Edge is first mentioned just mere minutes before he shows up. Have him die against Rubicante, no heal we die like [FFXIV REDACTED], so the party immediately shows up and Rubi gives you directly his spiel about anger. Cid remains as your fifth party member, with new hammers being used for whatever weebjutsus Edge might have provided. Later fights with Rubicante require minimal or no narrative changes.
During the last visit to the dwarves, Cid peaces out because they're getting info about the Red Wings doing Things all over the overworld, and the dwarves need help to repair their tanks (foreshadowing!).
Go to the moon, get Beardoya to join, come back, drink a Margarita, maybe have a conversation foreshadowing Golbez's mind control, Giant of Babel executes his "hello world" code ENTHUSIASTICALLY, previous foreshadow pays off with everybody inviting themselves to the party. Your party is 4/5 at this point.
Beard is shaved in a promo for the "Say no to drugs mind control" national campaign, Golbez goes seven hells what have i been doing!?, Kain pops ups and goes "I did what!?Again!?", have a similar "this is what happened and Zemus is a fuck" conversation, everyone flees into the whale like the bunch of fearless Pinochios they are.
The party have a faster welcome for Kain. "You good now?" "Me? I'm getting used to it. ('Kain joined the group!') Ask him." *waves both hands at Golbez* The party and Golbez have a more in depth conversation about where they stand, their responsibilities and/or lack thereof, and Cecil's growth.
Fusoya recovers and says "nah fam you kids stay and be kids, I gots me a mofo to spank" if you still want him around to leave and do The Thing, but Golbez joins as the fifth and last member*, for Justice and Redemption.
And a modding hero was born.
*As Cecil's reverse, Golbez is a Dark Knight (2-5 skills instead of only Darkness, if you want) with Black Magic, maybe with lower physical attack than Cecil but still just as tanky.
Due to what I assume are technical limitations, we don't really fight the Elemental Lords 'at the same time.' Rather, we fight them in sequence, Scarmiglione then Cagnazzo then Barbariccia then Rubicante, with what I am pretty sure are better stats than before - Rubicante notably is a worthy Phase 4, having upgraded his Inferno to be able to affect the entire party.
I really wish that the DS/3D remake had given you a battle against all four of them at once instead of doing the one-by-one lineup again. After all, they switched up a lot of the other boss battles for that remake, so it's disappointing they didn't do a group battle now that they had better technical capabilities. I can understand how developers want to uphold fidelity to the original product when reissuing classic games, but they were already changing up the formula a bit for the 3D version, so this was the perfect opportunity for a 4-way Fiend battle, and they blew it.
Edit: And I know that the DS's new superboss Geryon is sort of meant to fit that role, since it has the signature attacks of the four Fiends, but that's not the same to me. Aesthetically, having all four of the Fiends present as distinct individuals would be more exciting than fighting a single boss, especially if they also had their special attributes (Barbariccia's immunity to melee damage, Rubicante's cloak, etc.).
Given how FFIV has been going so far, it might even be intentional that The Squad didn't tell Edge about Kain's deal, because they assumed he was going to FFIV his way out of the party in short order 🙃.
Given how FFIV has been going so far, it might even be intentional that The Squad didn't tell Edge about Kain's deal, because they assumed he was going to FFIV his way out of the party in short order 🙃.
The image of Rydia staring at Edge with a squint because she's trying to figure out when he's going to drop dead or go into a coma or something because obviously it'll be him who leaves next and him misinterpreting it is very, very funny to me.
The image of Rydia staring at Edge with a squint because she's trying to figure out when he's going to drop dead or go into a coma or something because obviously it'll be him who leaves next and him misinterpreting it is very, very funny to me.
You know, thinking about it, I think it really didn't do Edge any favors to be the final permanent party member who manages to avoid dropping out of the party via injury/plot. IIR he doesn't really undergo any character growth at all after he joins the party and you fight his parents pretty soon after.
Spoilering just in case. It's fairly obvious but I just want to be sure we're still being careful about that kind of thing.
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!
