Oh, yeah I've been resisting remixes because I wanted to focus on the soundtrack as Omicron and any newcomers were experiencing it, but SSH has a cover of Decisive Battle that absolutely shreds.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Oh, yeah I've been resisting remixes because I wanted to focus on the soundtrack as Omicron and any newcomers were experiencing it, but SSH has a cover of Decisive Battle that absolutely shreds.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Yeah, I hear that - good catch! I'm going to guess that it's a very light bass drum kick, a harp thump is logistically complicated (transporting harp is awful, as many of my harpist friends have bitched to me over the years) so occam's razor it's a drum hit.
There's no harpsichord that I can hear in the transition from the brass bombast to the spanish guitar. The second guitar section is well executed, it's the initial statement's balance issues that I have beef with.
That and the trumpet sample. I could go into my usual joke about how low trumpet sounds like artistic nose blowing but mostly I'll just stick with what what I already said and blame the mixing/EQ.
I think I have an inkling maybe of what you're referring to. I look forward to that discussion!
Ah, to clarify, I meant that the SNES version made me think of a harpsichord*. You're right the Pixel Remaster is all guitar for those sections, and I'm a fan of the switch.
*It's not the SNES piano sample, and I don't think it's a guitar either.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Are you talking about right here? Yeah, this is a sample that's hard to catagorize. Hrm. Harpsichord is a lot more twangy, so I don't think that's the right call. Safest bet is that it's some sort of electric keyboard, like a wurlizer. Just with a stronger attack and brighter sound profile. Guitar/electronic keyboard composite?
Yeah, all she's missing is the cape and the headband.
Which honestly, comparing the Amano artwork with Celes in game... the heck happened to her pants? Who decided "Yeah this imperial general lady? Leotard and cape, that's what she's wearing to battle" when translating from concept art to sprites?
Which honestly, comparing the Amano artwork with Celes in game... the heck happened to her pants? Who decided "Yeah this imperial general lady? Leotard and cape, that's what she's wearing to battle" when translating from concept art to sprites?
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Yeah, all she's missing is the cape and the headband.
Which honestly, comparing the Amano artwork with Celes in game... the heck happened to her pants? Who decided "Yeah this imperial general lady? Leotard and cape, that's what she's wearing to battle" when translating from concept art to sprites?
Last edited:
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Were it not from her brief appearance in Terra's flashback, I'd suggest it was her prison garb and that the jailer was a perv of some sort, but no, she wore it on parade. Dress uniform, maybe?Yeah, all she's missing is the cape and the headband.
Which honestly, comparing the Amano artwork with Celes in game... the heck happened to her pants? Who decided "Yeah this imperial general lady? Leotard and cape, that's what she's wearing to battle" when translating from concept art to sprites?
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
One of her colleagues dresses like a clown. I think it's safe to say that there isn't a dress code for Geshtalian generals.
When you're in command, every day is casual Friday.
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
I kind of assume the leather suit of the concept artwork is what she'd wear as an Adventurer after Locke breaks her out, while the sprite design is her Imperial uniform, but cartridge limitations mean she stays in the one.
Of course I'd also use a ROM editor to change her bare legs into a green matching her top and pretend it's armor. Granted I don't think her top has the same "texture" as, say, Edgar and Leo - who are the ones wearing armor with her color palette - so I've probably just given her green leggings. But I can pretend otherwise.
EDIT: To be fair, Terra is basically in a bathing suit herself, with pauldrons that don't even attach to anything: LINK
At least the bathing suit pauldrons Celes wears might be attached to her top: LINK
Last edited:
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Links are broken.
And both Terra and Celes are magic, that their pauldrons stay in place is just a consequence of that.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
I'd like to think it's a visual design thing. That they first wanted to follow Amano's full body covered design, but the color distribution looked weirdly when moving, until they decided that looking like she's in a swimsuit was what worked better. At least that's better than some of the alternatives.
Final Fantasy VI, Part 6: The Veldt & Return to Narshe, Part A
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Aaaand we're back.
Last time we talked, Sabin and Cyan had just jumped headlong down a giant waterfall, which is not generally a course of action I would recommend, but they make it work.
There are actually random encounters on the way down, which is just incredibly funny to me. These guys are just having a fight to the death while in free fall, it's straight out of Shoot 'Em Up. Anyone remember Shoot 'Em Up?
Anyway, once the inexplicable flying fish are dispatched, our characters hit the water and, in an unexpected show of realism, that's enough to knock them out and they drift in the water until they wash ashore and are found by… a wild child?
Okay. Huh. I guess we're doing Guy from FF2 again, hopefully more thoroughly explored this time. In fact, this guy's name is 'Gau'! Sabin wakes up and asks Gau who he is, but the kid freaks out and flees, leaving us in a new, unknown corner of the map.
Now, I know this place looks like any random plains in any Final Fantasy game, but not so: we're actually in South Africa.
I mean, not literally, but -
It's the Veldt, that wide open scrubland where few trees grow, as might be found in South Africa. And Gau is apparently a local fixture, popping up in the middle of fights to tell us to leave in Tarzan-speak. Ignoring him for now as there is no real way to interact with him beyond beating him up, which feels a little rude, we head for the nearby town, Mobliz, a charming rural locality without much of note. It looks to be the only settlement in the Veldt, which is surrounded by mountains and the sea, leaving them isolated; they stay in touch with the rest of the world through pigeons and even appear to have a bird-based delivery system. Birdmazon. Unfortunately, none of that helps us find our way back to where we want to go, though someone mentions that powerful undersea current can carry you far if you have a diving helmet, which is… Insane? As a method of transporting people and goods? Just put on the diving suit and let the Gulf Stream jet you to America, sure thing. The pigeon postal service, incidentally, is how a wounded soldier who got stuck here somehow keeps in touch with his love back home in a place called Maranda.
Final Fantasy VI is putting a lot of care into putting these little vignettes of individual life in its world. People also make reference to Gau several times, though they don't know him by name, as a strange kid appearing sometimes and running alongside monsters. Someone recounts an anecdote about throwing some dried jerky to animals and Gau appearing out of nowhere to steal it. Which is our hint - when I visit the item shop, I notice they sell dried jerky for 150 gold a piece, so I by some in anticipation of our next encounter with Gau; when we run into him, I throw the treat at him, and it works! Gau starts running manically all over the screen before finally pausing in front of our characters to greet them.
Sabin tells him the food is all gone, Gau demands he go get more of it, and he and Gau get into a kind of Dude Stand-Off where they're both puffing their chest and going "I'M NOT SCARED OF YOU YOU'RE SCARED OF ME" which is only made funnier by the fact that Sabin is having this stupid testosterone match with a literal child.
Eventually they get tired of chasing each other, Sabin declares Gau "pretty tough for a little guy," Gau declares Sabin is "fun" and "strong" but an idiot who "falls for every trick," and Cyan steps in to calm them down.
At which point Gau decides the term 'thou' is so funny he just can't get enough of it and starts running around all over the screen while shouting "Thou! Thou!" until Cyan takes offense at being made fun of, Sabin tells Gau that Cyan is going through a rough time what with his family dying, and Gau shows some actual concern and apology.
Gau is overjoyed at his new friends, and promises to thank them by offering them his 'treasure,' the 'shiny thing,' whatever that is. Sabin is dubious that this could be anything of actual value, but Gau is insistent and leads us to Crescent Mountain, the other location on the Veldt besides Mobliz.
Just after a short intermission in the form of…
Oh dear.
The explainer for Gau's mechanics.
As explained by a kappa, for some reason.
So.
Gau is our Blue Mage, kind of.
Gau has two commands !Rage and !Leap (notably he does not have an !Attack command, though he does have !Item).
With !Leap, Gau jumps and quits the party, instantly ending a random encounter with no reward. A random few encounters later, he will reappear after defeating all enemies, at which point he must be convinced to join the party again by throwing him dried jerky, and he will have learned the special abilities of each monster we were fighting when he left, and each monster we were fighting when he returned.
Then, when we use !Rage, we open a menu of all the abilities Gau has learned, and we pick one. Gau then enters the 'Rage' status and uses that one ability every turn until the battle ends or he is KO.
With me so far? Here is where it gets more complicated.
First of all, the Veldt is the only area of the world in which !Leap is a valid command. It works nowhere else. This is because the Veldt is a special area in which you can encounter any enemy you have previously defeated in battle, but the battles reward 0 xp, meaning you can essentially farm them endlessly for whatever Gau skills you like. It also means that, at least until we unlock free transport across the map, this is our one and only opportunity to teach Gau those abilities; this is a use it or lose it scenario, once we leave the Veldt we are stuck with whatever abilities Gau got in our time there until the plot brings us back, and remember, Gau does not have a native !Attack command, so if we can't get him a useful Rage, he's useless.
Which is where the second point of complication comes in. Here is Gau's ability menu:
Each unique ability is referred to by the name of the monster we obtained it from, and has no descriptor of its effect. The only way to know what 'Wererat' does is to actually use it and find out (and, in the case of stuff like status effects, hope it lands so we have usable information). But also, this isn't a Blue Mage scenario where there is a specific list of spells that are Blue Magic and can be learned from several monsters while other monsters have no learnable skill; every single monster in the game has a Rage ability. Even palette swaps like the Magitek Armor and the Heavy Armor - both have the same ability, "Magitek Laser," and as far as I can tell there is no difference between the two, but they are still recorded as different abilities under different names and I cannot know which enemies have which abilities unless I look it up.
It's a system designed either for use with a guide, or for random fucking about trying whatever and seeing what works, for a few hours.
Anyway that's why after reading through it I felt extremely tired and decided to just go and play Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for a while, a sensible game that doesn't waste my time.*
*This is a joke, but I did end up dropping FFVI for a week in part because I didn't feel like dealing with Gau's mechanics.
It's some clunky bullshit, is what I'm saying here. And because I'm trying to keep myself minimally spoiled, I don't want to go look up which monsters have which good abilities and grind for them. So we'll just stick with that list above that I got from a couple of battles and see what happens (I actually got a couple more before finally leaving, like the Commander, who casts Break, which is pretty strong at this stage of the game).
