I will add something else. Like I said, the 3D version lets you hear the characters internal dialogue. Rydia note this isn't unusual for Yang. He dove right after her when the Leviathan attacked all.
Edward has dialogue both for Tellah's death (which you missed) and Yangs death. Mysidia's Eldar has dialogue for both Palom and Porom's death (again, it has been missed by now) as well as Tellah's death.
Because Cid is not actually a front-line combatant and if you set it up right you'll have actual literal fighters in the party instead? Cid is an engineer who happens to be able to whack dudes with a hammer. He's not a trained-from-childhood soldier like Kain, Cecil, and Rosa are. He's not a summoning prodigy trained to fight by the summons in their time accelerated home realm like Rydia. He's a middle-aged dude with a wrench. One character who's an actually lore-wise skilled combatant would fill the empty slot he leaves and it would be absolutely easily believable that Cid wouldn't come with you even if he finished whatever project.
Dude was 100% ready to throw hands with Rubicante. A sudden 'Oof, my age' arc would require a bunch of setup. There is also no such thing as an empty slot within the story. The game would need to establish a reason for a maximum of five.
Like, the sacrifice sucks in execution. But it's super understandable why the game wants to remove these leftover characters thoroughly. Sometimes simplifying the chess board is just the best thing for the story (and the writers mental health) long-term.
Yeah, but what about once the machine is finished? Why isn't he hitting the final boss with a hammer then. It's just kinda awkward and requires lots of planning.
This is also a funny subject to discuss in the thread of someone who literally forgot about an entire party member in the final showdown of their huge story.
Dude was 100% ready to throw hands with Rubicante. A sudden 'Oof, my age' arc would require a bunch of setup. There is also no such thing as an empty slot within the story. The game would need to establish a reason for a maximum of five.
Like, the sacrifice sucks in execution. But it's super understandable why the game wants to remove these leftover characters thoroughly. Sometimes simplifying the chess board is just the best thing for the story (and the writers mental health) long-term.
It's 'I am literally not a combatant, though I am willing to throw hands. I am going to be doing my actual fucking job, which is a vital part of allowing you schmucks to continue doing your job. No, I can't do that if I'm dead or fighting. That's what you guys, all of whom have been training to fight for 20+ years, are for.'
Like, I honestly don't get how you'd find that unbelievable? Cid isn't a combatant. He is not trained to fight. His job is to make airships and other vital machines, something he's really good at.
The group calls out to Tellah, pleading for him to hold it together, to get up, but it is a lost cause. Having exhausted himself casting Meteor, Tellah, in his last moments, gains clarity enough to see that he had been misled by his anger. Could he have won, had he stood with his new allies and fought Golbez as one, without hatred clouding his judgement? It's hard to tell. Even now - even with this realization dawning on him - Tellah can't help but ask the others to avenge his daughter for him, one last hope for vengeance.
Tellah: 'I...I can finally find peace in this'
Cecil: 'Because you understand that vengeance upon Golbez is not the answer to your pain?'
Tellah: 'What? No, don't be absurd. Because I can trust all of you to murder Golbez in Anna's name! Kill him! Render unto him a thousand years of agony! Death! Murder! Destroy! Hate! Hate! Hate! Ha...'
A moment of silence passes as Tellah falls finally silent.
Kain: 'He died as he lived. Thinking of murder.'
Rosa, you minx. You reached for the first place that came to your mind to teleport out of a collapsing tower, and your first thought was Cecil's bedroom? Girl, I get that you had this whole 'woe is me I am the Dark Knight and cannot love' thing going and then he turned into a literal knight in shining armor who also revealed himself to be a total twink, but, like, contain your thirst.
Rosa just knows how things can go with these angsty boys! Sure, you might lift the shadow over them, convincing them they can allow themselves to love, and more importantly bone, but given any length of time they'll revert to type and push you away again. Thus the only way to get it, is to be ready to teleport him to the bedroom immediately before the angst recurs and screws you out of getting screwed.
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.
I do like how the ongoing conflict you're dropped in the middle of implies that Golbez can't just roll over the dwarves, he had to martial forces from across the world and even then isn't winning. In the end he has to resort to infiltration, not being confident of beating them in the field.
But what could be a coherent thematic statement is impaired by the fact that these sacrifices do start to strain credulity - to feel more like they're here because the story is in love with the concept of them than anything else, like they're less urgent or necessary.
