HolyDragoon
Call Gespenst!
- Location
- Portugal
How many times did you wipe?
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
How many times did you wipe?
Stealing is actually Super Useful. Enemies tend to have a Common and a Rare Steal item. You can get some equipment an area or two ahead of schedule via Stealing. The Ice Soldiers You can encounter heading to Shiva have Mythril Swords you can Steal for example.
You can check the ingame bestiary from the Extras menu at the the title screen to see a list of Drops and Steal items from Enemies you've fought. If you're so inclined, no way to spoil yourself that way.
Edit: Well no way other than seeing all the ????????? Enemies left, and that's all the info you get, just ??????? and no picture.
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Steal is in a weird spot in FFV. There are a lot of great items you can get unlike FFIV, but the odds of hitting rare steals is low enough it makes me not want to bother most of the time.
I don't think anyone has provided the mechanics behind Steal, so I'll list them here. Steal has a 40% success rate by default, and 80% with the Thief's Gloves. You then have to roll on hitting the common or rare steal, with a 5/128 to hit the rare steal. Each enemy can only have one item stolen, so if you hit the common steal that's all you get.
Mercifully a lot of the really good rare steals have no common items, and there is one set of good common steals it's worth going for later in the game (if you've played the game you know which ones).
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
According to the wiki, you are correct. I said "the hurricane form lacks an ice weakness" out of dim memory of checking it once, but I was wrong; the wiki says that instead it's that the Hand is immune to Ice. I'm not sure if that changed in the Pixel Remaster or if I missed it in some way for some reason, because I burst through the Hand phase like I did the rest, but I couldn't say with which move or for what reason. Since I had Galuf summon Shiva and Faris cast Blizzara, either Lenna hit it so hard it immediately phase-skipped before its Ice immunity could be relevant, or Bartz did the same without his Ice bonus applying but I didn't notice because it was enough damage to force the phase change. Who knows
See, your assumption is sensible, but FFV is fast-paced as fuck even compared to FFIV, kinda like FF3 was to the first and second game. As of last session, I only had 9 hours logged in, and that's accounting for an hour-long grinding session.
Given that the games have tended to go slightly longer with each new entry, 9 hours with grinding isn't even hitting the halfway mark. There are some locations in the overworld left unexplored (about 7 to 10 ish depending on how you count and using the World Map item), but judging from knowledge of the games so far, I would estimate the chances of there being an "other world" reveal to be 99%.
And yes, I absolutely expect our efforts to be futile and the Earth Crystal to shatter when we get to it, so it'll be interesting how the game follows up on that.
On the mutant third hand, those of us who didn't have access to that gamer subculture were actually stuck trying to figure out things on our own, which was often highly frustrating. There were a number of old games where I reached specific points I could never progress past because I couldn't figure out the trick of it.
All in all Gamefaqs and later game wikis have made for a much better gaming experience for me.
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While that is true, there is a time spell that offsets that, and a weapon that casts that spell when used as an item that anyone can use.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Me, too. Specifically Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and it's bullshit "kneel in one specific spot a specific length of time to progress" mechanic.
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
So it turns out the "good" loot is still a ways off in this game, so stealing really isn't worth it. Yet. And you need to be either Thief or Freelancer to equip the Thief Gloves, which raises your !Steal rate from 40% to 80%.
And then you have some enemies with Rare and Common loot. Common loot drops 123/128 of the time when you use Steal, while Rare is only 5/128. And once you grab the Common steal, you can't get the Rare one, so you either use Return (Time Magic) to restart the fight and try again, or just shrug and stick with it.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Fun fact the Aqua Breath they cast is powerful blue magic.
it's also really weird! See, water is a damage type, so obviously Aqua Breath will do water damage, right? It's in the name.
Well no. It's a decently hard hitting spell against all enemies...
that does non-elemental damage with an eight times multiplier against enemies tagged as being 'Desert' enemies. The magical water breath doesn't do water damage.
If you're at all like me, you'll find that very strange.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
It's absolutely strange, but it's a very traditional element of the ability across Final Fantasy. FFIX has perhaps four Water abilities in total, if that, but Aqua Breath is a % based attack. In FFVI, it does both Water and Wind damage. That makes it three out of seven games it appears in (excluding the MMO as usual) where it's not Water elemental; it's basically a coin flip whether it'll actually be elemental or not, which for an ability with "water" in its name is one weird distribution to have.
- Location
- Canada, probably
Water spells are also weird in that there's no equipment that boosts them. The Summoner eventually gets a Water spell as one of their most powerful spells, but in effect it's usually weaker because the previous one can be buffed by equipment and the Water one can't.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Aqua Breath in FFXIV is used by Leviathan and can be learned by Blue Mage and deals Water-type damage, although due to the evolution of FFXIV's gameplay over time this is more of a curiosity than it has mechanical relevance; over time FFXIV has made elemental types, resistances and weaknesses obsolete to avoid a scenario in which a Black Mage who has Fire-type spells is objectively better to bring to a fight against Shiva than a Machinist with mostly unaspected damage.
