I feel having first experienced FFIV through the DS remake predisposed me to loving Golbez as much as I do.
Pretty much every part of Golbez's performance is enhanced by the DS remake, most notably his fight, and especially his scene after getting cleansed.
But there is something I really like with him even besides that; Kain kinda did it earlier, but it hits much harder with Golbez, that the moment he's free to act for himself, he throws himself into trying to repent and atone for something he feels he can never fully atone for. And for someone who has been the enemy the entire game so far, that hits a lot harder.
I think the coolest thing for me is that he is STILL trying to atone in pretty much every appearance we ever see afterwards. And in doing so is one of 2 characters in Dissidia that IMO doesn't feel like an empty shell.
Please allow a moment of your time to pay attention to FusRoDah's "KO" sprite, which represents him as having sunk down into a beard puddle. Hilarious.
Alternatively none of that is correct and the opposite is true; the Summons are instead the spirits of the land, entities naturally coalescing out of the elemental energies of the world and working towards its stability, and the reason Bahamut is on the moon is because he went there to meet with the new intruders whose presence threatened the world, and stayed as part of an agreement of cooperation once it was clear the Lunarians were, generally speaking, not going to disrupt the balance of the world.
This just in: FF4 confirmed as enviromentalism criticism of technofetishist societies and the summons were just resting from healing the shit that fucked the world in FF2.
Which, on top of being one of the coolest-looking attacks in the game (it has Kirby Dots!), deals instant KO to one character. The CPU uses it two or three times, causing a huge impairment to the party, then respawns the Attack and Defense Nodes; the Defense Node immediately sets out to reset your progress with its rapid-pace healing if not dealt with immediately. It's not a pretty fight.
Yeaaaah... I think I guess where they were trying to go with this, but it'd be better if Golbez was approached somehow by Zemus and tricked because "no lol acshually if you break all this shiz we can get your loved ones back!" or sumthing. That would have built up his character without nullifying it at the last moment. If all we knew was the mind control... who's Golbez, really?
Kain was first freed from mind control and nobody thought to explain to him why Kain ran off with the Crystal? Is this happening because nobody kept him in the loop on the group's drama??? I realize a sensible reading of the scene would be 'of course Edge knows, but it's hard to emotionally separate his feelings about being betrayed from his intellectual knowledge that Kain isn't truly responsible, which is why Rosa has to remind him,' but the idea that everyone forgot to tell him is consistent with the dialogue and extremely funny.
Incredible. I never thought of it like that. Honestly by the endgame the sack of Mysidia was little more than a distant memory for me and Cecil is so immediately and totally self-flagellating about the whole affair that personally his redemption arc never sat right for me, like I just felt the angst was disproportionate to what he'd actually done, so the idea of "no Cecil you are the only person with free will in this story, everyone else needed magic compulsion for warcrimes but you just said 'okay' " is fucking sending me.
At this point I'm pretty sure Edge was a last minute addition to the game; maybe Golbez would join you with Kain and he would be your last Sage stand in after Fusoya sacrificed himself to break the mind control. But maybe someone cried at 3 of the 5 final characters being in armor and complained about repetition or look I don't care anymore Edge is just the Scrappy and they didn't have the time to insert him gracefully into the dialogues.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall find a reason why Edge screwed FF4."
Second, you have to understand that when Fusoya casts his Brainwash-B-Gone spell and drops I deadass thought I had just seen the most embarrassing heroic sacrifice yet. Dude told Golbez "your Jordans are fake" and then immediately fell in the Family Guy Death pose, like jesus.
and, presumably, because it was a scene without any player characters present which would have probably been tricky from a coding standpoint in the days before pre-rendered cutscenes
Random FFXIV: when I first watched the Answers cinematic, and Bahamut burst out of Dalamud, I was doing the bit with me pointing at the screen going "I KNOW THAT REFERENCE".
I distinctly remember it being possible to try to unpetrify Palom and Porom through an item menu, only for the game to give you the same "they have become petrified of their own will" line as when Tellah tried it. Which I suppose implies that the elder is Just That Good if he can pull it off.