It's...somewhat improved in the DS version. Slightly. Yang clearly overcharges Focus to blow up the room, which immediately and obviously successfully stops the cannon fire. With Cid it feels like the Red Wings are right behind them and it's necessary to have a chance of escaping. Still far from being great, but a bit better at least.
Yeah, it's entirely possible Final Fantasy IV didn't want to swap out party members that way.
That said, maybe they could have come up with something for these guys to do elsewhere to free up the party slots, instead of pointless sacrifices. Cid could be working on some kind of machine to help the party later instead of traveling with them for example.
Honestly this seems more a problem with the translation and/or the script itself, and a few lines would make the entire thing work.
First, have Lugae and Rubicant remark that the Dwarves' attack is no longer a concern, "They've thrown their army away for nothing" or some such. In defeat, Lugae brags that the Dwarves are getting wiped out (he kinda does anyway). In the cannon room, the line about killing dwarves being fun should've been something like"Look at them run!". Reflect that the dwarves' diversion has gone bad, that they're losing badly and being routed, and the cannons will utterly ruin them if not taken out.
Then have them lock down the controls before the fight, and when defeated they brag the cannons won't stop firing until "every Dwarf is dead".
Boom, you've now set up ticking clock. Now have Rydia prepare to cast Fira or something, but Kain stops her: He's seen this tech while working for Golbez and if she destroys the cannons here they'll all die. Rydia tells them to leave while she does it, but here Yang steps up, says he can do it with "my power" (a reference to Focus, since we know it can be harmful), and he forcefully throws Rydia out and compels Cecil to accept his sacrifice in lieu of Rydia's.
Not only do you now remove the confusion issue, you've reflected to the game's earlier development. Yang dove into the ocean to save Rydia and failed, he thought she was dead, and he is not going to see her sacrifice herself when he can make the sacrifice.
As for the Cid thing? Honestly I think that's more understandable. The enemy is gaining on them, if they don't do something to get away the Red Wings will shoot them down, so escaping the Underworld and blowing up the tunnel is the only way to go. But throwing the bomb's not enough, it has to hit a specific point, and having flown the tunnel he's spotted the weakness. So he has to be the one to make sure.
The one flaw - why not fly to the Dwarves and get help - is something you settle by inference but by fixing Yang's sacrifice as I suggested would be openly known: they're in no shape to fight the Red Wings right now. It's just the Enterprise and a fleet of enemy airships they can't hope to beat on their own. Thus they had to collapse the tunnel to escape.
Anyway, looking forward to you moving on to Eblan. Just make sure you swing by Yang's wife first eh?
Eh, I think I was getting it mixed up with a character in a future FF that'll go unnamed for potential spoiler reasons. It's a weird mixup 'cause the conditions involved family wise really aren't the same now that I double check, but the character design is kinda' similar in a somewhat stretched way (i.e. they both have 'staches and tails, which is as far as I'm going!)? Wires got crossed, it's nothing unusual
Yang is dead. Cid is dead. Rubicante is in the wind. The Underworld has been sealed off.
This is a disaster. Let's see if we can fix this.
The engineers bulldoze right over Cecil's attempt to explain Cid's fate and hurry away to get back to the rest of their work (what are they working on? Are they making new airships? Without Cid?)
The hook attached to the Enterprise means we can now move the hovercraft to a couple of areas in the world that were separated by shallows and did not have an airship landing spot, including the Cave of Eblan next door to the ruined castle, as well as this FF1 callback, a weird mountain with a bunch of gnomes(?) in it:
The guy on the right is this guy's son, and he explains that his father found a rare ore, but would trade it for a rare animal tail.
Before we head to our next destination though, I decide to do some sight-seeing. It looks like Mist was rebuilt from its ruins, but with new inhabitants:
We also visit Yang's wife to break the sad news to her, as well as the elder to tell him of Tellah's demise:
In general this game has a lot more world-state changes and flag-keyed dialogue than any of the previous games, and I failed to anticipate that, missing some dialogue in the process. It's annoying, but the game didn't have a lot of those in the past so it kind of blindsided me.
Finally we head for the Cave of Eblan, which is another Generic Dungeon #137:
Side note: bats in this game, inexplicably, absorb lightning damage.
It turns out, however, that the population of Eblan was not wholly wiped out - only mostly. The survivors are hiding in a safe area of the cave, afraid to return to their castle where they would only make themselves targets again.