When you think about it though, Water type damage is kind of... weird. Like, fire, electricity, and cold all deal damage in their own particular way through the interaction of physics and biology, and direct exposure to any of them is harmful to any living being. Meanwhile, unless you're made of fire, "being wet" isn't a damaging effect. "Water damage" is, for the most part, blunt force trauma. You take damage from Tidal Wave not because the interaction of the human body and water is destructive, but because you're being hit with a thousand tons of moving fluid to the face. With that in consideration, I can see the argument for Water dealing unaspected damage?
When you think about it though, Water type damage is kind of... weird. Like, fire, electricity, and cold all deal damage in their own particular way through the interaction of physics and biology, and direct exposure to any of them is harmful to any living being. Meanwhile, unless you're made of fire, "being wet" isn't a damaging effect. "Water damage" is, for the most part, blunt force trauma. You take damage from Tidal Wave not because the interaction of the human body and water is destructive, but because you're being hit with a thousand tons of moving fluid to the face. With that in consideration, I can see the argument for Water dealing unaspected damage?
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
Alternatively, Aqua Breath is short for Aqua Vitae Breath and the monsters just reek of alcohol enough to physically hurt people.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
That's a fair argument except the weird part is that like, aesthetically aqua breath is some kinda... bubble storm or something? and does non-elemental but good against desert, whereas the game's Actual Tidal Wave attack does... water damage.
I genuinely have to wonder whether this is 'it makes more sense in the original japanese' or 'water damage was added after aqua breath and then it not changed' or what.
(incidentally, it's worth pointing out that Ninja do in fact have water damage scrolls, not ice damage, and so only have partial overlap in elements with eg a black mage.)
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
I suspect that they introduced Water in the sense that it's a multipurpose element. Fire, cold and electricity are pretty obvious about their application. Air, Earth, and Water, meanwhile, need a bit more of creative application. Say you can use wind to shake a target, even cut it; IIRC it tends to be particularly damaging to flying enemies. Earth follows a similar logic; it causes no damage to flying targets, the implication being that, while it might cause you blunt damage (either by getting hit by rocks or being crushed by a swallowing earthquake), the way it does it is different enough from the damage a mace or a big boulder to the face would do.
Water meanwhile can kill you in several ways as well. There's the blunt trauma via a ton of water falling on top of you of course. But there's also pressure (imagine being trapped in a water sphere, and it starts to apply to you the same pressure you would experience in the Marianas Trench. While nekkid). There's also water getting into your respiratory system and drowning you, and even swallowing enough water without drowning can be harmful; we are not supposed to be used as water balloons, after all.
It would be a safe bet to imagine that taking into account and balancing all that crap into the game system would be a design nightmare.
Water meanwhile can kill you in several ways as well. There's the blunt trauma via a ton of water falling on top of you of course. But there's also pressure (imagine being trapped in a water sphere, and it starts to apply to you the same pressure you would experience in the Marianas Trench. While nekkid). There's also water getting into your respiratory system and drowning you, and even swallowing enough water without drowning can be harmful; we are not supposed to be used as water balloons, after all.
It would be a safe bet to imagine that taking into account and balancing all that crap into the game system would be a design nightmare.
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Final Fantasy V, Part 6, Part A
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Alright, back on track!
We're not changing our party set-up at this stage. I'm going to make Bartz into a Ninja once he's mastered Mystic Knight, but for now we'll stick with our current roster.
After the castle explodes, our party finds itself in the plains near Karnak. The town wasn't harmed, and so we can walk back in and find out that everyone made it, though not all in good health:
The Queen isn't just injured, she's delirious. It looks like the stress of being possessed by an evil spirit has left her in a traumatic state.
Townsfolk express surprise at Cid's machine having destroyed the crystal, and one of them remarks that the fire in the local pub's fireplace has grown weaker. They also mention that the explosion blew a chunk of that wall Queen Karnak had built to keep out the annoying busybodies at the Library of Ancients:
Our next destination seems clear, although I'm looking for Cid before heading there. Of note, a scholar in a home warns me that in the desert on the way to the Library lives a fearsome monster called the 'Dhorme Chimera,' and that I should be careful in crossing the region. Last time someone told me that it was about the Jackanapes and I got my shit pushed in, so I'll definitely keep that in mindand immediately attempt to kill the beast as a personal challenge.
Cid, it turns out, is standing alone on his no-longer-fire-powered ship, and is having a bit of a depressive fit.
He then breaks off to go elsewhere, ignoring the party's calls to him. They're clearly sympathetic to his sadness, but don't seem to know how to help or reassure him. We track him down, and Lenna tries to tell him it wasn't his fault, but he just pushes the group away.
However, in the local pub, one of the townsfolks mentioned something interesting - Cid's grandson works at the Library of Ancients. Could it be that his grandson would know how to get his father out of his funk? It's worth a try! It's time to go meet that young man, who goes by the name of…
…
Mid.
His name is Mid. Cid's grandson Mid.
Some things shouldn't be allowed.
Alright. Let's head to the library, and on our way -
Well, that was quick.
The Dhorme Chimera doesn't fuck around. It deals ~500 damage a hit, which is enough to one-shot Faris, and has an Aqua Breath attack that hits everyone for 250+ damage.
However, it is only strong enough to one-shot Faris.
My first encounter with the beast ends in a nasty, but quick victory. The Punch Wizards deal so much damage that the Chimera only gets one turn before dying. This means that, unless it specifically targets Faris, victory is quick and easy, even if somebody (or the whole party) will require healing afterwards. Meaning…
I can farm it over and over for 3 ABP a pop.