Finally, having resolved to put up with Gau's bullshit no more than was strictly necessary to make him usable at all, we head for Crescent Mountain.
Crescent Mountain isn't a dungeon, it has only one room and no encounters. Basically, these little mounds of earth you see are all places where Gau buried something, maybe. He forgot where his treasure is. So you go to examine each one. Sometimes, you find a potion! Sometimes it's a trick and Gau steal Sabin's purse, which 'had 500 gil in it!' and actually does remove 500 gil from the party's reserves. Harsh.
Local jock absolutely bullied.
Finally, we find the actual treasure, the 'shiny, shiny,' which turns out to be…
Puh.
None of the characters have any idea what this is, Gau just valuing because it's shiny and Cyan dismissing it as just some random bowl, but it's clear from the sprite that this is the "diving helmet" that was stolen from Mobliz, probably by Gau, the little shit. It's the copper 'hard-hat' which, along with a waterproof canvas suit, would form the 'standard diving dress' that is our iconic image of deep sea divers of yesteryear. You know, the ones that gave us the Big Daddies from BioShock. Though Sabin doesn't appear to recognize it either, he does notice that the bowl would 'fit over one's head' and wonders if this might allow the party to breathe underwater.
Okay. Sabin. Sabin please. First of all, you would need an actual air intake. Do you see any air pump or hose to connect to the helmet? Do you see an oxygen tank? No? Also secondly, there are three of you. How exactly do you plan on making everyone fit inside one helmet? Also, are you seriously going to try crossing an entire ocean in nothing but one dingy helmet -
SURE, WHATEVER I GUESS.
God, look at Gau. He looks absolutely miserable at the prospect of taking a bath. Sabin and Cyan jump into the water without any hesitation but Gau stays behind for a bit - but, credit to him, he is already attached enough to his new friends that he does find it in himself to finally jump after them, and follow them into the Serpent Trench's underwater current.
This is another "rails" sequence, like the boat ride; our characters are carried forward by the flow, with no ability to pause between battles, facing a series of random encounters, and having to choose a direction to move in at a couple of junctures. I'm not a fan of the direction choice mechanic because it feels essentially random, there is no information on which to base your choices, you just take a guess.
Also some of those fishes are brutal.
The big thing here is that a party of Sabin, Cyan and Gau suffers from fully randomized targeting. Sabin's Blitz moves do not select their target, they pick an enemy at random. The same is true of Cyan's Bushido moves. Gau can have non-randomized targeting in that you can make him use a screen-wide ability like the Megalodoth's Snowstorm, but if you use a single-target ability, he is also random (and also you lose control of him for the entire fight once you use !Rage, he just keeps spamming the same ability other and other, so he can't use items). This is not a problem as long as we're in fights where enemies die to a single Aura Cannon or Fang, but it is a massive liability against anything that takes more than one hit to kill, because then the randomized targeting means all characters are freely scattering their shots without killing anything until they die to the enemy's action economy.
Alternatively I guess we could use the normal !Attack command to finish off enemies wounded but not killed by Aura Cannon/Fang, but it still leaves us at an action deficit. All in all, we wipe twice before finally making our way to our objective.
There are a couple of undersea caves where we can pause, heal up, and save.
And once again, our trio of ultimate himbos wash up on the shore totally knocked out after throwing themselves off a tall place and into rushing water. If this happens again I am calling it their defining attribute.
We've landed in Nikeah, a peninsular town that is currently blocked from the mainland by a rock slide and which is thus entirely dependent on the sea for trade and has an open-air market where we can restock and grab some Relics and weapons, although I've been starved for cash enough that I keep my expenses to a minimum (this might prove not to be my smartest decision.
It's also where, huh, we find out Gau's backstory in a casual conversation with an NPC at a bar.
"It was a problem birth. The mother didn't survive, and the man couldn't handle the loss… Went loony, 'e did! Thought 'is baby was some kind of monster and threw it out! Poor thing never 'ad a chance…"
Welp!
That's surprisingly grim, although there was never going to be a happy backstory behind 'child literally raised without human contact.' It's honestly a wonder that Gau survived at all, although it's unclear if his father threw him out literally after birth or as a toddler, when he might have had some chance of survival by fantasy rules. Maybe he was raised by monsters, and it's why he can learn their powers?
Also you see that lady just above the midwife giving us Gau's tragic backstory? She's a dancer, and if we talk to her she immediately tries to hit on Cyan, of all people, who immediately backs down in fright like a woman has never flirted with him in his life and calls her a 'licentious howler,' which has to be using a definition of 'howler' I'm not familiar with, so she decides to double down to make fun of him.
I think this is the most sexually explicit gag in the whole series to date. It hits Cyan so hard he instantly collapses from sheer shock. Sabin laughs at him and tells him to stop being such an easy mark for jokes, Cyan is like "how are you remaining so composed in the face of her womanly wiles" and Sabin drops this banger.
Sabin, you ace king, I love you.
Anyway Cyan launches into a slut-shaming rant so long that his dialogue markers literally stop rendering his speech and turn to 'rant rant rant,' and everyone makes fun of him. Which. Honestly. He kind of deserves for this one.
Anyway, bote time.
We book passage from Nikeah back to Narshe, and that's where Sabin, Cyan and Gau's side-story ends for now. Of note: this is not a sail ship, it's a steamship! I just think that's a neat detail and a way to show that the world of FFVI is different from the aesthetic assumptions we've built up so far.
Alright!
It looks like all the groups are going to be joining up while the Returners are trying to convince Narshe's citizens to break their neutrality and side against the Empire. Arvis (the old guy who rescued Terra, if you forgot) says that they are not asking the Narsheans to expose themselves to harm, but Banon contradicts him - the Returners are asking the Narsheans to spill blood for their cause, there is no point in denying it; the cost of allowing the Empire to run rampant is too great, and should they allow Gestahl to claim more Espers, the greatest disaster in history could be repeated, the War of the Magi.
I appreciate that Banon is honest with the costs involved in what he's asking of Narshe. He's clearly an honest man, with a strong conviction in his cause, but who refuses to look away from the consequences. Is it a good political choice? I want to think yes, that making an honest case for the costs and consequences of complacency is the correct move, though we won't get to see it - just as the Narsheans whisper among themselves as to the prospect of a new War of the Magi and apocalyptic consequences, Sabin arrives - with two new companions (that's good!) and terrible news (that's bad!).
This dire news actually turns out to have the opposite of intended consequences - instead of realizing the Empire's destructive evil, the Narsheans see that Doma was destroyed because of their alliance with the Returners; if the mighty Doma couldn't even withstand the Empire, what's the point in opposing the Empire only to be themselves destroyed? Which is of course when in comes the last of our allies:
Banon asks Locke how the hell he obtained such strategic information and Locke hasn't even had time to finish saying "Celes here was one of the Empire's gen-" before Cyan is shoving everyone aside to corner Celes, presumably with his sword drawn.
Oh yeah baby, that's the good stuff. Real character drama hours. Not only is Cyan's anger at any Imperial agent understandable, but he specifically calls her out as 'the infamous general Celes," responsible for "the sack of Maranda," that town our wounded soldier had been conscripted from, the one whose letters from his fiancée depict a grim view of a conquered city patrolled by jackbooted troops. So Celes's past in the army isn't something abstract and vague, she's clearly had her fair share of brutal exactions - that she had a line which Kefka finally crossed doesn't change her part in previous actions of the Empire. Celes herself doesn't bother offering a rebuttal or an excuse, which I think is to her credit, and Locke throws herself between the two of them - it looks like Terra wasn't a one-off, our boy has a white knight streak.
Interesting that Edgar, our resident womanizer, is the one who is most familiar and, implicitly, critical of Locke doing this, while alluding to past history that Locke only vaguely touched upon so far.
This is the point where Terra elects to chime in that she, too, was an imperial soldier, at which point Cyan freaks out even more; Edgar tries to convince Cyan that the Empire might be evil but its citizens aren't. Unfortunately there is no time for this conflict to be resolved - a townsguard barges in to shout that the Empire is already arriving!
Fat lot of good Locke's advance warning did them.
One of the soldiers asks how they're supposed to treat the civilians, to which Kefka answers, predictably, "What about them? Kill them all!" Someone protests that Narshe is a neutral city, to which Kefka has this, just, incredible answer:
Just.
I can't get over this stupid-ass pun in the context of him planning a mass murder.
Kefka is truly one of the characters of all time.
The village elder, seeing that the Empire is forcing their hand, decides to make the stand that they have no choice but to make at that point. The Esper was moved out of the mines, up onto the cliffs surrounding the town, granting a more favorable defensive position.
…
So like, why is Narshe not hanging out the esper to the Empire?
Don't get me wrong. The Empire has no right or claim to the esper. They're not owed shit, they're evil fascist bastards who have slaughtered entire population.
But, strictly from the point of view of Narshe being afraid and neutral, why are they hanging on to the very thing which the Empire is coming at them for? They don't seem to have any designs for the esper, no particular plans or intent to use it as a resource. If anything, they seem somewhat afraid of it. They don't seem to gain anything from keeping it, so why do they treat 'the Empire is coming to take the esper' as a question of 'oh no we are going to be forced to fight them and it'll be a massacre," as opposed to "let's just hand the esper over and hope for the best, not like we're using it for anything anyway"?
That would obviously not work out in the long term. Especially with Kefka in charge of the invasion, the Empire would do violence to them anyway, and either way would just conquer them eventually. But it's not even raised as a possibility to be shut down, it's like… The vibe here is that Narshe does want to keep the esper for some reason and is willing to risk their lives to protect it, but we don't know why?
Which once again comes back to 'what the fuck are espers in this story."
Ah well.
We have this cool little scene of the protagonists leaving the elder's house à la queue leu leu, during which Edgar tries to warn Celes off Locke; it's such an odd exchange; he's warning her that he has a 'complicated past,' and that he wasn't protecting her out of love.
I do appreciate Celes instantly telling him to fuck off and that he's totally misread the room. Edgar's "so much for my next suggestion" implies he's disappointed that she isn't 'love-starved' because he was about to hit on her, but I think the idea that he's the kind of scumbag who tells girls 'nah my friend totally isn't the guy for you but you know who is' is an affect, and he's more worried about Locke than anything.