The King and Queen of Eblan suffered an unmentioned "horrific fate," but the Prince survived. However, rather than stay here to protect and lead his people in their darkest hour, he instead headed towards the Tower of Babel hoping to avenge his parents, hoping that once he's slain Rubicante, the monsters will disappear and his people will be free to return to their homes.
Hmm. Village of ninjas, reckless prince, Cid and Yang just ditched… Yeah, I think we're about to get our final roster for the game in the form of the Ninja Prince of Eblan as our final character who sticks around this time.
If we can find him in time to save him from himself, that is.
I find the Blood Sword, but in my attempts at testing it out its damage has proven highly unreliable, sometimes hitting hard and sometimes hitting for so little damage than even Rosa's bow does better. What gives?
Between Tellah and this guy, it feels like the game is trying to say something about fighting with hatred or anger as your sole driving force.
Finally we stumble upon the unfolding blood feud:
This is a classic bit, but it never fails to amuse.
The guy in the cloak introduces himself as 'Edge, Prince of Eblan,' and Rubicante taunts him by saying he's never even heard of Eblan before (which we know is a lie, since he was discussing it with Dr Lugae), which is similar enough to Golbez with Rosa that I suspect one of the writers think 'bad guy pretends not to know people/thing he obviously know and is hurting the person talking to them' is a particularly good gag.
Edge deploys his ninjutsu powers (legally distinct from spells) against Rubicante, but the fiend is unfazed, criticizing his technique and telling him he's going to "show him how it's done" before promptly kicking his ass. What happens next, however, is more surprising:
So it looks like Rubicante is slotting into the category of the 'honorable foe' of the Elemental Lords, one who values worthy opponents and is willing to spare the life of his enemies if they appear to have potential. That's definitely an interesting twist when the Lords have so far just been uncomplicated Fiend-analogues.
Rubicante teleports away in a blast of fire, and Edge attempts to crawl after them, only to immediately collapse again. The party approaches him as he lies on the floor.
At first, Edge tells them to fuck off, this is his fight, and the others try to impart on him how monumentally stupid that is when Rubicante is one of the four Elemental Lords and just kicked his ass ten ways to sunday. Edge reacts by boasting that he is the heir to the kingdom of Eblan and its fabled ninjutsu and he can take care of himself. Rydia, however, has had enough of dubious self-sacrifice:
You tell 'em, girl.
This proves enough to mollify Edge, who agrees to let the group help, with his deciding factor being…
Sigh.
Yeah, I guess we were due for a womanizing/aggressively flirtatious character in the party at some point, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Amusingly though, he hasn't had three lines since deciding to join forces with us that Rydia is already having second thoughts about letting him in.
I will give him that, if you told me, "young ninja named Edge," this is literally, exactly the character I would be picturing. It's this guy. He's the platonic ideal of the ninja called Edge, complete with unnecessary but cool scarf hiding his mouth and white hair. He's lv 25 and the most fragile member of the party by far, which isn't ideal, but hopefully it'll even out over time.
Edge's special commands are "Ninjutsu," which opens up a menu of special techniques starting with Flame, which is a full-screen fire attack, and rapidly gaining Pin, which incapacitates enemies for one turn; and Steal, which, uh, steals stuff. In theory, anyway; every time I've tried using it I got a message that the enemy detected Edge and so the attempt failed.
Without further ado, we are back in the Tower of Babel, although in a separate area from before (actually, seeing as there are three of them, shouldn't these be the Towers of Babel?) where Edge uses his ninjutsu to somehow phase the entire group through a solid wall to get us in.
The new enemies in this section are sadly not particularly ice-vulnerable. These Mad Ogres in particular are a huge pain in the ass.
This new section in the Tower of Babel is mostly just the same as the old, so I'm not gonna expound on it. End of the day, we get high enough (or low enough? I didn't actually check if we were going up or down) and bump into an unexpected meeting…
A shocking upset!
Now, the thing is, the spirits of the dead have shown up before in FF, even in this specific game, with the King of Baron and Anna both making posthumous appearances - so it's not on-its-face absurd that the defunct royal couple would make an appearance to convey a last message to their son. When Edge rushes to them and his mother says "thank heavens you're alright," it even seems likely - and then things take a sharp turn:
Jesus, what happened to them? These are some impressively fucked up designs by the series's usual standards - the mournful face of the Queen, as if forced to fight against her will, the moth-eaten look of the King's limbs with holes in them, the lack of any clear, singular model, instead each royal having been turned into a jamble of bizarre body parts… It all conveys that these monsters are Not Right.