This is turning out way easier and more convenient than expected!
The Barehanded Caster trick honestly seems like it's almost cheating. Like, I would normally have to treat that thing as a real threat and spend my best spells killing it, running a sharp tally in MP costs, but instead I can just get free high damage and trivialize challenging encounters. I'm going to refrain from abusing this too much, because the Chimera also gives XP and I don't want to accidentally become so overleveled as to trivialize the whole game. I only kill, like… a dozen of the things. Enough to push Lenna over into learning HP +20% (at this point she's basically the party's tank) and push her over into her last skill, HP+30%, which is a loooong ways off.
And once we've crossed the desert, here's the library!
The higher levels of the Library are full of scholars, but they warn us that they have a slight problem: the basement has been overrun by monsters. Specifically, many of the Library's books are possessed. And Mid, who was looking for a particular tome, ventured down there and hasn't been heard of since. Looks like we'll need to go rescue him ourselves.
Sounds like this'll be our boss.
Up on the rooftop, we get an interesting scene with more lore. Two scholars are operating a furnace, and are burning books! Now, that seems like it would be anathema to such seekers of knowledge, but the fact is, they're trying to get rid of those possessed books. Unfortunately, their only means of identifying which books are possessed is to open them, and doing so exposes them to a risk of attack. Interacting with the books, one of them is a traveler's log, another is a Blue Mage's journal, and the third…
This presentation is so cool. The monsters are named after pages, and they literally come out of the page to fight you. When you kill one, another one with a different name pops up - as if we were literally flipping through the book to fight them. I love it.
After disposing of these books, one of the scholars mentions that they used to have Ifrit's help to identify and burn the books, but he's no longer with them. Could this mean a new summon will be waiting for us hidden somewhere in the library? Let's find out!
The library is a maze of sorts, with movable bookshelves that you have to interact with to open up passages. One of the monsters in there also uses Aera, so I have Galuf equip Learn and Lenna swap to Blue Mage to grab the spell, even if I'm not sure how much use I'll be getting out of it (it's only now that I realize that some of these Blue Mage spells are going to be obsolete by the time I actually use Blue Mage for offense, because I'm an idiot). There is also, however, a much more interesting BLU spell to be found here!
Level 5 Death, as has been said in the thread, is a spell that targets the whole enemy screen and instantly kills anyone with a level that's a multiple of 5. A very, very tasty prize…
…unfortunately, my characters are currently lv 21. And in order to learn Level 5 Death, you have to have it actually work on you, which means the character with Learn needs to died and be revived before the end of the fight.
I am not grinding 4 entire levels just so Galuf can learn this spell right now. We'll come back later.
And, secreted away in a corner of the library, what do we find?
Unfortunately, I failed to anticipate this, and so did not prep with an Ice-focused setup.
Not that it matters, because I have Shiva and Mystic Knight.
Yeah, at this point my party is beefed up enough that a character who's wearing his elemental weaknesses written on his face like Ifrit is a cakewalk.
Obtaining Ifrit in turns leads to a very funny interaction when I reach a particular haunted bookshelf that decides to get in my way:
This interaction is genuinely funny but also kind of fascinating with what it implies about Ifrit being the boss around the library. Like, the other cursed books know him by name and call him 'sir' and are terrified of pissing him off, it's genuinely cool.
Behind this bookshelf, we find the deepest room in the library, and someone with his back turned on us.
I don't know what I expected a cursed book spirit called 'Byblos' to look like, but I gotta say, this wasn't it.
A quick casting of Libra reveals Byblos to have 3600 HP and a weakness to Fire, which means it's time for Dad to send him to bed without dinner.
Then Bartz casts Fira on his sword and hits Byblos for 1,500 damage, which makes everything else the group is doing, even the summoning, feel kind of irrelevant. Jesus.
"Very soon," Byblos says, "the master's seal will be blown wide open!" Then he disintegrates. So he was working with our greater antagonist… interesting.
With this deadly battle involving terrifying magic and the unleashing of summons over, we walk up to Mid, who was standing like five feet away the entire time:
He didn't notice the battle.
The group is exactly as baffled as I am and can't fucking believe this guy. Mid makes mention of hearing 'some rustling' behind him, and everyone just kinda collectively facepalms.
The game does a lot of these group-wide reaction shots and it really works for the comedic atmosphere of much of the game.
Mid then opens a shortcut and leads us back to the upper levels of the library. I guess that explains how he survived blithely venturing into this den of demons. And thank god for it, because he doesn't even seem to realize he was ever in danger. This is his reaction to all the other Scholars gathering around him in joy and surprise that he's safe:
What a guy.
Breakup for image count.
We're not changing our party set-up at this stage. I'm going to make Bartz into a Ninja once he's mastered Mystic Knight, but for now we'll stick with our current roster.
After the castle explodes, our party finds itself in the plains near Karnak. The town wasn't harmed, and so we can walk back in and find out that everyone made it, though not all in good health:
The Queen isn't just injured, she's delirious. It looks like the stress of being possessed by an evil spirit has left her in a traumatic state.