Also, Within the Giant is a fantastic dungeon theme. Just wanted to mention that.
We know what he looks like 17 years later, but for all we know that might be the product of being really bored with nobody but FuSoYa to talk to and hitting the lunarian gym pretty often to kill time, rather than his look on Earth. Or if notimg else itd reveal he lives.
They do not. The very fact they do so much damage proves that Self-Destruct does as much dramage as the enemy has health left. They just don't like Lighting attacks.
Bahamut doesn't do 9999 damage in other versions, but it does do enough to one shot you. Like someone said, in the 3D version, Mega Flare punches through reflect. The book echoes that by saying the intended way to beat him is to use Kain to dodge. I didn't do that. REMEMBER HOW DEFEND CUTS ALL DAMAGE IN HALF!?
Yet another boss that fact trivializes. Also, the summon itself has it's cost bumped up to 99 and has a longer cast time, effectively making it another Meteor spell.
As Zap said, FuSoYa basically lies in the CPU fight since now the attack node hits for 3k and the defense node only heals for 1k but i chose to be stubborn and still fight it with only the attack node out. It wasn't easy.
In the remake, in new game + after fighting the four fiends, you can interact with that spot to fight the super boss, Geryon, an amalgamation of them. If you are not strong enough, you can fight him where you become a paladin later.
In the After Years, you fight the four fiends again for reason. It reveals they honestly appreciated their master, Goblez, Scarmiglione in particular happy he accepted him despite his freakish appearance.
Also, Kain? He has Gungir now. I honestly don't know how he found that thing.
Well, she does use more than just frying pans as weapons, as seen with her spoon/knife she gave to Edge.
Also, in the sequel, Yang gets knocked into another coma, alongside his daughter Ursula, because it cannot possibly be said enough how obssessed it was with copying everything the original did. Sheila/Yang's Wife once again provides the frying pan to smack Yang awake... and a ladle to do the same for Ursula.
I was going to leave this for when Omi ever got to TAY, but eh. If Squenix didn't put the effort in, why should I?
Of course WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
FFIV: The After Years is like someone trying to copy someone else's successful campaign/story, and doubles down on what he thinks were the important parts. Unfortunately, not only are some of those parts the grating, cringy ones (like the scripted battles), but also overuses even the good clichés and story bits like crazy to the point they wear out their welcome. And few of the new characters make a good impression, except for Luka. Yes, the Dwarf princess. She actually gets a few good scenes and her character is greatly expanded on.
Edge gets more mature, Rydia gets reduced to idiocy, having everything told to her, even stuff she should know about. We also get 'Kain is evil again but not really' because it's actually [REDACTED].
It felt like a cheap cash grab at the time, and while it has grown on some people, it's still a clear repeat of the original FFIV, which was done with actual effort.
Trivia: if you completely missed Yang being in the Sylph cave, and thus continued believing that he was dead the entire time, he still turns up in this scene, with dialogue (mostly?) unchanged, like it was obvious the entire time that he was just temporarily indisposed.
That was me. I damn near threw my controller shouting "does no one goddamned die in this game?" when he showed up. It was worse for me because I genuinely liked Yang both mechanically and as a character, so his pseudo death actually mattered to me. Seeing it reversed was like the game was mocking me for caring.
That feeling of the game taking the piss made the whole Golbez reveal fall flat, especially Rosa's reaction. Why should I, or Cecil, care that Golbez is actually his brother by birth? He's a stranger.
Like, I have an older brother myself and I would move heaven and earth for him, so it's not that I don't understand the bond between brothers. It's why I have no problems with Kain despite his revolving door mind control - Kain is clearly Cecil's brother, so of course Cecil forgives and extends his hand time and again. Golbez on the other hand is just some guy who shares DNA. I'm willing to accept that he's not fully responsible for his actions if he's been under mind control, and if he's going to try and atone for his actions while under said control then I support him in that, but otherwise him sharing parents with Cecil is irrelevant.