By the way, in my very first play through of Final Fantasy IV, I ran away from way too many battles, and was very under leveled. I managed to scrape through most of the bosses, but I got hard-walled at the archfiends rematch. Never even entered Summoners, Sylph or Bahamuts Cave and didn't even have the Ga spells on Rydia. At that point, I reset my file.
Part of the reason the Red Wings disappearing feels so weird, I think, is like we all assumed at some point Cecil was going to take back command of them, right? They show concerns about the king's actions in the intro, and they're clearly really loyal to Cecil, so we were all like "ah, there's gonna be some cool moment where their sense of justice and loyalty to Cecil wins out over their fear of the king," right?
Yeah, it was a lost opportunity. Even with the way the game was handled, it wouldn't have been hard to have the red wing soldiers show up in the cells when Cecil was going through the dungeon before the fight with Baigan, maybe have them comment "the new commander, Golbez, replaced everybody who wouldn't follow his orders with soldiers loyal to him!", and then have the Baigan fight followed by the reveal that the Redwings are now fully crewed by monsters only. Instead, the way things are handled, it leaves a lot of confusion and very little clarity.
The idea Edge was tacked onto FFIV at the last moment makes a disturbing amount of sense. That said, he made TAY playable and gave it some of its best story and character moments. Him looking at Palom and having that "oh God that used to be me" reaction was pure gold. Plus Rubicante's spirit cooperating with him, and the two even getting to do a one-on-one rematch if you have him in the party for that part of the final chapters.
So in the end, I'm not going to be too upset he was there.
As another note I don't think II covered before, there's a reason that when I first did the FFXIV trial seven plus years ago, when Heavensward was the Good New Shit and we had no idea we were being strapped into Yoshi-P and Ishikawa-san's Wild Feels Ride, I rolled my main Stephanos and picked Gladiator. It was the class thast led to Paladin and FFIV was my formative FF experience. And I did an internal SQUEE at seeing the Endwalker trailer for the first time and recognizing they were making Paladin the "expansion story class". PLDs 4 Life, man.
the two Cecil talked to in the opening survive to the sequel, where Cecil entrusted them with his son's training and supervision in his military career, since the son wanted to do it and Cecil trusted his old subordinates to keep his son safe. No word on what the two did between the IV opening and 17 years later, though.
It also reveals their names to be Biggs and Wedge; they die after the first dungeon of said sequel, as befits pre-PS2 characters of those names. Should have stayed anonymous if they wanted to live.
Last time, I left us in the middle of a cutscene. I needed some time to think about it.
Because this is the part of the game where it's decided it needed to address the fact that there are women in the team.
Remember when I was talking about the late 80s, early 90s influence of Enlightened Matriarchy Fantasy on a place like Troia? This is kind of the counterpart to it. When this game comes out in 1991, we're still years off Buffy or Xena in the West. Final Fantasy hasn't been particularly bad about female characters, generally - year, most of them are princesses, and there aren't many of them overall, but while Maria in FF2 is a non-entity, there's Leila, Umei, a couple neat characters here and there. It's not much but it's okay. But now we're in a game where ⅖ members of the final party are set to be women, and the game kind of… trips on its feet with it.
Like, the distinct impression I get from the scene that's about to come is that the game feels he has to "address" the presence of female characters in the endgame team; the game is trying to give its female characters agency, but it's self-conscious about it, because it's working against a background assumption that the reader will say 'hey, hold up, how come there are girls on the save-the-world team' and be justified in doing so, so it needs to make a whole production out of it.
And naturally that starts by making all our male characters have a Relatable Sexism Moment.
I guess it's not as bad as it could be. I know. Rydia was a child not long ago from everyone else's frame of reference, it's ambiguous how old/mature she's supposed to be now, it's fair to not want to put a teenager on the front line. Cecil is in love with Rosa, so he has a personal, vested interested in not wanting to see her harmed that might overshadow whether that is at all a good decision and (though it shouldn't) her own desires.
But it's still the three male characters in the final party telling the two girls they've got this and it's time to sit this out. Even though they will absolutely, definitely die if they try it without them.