Townsfolk express surprise at Cid's machine having destroyed the crystal, and one of them remarks that the fire in the local pub's fireplace has grown weaker. They also mention that the explosion blew a chunk of that wall Queen Karnak had built to keep out the annoying busybodies at the Library of Ancients:
Our next destination seems clear, although I'm looking for Cid before heading there. Of note, a scholar in a home warns me that in the desert on the way to the Library lives a fearsome monster called the 'Dhorme Chimera,' and that I should be careful in crossing the region. Last time someone told me that it was about the Jackanapes and I got my shit pushed in, so I'll definitely keep that in mind
Cid, it turns out, is standing alone on his no-longer-fire-powered ship, and is having a bit of a depressive fit.
He then breaks off to go elsewhere, ignoring the party's calls to him. They're clearly sympathetic to his sadness, but don't seem to know how to help or reassure him. We track him down, and Lenna tries to tell him it wasn't his fault, but he just pushes the group away.
However, in the local pub, one of the townsfolks mentioned something interesting - Cid's grandson works at the Library of Ancients. Could it be that his grandson would know how to get his father out of his funk? It's worth a try! It's time to go meet that young man, who goes by the name of…
…
Mid.
His name is Mid. Cid's grandson Mid.
Some things shouldn't be allowed.
Alright. Let's head to the library, and on our way -
Well, that was quick.
The Dhorme Chimera doesn't fuck around. It deals ~500 damage a hit, which is enough to one-shot Faris, and has an Aqua Breath attack that hits everyone for 250+ damage.
However, it is only strong enough to one-shot Faris.
My first encounter with the beast ends in a nasty, but quick victory. The Punch Wizards deal so much damage that the Chimera only gets one turn before dying. This means that, unless it specifically targets Faris, victory is quick and easy, even if somebody (or the whole party) will require healing afterwards. Meaning…
I can farm it over and over for 3 ABP a pop.
This is turning out way easier and more convenient than expected!
The Barehanded Caster trick honestly seems like it's almost cheating. Like, I would normally have to treat that thing as a real threat and spend my best spells killing it, running a sharp tally in MP costs, but instead I can just get free high damage and trivialize challenging encounters. I'm going to refrain from abusing this too much, because the Chimera also gives XP and I don't want to accidentally become so overleveled as to trivialize the whole game. I only kill, like… a dozen of the things. Enough to push Lenna over into learning HP +20% (at this point she's basically the party's tank) and push her over into her last skill, HP+30%, which is a loooong ways off.
And once we've crossed the desert, here's the library!
The higher levels of the Library are full of scholars, but they warn us that they have a slight problem: the basement has been overrun by monsters. Specifically, many of the Library's books are possessed. And Mid, who was looking for a particular tome, ventured down there and hasn't been heard of since. Looks like we'll need to go rescue him ourselves.
Sounds like this'll be our boss.
Up on the rooftop, we get an interesting scene with more lore. Two scholars are operating a furnace, and are burning books! Now, that seems like it would be anathema to such seekers of knowledge, but the fact is, they're trying to get rid of those possessed books. Unfortunately, their only means of identifying which books are possessed is to open them, and doing so exposes them to a risk of attack. Interacting with the books, one of them is a traveler's log, another is a Blue Mage's journal, and the third…
This presentation is so cool. The monsters are named after pages, and they literally come out of the page to fight you. When you kill one, another one with a different name pops up - as if we were literally flipping through the book to fight them. I love it.
After disposing of these books, one of the scholars mentions that they used to have Ifrit's help to identify and burn the books, but he's no longer with them. Could this mean a new summon will be waiting for us hidden somewhere in the library? Let's find out!
The library is a maze of sorts, with movable bookshelves that you have to interact with to open up passages. One of the monsters in there also uses Aera, so I have Galuf equip Learn and Lenna swap to Blue Mage to grab the spell, even if I'm not sure how much use I'll be getting out of it (it's only now that I realize that some of these Blue Mage spells are going to be obsolete by the time I actually use Blue Mage for offense, because I'm an idiot). There is also, however, a much more interesting BLU spell to be found here!
Level 5 Death, as has been said in the thread, is a spell that targets the whole enemy screen and instantly kills anyone with a level that's a multiple of 5. A very, very tasty prize…
…unfortunately, my characters are currently lv 21. And in order to learn Level 5 Death, you have to have it actually work on you, which means the character with Learn needs to died and be revived before the end of the fight.
I am not grinding 4 entire levels just so Galuf can learn this spell right now. We'll come back later.
And, secreted away in a corner of the library, what do we find?
Unfortunately, I failed to anticipate this, and so did not prep with an Ice-focused setup.
Not that it matters, because I have Shiva and Mystic Knight.
Yeah, at this point my party is beefed up enough that a character who's wearing his elemental weaknesses written on his face like Ifrit is a cakewalk.
Obtaining Ifrit in turns leads to a very funny interaction when I reach a particular haunted bookshelf that decides to get in my way:
This interaction is genuinely funny but also kind of fascinating with what it implies about Ifrit being the boss around the library. Like, the other cursed books know him by name and call him 'sir' and are terrified of pissing him off, it's genuinely cool.
Behind this bookshelf, we find the deepest room in the library, and someone with his back turned on us.
I don't know what I expected a cursed book spirit called 'Byblos' to look like, but I gotta say, this wasn't it.