Which makes it somewhat unfortunate that these cool fucked-up designs aren't used for any real battle, but a purely scripted event. The characters are playable, and you can attack the king and queen, even with Edge himself, but it's irrelevant. The game just plays out a conversation in which the royals mock Edge and Edge attempts to appeal to their true selves, until they break free of the spell:
"I'm sorry, Edge," they say, "we are no longer human, we no longer belong here," which is a strange line that really raises questions about the nature of monsters and their place in this world, especially given how often people have been turning into monsters, willingly or otherwise, over the course of the game. But whether that's because they are unable to stay, or choose not to, the royal couple tell Edge that Eblan's fate is now in his hands, and they both fade away.
I'm beginning to know how this game plays its tricks by now. If this was a fakeout 'story' boss fight, at the end of such a long dungeon - then the real boss is not far behind. And wouldn't you know it, someone teleports in in the aftermath:
Okay, so Rubicante is of the "mass murder is fine, but I draw the line into twisting people into horrifying mockery of themselves" school of villainy, while Dr Lugae is of the "underling using his relative autonomy to commit horrific crimes his bosses wouldn't approve of if they knew about it" school of villainy. A good dynamic, shame we didn't see more of it. It's interesting that the game is really doubling down on making sure Rubicante comes across as the Honorable One, considering everyone on the bad guy team so far has been an unrepentant asshole.
Edge, somewhat understandably, is not in a charitable mood, and does not care for Rubicante's "self-righteous blabbering" and wants to kill him here and now. Rubicante - here again repeating one of the sub-themes that's mostly existed in Tellah's arc and, by implication more than explicitly, in Cecil's, says that "I admire your spirit. But anger can never draw out one's true strength - it blinds you to what you truly need to see."
So he's not just an honorable villain who's only in this for gudfites, he's also the kind of antagonistic mentor figure who hands out advice on character growth? That's interesting. I like him, honestly.
What happens next is kinda cool but also honestly kinda hilarious - Edge (who, I will remind you, is called Edge) shouts "Shut up! I will show you the power of rage!" and instantly gets so pissed off he unlocks two whole new abilities.
Love it. A+, no note.
What happens next is also incredibly funny - Rubicante sees this and his eyes metaphorically light up like he's mentally shouting "SCORE!" and he hands out a full heal and MP refill to the entire party so he can fight them at full power.
I love this. My favorite villains are in this archetype - the kind who's here to have a great time engaging in badass fights, who respond to "You killed my parents!" with "Yeah and doesn't that just piss you off? Come at me!"
It's like the villainous version of Goku handing Cell a senzu bean.
Rubicante absolutely delivers on the hype. He's probably the most difficult fight in the game so far. Functionally he's very simple; he has two states, "cloaked" and "uncloaked." When he's cloaked, all elemental damage he takes is turned into healing, and his two attacks are a weak physical attack and Fira, hitting the whole party for damage numbers of the kind you can see above. When he is decloaked, he is extra-vulnerable to Ice damage (which the game bizarrely represents by him casting Blizzara on himself), but he changes his attack to Inferno, an enormously powerful fire-type attack that can instantly kill Rosa, Edge or Rydia, and easily kill Cecil or Kain if they're not topped up. The Attack command will do normal damage regardless of state, but Rubicante will immediately react by casting Fira out of turn.
Cecil wielding Icebrand, Kain's Jump command and Edge's new Flood ability all do significant damage when used properly, although it can be tricky to time them correctly - Rubicante can phase-shift during the charge-up time after a command is entered, meaning the fight involves a lot of waiting for Rubicante to phase-shift and entering the next attack immediately to take advantage of the window. The MVP of the fight, however, is Rydia's Shiva Summon, which compounded with Rubi's ice weakness, hits him for 6k-7k damage every time. I am told that Edge's Steal command can force Rubicante to change cloak states, thus making it easier to control attack timing, but I haven't been able to make it work - all Steal attempts simply resulted in failure.
All in all, a tough battle that doesn't go over well the first time, when I don't yet understand his mechanics and mostly just act arbitrarily (did you know that Inferno is technically not a spell, meaning Reflect doesn't work on it?). I abort that fight before its conclusion and reload once I have a better understanding of what's going on, and our second run is smoother. It still involves a number of KOs, Rubicante being a generally highly threatening opponent capable of tremendous pressure and one-turn kills on soft targets.
But in the end, with good coordination and plenty of healing, we prevail.
"Until we meet again," Rubicante says, before once again teleporting away.