And while I understand that a line like this isn't meant to be taken literally, it's just Edge saying some rude shit to try and get Rydia to storm off so she'll be safe, it's still hilarious to see this:
When Rydia is, by far, the single most powerful member of the team.
So Rosa (appears to) leave first, at Cecil's pleading, and Rydia (appears to) do the same after Edge pisses her off enough to leave everyone to their own suicide mission. Our three dudes share a somber moment of hoping the girls will be safe as they bear the burden of doing this all alone.
Aside from the sexism, another reason why this annoys me is that, as should be obvious for anyone who's looking at narrative developments through the lens of party balance, this obviously isn't going to happen. We're not going to ditch our two mages and run the final dungeon on a three-men team. But it's like the game felt like it had to address this somehow, to make the big "Sorry no girls allowed" moments happen even if only to subvert it, and…
Well, anyway.
Cecil, Edge and Kain fly the ship to the moon.
But just as they are about to exit the ship, they find out they had stowaways!
"I guess we have no choice," Kain says. "Well, aren't you the ladies' man," Edge exclaims. Cecil finally relents and swears to protect Rosa with her life, and then, the Big Kiss:
After which Rydia also emerges from the teleporter, making two extremely cogent points about why they're idiots for trying to get her out:
And with this whole kinda dumb bit behind them, the group decides to move forward together.
…you know, I'm going to assume that the Lunar Whale extended rooms outside the screen that we can't access, because the alternative is that Rydia and Rosa just clung to the outside of the hull as the ship made its way through the vacuum of space. Which is admittedly extremely funny.
But it's kind of a frustrating bit, yeah? It requires all three male characters to spontaneously develop a case of Rapid Onset Sexism (Patronizing Variant) and it flies in the face of all the trials they just went through together. But also I guess it's like… context of the time, it's pretty good in that the female characters proactively assert their agency against the will of their male peers and are validated for it?
There's a particular plot construction in stories of a certain time period that goes roughly like this:
Male protagonists, who are assumed to be the decision makers, make a decision that's bad, or reckless, or thoughtless, or which has them ignore the wishes of the female characters.
The female characters pretend to go along with it.
Later, it is revealed that - either because they just ignored the male characters and went behind their back, or because they just nodded and waited in the knowledge that events would turn out in their favor - the female characters were right, and the male characters were idiots for not listening to them.
The male characters are embarrassed and the female characters are smugly vindicated.
It's characteristic of a certain kind of clumsy if well-intentioned writing that's trying to affirm female character agency but can't really step out of the baseline assumption that male characters will be (not necessarily knowingly) chauvinistic and assumed to be incharge, and counters that by playing into some old Female Wisdom/Mother Knows Best tropes were sometimes all you can do is let the boys do the stupid thing they want to do while girls solve the real problems the real way. I associate it with some bits of David and Leigh Eddings' writing?
I have spent entirely too much time thinking about this sequence. Let's move on.
We're back on the moon, and it's been pointed out to me that I have missed an important cave on the Moon. I'm well aware of that, and I know exactly which one - it's this one:
However, the reason I haven't been there is that I assumed I simply couldn't. As I've mentioned before, the rubble on the moon plains prevents the Lunar Whale from landing; it can only land on the elevated gray plateaus, and then you have to take the stairs down to the plains. Here, there are no stairs, so I assumed I couldn't land, and I figured the game would reveal a path there eventually.
That's incorrect, though. The game is just playing funny tricks on me and there is one tile of plain in that valley where I can land just fine.
I hate it when it does that.
So, let's see what all the hubbub is about…
Oh god.
It is the moon rabbits.
An entire species of them.
Everything about this is just A STUPID BAD PUN.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY. NAMINGWAY. THE HUMMINGWAYS.
THERE IS AN ENTIRE SPECIES OF MOON RABBITS WITH PUN NAMES THAT SERVE NO PLOT PURPOSE AND JUST EXIST AS A PUNCHLINE TO THE EXISTENCE OF THIS ONE INEXPLICABLE CHARACTER WE KEEP BUMPING INTO EVERYWHERE.
Fucking-
Incredible.
Truly this is top tier content.