So remember how you weren't using status effects regularly? Between enemies with large amounts of HP that make alpha striking through high tier spells unsustainable and counters to hit your MP even harder when you have to revive and heal after the fact, the Moon is where the game finally bites you in the ass over it.
We are beginning to tread in true Nostalgia Territory here. NES nostalgia exists, to be sure, but in my admittedly limited experience, people tend to treat games like the original Legend of Zelda more as historical artifacts to studied and learned about as distant origins of the medium, while it's SNES-era games like A Link to the Past that get all the remakes, 00s GBA ports, and so on?
One hesitates to just say "it's because the games are better" even if they were, but it does feel like the SNES was where a lot of franchises really codified a lot of the major elements that would persist as they went on across future consoles. If someone who had never played ALttP but had played later 2D Zelda games sat down with a copy, I think there's a good chance that they'd not only enjoy it but find it comfortably familiar. I'm not sure that would happen with the original LoZ, and not just because of the difficulty or the janky controls.
"The raid on Mysidia was imperative for Baron's prosperity. The Mysidians know too much about the Crystals - their very possession of one is a threat to Baron.
This is obviously Some Bullshit (TM), but it had me trying to remember if there were any of the games where a Crystal was actually a strategic resource - that is, actually letting the country that possessed it do something that gave them an advantage over others, rather than it being more something they're just keeping stored away safely.
FFXI players of course know the Bomb Ring as a not-very-good ring dropped by a Bomb NM, and so would wonder why anyone would need one taken somewhere in the first place...
Oh wait, those games came out in the opposite order.
It does make me wonder if the original Japanese name doesn't carry the same subtext.
Yeah when it comes to the battle systems... personally I'd say FFX blends up the turn based best? In that speed actually matters because you can get more turns, but also you have time to decide what you want to do and can see the upcoming turn order (and even what changes certain moves might make to said order).
Some of the Atelier games also work like this. It's probably one of my favorite RPG systems in general. (I didn't like what Atelier Sophie did with it though, since each character and enemy still acted once a turn regardless of anything else, so the value of things that affected turn order was diluted.
FFXI as it happens has antlions, which have a model that's actually somewhat evocative of the sprite in this game. And they are indeed non-agressive... except the ones that hide underground and ambush you.
They also drop a unique red stone, but the descriptions make them sound like ordinary raw gemstones.
Who, incidentally, also appear in FFXI, but though they have the right names and roughly the right creature types, they don't seem to form a group in any meaningful way (beyond "Kirin can summon them" anyway), or have a real story presence.
We've never seen the paladin named as such in FF before, but we've definitely seen its vibe before - in the Knight of FF1 and FF3; a powerful warrior, wielding swords and heavy armors, in one case wielding white magic alongside its combat prowess, in the other protecting others with its own body. But this framing, making it the antithesis of the Dark Knight, a warrior of light to its warrior of darkness, purified from the corrupting influence of the dark sword, is new.
This is pretty similar overall to the way FFXI played it. The Dark Knight's power there isn't corrupt or evil, but it's certainly dangerous, and very heavily focused on doing as much damage to the enemy as possible, to the exclusion not only of protecting others but also of seeing to their own safety. That and things that drain power from the enemy in one way or another.
I wonder why both Lich and Scarmiglione have been associated with undeath. If I had to hazard a guess, it would be because of burial - the Fiend/Elemental Lord of Earth lays claims to all that is within the ground, and that includes the dead answering his command. It's a really compelling association, but one I've rarely seen in other media; usually death/undeath is treated as its own domain separated from the earth.
FFXI I suppose also fits into this; the only type of undead that are earth element AFAIK are skeletons, but they're also one of the only undead types that seem directly 'a body risen from it's grave' rather than being spirits without bodies, creatures that became undead without passing through the traditional process of dying and being buried, or are just weird things that don't quite seem to line up with anything else.