This is cool. I like this guy, and I am excited to fight him again.
"Father… Mother…" Edge says, "You can rest in peace now." Then, to everyone's surprise, the NPC train shows up!
Edge informs 'Gramps' that "We got him, it's over," which suggests we got a very different impression of Rubicante's exit scene. Like… dude. He made vaguely impressed noises before saying we'll have a rematch and vanished in a puff of flame. That guy's not dead.
Well, anyway, with his anger sated, Edge pauses to ask for the first time who's this Golbez dude everyone keeps talking about. I guess it makes sense that he wouldn't have heard of him - Eblan seems to have been attacked early, at a time when Golbez was still concealing his true motives and power, so Eblan and Edge only saw Rubicante as the 'face' of the attack, but it's still kind of funny that he's been with us for half an hour and still doesn't know about the villain of the game.
The party explains the situation, and Edge decides to join with us to see our crusade against him through. Gramps protests that his people need him, but Edge tells him stopping Golbez is more important, and not to worry, "I'll be fine," which given our track record on allies who joined up with us swearing they'd be back safe and sound, is darkly hilarious. (That's all of them. Literally all of them. Cid's version requires an optional conversation with his daughter, but Palom, Porom, Cid and Yang all have some variant on "don't worry it's fine if I join this epic adventure that my loved ones are telling me is a bad idea, I'll be back in no time with all my limbs.")
The Eblanites wish the Prince good luck, and with Edge in tow, we finally, finally step into Babel's inner sanctum, the crystal room, where seven of the eight crystals wait for us!
It's there! We made it! We found the crystals completely unprotected!
There's a trap door and we fall several stories down into a closed-off section of the first part of the Tower of Babel.
After that, all that remains to do is follow the path until we find some way out of this mess, which comes to us in the form of a Red Wing airship they left behind unattended!
Rydia. Rydia please. That's not- Am I suppose to still treat her as a child? Did she get some particularly Kantian philosophy classes in the Land of Summons?
Yeah, that's it, that's my take. The summons are hardcore Kantians. Morality does not change according to circumstances. If you lie to protect someone's life, Leviathan is disappointed in your weak moral fiber. That's canon now.
Edge, stop trying to flirt with this girl you met five minutes ago.
Oh hey look, we're back in the Underworld!
THAT SACRIFICIAL PLAY BY CID SURE LASTED A GOOD LONG WHILE NOW DID IT
Okay, the ship can't fly over the magma, which means we're bound to fly overland back to the only destination currently available to us - the Dwarven Castle.
Okay, so there are dwarven women, they just look completely identical except for their color scheme.
Which, actually, FFXIV also did in a pretty funny way, although that seems a little off-topic for this update. Now, I don't remember the nurses from our first time here, and I think they might be new, because they have some… interesting… dialogue…
Let's put a pin in that.
The King is waiting for us.
The party must once again inform the King that they have failed, and once again the King takes it in stride. He explains that Golbez is persistent, but still hasn't found a way into the Sealed Cavern - but he wll, eventually, succeed. As a result, the King wants us to get there and claim the Crystal before he does, a flawless plan that worked out 0 out of the last 3 times we tried it. But I guess at this point there is literally nothing else to do (except go back to the Tower and try it again? Can't we do that?).
The King asks his daughter Luca to come over and hand him her necklace, bequeathed to her by her mother, which he reveals is the key to the sealed cavern, and he gives it to us, then promises to hold off the enemy forces while we head for the cavern. Cecil's answer is a tepid "we'll do our best" which, to be fair, at this point and in his shoes, is the most enthusiasm I could manage.
Of course, we can't do that right now, because our ship can't cross the magma sea and is stuck on this continent.
…
Okay.
HE'S
ALIVE???
HE THREW HIMSELF OFF AN AIRSHIP
SEVERAL HUNDRED FEET HIGH AT LEAST
INTO A MAGMA OCEAN
WHILE HOLDING A BOMB
WHICH HE BLEW HIMSELF UP WITH
AND HE'S FINE???
OH MY GOD
Right, so, that logic that's been discussed that the clumsy character deaths are there to make room in the roster made sense - like, they were a sensible read of the information we had so far - but it doesn't actually pan out, because not only is Cid not dead, unlike Desch he doesn't turn up at the end of the game - he shows up right now, like half an hour later.