Alright, that was a fun break, but it's time.
Time for the endgame. Time for the final confrontation. Time for the last dungeon.
Looks like we're doing the FF3 "powerful relic weapons guarded by special bosses in the final dungeon" thing again. Cool. I can dig that.
Let's go.
From here on out, the rest of this update is going to be hardcore dungeoneering and mechanics. We're not gonna hit the plot again until the next update, but this consumed two hours of my life with painful fights, so I am going to break it down. I will no doubt say things that are wrong; keep in mind that 90% of my mechanical analysis is a cold read of what the game is presenting me with. I come at most of these fights without foreknowledge or expectations, I don't have the baseline of 'oh everyone knows X is fought in Y way,' as should be obvious by me getting the CPU fight completely wrong; I can only tell you how the game scanned for me.
This is the Lunar Subterrane, and it's probably longest dungeon in the franchise so far? I think that's in part because FFIV is just Everything Bigger and Badder, but also because the introduction of save points mid-dungeon means the game can extend the length of dungeon past what would be meaningfully possible to accomplish in a single run.
The enemies here are tough, with tons of HP, powerful attacks, incapacitating status effects, and come in multiple combos for added spice. Everything dies if I apply Bahamut, but I can't afford to do that every fight - the dungeon is simply too long and Ether too rare.
The Gold Dragon has over 10k HP, responds to any attack or magic with a Construct move that paralyses a character and AFAICT can only be healed by Esuna, and attacks on its turn with Thunderbolt for 1k+ damage.
The Selene Guardians have tremendous magic resistance, meaning Rydia is just kinda sitting these out.
But also some that are just kind of funny:
All this little dude does, every turn, is cast Scan on itself, which tells you how much HP it has left and that it has a Lightning weakness. This is some of the most obvious bait I've seen in my life, so I just kill it with weapons, which it is completely helpless against. Apparently if you hit it with lightning it counters for massive damage?
This guy casts Doom every turn, which puts up a counter over a character's head, starting at 10 and going down by 1 every ATB gauge. When it reaches 0, they die, but there's no way I would fail to kill it in ten rounds, so it's harmless.
There are plenty of items in there, most of them in chests guarded by more-powerful-than-average monsters or monster combos.
Most of them are kind of boring, in that they're marginal improvements in Defense of a couple points with special immunities or resistance shuffled around. These include the Crystal Armor set, the Dragon Armor set. A couple are more interesting, but also kind of inexplicable/useless, like these two items that seem to hint at the possibility of a 'physical build' for Rydia or Rosa:
The Flame Whip is a genuinely powerful weapon with a chance to cause paralysis on every hit. But the Stardust Rod that is Rydia's over weapon option has an innate Intellect bonus, which means her magic is better, and I'm having her cast Bio every combat, so… What's the point? And the Minerva Bustier is this taken up to 11; it is a massive physical boost, far stronger than any piece of gear that can be equipped by a dude… and it comes with maluses that make magic actively worse.
Put together, I could try and make Rydia into a physical attacker, if I wanted to, for some reason. Or I could buff Rosa (she can't equip the whip but she can equip the Bustier), which given how often I have her use her bow in random encounters would be genuinely a boost in power… at a huge cost to her healing?
It's such a strange option to propose here at the 11th hour.
Anyway, we mostly don't care about those. We care about those:
Relic weapons with unique bosses!
Those work like FF3 except instead of being in their own dungeon they're part of the main dungeon and require pathfinding, because fuck me this place is a maze:
There are ten floors of these. That's too many fucking doors.
The Relics are of course, given the nature of the game, each designed for a specific character. So for instance, the White Dragon is defending Murasame - and being the first boss I fought in a feverish session of pure back-to-back combat, I will be honest with you, I totally forgot what its deal was. It does dragon stuff, I guess? It casts Slow and Earthquake sometimes? Whatever, it dies, and Edge gets a relic katana. Moving on.
