Ooooh, he's… He's definitely known better days… God, and undeath tanked his Bravery (but somehow raised his Faith), are you serious? 33? He's still got his Blade of Ruin Ability, but now he's a Vampire like Elmdore before him, and he's perpetually regenerating through Lifefont. Plus, lv 47; pretty scary overall.
You know, Bravery is used as the calculation for a few different things, like the activation chance of certain abilities? I almost wonder if Zalbaag's tanked bravery is there to represent what little remains of his sense of self fighting from the inside,
desperately trying to not kill the last remnants og his family.
Like Zalbaags entire deal here is horrifying, but the idea that he can exert maybe just enough control to disrupt his undead shell just a little bit? Even he does the deserve that kind of fate.
It's Hadrian who gets the Vampire's kiss this time, but Mustadio is quick to toss a Holy Water at him, curing the effect, and our party closes in, cornering Zalbaag on all sides and getting us the second part of the dialogue.
Agrias: "Hey Mustadio."
Mustadio: "Yeah?"
Agrias: "Is there a reason you never mentioned that holy water can be used to cure vampirism?"
Mustadio: ".... um."
Agrias: "Do you have any more on you, perchance?"
Mustadio: "..."
Mustadio:
throws bag over a cliff
Mustadio: "Fresh out I'm afraid."
I only wish he'd remembered and spoken Tietra's name in that last moment.
Truthfully, despite Zalbaag showing some spine and a little actual nobility, I think he truly fails to see what he did wrong that day. Despite it all, that callousness was real, he saw Tietra as barely above notice, and Ramza's reaction an overreaction to the standard actions of nobility.
For all that we're seeing now, Zalbaag was a bad person. One who made some realizations and did a little better in the end, but still fundamentally the same man.
On the ground of the throne room, High Confessor Marcel feebly tries to crawl, reach out, beg for help. At last, Ramza enters; at first he simply takes in the room and the sight of all the dead bodies, but then he notices Marcel moving and hurries to his side.
I think there's something to be said about how the architect of so much suffering, the mastermind behind so many of these events, was in the end just an old man - one scared and confused when he met a blade in person. Even as the supernatural comes to the fore, and the Lucavi takes over the conspiracy in truth, the game never really shies away from how much of this was orchestrated by mortal men with mortal concerns.
For the greater part of Ivalice, this war was a mortal struggle, and the supernatural never comes to eclipse things. There's no sorceress conquering nations, no threat to time and space, the rest of Ivalice feels so. Mundane? In a way that works to highlight how much of an outside threat the Lucavi really are, and what they threaten to overturn.