But then, the thing I have been waiting for THIS ENTIRE TIME
TERRA FINALLY MEETING SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HER FROM HER PAST
Terra says that Celes can use magic, but it's different from hers; Celes explains that she was raised to be a Magitek Knight basically from birth, having been infused with magic as a very young child.
Which. Okay. So the Empire is running a super soldier program, taking children and blasting them with magic to produce its magic-using elite. Wow. That's some new context and waaaiiiit that's basically SOLDIER from FFVII!!!
Then Terra has the weirdest follow-up question:
Celes is predictably baffled by this question, asking Terra if she's mocking her before turning away and leaving, leaving us with only more questions than we had a moment ago.
I think it's pretty clear that Terra feels something is off in her relation to other people, and she assumed that maybe the process of infusing her with magic had made her different somehow, that maybe all Magitek Elites had their capacity for emotion affected by the process, but Celes doesn't even seem to have any idea what she's talking about; so whatever's up with Terra, it's specific to Terra herself, and she lacks the lexicon and social acuity to do more than prod at it from a distance without daring to explain herself to others.
Poor girl.
Cyan gives a classic 'I don't trust you' warning to Celes, who responds with a similarly classic 'my actions will speak for themselves,' and then it's time to face the Imperial advance.
…
Okay, first off, I just want to note that it's extremely funny that the Narshe guards are nowhere to be seen. We stepped up and they immediately decided to let us handle this on our own or fucking die trying. Good luck, suckers!
Second: Okay. Okay, so as expected, the moogles protection mission was a tutorial. We are doing the same 'move three separate groups of characters, cutting off multiple enemy advances while protecting a vulnerable characters, spreading the toll of the fight across three parties' thing, only this time we are not provided with full 4-people parties balanced for us, we have to make our own.
This is really, really cool and also really, really stressful. Depending on how much the game uses it, this could easily be either one of its coolest mechanics, or the worse by far.
I have 7 characters. This means I can do two parties of 2 and one party of 3. I only have two mages, which means I only have two healers (Celes and Terra both have black and white magic so it seems reductive to just label them 'healers' but I don't mean that it will be their assigned role, only that they can do that roll at all whereas none of the others can). And these characters, huh, aren't created equal. Both in their toolkits and stats to begin with, but also in the fact that Sabin, Cyan and Gau are lv 11 at this point and Terra is lv… 8 or 9, I think?
Things could be better is what I'm saying. I have to build three roughly balanced parties and then try to juggle enemies to keep resource drain to a minimum.
Cut for image count.
Last time we talked, Sabin and Cyan had just jumped headlong down a giant waterfall, which is not generally a course of action I would recommend, but they make it work.
There are actually random encounters on the way down, which is just incredibly funny to me. These guys are just having a fight to the death while in free fall, it's straight out of Shoot 'Em Up. Anyone remember Shoot 'Em Up?
Anyway, once the inexplicable flying fish are dispatched, our characters hit the water and, in an unexpected show of realism, that's enough to knock them out and they drift in the water until they wash ashore and are found by… a wild child?
Okay. Huh. I guess we're doing Guy from FF2 again, hopefully more thoroughly explored this time. In fact, this guy's name is 'Gau'! Sabin wakes up and asks Gau who he is, but the kid freaks out and flees, leaving us in a new, unknown corner of the map.
Now, I know this place looks like any random plains in any Final Fantasy game, but not so: we're actually in South Africa.
I mean, not literally, but -
It's the Veldt, that wide open scrubland where few trees grow, as might be found in South Africa. And Gau is apparently a local fixture, popping up in the middle of fights to tell us to leave in Tarzan-speak. Ignoring him for now as there is no real way to interact with him beyond beating him up, which feels a little rude, we head for the nearby town, Mobliz, a charming rural locality without much of note. It looks to be the only settlement in the Veldt, which is surrounded by mountains and the sea, leaving them isolated; they stay in touch with the rest of the world through pigeons and even appear to have a bird-based delivery system. Birdmazon. Unfortunately, none of that helps us find our way back to where we want to go, though someone mentions that powerful undersea current can carry you far if you have a diving helmet, which is… Insane? As a method of transporting people and goods? Just put on the diving suit and let the Gulf Stream jet you to America, sure thing. The pigeon postal service, incidentally, is how a wounded soldier who got stuck here somehow keeps in touch with his love back home in a place called Maranda.
Final Fantasy VI is putting a lot of care into putting these little vignettes of individual life in its world. People also make reference to Gau several times, though they don't know him by name, as a strange kid appearing sometimes and running alongside monsters. Someone recounts an anecdote about throwing some dried jerky to animals and Gau appearing out of nowhere to steal it. Which is our hint - when I visit the item shop, I notice they sell dried jerky for 150 gold a piece, so I by some in anticipation of our next encounter with Gau; when we run into him, I throw the treat at him, and it works! Gau starts running manically all over the screen before finally pausing in front of our characters to greet them.
Sabin tells him the food is all gone, Gau demands he go get more of it, and he and Gau get into a kind of Dude Stand-Off where they're both puffing their chest and going "I'M NOT SCARED OF YOU YOU'RE SCARED OF ME" which is only made funnier by the fact that Sabin is having this stupid testosterone match with a literal child.
Eventually they get tired of chasing each other, Sabin declares Gau "pretty tough for a little guy," Gau declares Sabin is "fun" and "strong" but an idiot who "falls for every trick," and Cyan steps in to calm them down.
At which point Gau decides the term 'thou' is so funny he just can't get enough of it and starts running around all over the screen while shouting "Thou! Thou!" until Cyan takes offense at being made fun of, Sabin tells Gau that Cyan is going through a rough time what with his family dying, and Gau shows some actual concern and apology.
Gau is overjoyed at his new friends, and promises to thank them by offering them his 'treasure,' the 'shiny thing,' whatever that is. Sabin is dubious that this could be anything of actual value, but Gau is insistent and leads us to Crescent Mountain, the other location on the Veldt besides Mobliz.
Just after a short intermission in the form of…
Oh dear.
The explainer for Gau's mechanics.
As explained by a kappa, for some reason.
So.
Gau is our Blue Mage, kind of.
Gau has two commands !Rage and !Leap (notably he does not have an !Attack command, though he does have !Item).
With !Leap, Gau jumps and quits the party, instantly ending a random encounter with no reward. A random few encounters later, he will reappear after defeating all enemies, at which point he must be convinced to join the party again by throwing him dried jerky, and he will have learned the special abilities of each monster we were fighting when he left, and each monster we were fighting when he returned.
Then, when we use !Rage, we open a menu of all the abilities Gau has learned, and we pick one. Gau then enters the 'Rage' status and uses that one ability every turn until the battle ends or he is KO.
With me so far? Here is where it gets more complicated.
First of all, the Veldt is the only area of the world in which !Leap is a valid command. It works nowhere else. This is because the Veldt is a special area in which you can encounter any enemy you have previously defeated in battle, but the battles reward 0 xp, meaning you can essentially farm them endlessly for whatever Gau skills you like. It also means that, at least until we unlock free transport across the map, this is our one and only opportunity to teach Gau those abilities; this is a use it or lose it scenario, once we leave the Veldt we are stuck with whatever abilities Gau got in our time there until the plot brings us back, and remember, Gau does not have a native !Attack command, so if we can't get him a useful Rage, he's useless.
Which is where the second point of complication comes in. Here is Gau's ability menu:
Each unique ability is referred to by the name of the monster we obtained it from, and has no descriptor of its effect. The only way to know what 'Wererat' does is to actually use it and find out (and, in the case of stuff like status effects, hope it lands so we have usable information). But also, this isn't a Blue Mage scenario where there is a specific list of spells that are Blue Magic and can be learned from several monsters while other monsters have no learnable skill; every single monster in the game has a Rage ability. Even palette swaps like the Magitek Armor and the Heavy Armor - both have the same ability, "Magitek Laser," and as far as I can tell there is no difference between the two, but they are still recorded as different abilities under different names and I cannot know which enemies have which abilities unless I look it up.
It's a system designed either for use with a guide, or for random fucking about trying whatever and seeing what works, for a few hours.
Anyway that's why after reading through it I felt extremely tired and decided to just go and play Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous for a while, a sensible game that doesn't waste my time.*
*This is a joke, but I did end up dropping FFVI for a week in part because I didn't feel like dealing with Gau's mechanics.
It's some clunky bullshit, is what I'm saying here. And because I'm trying to keep myself minimally spoiled, I don't want to go look up which monsters have which good abilities and grind for them. So we'll just stick with that list above that I got from a couple of battles and see what happens (I actually got a couple more before finally leaving, like the Commander, who casts Break, which is pretty strong at this stage of the game).
Finally, having resolved to put up with Gau's bullshit no more than was strictly necessary to make him usable at all, we head for Crescent Mountain.
Crescent Mountain isn't a dungeon, it has only one room and no encounters. Basically, these little mounds of earth you see are all places where Gau buried something, maybe. He forgot where his treasure is. So you go to examine each one. Sometimes, you find a potion! Sometimes it's a trick and Gau steal Sabin's purse, which 'had 500 gil in it!' and actually does remove 500 gil from the party's reserves. Harsh.
Local jock absolutely bullied.
Finally, we find the actual treasure, the 'shiny, shiny,' which turns out to be…
Puh.
None of the characters have any idea what this is, Gau just valuing because it's shiny and Cyan dismissing it as just some random bowl, but it's clear from the sprite that this is the "diving helmet" that was stolen from Mobliz, probably by Gau, the little shit. It's the copper 'hard-hat' which, along with a waterproof canvas suit, would form the 'standard diving dress' that is our iconic image of deep sea divers of yesteryear. You know, the ones that gave us the Big Daddies from BioShock. Though Sabin doesn't appear to recognize it either, he does notice that the bowl would 'fit over one's head' and wonders if this might allow the party to breathe underwater.
Okay. Sabin. Sabin please. First of all, you would need an actual air intake. Do you see any air pump or hose to connect to the helmet? Do you see an oxygen tank? No? Also secondly, there are three of you. How exactly do you plan on making everyone fit inside one helmet? Also, are you seriously going to try crossing an entire ocean in nothing but one dingy helmet -
SURE, WHATEVER I GUESS.
