness, in FFXIV (drink!), the Tower of Zot and the Tower of Babil (slightly altered spelling) are part of the same group of superstructures, which share a purpose and an architectural style and are visited at different times.
'Babil' is the spelling from the original English release, which this version appears to have corrected. Possibly an attempt to Fantasy-up a blunt reference that American audiences would be more likely to recognize.
I love how they say "guess who? Yup, Calcobrinas!" It wouldn't have worked the same way originally, but for you, having faced FFXIV's version, the mockery and recognition would make it perfect.
Wait a minute, is this actually the first Final Fantasy game to not include a sailship? It is! We go directly from the hovercraft to the airship! I hadn't even noticed! Like, we do acquire a ship over the course of the plot… but it only exists long enough for a cutscene before Leviathan swallows it. That's interesting, they really changed up the world unlock design, didn't they?
Two decades ago, I just thought "Huh, this is creepy". When I saw them in FFXIV I could only imagine with a mind full of cruelty about those players who would be curious enough for playing the old games. And you didn't disappoint.
I remember when I was GMing a FFd6 Homebrew campaign, ruleset was found on Giants in the playground forums ages ago, and my party was in a abandoned Santorum. The Boss of the Area? Calcabrina, only one player realized what was about to happen and his horror was palpable.
Edit: The other players were convinced that it was going to be a Tonberry.
So fun fact, Golbez is actually a really easy fight in this version. He's extremely weak to Bio, and as you can see, you don't even need to spam it in order to beat him here.
The DS version is...somewhat different. In that it's the fight with Magus from Chrono Trigger on steroids: He'll change his elemental weakness, absorb everything that isn't the right element, and change it again almost immediately after getting hit in the weakness.
And you still start the actual boss part with only 2 members, with Rydia being extremely susceptible to being destroyed by Golbez. In a game that's full of enemy buffs and changes to make it much harder than the original, this second Golbez fight, or first if you don't count the cutscene Tellah fight, is probably the biggest buff.