That guy is fun. He's an upgraded form of the Ahriman from earlier; first it omnicasts Doom, meaning every party member now has a 10-turn timer over their head counting down. Then it omnicasts Haste, meaning everyone takes their turn faster, meaning the timer goes down faster. It's a clever trick to make you scared and fumble in panic, but ultimately all you have to do is kill it before the timer reaches 0 and it made your attacks come out faster, so I just keep my cool and win before the timer even gets midway through.
The Holy Lance, obviously, goes to Kain.
Then there are these guys…
LUNASAURS. ZOMBIE DINOSAURS FROM THE MOON. I love it.
Nothing much to say here, we beat them up for their lunch money, grab the precious, precious ribbons with their status effect-protecting abilities, and then we… make a pit stop.
The Lunar Subterrane is one of those dungeons where I just can't do it in one go, the resource cost is too intensive. My characters are gaining crazy levels fighting all these high-tier monsters but it seriously eats through their MP and HP (healing HP is easy enough but then that's fewer MP and…) so I have to Teleport out and rest using a tent several times.
This is especially true because of the maze-like structure of the dungeon, with multiple hidden paths, teleporters, doors to nowhere, doors and stairs that loop in and out of themselves, such that I had to basically pull a map off the Internet and then break the dungeon down into a series of "expeditions," clearing an area, getting one or two relics, 'porting out, healing up, and going back in. It takes a while.
In particular, it is only with the help of a map that I am able to find my way through a particularly convoluted bit of traveling to reach a closed-off corner and confront..
Well, the most powerful of the relic weapons, protected by the most powerful of the guardians.
Dark Bahamut.
I am really curious as to whether this is supposed to mean Zemus has corrupted the weapons' guardians to turn them against his enemies, or whether the dragons can sense Zemus's influence on Cecil and is treating him as a servant of the very man we're here to slay, because I think the latter is much more interesting.
By the way?
This totally proves my theory about Summons being Lunarian creations. I mean, they have a special Bahamut protecting their legendary forbidden weapons, what more need be said.
Bahamut was a simple problem: have you done your homework on his weakness, and can you execute on that weakness fast enough to save your team and make him kill himself?
Dark Bahamut assumes that you have learned the basics of the problem it's asking, and then ramps everything up to 11. If you didn't beat the original problem, fuck you, go back to school.
Dark Bahamut has no countdown; it opens the fight with Mega Flare faster than you can take your first action, putting anyone it doesn't kill outright (the damage is so massive that in the above screenshot Kain instadies from full HP) into the danger zone. Then it casts Reflect on itself, and starts bouncing Flare off himself onto your party. One might think, "well, that's not as bad as if he just kept casting MF," which is technically true, but that only makes the fight incredibly difficult as opposed to outright impossible, because Dark Bahamut is incredibly fast and easily casts Flare twice per round - and once it's done, it goes back to Mega Flare. One might say "use Slow" but the only character with slow is Rosa, and she is heavily taxed by the need to heal and cast Reflect. Flare deals heavy, but not lethal damage, but can't be reflected (since he's badminton-ing it off himself in the first place). Mega Flare will wipe the party if they're not all at full health, though, and the only defense is Reflect to cast it back at DaBaMu, and now that FuSoYa is gone and with only one Curtain event in my inventory, the only way to apply Reflect is Rosa casting it one at a time.
Needless to say we wipe our first attempt.
A Reflect-protected Rosa makes a valiant, but futile last stand.
Reload. Refresh. Try again.
Here is the cold, hard truth of this party set-up:
I don't really need Edge and Kain.
Years (decades?) before modern MMORPG design, Edge and Kain are a case study in why FFXIV boss fights tend to have a time limit to victory called an 'Enrage,' which forces you to deal sustained damage to beat the boss quickly enough. Cecil takes hits, survives them, provides backup healing, and deals solid damage. Rydia is my main powerhouse, dealing 8k-9k damage every turn as long as she has MP and is alive. Rosa is the only reason any of this is possible at all thanks to her support and healing spells.
All Edge and Kain do is make the fight finish faster. And that's a very important role, don't get me wrong, because Cecil/Rydia/Rosa aren't self-sufficient, they can't survive indefinitely against Dark Bahamut's onslaught, they need to burn through resources. But what Edge and Kain do, mostly, is deal damage when I don't need them for something else, provide flex room to use an item to help one of the party members who really matters, and provide another body for DaBaMu to randomly select from when casting Flare and hopefully miss one of the main trio.