God, look at Gau. He looks absolutely miserable at the prospect of taking a bath. Sabin and Cyan jump into the water without any hesitation but Gau stays behind for a bit - but, credit to him, he is already attached enough to his new friends that he does find it in himself to finally jump after them, and follow them into the Serpent Trench's underwater current.
This is another "rails" sequence, like the boat ride; our characters are carried forward by the flow, with no ability to pause between battles, facing a series of random encounters, and having to choose a direction to move in at a couple of junctures. I'm not a fan of the direction choice mechanic because it feels essentially random, there is no information on which to base your choices, you just take a guess.
Also some of those fishes are brutal.
The big thing here is that a party of Sabin, Cyan and Gau suffers from fully randomized targeting. Sabin's Blitz moves do not select their target, they pick an enemy at random. The same is true of Cyan's Bushido moves. Gau can have non-randomized targeting in that you can make him use a screen-wide ability like the Megalodoth's Snowstorm, but if you use a single-target ability, he is also random (and also you lose control of him for the entire fight once you use !Rage, he just keeps spamming the same ability other and other, so he can't use items). This is not a problem as long as we're in fights where enemies die to a single Aura Cannon or Fang, but it is a massive liability against anything that takes more than one hit to kill, because then the randomized targeting means all characters are freely scattering their shots without killing anything until they die to the enemy's action economy.
Alternatively I guess we could use the normal !Attack command to finish off enemies wounded but not killed by Aura Cannon/Fang, but it still leaves us at an action deficit. All in all, we wipe twice before finally making our way to our objective.
There are a couple of undersea caves where we can pause, heal up, and save.
And once again, our trio of ultimate himbos wash up on the shore totally knocked out after throwing themselves off a tall place and into rushing water. If this happens again I am calling it their defining attribute.
We've landed in Nikeah, a peninsular town that is currently blocked from the mainland by a rock slide and which is thus entirely dependent on the sea for trade and has an open-air market where we can restock and grab some Relics and weapons, although I've been starved for cash enough that I keep my expenses to a minimum (this might prove not to be my smartest decision.
It's also where, huh, we find out Gau's backstory in a casual conversation with an NPC at a bar.
"It was a problem birth. The mother didn't survive, and the man couldn't handle the loss… Went loony, 'e did! Thought 'is baby was some kind of monster and threw it out! Poor thing never 'ad a chance…"
Welp!
That's surprisingly grim, although there was never going to be a happy backstory behind 'child literally raised without human contact.' It's honestly a wonder that Gau survived at all, although it's unclear if his father threw him out literally after birth or as a toddler, when he might have had some chance of survival by fantasy rules. Maybe he was raised by monsters, and it's why he can learn their powers?
Also you see that lady just above the midwife giving us Gau's tragic backstory? She's a dancer, and if we talk to her she immediately tries to hit on Cyan, of all people, who immediately backs down in fright like a woman has never flirted with him in his life and calls her a 'licentious howler,' which has to be using a definition of 'howler' I'm not familiar with, so she decides to double down to make fun of him.
I think this is the most sexually explicit gag in the whole series to date. It hits Cyan so hard he instantly collapses from sheer shock. Sabin laughs at him and tells him to stop being such an easy mark for jokes, Cyan is like "how are you remaining so composed in the face of her womanly wiles" and Sabin drops this banger.
Sabin, you ace king, I love you.
Anyway Cyan launches into a slut-shaming rant so long that his dialogue markers literally stop rendering his speech and turn to 'rant rant rant,' and everyone makes fun of him. Which. Honestly. He kind of deserves for this one.
Anyway, bote time.
We book passage from Nikeah back to Narshe, and that's where Sabin, Cyan and Gau's side-story ends for now. Of note: this is not a sail ship, it's a steamship! I just think that's a neat detail and a way to show that the world of FFVI is different from the aesthetic assumptions we've built up so far.
Alright!
It looks like all the groups are going to be joining up while the Returners are trying to convince Narshe's citizens to break their neutrality and side against the Empire. Arvis (the old guy who rescued Terra, if you forgot) says that they are not asking the Narsheans to expose themselves to harm, but Banon contradicts him - the Returners are asking the Narsheans to spill blood for their cause, there is no point in denying it; the cost of allowing the Empire to run rampant is too great, and should they allow Gestahl to claim more Espers, the greatest disaster in history could be repeated, the War of the Magi.
I appreciate that Banon is honest with the costs involved in what he's asking of Narshe. He's clearly an honest man, with a strong conviction in his cause, but who refuses to look away from the consequences. Is it a good political choice? I want to think yes, that making an honest case for the costs and consequences of complacency is the correct move, though we won't get to see it - just as the Narsheans whisper among themselves as to the prospect of a new War of the Magi and apocalyptic consequences, Sabin arrives - with two new companions (that's good!) and terrible news (that's bad!).
This dire news actually turns out to have the opposite of intended consequences - instead of realizing the Empire's destructive evil, the Narsheans see that Doma was destroyed because of their alliance with the Returners; if the mighty Doma couldn't even withstand the Empire, what's the point in opposing the Empire only to be themselves destroyed? Which is of course when in comes the last of our allies:
Banon asks Locke how the hell he obtained such strategic information and Locke hasn't even had time to finish saying "Celes here was one of the Empire's gen-" before Cyan is shoving everyone aside to corner Celes, presumably with his sword drawn.
Oh yeah baby, that's the good stuff. Real character drama hours. Not only is Cyan's anger at any Imperial agent understandable, but he specifically calls her out as 'the infamous general Celes," responsible for "the sack of Maranda," that town our wounded soldier had been conscripted from, the one whose letters from his fiancée depict a grim view of a conquered city patrolled by jackbooted troops. So Celes's past in the army isn't something abstract and vague, she's clearly had her fair share of brutal exactions - that she had a line which Kefka finally crossed doesn't change her part in previous actions of the Empire. Celes herself doesn't bother offering a rebuttal or an excuse, which I think is to her credit, and Locke throws herself between the two of them - it looks like Terra wasn't a one-off, our boy has a white knight streak.
Interesting that Edgar, our resident womanizer, is the one who is most familiar and, implicitly, critical of Locke doing this, while alluding to past history that Locke only vaguely touched upon so far.
This is the point where Terra elects to chime in that she, too, was an imperial soldier, at which point Cyan freaks out even more; Edgar tries to convince Cyan that the Empire might be evil but its citizens aren't. Unfortunately there is no time for this conflict to be resolved - a townsguard barges in to shout that the Empire is already arriving!
Fat lot of good Locke's advance warning did them.
One of the soldiers asks how they're supposed to treat the civilians, to which Kefka answers, predictably, "What about them? Kill them all!" Someone protests that Narshe is a neutral city, to which Kefka has this, just, incredible answer:
Just.
I can't get over this stupid-ass pun in the context of him planning a mass murder.
Kefka is truly one of the characters of all time.
The village elder, seeing that the Empire is forcing their hand, decides to make the stand that they have no choice but to make at that point. The Esper was moved out of the mines, up onto the cliffs surrounding the town, granting a more favorable defensive position.
…
So like, why is Narshe not hanging out the esper to the Empire?
Don't get me wrong. The Empire has no right or claim to the esper. They're not owed shit, they're evil fascist bastards who have slaughtered entire population.
But, strictly from the point of view of Narshe being afraid and neutral, why are they hanging on to the very thing which the Empire is coming at them for? They don't seem to have any designs for the esper, no particular plans or intent to use it as a resource. If anything, they seem somewhat afraid of it. They don't seem to gain anything from keeping it, so why do they treat 'the Empire is coming to take the esper' as a question of 'oh no we are going to be forced to fight them and it'll be a massacre," as opposed to "let's just hand the esper over and hope for the best, not like we're using it for anything anyway"?
That would obviously not work out in the long term. Especially with Kefka in charge of the invasion, the Empire would do violence to them anyway, and either way would just conquer them eventually. But it's not even raised as a possibility to be shut down, it's like… The vibe here is that Narshe does want to keep the esper for some reason and is willing to risk their lives to protect it, but we don't know why?
Which once again comes back to 'what the fuck are espers in this story."
Ah well.
We have this cool little scene of the protagonists leaving the elder's house à la queue leu leu, during which Edgar tries to warn Celes off Locke; it's such an odd exchange; he's warning her that he has a 'complicated past,' and that he wasn't protecting her out of love.
I do appreciate Celes instantly telling him to fuck off and that he's totally misread the room. Edgar's "so much for my next suggestion" implies he's disappointed that she isn't 'love-starved' because he was about to hit on her, but I think the idea that he's the kind of scumbag who tells girls 'nah my friend totally isn't the guy for you but you know who is' is an affect, and he's more worried about Locke than anything.
But then, the thing I have been waiting for THIS ENTIRE TIME
TERRA FINALLY MEETING SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HER FROM HER PAST
Terra says that Celes can use magic, but it's different from hers; Celes explains that she was raised to be a Magitek Knight basically from birth, having been infused with magic as a very young child.
Which. Okay. So the Empire is running a super soldier program, taking children and blasting them with magic to produce its magic-using elite. Wow. That's some new context and waaaiiiit that's basically SOLDIER from FFVII!!!
Then Terra has the weirdest follow-up question:
Celes is predictably baffled by this question, asking Terra if she's mocking her before turning away and leaving, leaving us with only more questions than we had a moment ago.
I think it's pretty clear that Terra feels something is off in her relation to other people, and she assumed that maybe the process of infusing her with magic had made her different somehow, that maybe all Magitek Elites had their capacity for emotion affected by the process, but Celes doesn't even seem to have any idea what she's talking about; so whatever's up with Terra, it's specific to Terra herself, and she lacks the lexicon and social acuity to do more than prod at it from a distance without daring to explain herself to others.
Poor girl.
Cyan gives a classic 'I don't trust you' warning to Celes, who responds with a similarly classic 'my actions will speak for themselves,' and then it's time to face the Imperial advance.
…
Okay, first off, I just want to note that it's extremely funny that the Narshe guards are nowhere to be seen. We stepped up and they immediately decided to let us handle this on our own or fucking die trying. Good luck, suckers!