A quick casting of Libra reveals Byblos to have 3600 HP and a weakness to Fire, which means it's time for Dad to send him to bed without dinner.
Then Bartz casts Fira on his sword and hits Byblos for 1,500 damage, which makes everything else the group is doing, even the summoning, feel kind of irrelevant. Jesus.
"Very soon," Byblos says, "the master's seal will be blown wide open!" Then he disintegrates. So he was working with our greater antagonist… interesting.
With this deadly battle involving terrifying magic and the unleashing of summons over, we walk up to Mid, who was standing like five feet away the entire time:
He didn't notice the battle.
The group is exactly as baffled as I am and can't fucking believe this guy. Mid makes mention of hearing 'some rustling' behind him, and everyone just kinda collectively facepalms.
The game does a lot of these group-wide reaction shots and it really works for the comedic atmosphere of much of the game.
Mid then opens a shortcut and leads us back to the upper levels of the library. I guess that explains how he survived blithely venturing into this den of demons. And thank god for it, because he doesn't even seem to realize he was ever in danger. This is his reaction to all the other Scholars gathering around him in joy and surprise that he's safe:
What a guy.
Breakup for image count.
Final Fantasy V, Part 6, Part B
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
At least it turns out that whole expedition wasn't for nothing - he's found something of actual value!
It's a little weird because it's been established that Queen Karnak built the wall to keep out the annoying scholars, and the Fire Crystal only blew up just now, so how did he even know that the fire-powered ship needed a new power source? Either way, he's intent on taking that information to Cid. Unfortunately, if he has up to date knowledge regarding the ship, his information regarding his grandpa is a little outdated:
Mid refuses to believe that his grandfather would simply give up, and storms out of the library to find him. We follow him back to Karnak…
Murdering some more chimeras along the way for their Blue Magic..
The group actually gets back to Karnak ahead of Mid, and find Cid alone in his room, still despondent.
Fortunately, Mid has come up with one tactic the party couldn't figure out:
Beating the shit out of him.
More specifically, he's doing that visual trope where a character is beating against another character with their flailing fists in what's not really violent intent but an expression of sadness/anger.
Mid berates his grandfather in what comes across pretty clearly as a feeling of betrayal - that Cid taught him to never give up and to never be afraid of failing, that failing just means trying again and again until it works, and now it's that very same Cid who is failing to abide by this lesson and giving up.
This, it turns out, was just what Cid needed to be reminded of.
I am going to laugh very hard if/when it turns out the Earth Crystal shatters too.
It turns out Cid doesn't know where the Earth Crystal is. We need to find it, and for that, we need a means of transportation that can take us across the whole world - we need the fire-powered ship, which is where Mid's new book discoveries come in. The book he's found shows how to power the ship by…
By…
????
There is no explanation; Cid just pores over the text and is like "oooh, of course, that makes sense!" and then they leave. We follow after them back to the ship, where Cid tells us to sit tight while he and his grandson take care of the refits. As we do, though, Galuf has a moment.
Uh. What prompted this now, of all times?
We flash back, first to the conversation we had just now…
It turns out Galuf has gone through the same situation as Cid before, and the parallels are stirring his memories. Remember that girl the siren showed him who called him grandpa and whom he couldn't remember? Just like Cid, Galuf is a grandfather. And just like him, he's been berated by his grandchild, in the same flailing fists fashion, with the same insults.
Krile. That's the name of his daughter.
Getting a lot of FFXIV meta lore today!
For the non-players: in the Heavensward expansion of FFXIV, we are introduced to two things. One is the Great Gubal Library, a massive magical library that is full of possessed books, that we have to venture into to find a specific plot-relevant book, and its final boss is Byblos. The other is an important friendly NPC called Krile.
Now, FFXIV's Krile is an adult woman, not a child. However, she's also a lalafell, meaning she looks like this:
And I'd be willing to bet that it's in reference to this Krile, who appears - though it's hard to judge from sprites - younger than the rest of the cast.
We are not privy to the rest of that flashback, but this is not all that Galuf has remembered. No, he finally remembers who he is and, perhaps even more importantly, where he comes from.
Okay, I-
I can't say I'm surprised. Like I said earlier in the thread, I was already strongly suspecting an 'other world' twist - we can't be past the midway point of the game, and we're running out of word locations to explore. We also know that meteorites keep falling with what appears to be a purpose, and that people and monsters are using them as vehicles (terrifying as that sounds). That said, I wasn't expecting Galuf to just drop this on us like that.
But it's more than that. As we already suspected, Galuf is a Big Fucking Deal, and his amnesia has been interfering with an extremely important mission: stopping an evil that was sealed thirty years ago and is now reawakening.
"Exdeath" is kind of an incredible name. I can't not read it as X-Death. Like, dude called himself Superkill. It is either an incredible statement of threat, or the most self-aggrandizing edginess I've seen in this series.
And it turns out there may actually be some guilt mixed in as well, because we see a brief shot of the four Illuminati conspiring to seal Exdeath, and…
They used 'our' world to seal Exdeath because the crystals were there, and they used it instead of their world, which means that now that he's escaping we're the one facing the consequences.