Oh hai, it's the part where I got stuck when I played this game. Because I didn't have the manual, and so didn't know that a defense command was even a thing, let alone guess how to do it. (I *think* I eventually looked up an FAQ that explained it, but I'm not sure how much further I got after that.)
But not in FF - and, by and large, this is purely an antagonist feature, not one that the player characters have access to (I can think of one notable example of an FFXIV character with the power to assume a 'monster' form and treated as a heroic figure, but it stands out as an exception).
So, the way FFXIV jobs work is that each one has a storyline exclusive to this class, featuring a job mentor and some NPCs who, while not necessarily unique to the job, are most prominently featured there and bit players in the rest of the game.
FFXI's approach to this is kind of odd. It's rare for the dialogue to acknowledge that job changing is a thing at all, aside from vague references to having to be experienced enough with something before becoming one of the advanced jobs. In particular, for most artifact armor quests (the rough equivalent of those job exclusive storylines), if you have to go fight something you can usually do it on whatever job you want, even if that wouldn't make sense storywise. But also some of those quests don't really have anything to do with being a member of that job beyond involving characters you met in the process of unlocking it.
Oh, and Blue Mage's AF quests involve something that's interesting given one of the ongoing plot threads in FFIV.
It's revealed that Blue Mages who lose control of their powers turn into monsters.
This is kind of a huge deal to just drop in one dialogue box in an incidental conversation, isn't it? Like… what does that mean? Did he turn the soldiers who followed him into monsters, or did he recruit only monsters and disguise them as human soldiers? What about the actual Baron soldiers, where were they during all that time?
My headcanon is that at least the Red Wing who went 'What the hell are we even doing?' in the opening sequence was killed and replaced by a disguised monster, because I find that more acceptable than him deciding to just go along with everything else that came later.
They're also a matriarchy with an all-female fighting force, as well as the only country so far to be ruled not by a monarchy but by a council of enlightened female clerics, no seriously:
Oookay. So, there's a distinct difference between a fictional society arranged along those lines that feels like the way things worked out somewhere, and one that feels like someone's fetish. I've seen the former done well in a surprising number of Ranma 1/2 fanfics.
... I, uh, didn't really feel like this game really pulled it off.
Cait Sith, you say? Because that sure looks like a Coeurl to me. Pretty jarring when you're used to the one from FF7... or FF6... or that thing in FFXI...
Tangentially, I was talking with @YOLF and we were thinking that it's like... Really interesting how (again, similar to its namesake's FF1 role) the Dark Elf appears... completely unconnected to the broader plot of the game?
Because on one hand this is an important thematic statement about the characters within the story - these people are reckless and too quick to throw their own lives away. Even when they're acting as a group, they don't concert, they don't look for other angles, they don't try to rely on each other; whether it's Palom and Porom turning themselves to stone before anyone can do anything about it, or Tellah carrying out his personal vendetta against Golbez in willful ignore of the cost it has for himself and others, Cecil barely avoiding death at Golbez's hands rather than let him escape after Tellah's death, and now Yang and Cid in two questionably-necessary sacrifices, people do choose death too hastily.
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.
I don't know, I think that could actually contribute to an attempt at deconstructing the heroic sacrifice, where as you go along it starts to seem more and more questionable whether a sacrifice really made sense or contributed to the character's goals, rather than being something they chose for other reasons. I've seen some stories that explored that. There was a line that seemed like it evoked the same sort of idea in one of Lois McMaster Bujold's books...
Brothers in Arms said:
And yet . . . well, people do get hypnotized by the hard choices. And stop looking for alternatives.
In context this was not talking about the same sort of self-sacrifice, but I think the line still works.
... But then nobody but Tellah actually staying dead pretty well undermines this though. (And he is old, so he doesn't count. </sarcasm yet I wouldn't be surprised if that's what someone was thinking>)
Not trying to dump on FF7, exactly, but it really does need to be said by folks that were there, no, that stuff didn't look great even at the time, heh.