This means that, when it becomes evident that I simply do not have the maneuvring room to give everyone a Reflect, some cuts have to be made:
And out of that cold-blooded calculus, victory is born.
Edge got a Full-Life and Kain a Phoenix Dawn, but ultimately they didn't really get a turn before the final victory.
Ragnarok is a vast leap in power for Cecil, and an easy cinch for strongest weapon in the game.
And once that's done, it's time to venture into the second part of the dungeon - which is very strikingly visually distinguished from the first. In ways reminiscent of both previous FFs' final dungeon, it is a glass/crystal floor, only this time instead of a star-studded void or an infinite darkness, it directly overlooks the molten core of Luna herself:
And it has some crazy monsters. In the interests of not overstretching my picture budget, pretty much every encounter on this floor is at least miniboss-tier. The 'Wicked Mask,' a hideous statue of a humanoid face, has a complicated rhythm where it first casts Reflect on self, then omnicasts Reflect on the player party, then starts bouncing Holy and Flare off itself, forcing the group to DPS race it to death before it starts taking half of someone's HP every turn. With as much HP as it has, this is only possible with expensive spell use (of note, when I need to really stack damage at the cost of everything else, Rosa has learned Holy like a level ago), so usually I have to accept some loss.
Also Behemoth is a common random encounter here. I just have Edge cast Smoke and escape every time because fuck that.
Also there are Blue and Red Dragons? I'm sure there is something bad about them but tbh at this point they're just a breath of fresh air every time.
Now…
That's one of the coolest environments in the franchise so far. It's so… eerie and ominous. Oh and yeah also there is another relic weapon that is…
…wait, another katana?
Something about this is wr-
Oh shit oh fuck it's Dark Leviathan oh fuck-
He casts Tidal Wave twice in a row as his opening move before any ATB fills up and, as you can see from my screenshot above, I forgot to heal my party before initiating the fight, meaning we wipe instantly.
Reload. Refresh. Try again.
Ogopogo has a very powerful and frightening opening move. After that, though, it only uses physical attacks, meaning it's much less of a threat than Dark Bahamut… Except if you try to exploit its elemental weakness with Lightning spells it casts Whirl, which is Tornado-except-not-a-spell, so it hard sets a party member to single digit HP while ignoring Reflect, and if you use any other magic it counters with a freezing magic attack, and since I don't figure that out on the fly while I am in the middle of the battle, it's a pretty painful fight, which, again, is won at much expense for my two more disposable characters:
But a victory it is nonetheless.
As a reward, we get the legendary sword Masamune.
Because Edge is a dual wielder, you see. He needs two relic katanas. Meanwhile Rosa and Rydia get…
…
They get nothing?
Holy shit, they literally don't get any relic weapon!
Okay, it doesn't matter that much technically because the only reason they would matter would be their passive stat bonuses, which is pretty boring for a legendary artifact, but still. Rydia did acquire the Stardust Rod from an earlier chest guarded by Yet Another Fucking Behemoth, which has a crazy +15 Intellect bonus, and which can be used to cast Comet for free, which sounds good but seems to do incredibly low damage (like in the low hundreds, barely better than her attack), and Rosa got… an Artemis Arrow for her bow?
Am I supposed to treat the Ribbons as 'their' artifacts?
It's kind of funny in light of what I was talking about earlier regarding the female characters' treatment by the narrative.
Like - I can't emphasize this enough:
Edge of all people got two goddamned relics, and Rydia and Rosa got zero.
Perhaps it's appropriate that Rydia started off that dungeon getting the Stardust Rod before we started the relic run, before she and Rosa both really got…
…shafted.
No, I won't apologize.
Well, at least all the relics have been acquired.
Which means it's now time to warp up several floors to the safe room midway through the dungeon, heal up, and save, and take a long, deep breath.
A long, nice, deep breath, thinking about pretty flowers.