Also…
That werewolf was the werewolf dude who intervened before the Fire Crystal shattered. These other two, though? The guy on the right has a helmet that's not quite a dead ringer for King Tycoon's helmet, but he could have changed it since then… I'm going to put him down as a maybe. That blond guy with the ponytail, though? The game is trying to hide his face by positioning him with his back to the camera, but that's 100% Bartz's dad from that one flashback at the beginning of the game. The very same who was talking about how the crystals shouldn't be his son's burden to bear. Our boy is an alien, I'm calling it now.
Would the game pull the same twist regarding its central protagonist twice in a row? Yeah, I think it would. And Lenna (and by extension Faris) might or might not be as well. Given Galuf is himself an alien, it would make a 4-for-4.
…
So the reason Galuf survived being so closed to a meteorite impact is that he was never at the impact site in the first place. He was in the meteorite, riding it down to earth. And the meteorite near the Water Shrine was carrying this unnamed soldier, and the one near Karnak had the werewolf inside it… The meteorites are the good guys, while Exdeath is possessing others like Garula or Queen Karnak to do his bidding here, from earth, where he's sealed.
Well, at least they travel in style.
Galuf reveals it's not his first time on this planet. He came here once, thirty years ago, to seal Exdeath. And if all four crystals break, the fiend will be free again.
Unfortunately, this is where his recollections end, and the strain of drawing back these memories gets to him. He passes out, but not without impressing on us again that we can't allow Exdeath to be revived.
Well.
We now have a name to put to our greater evil! We've gone a surprisingly long time without knowing what force we were actually up against - the game kinda used the crystal-amplifying machines as a red herring, didn't it? The hubris of man overstressing the crystal may or may not have played an important part in getting the crystals to the point where they could be shattered by Exdeath's influence, but we're up against something more serious than well-meaning but misguided attempts at ensuring human prosperity.
This is what I'm going to call a very Final Fantasy move. It's growing more and more apparent to me over time that while Final Fantasy often has this kind of… 'incidental' threats to the world, stuff like Garlemald's imperialism (FFXIV), Shinra's over-exploitation of natural resources (FFVII), Palamecia's conquests (FFII), Baron's greed (FFIV), these are all ultimately backdrop for a cosmic threat or pure evil kind of deal ([REDACTED], Jenova, Actual Hell, Golbez and then Zeemus). In Final Fantasy, an evil corporation or warlike empire is rarely if ever the endgame.
We let Galuf rest in peace and go back onto the deck, where we find that he's not the only one who's taking a power nap:
"Slept like a top"? I can't say I've ever heard that expression before. Well, now that the refits are done, are Cid and Mid finally going to explain what means they found of powering the ship without the Crystal?
No. Fuck you.
Cid and Mid are heading back to the Library of Ancients, and wish us bon voyage.
Bartz heads to the helm, and we begin the next leg of our journey!
Well. That was a lot of stuff to take in. I think that makes it a good stopping point for today.
Next up, we scour the world for the Earth Crystal, and then I can only assume we'll be heading to space!
It's a little weird because it's been established that Queen Karnak built the wall to keep out the annoying scholars, and the Fire Crystal only blew up just now, so how did he even know that the fire-powered ship needed a new power source? Either way, he's intent on taking that information to Cid. Unfortunately, if he has up to date knowledge regarding the ship, his information regarding his grandpa is a little outdated:
Mid refuses to believe that his grandfather would simply give up, and storms out of the library to find him. We follow him back to Karnak…
Murdering some more chimeras along the way for their Blue Magic..
The group actually gets back to Karnak ahead of Mid, and find Cid alone in his room, still despondent.
Fortunately, Mid has come up with one tactic the party couldn't figure out:
Beating the shit out of him.
More specifically, he's doing that visual trope where a character is beating against another character with their flailing fists in what's not really violent intent but an expression of sadness/anger.
Mid berates his grandfather in what comes across pretty clearly as a feeling of betrayal - that Cid taught him to never give up and to never be afraid of failing, that failing just means trying again and again until it works, and now it's that very same Cid who is failing to abide by this lesson and giving up.
This, it turns out, was just what Cid needed to be reminded of.
I am going to laugh very hard if/when it turns out the Earth Crystal shatters too.
It turns out Cid doesn't know where the Earth Crystal is. We need to find it, and for that, we need a means of transportation that can take us across the whole world - we need the fire-powered ship, which is where Mid's new book discoveries come in. The book he's found shows how to power the ship by…
By…
????
There is no explanation; Cid just pores over the text and is like "oooh, of course, that makes sense!" and then they leave. We follow after them back to the ship, where Cid tells us to sit tight while he and his grandson take care of the refits. As we do, though, Galuf has a moment.
Uh. What prompted this now, of all times?
We flash back, first to the conversation we had just now…
It turns out Galuf has gone through the same situation as Cid before, and the parallels are stirring his memories. Remember that girl the siren showed him who called him grandpa and whom he couldn't remember? Just like Cid, Galuf is a grandfather. And just like him, he's been berated by his grandchild, in the same flailing fists fashion, with the same insults.
Krile. That's the name of his daughter.
Getting a lot of FFXIV meta lore today!
For the non-players: in the Heavensward expansion of FFXIV, we are introduced to two things. One is the Great Gubal Library, a massive magical library that is full of possessed books, that we have to venture into to find a specific plot-relevant book, and its final boss is Byblos. The other is an important friendly NPC called Krile.