Second: Okay. Okay, so as expected, the moogles protection mission was a tutorial. We are doing the same 'move three separate groups of characters, cutting off multiple enemy advances while protecting a vulnerable characters, spreading the toll of the fight across three parties' thing, only this time we are not provided with full 4-people parties balanced for us, we have to make our own.
This is really, really cool and also really, really stressful. Depending on how much the game uses it, this could easily be either one of its coolest mechanics, or the worse by far.
I have 7 characters. This means I can do two parties of 2 and one party of 3. I only have two mages, which means I only have two healers (Celes and Terra both have black and white magic so it seems reductive to just label them 'healers' but I don't mean that it will be their assigned role, only that they can do that roll at all whereas none of the others can). And these characters, huh, aren't created equal. Both in their toolkits and stats to begin with, but also in the fact that Sabin, Cyan and Gau are lv 11 at this point and Terra is lv… 8 or 9, I think?
Things could be better is what I'm saying. I have to build three roughly balanced parties and then try to juggle enemies to keep resource drain to a minimum.
Cut for image count.
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Final Fantasy VI, Part 6: The Veldt & Return to Narshe, Part B
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Okay, first try.
Terra and Locke are together for the sole reason that they started the game as a duo. I have no clue what to do with Gau, so I just add him as another warm body to my 'main' party, Celes and Sabin, with Celes being able to provide both damage, protection and healing, and Sabin having the strongest attacks of any PC by far. Then Cyan, my second strongest single-target attacker, goes with Edgar, my best multi-target attacker, to try and compensate for their lack of healing with sheer murder.
Does it work?
Eeeeh.
The enemies are mostly slightly stronger versions of enemies we've fought before. Unfortunately Terra and Locke are my two lowest-level characters, and really struggle to both deal damage and survive special attacks.
When one of the three parties is KO'd, they are sent back to the healing bucket at the start of the path. This isn't too onerous, it means a slight loss of time but the soldiers just aren't all that fast to begin with so we can easily catch up. We do get XP from these fights, which makes me think it's actually possible to skip them, but we won't find out today - despite our characters' shortcoming, we do manage to grind through all the soldiers and confront the special officer protecting Kefka:
Hell's Rider is one of two bosses we fight in this sequence, and if I though the Terra/Locke duo could make it, I was wrong. I mean, they make a valiant effort; Locke steals a Mythril Vest and tries his best to hurt the massive enemy with his puny stabs, while Terra alternates between weak Fire casts and Cure to try and keep the two of them from being wiped, but ultimately my margin or error is far too thin.
I can't believe my enemy would resort to such dirty tactics as the same poison gas I use against them.
His special attacks are too potent for their tiny HP pool to withstand, and they have to go sit on the bench. Which means we'll tackle the boss with the real A-Team…
…Huh, I guess I must have decided that after utterly crushing the Hell's Rider, the Celes/Sabin/Gau team was too low on HP and MP to take on the real boss. Well, not that it should matter. Kefka's a joke, right? Cyan and Edgar teaming up should be more than enough to take him down.
Aw fuck he graduated to a proper boss sprite. We're proper toast now.
Yeah it turns out the hopes I might have been holding on of Kefka being a fake who uses tricks to look like he has magic but not being an actual proper wizard, thus his fleeing from Cyan and Sabin last time, were short-lived. Dude's stronger than we are.
Don't get me wrong, dude's no Exdeath. His spell repertoire is broad, he's shown at least ice, fire, poison and drain, and reaches up to Tier 2 with Blizzara, which is a one-hit kill, but he's no master sorcerer. He is, unfortunately, more than Cyan and Edgar can tackle at this stage - and wiping to the actual boss here, unfortunately carries the effects of a standard game over.
Another extra compared to previous games: when the party loses, we get a black screen of the front character falling to their knees in defeat. Suitably dramatic.
Okay, so, we can't brute force this*, we are simply too low-level to reliably survive boss attacks here and our damage is really low. We're gonna need to approach this the smart way.
*This is what we call 'foreshadowing, by the way.
Remember that line-up at the start of the scene where all the characters are in a row? Basically it's there to allow us to swap equipment. Every time we interact with a character, we swap to them, which means we can actually change our gear set freely before the big fight. Terra is getting both Earrings in hopes of boosting her magic, Celes is getting a White Cape (status effect protection plus increase to all defenses), Locke is equipping the Genji Glove so he can dual-wield daggers and massively increase his attacking power (this is extra important because Locke is the only character who uses the !Attack command; everyone else has a special ability that is more useful than !Attack, except him), and a number of other tweaks like this. Then I tweak my party set-up to better balance out characters based on level and coverage, and we try again!
…
Sometimes I look at screenshots I took literally 24 hours ago and I'm like.
What was I doing?
What was the big idea here?
Why did I decide Terra and Edgar alone could take on Kefka? Did I have a plan? What was the concept here, Past Omi.
Anyway that's another wipe, reload, try again with a proper team.
Okay, look, I can explain that one. It was simple. I figured, "Celes has Runic, which absorbs magic. She can just nullify all of Kefka's spells while Cyan delivers high-damage Bushido attacks with Fang.
Two problems here.
One: Cast times are back.
Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that?
Okay, so you remember how in FFIV, once you gave the order to perform a command, the character entered a preparatory position, and the action would 'charge' while the ATB system went on? The result being that it was possible, and even common if you were unlucky, to mistime casting - order someone to cast a spell only for the enemy to shift to a defensive stance before they were finished casting, for instance.
FFV did away with that. Inputs in FFV are pseudo-instant, although they don't necessarily look that way; if you tell a character to cast Curaga, then their Curaga cast will 'queue up' with whichever actions are still waiting to be performed because of animation time. Like, if Neo Exdeath is casting Grand Cross, that takes a while. If, during that time, I have Bartz use Rapid Fire and Faris use Dualcast, then the game waits for Grand Cross to be over, executes all of Bartz's eight attacks, and then executes Faris's Dualcast, but all of this is happening while the game is otherwise frozen. There is never a situation in FFV where I order a character to do something, they enter a charge state, the enemy continues to have their ATB gauge fill up and then reaches their 'turn' and performs their own action before my character has done their move, invalidating it.
I really wish I had spent more time discussing this during FFV, because it's a huge improvement in convenience of play that leads to a lot fewer nasty misplays that feel 'unfair' or random.
Unfortunately Final Fantasy VI brought it back.
Which means that, in Celes's case, if I use Runic, there is a lag between me telling her to use it, and Celes actually 'casting' Runic; if the enemy casts a spell during that lag time, it goes through. Then, because Celes technically took her turn before the enemy attacked, her ATB gauge fills up waiting for a spell that never comes, and then her next turn rolls around, having wasted a full turn trying to defend against a spell that never came because it had already come through.
A similar issue plagues Cyan's Sky counter, which is why I mostly only ever use Fang instead.
Anyway.
Also I don't know if Kefka's AI is tweaked to adjust to characters he 'knows' within the story, but on the one time I brought Celes to the fight, he decided to almost exclusively use physical attacks. Between spells slipping through the gaps in Runic and physical attacks on turns in which Celes is trying to defend against spells, this duo fares no better.
As usual Kamehameha was the correct answer.
Sabin is just the most powerful character I have access to at this stage in the game and it's not even close. He has the highest HP out of everyone and the most damaging move which costs nothing and is equally damaging to any row. His Aura Cannon hits for 350 damage insted of at best 200 from Terra's Fire or Celes's Blizzard. Locke, with Haste and the Genji Glove, can deal decent amount of damage and, even more importantly, quickly throw items at party members who need them. Gau brings in some extra damage every turn.
…
I don't really know what happened in this fight. I was trying to take screenshots and toggle the autobattle when the game got stuck in some kind of super-fast autobattle mode. I pushed buttons in vain trying to make it stop and resume control over my character, but nothing would do it, Sabin was cast in an endless loop of casting Aura Cannon while Locke attacked with his daggers.
Anyway we won. I guess all we needed was to just keep doing massive damage every turn as fast as possible and not care about anything else.
What did we learn?
Hell if I know.
But at last! We've thwarted the Imperial attack. Kefka runs away while swearing that he won't forget this, and the group hurriedly rushes to the esper to see if it's intact.
It is safe, it looks like. More than that - it appears to be alive, even inside its frozen shell. Others are baffled at this; but before they can investigate, something starts going on with Terra. She looks… troubled… And when Locke approaches her to make sure she's alright, there is a flash of blue light and he is knocked to the side, nearly over the side of the mountain!
Celes hurriedly grabs Locke before he can fall and pulls him up but Terra - presumably wracked by anime-style 'psychic powers gone out of control' expressions? This is a bit where the game does not benefit from the sprite style when it comes to clearly expressing what the characters are feeling - screams "No!!!" and then either she, or the esper, but I'm leaning towards 'she, accidentally,' fucking blasts everyone nearly to their deaths.
Terra, all concern for her friends seemingly gone from her mind, approaches the esper, and those characters that are still conscious remark in amazement that the esper is reacting to her.
The esper seems to reach into Terra's mind, talking to her, but we don't hear what it's saying. She begs it to tell her who she is while the others yell at her to get away from it. She doesn't.
And that's when she turns Super Saiyan.
Well.
Not Super Saiyan, not really. This doesn't feel like a power-up sequence, it feels more like some hidden nature revealed. It's totally out of control of Terra, and it causes her to, understandably, freak out. At which point she just shots out like a comet and flies into the sky.
This whole sequence has Terra just flying across the world, in what seems much less like a controlled moment of freedom and discovery and a lot more like Bartz flipping out and driving the airship into several circles around the planet in V. And then… fade to black, as she disappears.
Well.
…is Terra an esper?
Did the empire capture and mind control an actual esper, using magic to disguise it as a human?
Or is she rather some kind of weird human/esper hybrid, a creation of unholy science?
Or something altogether different and weirder?
What's clear is that she's definitely not 'just' an ordinary human, not even a special ordinary human like Celes who was infused with magic; the power implied in both her past slaughter of Imperial soldier and just going Superman in the sky suggest she is vastly more powerful in 'truth' than when we control her as an amnesiac.