There is one thing about FF7 that I think does stand out as an improvement over a lot of the earlier games that came to me after seeing it discussed in another LP I've been reading. Although it's not necessarily about the graphics, I think it was enabled by it. A lot of the places you go through in the earlier games feel like dungeons that were designed for RPGs. FF7's felt like actual places a lot more of the time. (Even if sometimes it's actual places built by mad scientists with no OSHA compliance.)
And she gives us the Frying Pan. The legendary Nonstick Frying Pan with which she fended off the invaders of Fabul. To go. And smack her husband with. Who is in a coma.
What matters is this: after one or two attacks, Odin's sprite raises his sword. This signals an extremely short time window; once that window has passed, Odin uses Zantetsuken, hitting the entire party for the kind of damage you can see above, easily killing everyone in a single move.
Odin has this ability in FFXI too. Though it's kind of funny from my perspective... The only fight I've done against him is the one in the "Einherjar" event, which was made as level 75 content... and with me being item level 119 soloing it. At that point, Zantetsuken was meaningless, since he's too close to death by the time he gets ready to use it. But Geirrothr, an ability that does 10,000 damage divided between all players (and their pets if any) in range, which wouldn't have meant much against what could have been up to 36 players, was guaranteed death if I got caught in it as a soloist, and he used that one multiple times. Wasn't a very dangerous fight outside of that element, but getting around that as a solo beastmaster took some tricky cooldown management.
I am going to choose to ignore that Porom and Palom being un-petrified off-screen with no explanation other than apparently we could have done this the entire time but we didn't for whatever reason,
This whole thing bugs me, but I'm not really sure how to explain why.
Though I've got to say that it was very refreshing when another (non FF) game had the main character discover a similarly long-lost relationship, and when they met the relative... stabbed them, because they weren't mind controlled and were both still a major threat to everyone else and completely unrepentant.
One hesitates to just say "it's because the games are better" even if they were, but it does feel like the SNES was where a lot of franchises really codified a lot of the major elements that would persist as they went on across future consoles. If someone who had never played ALttP but had played later 2D Zelda games sat down with a copy, I think there's a good chance that they'd not only enjoy it but find it comfortably familiar. I'm not sure that would happen with the original LoZ, and not just because of the difficulty or the janky controls.
I've said it in this thread and others, but SNES was where a lot of series just came about proper, smoothing out the rougher edges and properly codifying what made for peak good gameplay. That's not in any way saying that their NES counterparts are bad, and heck there are a few absolute standouts like Super Mario Bros 3 being honestly comparable to Super Mario World in scope, but overall if I wanted to introduce someone to early console gaming I'd proooobably start them around the SNES era over the NES.
This is obviously Some Bullshit (TM), but it had me trying to remember if there were any of the games where a Crystal was actually a strategic resource - that is, actually letting the country that possessed it do something that gave them an advantage over others, rather than it being more something they're just keeping stored away safely.
Since I'm in the middle of FFV currently, several of the crystals are actually specifically used as a form of resources and are hooked up to machines that enhance them. I don't recall what Tycoon was doing with the Wind Crystal, but Walse has the Water Crystal actively purifying the water in the kingdom and bringing prosperity, and Karnak has it both hooked into the castle's power systems and the Fire-Powered ship uses it to move about even though the winds are dying.
Also as a general thing on replies, Omni is technically trying to play the games one by one blindly, so it might be a good idea to tread lightly with comparisons to future games without using spoiler tags. Granted, the majority of what you wrote was on FFXI which I'm not sure if he actually intends to play? Well I'm sure that bridge will be crossed... sometime late next year at the earliest with the current pacing and with the fact that the games are only getting bigger from here on out.
One plot point in FFV is a city that refuses to stop using the water crystal for recreation, health and defense. Another nation also uses the fire crystal as a power source.
There are apparently coeurls in FFIV, but the cat sith is a variation on them in this game.
I also just find it absolutely wild that 'coeurl' made it into the Final Fantasy lexicon, being a direct rip from a famous(?) sci-fi story instead of a direct rip from D&D like almost all the other monsters.