Now, FFXIV's Krile is an adult woman, not a child. However, she's also a lalafell, meaning she looks like this:
And I'd be willing to bet that it's in reference to this Krile, who appears - though it's hard to judge from sprites - younger than the rest of the cast.
We are not privy to the rest of that flashback, but this is not all that Galuf has remembered. No, he finally remembers who he is and, perhaps even more importantly, where he comes from.
Okay, I-
I can't say I'm surprised. Like I said earlier in the thread, I was already strongly suspecting an 'other world' twist - we can't be past the midway point of the game, and we're running out of word locations to explore. We also know that meteorites keep falling with what appears to be a purpose, and that people and monsters are using them as vehicles (terrifying as that sounds). That said, I wasn't expecting Galuf to just drop this on us like that.
But it's more than that. As we already suspected, Galuf is a Big Fucking Deal, and his amnesia has been interfering with an extremely important mission: stopping an evil that was sealed thirty years ago and is now reawakening.
"Exdeath" is kind of an incredible name. I can't not read it as X-Death. Like, dude called himself Superkill. It is either an incredible statement of threat, or the most self-aggrandizing edginess I've seen in this series.
And it turns out there may actually be some guilt mixed in as well, because we see a brief shot of the four Illuminati conspiring to seal Exdeath, and…
They used 'our' world to seal Exdeath because the crystals were there, and they used it instead of their world, which means that now that he's escaping we're the one facing the consequences.
Also…
That werewolf was the werewolf dude who intervened before the Fire Crystal shattered. These other two, though? The guy on the right has a helmet that's not quite a dead ringer for King Tycoon's helmet, but he could have changed it since then… I'm going to put him down as a maybe. That blond guy with the ponytail, though? The game is trying to hide his face by positioning him with his back to the camera, but that's 100% Bartz's dad from that one flashback at the beginning of the game. The very same who was talking about how the crystals shouldn't be his son's burden to bear. Our boy is an alien, I'm calling it now.
Would the game pull the same twist regarding its central protagonist twice in a row? Yeah, I think it would. And Lenna (and by extension Faris) might or might not be as well. Given Galuf is himself an alien, it would make a 4-for-4.
…
So the reason Galuf survived being so closed to a meteorite impact is that he was never at the impact site in the first place. He was in the meteorite, riding it down to earth. And the meteorite near the Water Shrine was carrying this unnamed soldier, and the one near Karnak had the werewolf inside it… The meteorites are the good guys, while Exdeath is possessing others like Garula or Queen Karnak to do his bidding here, from earth, where he's sealed.
Well, at least they travel in style.
Galuf reveals it's not his first time on this planet. He came here once, thirty years ago, to seal Exdeath. And if all four crystals break, the fiend will be free again.
Unfortunately, this is where his recollections end, and the strain of drawing back these memories gets to him. He passes out, but not without impressing on us again that we can't allow Exdeath to be revived.
Well.
We now have a name to put to our greater evil! We've gone a surprisingly long time without knowing what force we were actually up against - the game kinda used the crystal-amplifying machines as a red herring, didn't it? The hubris of man overstressing the crystal may or may not have played an important part in getting the crystals to the point where they could be shattered by Exdeath's influence, but we're up against something more serious than well-meaning but misguided attempts at ensuring human prosperity.
This is what I'm going to call a very Final Fantasy move. It's growing more and more apparent to me over time that while Final Fantasy often has this kind of… 'incidental' threats to the world, stuff like Garlemald's imperialism (FFXIV), Shinra's over-exploitation of natural resources (FFVII), Palamecia's conquests (FFII), Baron's greed (FFIV), these are all ultimately backdrop for a cosmic threat or pure evil kind of deal ([REDACTED], Jenova, Actual Hell, Golbez and then Zeemus). In Final Fantasy, an evil corporation or warlike empire is rarely if ever the endgame.
We let Galuf rest in peace and go back onto the deck, where we find that he's not the only one who's taking a power nap:
"Slept like a top"? I can't say I've ever heard that expression before. Well, now that the refits are done, are Cid and Mid finally going to explain what means they found of powering the ship without the Crystal?
No. Fuck you.
Cid and Mid are heading back to the Library of Ancients, and wish us bon voyage.
Bartz heads to the helm, and we begin the next leg of our journey!
Well. That was a lot of stuff to take in. I think that makes it a good stopping point for today.
Next up, we scour the world for the Earth Crystal, and then I can only assume we'll be heading to space!
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Note that Level 5 Death will totally oneshot your entire party. Which means if you want to actually learn it, you must commit the horrible sin against OCD of desyncing the parties levels so one guy can die to it (and then be revived) without just, you know, having an instant full party wipe.
Note this bookshelf will prevent you from getting through the dungeon, meaning you absolutely must acquire Ifrit. It's not possible to skip him (at least without wacky bug exploits or something, but nothing I know of at least).
Fun fact: an Exdeath reference character exists in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, but there the name was translated as Exodus, making it easy to miss if you're not closely familiar and paying attention.