Well. That's a solid mystery alright. And certainly an impactful twist and turn in the narrative.
We fade in to Locke, who passed out after being knocked out by Terra/the esper; he is quickly caught up. Celes even makes the specific connection that 'she looked like an esper.' Edgar barges into the room and, once reassured that Locke is okay, tells everyone that they have to find Terra - who appeared to go 'streaking across the sky, towards Figaro.' I… think she went rather a little farther than this, but it's not like they have radar capable of following her course beyond visual range of Narshe, so that's their best bet.
Locke is determined to find Terra and protect her, but Edgar tampers by saying they still need to keep watch on the esper and protect Banon - it looks like it's time to split the group again, only this time, we get to pick who we take.
Okay.
If I were a gullible idiot, I might select a party of the four characters I feel are the strongest, AND THEN THE GAME COULD BACKSTAB ME BY HANDING ME CONTROL OF THE LEFTOVERS IN THE MIDST OF AN IMPERIAL ATTACK.
Ahem.
Well, it's not just that. Having only three characters in the party leaves room for if, for instance, we meet another party member along the way. Like Shadow, or…
…
We have seven characters right now: Locke, Cyan, Edgar, Sabin, Celes, Gau, and Terra, who is currently off on a sabbatical. If we add one more character, which would be Shadow, that gives us 8 characters, more than in any FF game so far except FF2, which doesn't count. It's also, more importantly, twice 4, meaning it splits evenly into two parties for later events. However, this is now the second time the game has split us into three parties for the "tower defense" sequences, so…
Yeah, I'm gonna call it as 12 playable characters total. One of them being the Moogle.
Anyway!
As I've pointed out before, Cyan is a fairly sturdy and offensively powerful character, Edgar still has some pretty good multitarget attacks, and Gau has some okay Abilities although I haven't tested all of them (mostly I just spam Break), so…
Celes, Sabin, Locke? A mage, a bruiser, and a thief/potion dispenser.
Yeah, I think I can work with that.
Next time: We explore Narshe, revisit Figaro, and go on a grand adventure.
…
At some point I'm gonna need to actually level up my characters, I have been told 'by the way try to keep your level to a minimum in the early game because there is stuff that happens later that makes leveling up too high too early detrimental and it's been four hours and I just got my ass handed to me by Kefka three times in a row
Terra and Locke are together for the sole reason that they started the game as a duo. I have no clue what to do with Gau, so I just add him as another warm body to my 'main' party, Celes and Sabin, with Celes being able to provide both damage, protection and healing, and Sabin having the strongest attacks of any PC by far. Then Cyan, my second strongest single-target attacker, goes with Edgar, my best multi-target attacker, to try and compensate for their lack of healing with sheer murder.
Does it work?
Eeeeh.
The enemies are mostly slightly stronger versions of enemies we've fought before. Unfortunately Terra and Locke are my two lowest-level characters, and really struggle to both deal damage and survive special attacks.
When one of the three parties is KO'd, they are sent back to the healing bucket at the start of the path. This isn't too onerous, it means a slight loss of time but the soldiers just aren't all that fast to begin with so we can easily catch up. We do get XP from these fights, which makes me think it's actually possible to skip them, but we won't find out today - despite our characters' shortcoming, we do manage to grind through all the soldiers and confront the special officer protecting Kefka:
Hell's Rider is one of two bosses we fight in this sequence, and if I though the Terra/Locke duo could make it, I was wrong. I mean, they make a valiant effort; Locke steals a Mythril Vest and tries his best to hurt the massive enemy with his puny stabs, while Terra alternates between weak Fire casts and Cure to try and keep the two of them from being wiped, but ultimately my margin or error is far too thin.
I can't believe my enemy would resort to such dirty tactics as the same poison gas I use against them.
His special attacks are too potent for their tiny HP pool to withstand, and they have to go sit on the bench. Which means we'll tackle the boss with the real A-Team…
…Huh, I guess I must have decided that after utterly crushing the Hell's Rider, the Celes/Sabin/Gau team was too low on HP and MP to take on the real boss. Well, not that it should matter. Kefka's a joke, right? Cyan and Edgar teaming up should be more than enough to take him down.
Aw fuck he graduated to a proper boss sprite. We're proper toast now.
Yeah it turns out the hopes I might have been holding on of Kefka being a fake who uses tricks to look like he has magic but not being an actual proper wizard, thus his fleeing from Cyan and Sabin last time, were short-lived. Dude's stronger than we are.
Don't get me wrong, dude's no Exdeath. His spell repertoire is broad, he's shown at least ice, fire, poison and drain, and reaches up to Tier 2 with Blizzara, which is a one-hit kill, but he's no master sorcerer. He is, unfortunately, more than Cyan and Edgar can tackle at this stage - and wiping to the actual boss here, unfortunately carries the effects of a standard game over.
Another extra compared to previous games: when the party loses, we get a black screen of the front character falling to their knees in defeat. Suitably dramatic.
Okay, so, we can't brute force this*, we are simply too low-level to reliably survive boss attacks here and our damage is really low. We're gonna need to approach this the smart way.
*This is what we call 'foreshadowing, by the way.
Remember that line-up at the start of the scene where all the characters are in a row? Basically it's there to allow us to swap equipment. Every time we interact with a character, we swap to them, which means we can actually change our gear set freely before the big fight. Terra is getting both Earrings in hopes of boosting her magic, Celes is getting a White Cape (status effect protection plus increase to all defenses), Locke is equipping the Genji Glove so he can dual-wield daggers and massively increase his attacking power (this is extra important because Locke is the only character who uses the !Attack command; everyone else has a special ability that is more useful than !Attack, except him), and a number of other tweaks like this. Then I tweak my party set-up to better balance out characters based on level and coverage, and we try again!
…
Sometimes I look at screenshots I took literally 24 hours ago and I'm like.
What was I doing?
What was the big idea here?
Why did I decide Terra and Edgar alone could take on Kefka? Did I have a plan? What was the concept here, Past Omi.
Anyway that's another wipe, reload, try again with a proper team.
Okay, look, I can explain that one. It was simple. I figured, "Celes has Runic, which absorbs magic. She can just nullify all of Kefka's spells while Cyan delivers high-damage Bushido attacks with Fang.
Two problems here.
One: Cast times are back.
Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that?
Okay, so you remember how in FFIV, once you gave the order to perform a command, the character entered a preparatory position, and the action would 'charge' while the ATB system went on? The result being that it was possible, and even common if you were unlucky, to mistime casting - order someone to cast a spell only for the enemy to shift to a defensive stance before they were finished casting, for instance.
FFV did away with that. Inputs in FFV are pseudo-instant, although they don't necessarily look that way; if you tell a character to cast Curaga, then their Curaga cast will 'queue up' with whichever actions are still waiting to be performed because of animation time. Like, if Neo Exdeath is casting Grand Cross, that takes a while. If, during that time, I have Bartz use Rapid Fire and Faris use Dualcast, then the game waits for Grand Cross to be over, executes all of Bartz's eight attacks, and then executes Faris's Dualcast, but all of this is happening while the game is otherwise frozen. There is never a situation in FFV where I order a character to do something, they enter a charge state, the enemy continues to have their ATB gauge fill up and then reaches their 'turn' and performs their own action before my character has done their move, invalidating it.
I really wish I had spent more time discussing this during FFV, because it's a huge improvement in convenience of play that leads to a lot fewer nasty misplays that feel 'unfair' or random.
Unfortunately Final Fantasy VI brought it back.
Which means that, in Celes's case, if I use Runic, there is a lag between me telling her to use it, and Celes actually 'casting' Runic; if the enemy casts a spell during that lag time, it goes through. Then, because Celes technically took her turn before the enemy attacked, her ATB gauge fills up waiting for a spell that never comes, and then her next turn rolls around, having wasted a full turn trying to defend against a spell that never came because it had already come through.
A similar issue plagues Cyan's Sky counter, which is why I mostly only ever use Fang instead.
Anyway.
Also I don't know if Kefka's AI is tweaked to adjust to characters he 'knows' within the story, but on the one time I brought Celes to the fight, he decided to almost exclusively use physical attacks. Between spells slipping through the gaps in Runic and physical attacks on turns in which Celes is trying to defend against spells, this duo fares no better.
As usual Kamehameha was the correct answer.
Sabin is just the most powerful character I have access to at this stage in the game and it's not even close. He has the highest HP out of everyone and the most damaging move which costs nothing and is equally damaging to any row. His Aura Cannon hits for 350 damage insted of at best 200 from Terra's Fire or Celes's Blizzard. Locke, with Haste and the Genji Glove, can deal decent amount of damage and, even more importantly, quickly throw items at party members who need them. Gau brings in some extra damage every turn.
…
I don't really know what happened in this fight. I was trying to take screenshots and toggle the autobattle when the game got stuck in some kind of super-fast autobattle mode. I pushed buttons in vain trying to make it stop and resume control over my character, but nothing would do it, Sabin was cast in an endless loop of casting Aura Cannon while Locke attacked with his daggers.
Anyway we won. I guess all we needed was to just keep doing massive damage every turn as fast as possible and not care about anything else.
What did we learn?
Hell if I know.
But at last! We've thwarted the Imperial attack. Kefka runs away while swearing that he won't forget this, and the group hurriedly rushes to the esper to see if it's intact.
It is safe, it looks like. More than that - it appears to be alive, even inside its frozen shell. Others are baffled at this; but before they can investigate, something starts going on with Terra. She looks… troubled… And when Locke approaches her to make sure she's alright, there is a flash of blue light and he is knocked to the side, nearly over the side of the mountain!
Celes hurriedly grabs Locke before he can fall and pulls him up but Terra - presumably wracked by anime-style 'psychic powers gone out of control' expressions? This is a bit where the game does not benefit from the sprite style when it comes to clearly expressing what the characters are feeling - screams "No!!!" and then either she, or the esper, but I'm leaning towards 'she, accidentally,' fucking blasts everyone nearly to their deaths.
Terra, all concern for her friends seemingly gone from her mind, approaches the esper, and those characters that are still conscious remark in amazement that the esper is reacting to her.