And yeah, it feels very much like the actual intended final party composition was going to be Golbez, Kain, Cecil, Rosa, and Rydia (and every time I see Rydia I think 'why didn't they just use the actual name that the Japanese writers were clearly intending, Lydia, Rydia just makes it seem like you're making a bad racist joke') but they swerved at the last moment so you got saddled with Edge McBlade Ninja Supreme In A Trenchcoat With A Katana (folded 1000 times unlike your baka gaijin swords) Who Studied The Blade While You Were Talking To Girls instead.
They could have had some sick thematic callbacks with Golbez, too, especially if he was the 'real' Dark Knight class and the DRK and PLD had to join forces, linking the light and the darkness, to conquer true evil. And so on.
This is obviously Some Bullshit (TM), but it had me trying to remember if there were any of the games where a Crystal was actually a strategic resource - that is, actually letting the country that possessed it do something that gave them an advantage over others, rather than it being more something they're just keeping stored away safely.
Unlike the people above I have the luxury of not having to spoil shit because lol: FF12 Revenant Wings has - if I remember correctly, which is a big if - the discovery of mined non-capital-C crystals that allow for sustained mass summoning as the inciting incidence for its colonialism storyline and the genre switch.
Unlike the people above I have the luxury of not having to spoil shit because lol: FF12 Revenant Wings has - if I remember correctly, which is a big if - the discovery of mined non-capital-C crystals that allow for sustained mass summoning as the inciting incidence for its colonialism storyline and the genre switch.
and every time I see Rydia I think 'why didn't they just use the actual name that the Japanese writers were clearly intending, Lydia, Rydia just makes it seem like you're making a bad racist joke'
They could have had some sick thematic callbacks with Golbez, too, especially if he was the 'real' Dark Knight class and the DRK and PLD had to join forces, linking the light and the darkness, to conquer true evil. And so on.
And hell if that wouldn't have been great. Brings character classes full circle and reinforces the thematic narrative. But I guess it was too much to ask at that time.
If that's the case, I'm not sure we can count those types of cristals. They're clearly a different, more utilitarian beast than the typical mystical ones in the series.
That bit is me just theorising, to be fair, but the R/L distinction mostly doesn't exist in Japanese so the choice of R instead of L was deliberate on the translators' part.
Now, it's entirely possible the writers actually did intend her to be Rydia - we have a dude named Golbez, they're obviously not above engrish - but the other main characters mostly have actual real English names (Cecil Harvey, Rosa Joanna Farrell, Kain Highwind, Edward Chris von Muir (an aristocratic name that actually sounds like the sort of name you'd end up with in a tangled incestuous aristocracy), Edward Geraldine, Cid Pollendina) so I think Lydia is a more likely intent?
If that's the case, I'm not sure we can count those types of cristals. They're clearly a different, more utilitarian beast than the typical mystical ones in the series.
Considering what we've seen of him until now, I have little doubt that the reason is that the girls wouldn't talk back. Seriously, why does it seems like he'll get with Rydia .
Considering what we've seen of him until now, I have little doubt that the reason is that the girls wouldn't talk back. Seriously, why does it seems like he'll get with Rydia .
Don't worry, he doesn't. And I don't think that's a spoiler considering how unrelated he is to anybody else's plot.
Even by the time of the sequel. He never marries, and 17 years later he's still carrying a torch for her... and him being older and wiser but unfortunately still characteristically him, she still shoots him down.
Literally shoots him down. They have a combo move where he blows her a kiss, a heart floats towards her, and she shoots it down with an arrow, causing an explosion that damages the enemy.
Well, with the next post FFIV will have reached 16 parts, making it officially longer than any of the others in terms of how many posts you've made in the thread about each game, and that despite the fact that you've managed to include a lot more plot into each update. So, the images also being on the same amount shouldn't be too surprising. How much game do you think is left, if you had to make a guess?
I didn't respond to that at the time because I had already progressed to the part covered by this update and was dragging my feet writing it, but at this point I'm pretty sure all that's left is the final dungeon.