(I encourage people to not talk about said character at all just because they are a reference to our still as yet unseen Presumable Big Bad)
Man, remember like two updates ago when Omi was going "Idunno about this Mystic Knight thing, they take a full extra turn to not really increase damage input all that much"? Good times. Good times
That's actually a pretty interesting way to do a Krile reference, ngl. And since we're mentioning ages (which don't actually come up in the game) and I got curious and looked them up a bit ago, might as well list a few here:Krile. That's the name of his daughter.
Getting a lot of FFXIV meta lore today!
For the non-players: in the Heavensward expansion of FFXIV, we are introduced to two things. One is the Great Gubal Library, a massive magical library that is full of possessed books, that we have to venture into to find a specific plot-relevant book, and its final boss is Byblos. The other is an important friendly NPC called Krile.
Now, FFXIV's Krile is an adult woman, not a child. However, she's also a lalafell, meaning she looks like this:
And I'd be willing to bet that it's in reference to this Krile, who appears - though it's hard to judge from sprites - younger than the rest of the cast.
Bartz - 20
Lenna - 19
Galuf - 60
Faris - 20
Krile - 14
Really, the most surprising ones to me personally are Krile (who seems maybe 12 at most) and the smaller than expected age gap between Lenna and Faris. In particular, with how they're shown during the Castle Tycoon flashback bit to them being sisters, I'd peg Faris as being at least 3 or 4 when Lenna is little more than a newborn child.
But hey, that's fantasy ages for you. Maybe they didn't want too much of an age gap between Bartz and Lenna for shipping purposes.
I'll correct just one thing here, no elaboration on the rest: that's not the same werewolf as the one from the meteor, he has a slightly different fur color (flashback werewolf is brown/blonde colored, meteor werewolf was more grey/black).
Yeah, it's... a surprisingly common issue, now that you point it out. Not naming specifics, I can think of at least two or three other FF games that have a similar "but ignore all that possible real-world parallel stuff, time for big evil space baddies and wizards and demons or something" vibe by the end. Which works, I suppose, but it can be somewhat disappointing at times to go from the evils of man to "actually it was all because of Zeemus" or whatever else.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Fundamentally Mystic Knight just gets better the farther through the spell list you get, and also is kinda a lot specialized for boss fighting.Man, remember like two updates ago when Omi was going "Idunno about this Mystic Knight thing, they take a full extra turn to not really increase damage input all that much"? Good times. Good times
Random encounters you can probably blow through in one to two turns if you play smart as a general rule, so why burn an entire turn on setup? Bosses though tend to take longer, and if you're better than tripling or quadrupling your firepower for the entire fight with one action only to then spend another five or ten or whatever turns fighting, that's starting to get pretty unambiguously worth it.
But also like, Fire>Fira>Firaga is getting red-queened a bit by enemy stats going up, but the Mystic Knight is keeping up with rising HP just through weapon improvements...
Which means the Mystic Knight's spell tiers going up in damage winds up straight extra, not just 'well it's better but by the time you're expected to use it enemies got tougher too'.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Pretty sure this is a "why not both" situation, honestly.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I've been warned about this, but due to random fight happenstance there's already a small XP gap that leaves Galuf a step behind the rest of the group. Hopefully it'll be enough when we get there; I'll try to zip back to the Library as soon as the rest of the party hits lv 26.
That the whole cast (sans Krile) are actually adults is a pleasant surprise; it's never quite clear from writing alone.Man, remember like two updates ago when Omi was going "Idunno about this Mystic Knight thing, they take a full extra turn to not really increase damage input all that much"? Good times. Good times
That's actually a pretty interesting way to do a Krile reference, ngl. And since we're mentioning ages (which don't actually come up in the game) and I got curious and looked them up a bit ago, might as well list a few here:
Bartz - 20
Lenna - 19
Galuf - 60
Faris - 20
Krile - 14
Spritework doesn't sell Galuf as being 60, though. They should have put some salt in his pepper, dude doesn't come across as a day over 50.
See, I noticed that, but I just assumed he was grey because... It's thirty years later and he grew old.
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- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I mean, if the Wind, Water, and Fire crystals are out of commission, surely that means this new propulsion system is Earth-based somehow? Perhaps Cid and Mid swapped out the internal combustion engine for a nuclear reactor - in the space of an afternoon.
I've heard it's a mistranslation of "Exodus" that they ran with in later ports and remasters because lol, why not?
(EDIT: Terrabrand appears to corroborate this.)
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ah, the Edmond Wells school of engineering. I can respect that.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
You've experienced the Peak, you've experienced the Deep, now get ready for...
The Mid
Damn, you really did do some grinding. When I got to the library my group were only like level 17 or 18, and the monsters around it are absolute dogshit for grinding, so I despaired, made peace with the fact I wouldn't get Level 5 Death, and moved on. But then I was able to grind to 20 in the dungeon itself and get it anyway.
Fun fact, you can already have Ramuh by this point and if you do this conversation is replaced with Ramuh piping up from your summon inventory to say hi to Ifrit and Ifrit being like "oh sup bro you're chill with these guys?"
I don't know what I expected a cursed book spirit called 'Byblos' to look like, but I gotta say, this wasn't it.
Yes it was, you've already played FF14
You: "I don't get the point of Mystic Knight it seems really low-tier"
Bartz: "alright, bet"
That's wild as shit, I figured Faris for 19-20 but I always assumed Bartz and Lenna were more in the 15-16 range, and Galuf more of a mid-50s.
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