You know, it's funny, actually, because that first scene, the one with Cid's assistants installing the hook and brushing off Cecil's attempt at bearing the sad news to them? At the time it scans as a sad note that they believe in him so much they can't anticipate the sad truth and Cecil can't bring himself to tell them… But you combine that with the fact that when you visit Cid's daughter, she also has a line about how she's sure her dad is fine, and Cecil doesn't contradict her either, and suddenly it becomes clear that nobody outside the main party acknowledges Cid's death because the writers realized that it would have looked ridiculous if we went through several scenes of grieving at the tragic but heroic death of the engineer only for him to turn up alive one single dungeon run later. So Cecil is struck by selective muteness and can't tell them!
This is what I would describe as inelegant writing, rather than generically 'bad.' It's just kind of clumsy and awkward and groaning under the stress of internal contradictions.
Here is the entire conversation in which Cid explains his survival:
That's it! That's the whole thing!
Incredible.
But, hey, Cid's fun, and he's fine, so I'll take that as a win.
Edge and Cid immediately start butting heads in the same way Tellah and Cid used to do, Edge's ego immediately triggering Cid's instinct to poke holes at it.
I'm worried that Rydia and Edge's bickering is meant to read as early shipping.
Okay any ambiguity is gone it's absolutely meant that way.
Anyway, the group asks Cid for his help retrofitting their new ship to be lava-proof, at which point Cid immediately jumps out of bed to get to work. The dwarven nurses try to restrain him, and instead end up… pulled along in his wake as assistants?
Cid and Edge do a whole dance routine to show how enthusiastic they are about their new ship and to show that despite their bickering they're bonding together.
Cid's unbeatable animal magnetism at work, I suppose.
There is then a weird death fakeout scene - Cid is back in bed, saying now the Falcon can fly over anything, and then falls silent. A sad music starts to play, Kain calling out Cid's name in fear, as if the old man had expended one last burst of strength to do the work needed of him and his body had simply given up…
And he's fine, just exhausted. Every is relieved and thanks Cid and tells him to rest, and we head back out.
With the ship now able to fully explore the underworld, we can actually head to several new locations, only some of which are actively trying to kill us!
This place is home to a master blacksmith who 'lost his spark' and is lying about in bed, refusing to work on anything unless someone finds him the legendary adamantite. I imagine that adamantite is what the Mini Dude will give me once I find him his rare tail.
This is another dwarven town, whose main characteristic is that its dwarves say 'Howdy-oh!' instead of 'Lali-oh.' Its inhabitants are sad that Sylphs won't talk to them.
…okay, now this is interesting.
It looks like the path to the Land of Summons is actually already open? I could potentially make my way through it and get access to high-tier summons somewhat ahead of time? Judging from an initial encounter, the place might be too difficult for me to make my way through at this level… But if I could, maybe that might be an early advantage 🤔
I'll think about it. For now, this seems like a good place to stop!
First, the DS translation, to go along with calling the summons Eidolons and their home the Feymarch, called the dungeon to get to them the Passage of Eidolons - almost the same, but just a little more fancy a word choice.
Second, in some earlier translations, instead of howdy-ho, the Tomrans say hi-ho. Yes, really.
Edge's name is another funny story. Edge is just a nickname. His real name, given in the Japanese but not the English versions (or possibly ancillary media only in the Japanese, I'm not sure)? Edward. I've no idea why the translator, when giving Gilbert a new 6-letter name, chose a name already used for another party member.
With Cid, this ability to face-tank a nuke that rearranged a mountain range followed by face tanking a fall at terminal velocity onto jagged rocks at near-lava temperatures and then sleeping it off with no problems makes a degree of sense (not a high degree, but a degree) when you look at his stats - he's got more HP and better stamina than even Cecil, who is the party's dedicated tank that got his current defensive prowess via rare divine shenanigans.
Come now Omicron, it was only a little mountain-range melting explosion straight to the face. Honestly, kids these days, always underestimating their elders. Shameful.
Anyway, the group asks Cid for his help retrofitting their new ship to be lava-proof, at which point Cid immediately jumps out of bed to get to work. The dwarven nurses try to restrain him, and instead end up… pulled along in his wake as assistants?
Incidentally I totally forgot to bring it up at the time but in FF3, in the big library, there is a bookshelf you can read with a list of the best airships in the world. It serves as a teaser for airships you haven't had yet, but also, the information in it literally can't exist in the setting yet. Like it references the "submersible Nautilus" before you upgrade it with submarine capabilities and it calls out the Invincible while it is still a forgotten relic buried in an ancient temple.