Look, remembering things is hard. I don't like doing it.
You don't want to destroy both nodes, though. Because the part where the CPU freaks out and instakills three people is a small hint that doing so is a failure state. What you're supposed to do is only kill the Defence node and then just own the CPU with single-target attacks because the Attack node is pitifully weak compared to the ramifications of taking three TKOs. But of course you would just himbo your way through it.
Second, you have to understand that when Fusoya casts his Brainwash-B-Gone spell and drops I deadass thought I had just seen the most embarrassing heroic sacrifice yet. Dude told Golbez "your Jordans are fake" and then immediately fell in the Family Guy Death pose, like jesus.
One is, I THINK this is where they put it, the flashback scene. Around this point the DS version goes into a flashback to the day Cecil was born, which reveals quite a bit that supposedly comes from script originally intended for the original version that had to be cut for game size (and, presumably, because it was a scene without any player characters present which would have probably been tricky from a coding standpoint in the days before pre-rendered cutscenes).
KluYa had, months past, been teaching magic to humans... one of whom proceeded to use that magic KluYa taught him to kill KluYa. While his wife was several months pregnant with Cecil. Weakened by grief (and the general state of medical care in your average fantasy setting), she died in childbirth, and the baby was named in her memory - her name having been Cecilia (despite her name being pronounced Seh-Seel-ia and Cecil's name being pronounced Seh-sil).
This one-two punch of loss left Cecilia's older son Theodor, then about ten, filled with rage and resent at the world and at humanity in general for killing his father, and at his newborn younger brother in particular (despite having exhibited excitement to have a new baby brother earlier that very day) for killing his mother. Rage and resent that provided an opening for Zemus, who took control of him that very day, starting with whispers about how his father died because of his own weakness and about how it was the baby's fault his mother died, and who 'convinced' him to change his name from Theodor to Golbez.
Why the name change for Golbez? Because Anakin Skywalker changed his name to Darth Vader when he was seduced by an evil sorceror, duh.
Also, you gotta give Golbez/Theodor kudos for having as much sense of self and conscience as he does once the mind control was broken, given that he's spent literally his entire life since age 10 under mind control.
The other relevant bit from the DS version is this.
This part right here. They changed the battle so you need to kill the attack node and leave the defense node alone if you want to survive (if you took out defense then attack retaliated hard), while upping the difficulty. And they didn't bother to change the pre-battle hint from FuSoYa that you needed to take the defense node out first.
Okay, Theodor/Golbez is just silly. The rest is cool.
I think it does bother me though that this suggests Golbez was under constant mind control for decades, because, like... It really does render him non-culpable for anything other than "having some understandable dark feelings at one point in his life," which is kind of a shitty thing to blame someone for, and we never really 'met' Golbez. His released self is for all intents and purposes a new character.
Curious what the game is going to do with him, though, given it's highly unlikely they'll just beat Zemus off-screen.
Back when I was playing the SNES Easy Type version as a kid, I noticed that Rydia and FuSoYa had the Tornado spell. Since I had been Tornadoed before and knew it dropped HP to single digits, this meant I went through the entire endgame dungeon of Bahamut's Lair just Tornadoing the big scary non-boss enemies and then killing them, thus not actually knowing what any of them actually did mechanically.
So funny thing is: because the game doesn't explain the actual mechanics behind anything, and because Tornado lacks a visual feedback mechanism so you an understand what's happening when you cast it, I only finally understood what it does the first time someone cast it on me. Which means I had an incredibly powerful spell waiting in my arsenal for like... All of FF3 and most of the way through FF4 without ever knowing that it was actually good? And then because it took that long and I was already navigating so many things I then promptly forgot about it again and have failed to use it.
So Zemus had been acting through Golbez literally since the day Cecil was born... and Cecil was taken in by the King of Baron who was killed and replaced by a Monster Lord directly in the service of Zemus several years ago at least, by implication of the King being the one to insist Cecil was trained as a Dark Knight... and Zemus knew all along who Cecil was, and that he was uniquely dangerous to his plans if left free but also vulnerable to his mind control...