The esper seems to reach into Terra's mind, talking to her, but we don't hear what it's saying. She begs it to tell her who she is while the others yell at her to get away from it. She doesn't.
And that's when she turns Super Saiyan.
Well.
Not Super Saiyan, not really. This doesn't feel like a power-up sequence, it feels more like some hidden nature revealed. It's totally out of control of Terra, and it causes her to, understandably, freak out. At which point she just shots out like a comet and flies into the sky.
This whole sequence has Terra just flying across the world, in what seems much less like a controlled moment of freedom and discovery and a lot more like Bartz flipping out and driving the airship into several circles around the planet in V. And then… fade to black, as she disappears.
Well.
…is Terra an esper?
Did the empire capture and mind control an actual esper, using magic to disguise it as a human?
Or is she rather some kind of weird human/esper hybrid, a creation of unholy science?
Or something altogether different and weirder?
What's clear is that she's definitely not 'just' an ordinary human, not even a special ordinary human like Celes who was infused with magic; the power implied in both her past slaughter of Imperial soldier and just going Superman in the sky suggest she is vastly more powerful in 'truth' than when we control her as an amnesiac.
Well. That's a solid mystery alright. And certainly an impactful twist and turn in the narrative.
We fade in to Locke, who passed out after being knocked out by Terra/the esper; he is quickly caught up. Celes even makes the specific connection that 'she looked like an esper.' Edgar barges into the room and, once reassured that Locke is okay, tells everyone that they have to find Terra - who appeared to go 'streaking across the sky, towards Figaro.' I… think she went rather a little farther than this, but it's not like they have radar capable of following her course beyond visual range of Narshe, so that's their best bet.
Locke is determined to find Terra and protect her, but Edgar tampers by saying they still need to keep watch on the esper and protect Banon - it looks like it's time to split the group again, only this time, we get to pick who we take.
Okay.
If I were a gullible idiot, I might select a party of the four characters I feel are the strongest, AND THEN THE GAME COULD BACKSTAB ME BY HANDING ME CONTROL OF THE LEFTOVERS IN THE MIDST OF AN IMPERIAL ATTACK.
Ahem.
Well, it's not just that. Having only three characters in the party leaves room for if, for instance, we meet another party member along the way. Like Shadow, or…
…
We have seven characters right now: Locke, Cyan, Edgar, Sabin, Celes, Gau, and Terra, who is currently off on a sabbatical. If we add one more character, which would be Shadow, that gives us 8 characters, more than in any FF game so far except FF2, which doesn't count. It's also, more importantly, twice 4, meaning it splits evenly into two parties for later events. However, this is now the second time the game has split us into three parties for the "tower defense" sequences, so…
Yeah, I'm gonna call it as 12 playable characters total. One of them being the Moogle.
Anyway!
As I've pointed out before, Cyan is a fairly sturdy and offensively powerful character, Edgar still has some pretty good multitarget attacks, and Gau has some okay Abilities although I haven't tested all of them (mostly I just spam Break), so…
Celes, Sabin, Locke? A mage, a bruiser, and a thief/potion dispenser.
Yeah, I think I can work with that.
Next time: We explore Narshe, revisit Figaro, and go on a grand adventure.
…
At some point I'm gonna need to actually level up my characters, I have been told 'by the way try to keep your level to a minimum in the early game because there is stuff that happens later that makes leveling up too high too early detrimental and it's been four hours and I just got my ass handed to me by Kefka three times in a row
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GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
How to use Gau:
1. Use !Leap on Stray Cat
2. Cat Scratch your way to victory for the rest of the game
Rage is a mechanic that can be completely ignored by just grabbing Stray Cat as soon as you get Gau and abusing it for the rest of the game - Cat Scratch lets you attack four times in a row. It's as simple as it is strong. There's a couple of other good ones, but you can basically just use Stray Cat and Gau will be great from the moment you get him until the final boss.
1. Use !Leap on Stray Cat
2. Cat Scratch your way to victory for the rest of the game
Rage is a mechanic that can be completely ignored by just grabbing Stray Cat as soon as you get Gau and abusing it for the rest of the game - Cat Scratch lets you attack four times in a row. It's as simple as it is strong. There's a couple of other good ones, but you can basically just use Stray Cat and Gau will be great from the moment you get him until the final boss.
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- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I'd call it a dungeon. It's not on the overworld, and it's not really a town.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
I think Gau gains statistics depending on each Rage, them being different even among mirror swaps.
It's definitely intended as a skill piñata, although there are "better" choices than others, of course, and a guide helps if you can't be arsed to fuck around. I remember a few solid choices back in the SNES times that could last for a long time, but that risks making Gau far more boring.
Pfft.Okay. Sabin. Sabin please. First of all, you would need an actual air intake. Do you see any air pump or hose to connect to the helmet? Do you see an oxygen tank? No? Also secondly, there are three of you. How exactly do you plan on making everyone fit inside one helmet? Also, are you seriously going to try crossing an entire ocean in nothing but one dingy helmet -
SURE, WHATEVER I GUESS.
Sure, it's a joke, but something to note is how he says it's a "benefit", not a loss or anything negative or neutral. It's purely, actively positive.
*humms in "you still haven't seen shit"*
Myself, I just make one party of 4 with the main characters I want to tackle the boss, another of 3, each with Terra or Celes, then park them in the two chokepoints at the sides of where you start, then wait until the fuckers come to papa.
PFF-
Actually, I got no higher ground to judge anyone here, because I did fuck and fuck up a lot here my first time.
That's a good search party.
*sigh* No. That's... no. No. NO. No no no no no NO! Not on your first playthrough! There are plenty you still don't know about the game to be able to skip or brute force things. You're only setting yourself up for frustration.At some point I'm gonna need to actually level up my characters, I have been told 'by the way try to keep your level to a minimum in the early game because there is stuff that happens later that makes leveling up too high too early detrimental and it's been four hours and I just got my ass handed to me by Kefka three times in a row
Go level up. Three or four levels won't kill you.
Thing is people tell this presumably for a quite farther point than this. He will grok the how, but not the why or when.
Even if you can't get Stray Cat, I remember Templar being solid for half the game, which is a forced encounter in the Doma camp anyway IIRC, and gave Gau I think both a decent attack and some Fira goodness.
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
One of the (character builds) guides I follow describes Gau as being only as useful as the amount of effort you put into him.
So you could follow a Gau guide that explains all the different Rages he could get and where to get them and how useful they are, and spend hours on the Veldt trying to get them and manipulating the game RNG to get them to spawn in the first place, in which case you get a Gau that can literally solo the Narshe defence sequence (bar Kefka, and even then I suspect he'd be able to solo Kefka too), all through the critters you've already encountered. Which means as the game goes on and you encounter more types of enemies, Gau just gets stronger from there.
Or you go "screw it" and just get Stray Cat for Cat Scratch, and you get a Gau who at least holds up his end, but isn't anything noteworthy. But it's a very quick in-and-out of the Veldt right after you pick up the Stray Cat Rage.
Amusingly, Gau is the first character we meet who does need to be in the front row, because Cat Scratch (and most of his physical Rages) do care about row.
So you could follow a Gau guide that explains all the different Rages he could get and where to get them and how useful they are, and spend hours on the Veldt trying to get them and manipulating the game RNG to get them to spawn in the first place, in which case you get a Gau that can literally solo the Narshe defence sequence (bar Kefka, and even then I suspect he'd be able to solo Kefka too), all through the critters you've already encountered. Which means as the game goes on and you encounter more types of enemies, Gau just gets stronger from there.
Or you go "screw it" and just get Stray Cat for Cat Scratch, and you get a Gau who at least holds up his end, but isn't anything noteworthy. But it's a very quick in-and-out of the Veldt right after you pick up the Stray Cat Rage.
Amusingly, Gau is the first character we meet who does need to be in the front row, because Cat Scratch (and most of his physical Rages) do care about row.
Man, I really love Gau the wild child boy. He doesn't get a lot of characterization or screen time, but what he does gives us a pretty fun character who's also just... surprisingly empathetic despite the fact that he can barely speak english and this scene alone is probably the most interaction he's had with other humans in his entire life.Sabin tells him the food is all gone, Gau demands he go get more of it, and he and Gau get into a kind of Dude Stand-Off where they're both puffing their chest and going "I'M NOT SCARED OF YOU YOU'RE SCARED OF ME" which is only made funnier by the fact that Sabin is having this stupid testosterone match with a literal child.
Eventually they get tired of chasing each other, Sabin declares Gau "pretty tough for a little guy," Gau declares Sabin is "fun" and "strong" but an idiot who "falls for every trick," and Cyan steps in to calm them down.
At which point Gau decides the term 'thou' is so funny he just can't get enough of it and starts running around all over the screen while shouting "Thou! Thou!" until Cyan takes offense at being made fun of, Sabin tells Gau that Cyan is going through a rough time what with his family dying, and Gau shows some actual concern and apology.
So one small bit here I'll correct now, before the full character writeup at the end: You don't need jerky to re-recruit Gau on his repeat appearances. Whenever he shows up after a fight, just wait a few seconds and he'll go "AHUUU ME GAU REMEMBER YOU, ME FRIEND!" and rejoin as long as you have a free slot in your party.
And yes, it's kind of... annoying to try and return to the Veldt at this point in the game. Not impossible, but you have to like... walk your way back across the entire continent so far and back through the path of Sabin's scenario (sans the Phantom Train), then jump back in the river again and take a ship again to get back to the main plot. Really not worth it until you have better transport to reach the Veldt later... meaning your Gau is probably going to be fairly dead weight for the time being.
Hahaha
Good one, yes, there's noting time wasting in Wrath of the Righteous, not at all
No three hour long tavern defense missions you can't save in the middle of haha
(Great game outside of that one fight so far but holy SHIT fuck that mission)
As if Master Himbo Sabin would do anything else, right?Puh.
None of the characters have any idea what this is, Gau just valuing because it's shiny and Cyan dismissing it as just some random bowl, but it's clear from the sprite that this is the "diving helmet" that was stolen from Mobliz, probably by Gau, the little shit. It's the copper 'hard-hat' which, along with a waterproof canvas suit, would form the 'standard diving dress' that is our iconic image of deep sea divers of yesteryear. You know, the ones that gave us the Big Daddies from BioShock. Though Sabin doesn't appear to recognize it either, he does notice that the bowl would 'fit over one's head' and wonders if this might allow the party to breathe underwater.