Also I lied about a bunch of this. My real run involved meeting Ogopogo before Dark Bahamut and a lot of failing to find my way and running into dead ends and cursing under my breath while checking an online map. Often in these LPs, if I have to choose between perfect accuracy to how I played things and a slightly 'cleaned up' account that's meant to not read like incoherent garbage, I will pick the latter. Although I usually put a note like this at the end because I'm not in this to make you think I am more competent than I am, I am in fact very bad.
Next time: we beeline for the end of that crystal place, enter the final floor, and enter the final stretch of the story.
I knew it was coming first thing in this update and I still hate it. I consider that bullshit not just the worst cutscene in FF4, but the worst in all of FF.
I now have the image of Kain and Edge being jobber rival characters always getting punked so Cecil and Rydia can kick ass and look cool while Rosa heals them and just ignores them and lets them moan in pain in the background.
There's a particular plot construction in stories of a certain time period that goes roughly like this:
Male protagonists, who are assumed to be the decision makers, make a decision that's bad, or reckless, or thoughtless, or which has them ignore the wishes of the female characters.
The female characters pretend to go along with it.
Later, it is revealed that - either because they just ignored the male characters and went behind their back, or because they just nodded and waited in the knowledge that events would turn out in their favor - the female characters were right, and the male characters were idiots for not listening to them.
The male characters are embarrassed and the female characters are smugly vindicated.
It's characteristic of a certain kind of clumsy if well-intentioned writing that's trying to affirm female character agency but can't really step out of the baseline assumption that male characters will be (not necessarily knowingly) chauvinistic and assumed to be incharge, and counters that by playing into some old Female Wisdom/Mother Knows Best tropes were sometimes all you can do is let the boys do the stupid thing they want to do while girls solve the real problems the real way. I associate it with some bits of David and Leigh Eddings' writing?
That's a good way of describing this kind of writing, I'm glad you brought this up.
At least the lesson it imparts (male chauvinism is dumb, female viewpoint should be respected) is good even if it's ham handed in the delivery. Certainly beats the alternative.
Eh, other games have some strong contenders. But yeah, easily the worst scene in FFIV, no doubt on that one. It really comes out of nowhere. Also, when I saw it, I thought for a moment "wait, it's not going to have these three arrive on the moon to find Golbez and Fusoya waiting to take up the last two spots as the final team mages, is it?", which was very rage inducing. At least it didn't do that, but it was still pretty annoying.
Also, for some reason I remembered Ogopogo being named Shinryu, making me think it was the first Shinryu appearance in the series. It seems not.
Dark Bahamut has no countdown; it opens the fight with Mega Flare faster than you can take your first action, putting anyone it doesn't kill outright (the damage is so massive that in the above screenshot Kain instadies from full HP) into the danger zone.
All this little dude does, every turn, is cast Scan on itself, which tells you how much HP it has left and that it has a Lightning weakness. This is some of the most obvious bait I've seen in my life, so I just kill it with weapons, which it is completely helpless against. Apparently if you hit it with lightning it counters for massive damage?
The lady Guardians drops the Artemis Bow and Arrows, while the Blue & Friend Dragons the Dragon Whisper whip. And technically, the Stardust Rod and Sage Staff would be the "found around" relics. Those are their final weapons, but yeah, none of those have an actual flavor boss guarding them, which... bleh.
I was actually going to make a joke earlier in the thread about Namingway obviously being from the moon as he was a rabbit and the Japanese have that moon rabbit myth thing... then I looked it up to make sure it was me making a joke and then I had to not make the joke or I'd have been booed for spoilers. Sometimes these things are very predictable, I guess?
Also, yup, that's sure a buncha sexism pretending to not be sexist all right. Really love the fakeout where they pretend to be trying not to be sexist, followed by the hammerblow of 'fuck you if you think icky girls should get cool unique equipment with sick boss fights attached'. Wait, no, I actually hate it. Thanks, Final Fantasy.
A 10 minute unskippable love story cutscene between two characters I don't care about is annoying as hell, but it's rage inducing for an entirely different reason than Surprise, Sexism with a side of attempting to get the entire party killed.