And the best use Zemus/Cagnazzo could think of to put Cecil to was to order him to retrieve the Crystals until he expressed some doubts, then give him a mission that guarantees he just leaves and does his own thing? Like, the Bomb Ring didn't even actually injure Cecil or Kain, remember, it wasn't a suicide mission.
Surely Zemus could have gotten a lot more mileage out of either throwing Cecil in the dungeon and trying to induce the mental state that would open him to mind control, or else just having him killed, right?
Very early on, Cecil has a few lines about how the nature of a Dark Knight is to do terrible things, and that soon he will no longer even feel remorse about it. I think the idea is that he has a strong moral core that makes mind-control impossible at first, but the Dark Knight's power will erode that core and corrupt him until he's vulnerable to takeover by Zemus again. It could do with being actually said, though; especially when Cecil goes "but why did Zemus use Golbez instead of me?" and Golbez shamefully speaks of the "seeds of evil" in his heart.
At this point I think the game's writers kind of forgot Cecil was supposed to have done bad things first before earning redemption.
So one thing Ive always found interesting is that Cicel's theme "The Red wings" has a small part of it that sounds very close to "Goblez clad in darkness"
I do need to actually see the written score but I'm willing to bet they are near identical in that musical phase, and would be actually a very early clue to the two being related.
Like there's stuff you could theorize with monster transformation or being murdered and replaced or whatnot but none of it is actually in the game, which is kind of galling when a big part of Cecil's original arc was his role as leader of the Red Wings, his men talking about him and his orders, the King taking them away from him, Golbez taking over in his place, and so on, and the fate of all these dudes is never addressed
They really feel like there was an intended arc there for the Red Wings that was never completed.
When I read this, I assumed that the intended solution was to hit Odin with a lightning move when his sword is raised and force him to cancel the attack. I don't know if it'd work, but I'm surprised you didn't try it.
That was also my assumption. I spent a couple of fights trying to get a lightning move at just the right time to cancel Zantetsuken. It would have been neat, but unfortunately it doesn't work. The text is only meant to indicate that Odin is vulnerable to Lightning, so you use those spells to deal as much damage as possible to kill him before he uses Zantetsuken.
Yeaaaah... I think I guess where they were trying to go with this, but it'd be better if Golbez was approached somehow by Zemus and tricked because "no lol acshually if you break all this shiz we can get your loved ones back!" or sumthing. That would have built up his character without nullifying it at the last moment. If all we knew was the mind control... who's Golbez, really?
Yeah, I've had similar thoughts on the topic that I outlined above.
At this point I'm pretty sure Edge was a last minute addition to the game; maybe Golbez would join you with Kain and he would be your last Sage stand in after Fusoya sacrificed himself to break the mind control. But maybe someone cried at 3 of the 5 final characters being in armor and complained about repetition or look I don't care anymore Edge is just the Scrappy and they didn't have the time to insert him gracefully into the dialogues.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall find a reason why Edge screwed FF4."
I distinctly remember it being possible to try to unpetrify Palom and Porom through an item menu, only for the game to give you the same "they have become petrified of their own will" line as when Tellah tried it. Which I suppose implies that the elder is Just That Good if he can pull it off.
It's a plot development that didn't make sense in the first place, solved by a resolution that makes even less sense, and which makes the initial plot point make less sense than it already did in retrospect!
So remember how you weren't using status effects regularly? Between enemies with large amounts of HP that make alpha striking through high tier spells unsustainable and counters to hit your MP even harder when you have to revive and heal after the fact, the Moon is where the game finally bites you in the ass over it.
Okay but just like imagine though? An RPG this old where you legit get to the final boss and it just goes "yeah FuSoYa and Golbez already murked him" and the game ends. Subverts every possible expectation ever for the time.
I mean I'd use status effects more if FF games didn't regularly go "yeah anything stronger than goblin-tier is immune to 90% of status effects and you'll have to guess randomly or use a guide to figure out which ones work".