Okay. Sabin. Sabin please. First of all, you would need an actual air intake. Do you see any air pump or hose to connect to the helmet? Do you see an oxygen tank? No? Also secondly, there are three of you. How exactly do you plan on making everyone fit inside one helmet? Also, are you seriously going to try crossing an entire ocean in nothing but one dingy helmet -
SURE, WHATEVER I GUESS.
Since you called out those fishes as brutal, I might as well call out that hilariously 2 out of 3 of them are in fact great Rages for Gau: There's one that gives him Aquabreath, and another that gives him Gigavolt, a single target electric spell that has damage comparable to oh, Thundaga.
The latter of those two being available this early may give you one hint to just how terrifyingly strong Gau is if you put in the time and knowledge investment (though I won't begrudge anyone who doesn't, this playthrough is the first time I've really been using him myself.)
I suspect it's some straight up Tarzan/Mowgli levels of tossed out and raised entirely by monsters, myself. Though that does also raise a question of where exactly monsters are in the FFVI ecosystem, if some are apparently willing and able to raise an infant child? Really does feel like it varies from game to game, where in some cases it's "literally incarnations of evil and dark energy" while in others there's like... actually intelligent monster species who just don't' particularly like humans.
MAN this gag... this one really didn't land for me, personally. It kind of hearkens right back to how the story swapped right into humor for Cyan despite Doma being massacred literally minutes ago in the Imperial Camp, but it's just... Cyan's wife and child died maybe less than a week ago at this point, and Sabin's response to Cyan not enjoying some random bar lady hitting on him is to go "haha Cyan you're so silly", not to mention Cyan launching into this whole "womanly wiles" gag. Feels like a missed opportunity to explore his trauma a bit more, I guess.
Yeah I've found Banon to be surprisingly likeable on replay with how brutally honest he is. Certainly more of a character than I remembered in previous playthroughs, where I mostly just recalled him as "they guy with Prayer who you can't let die on the raft".
Oh boy, more Terra is super socially weird content! I'm sure this won't become even more relevant to look back on at the end of the update or anything.Yeah! Remember that? Celes, Terra, Leo and Kefka were all present in that prologue sequence with Emperor Gestahl! They know each other! Terra says that Celes can use magic, but it's different from hers; Celes explains that she was raised to be a Magitek Knight basically from birth, having been infused with magic as a very young child.
Which. Okay. So the Empire is running a super soldier program, taking children and blasting them with magic to produce its magic-using elite. Wow. That's some new context and waaaiiiit that's basically SOLDIER from FFVII!!!
Then Terra has the weirdest follow-up question:
Celes is predictably baffled by this question, asking Terra if she's mocking her before turning away and leaving, leaving us with only more questions than we had a moment ago.
I think it's pretty clear that Terra feels something is off in her relation to other people, and she assumed that maybe the process of infusing her with magic had made her different somehow, that maybe all Magitek Elites had their capacity for emotion affected by the process, but Celes doesn't even seem to have any idea what she's talking about; so whatever's up with Terra, it's specific to Terra herself, and she lacks the lexicon and social acuity to do more than prod at it from a distance without daring to explain herself to others.
So first, I just want to point out that ignoring the party split for the Forked Tower in FFV, this is straight up the first time in Final Fantasy history that you get to actually choose your party members and set them up how you'd like, rather than having a per-determined party for the entire game. A series staple that started here.
Secondly, to be honest... the best bet for this segment is totally just to slam your top 4 party members in one group and have them run around stomping all the threats themselves, particularly since you have infinite healing available up above. Bonus points for making sure Celes is in that party so she can eat Kefka's spells in the fight with him (leaving him with exclusively the attack option), and putting Locke in a solo party for... reasons to be explained in the next quote.
So FUN FACT: Since the only fight that causes a game over if you lose it is Kefka, you can actually bring Locke in to steal this Mythril Vest, get knocked out... then heal and repeat indefinitely until you have enough vests to outfit the entire party in some kickass good armor for this part of the game.
Well, there's one other wild boy who's absolutely stronger at this point in the game... or one of the weakest characters if you don't know how to use him
Don't worry, that "keep them minimum" threshold is coming up in an update or two, and you'll probably understand why it's a recommendation when you get there. And honestly, it's not a super important recommendation, I didn't worry about it much this playthrough and my party is still crushing everything in their way.
As for party composition, Celes/Sabin/Locke is good, though I'll make one recommendation at least: Since your first destination from here is Figaro, I'll recommend bring Edgar along even if you just walk back to Narshe and dump him afterwards. No spoilers, but there's a missable cutscene if you bring both brothers back to their home kingdom together.
And now, how about some character analysis for the smallest bestest boy, Gau!
Adloquium already said it, but Gau is basically worth however much investment you put into him. With little or no investment, Gau is probably one of the worst characters in the entire game, because most of his starting Rages are pretty garbage and it's a bit of a pain to keep !Leaping into groups on the Veldt with no idea exactly which Rages are actually worth grabbing. On the other hand, if you do invest time in getting those Rages and figuring out/looking up which ones are good?
First, some mechanical knowledge on Rages: They entirely take away control of Gau once activated, though he can still do things like toss items before you Rage if you want him to. Once Raging, every Rage has two different attacks - 50% of the time and dependent on what Rage he's using, and a normal attack command used the other 50% of the time (or so the wiki says, other sources have mentioned 75% ability and 25% normal attack). Also importantly, Rages give Gau all the modifiers of whatever he's raging as. Rage as something that flies, Gau gets the float status. Rage as something with inate Protect status, he gets the Protect status. Rage as something that absorbs or is weak to certain elements, he absorbs or is weak to those elements. Rage as an undead, Gau is now undead and healed by death spells, injured by healing.
As for a few good Rages themselves at this point in the game, Stray Cat/Cat Scratch has already been mentioned, which is a single physical attack that does quadruple damage of normal. Templar is also a staple that I used for basically the entire upcoming chunk of the game because it autocasts Protect on Gau, and then he casts Fira at a point in time where Celes and Terra are miles off from learning second tier magic - many a combat can be cleared turn 1 because Gau just set the entire battlefield on Fire. And one other notable one is of all things, Mu - for whatever reason it's ability is Snare, which opens a giant hole under an enemy and drops them in, killing them instantly.
Basically, it's up to you if you want to put in the investment for Gau in the future because knowing which rages to pick makes him an absolute powerhouse. You could figure them out yourself, or you could ask the thread and get a few suggestions or pointers on which rages are good.
Or you can dump Gau by the wayside for much less complicated party members, and frankly? I totally understand if you do, he'san unholy fusion of a Berserker, Blue Mage, and Beastmaster, all classes that in FFV required some system knowledge or babysitting to make good. Like has been said, Top Tier character if you invest... but one of the worst in the game if you don't.
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Man, Gau isn't my favorite character in the roster, but I'm sorry to hear that he put you off the game for a whole week.
So, this actually isn't true, though it's definitely not something you'd discover without going way out of your way. All the various passages Sabin used to get to the Veldt? They all still exist. You can, right after the Narshe battle, go south to the Figaro cave, through Mt. Kolts, to the Returner hideout, where you can get back into the river Lethe which takes you to where Sabin washed up before. You can take the same route south (though you just pass the Imperial Camp on the overworld, you can't go back in) and jump back down the waterfall to get to the Veldt again.
At least, you could back on the SNES. Admittedly, I didn't try it at this point during my own Pixel Remaster playthrough.
I've definitely never bothered maxing out Gau's Rages because you absolutely do need a guide for that (if you think Gau's mechanic is insane, the mechanics behind how the Veldt rolls encounters would make you throw your keyboard) but several very easily accessible ones can give Gau a real suite of workhorse options.
Each Rage actually only has one special move that it uses, so when he selects it for a rage Gau either does a basic attack, or the one special attack from that Rage. The Stray Cat was already mentioned as a great pickup for the Cat Scratch move, but certain other Rages can give you spells way earlier than you 'should' have them. Of things you could get right now, one gives you Fira, another gives you something between Thundara and Thundaga in power, for example. Gau also gets certain statuses from some rages. The various magitek armor varieties, for instance, also give Gau Protect when he uses them.
Heh, remember how you were complaining at the game designers for sticking you on the Phantom train with no shop (that you found )? This fight here is actually where that complaint used to be warranted. That bucket with the recovery water in it was a PR addition. In the SNES version, the squad shuffle to move equipment around was there but it was possible to find yourself stuck in this fight without having restocked on items, and no way to recover before the battle and to just be stuck without enough endurance to make it through. Tough luck if you didn't have a backup save file.
Iteration! Fail Faster!
Okay, so first off I should ask if you have the option set for monster ATBs to pause while you're in a menu turned off? Because that's a thing in FFVI. If that's on, then monsters can issue commands while you're in a menu. Even with that off, it can look like they're issuing commands while you're in a menu, but that's just the game playing out the animations of moves that were already queued up before you opened your Blitz menu or whatever. That's relevant here because FFVI barely has actual cast times, but the animations can get backed up so that you'll enter the Runic command, and that puts it into the queue behind whatever other commands are already set to go. The only two exceptions to this are Fight, and Item, which more or less fire instantly. Other than that, as far as I know Firaga, Holy, or the simple Cure spell all have more or less the same delay.
Now, I explained all that to get to this: anything that's a counter stance, of which Runic and the Sky Bushido both are, actually last until you issue another command. So, even if Celes misses a spell with Runic because something else was ahead of it in the queue, you can have her sit on her full ATB guage until she blocks the next spell, and then have her immediately take another turn. Obviously at some point waiting too long is a detriment, but unless you're waiting long enough to fill up her ATB bar again you're still doing fine in action economy because an enemy spell is still getting blanked.
I mostly plan to stay out of suggestions like this, but I'm making an exception here because if you take Sabin and Edgar to figaro right here, you get a special scene with them that is pretty crucial to their story, and it is completely missable. Likewise, there's a scene for Locke in Kohlingen, but you've already got him in mind to go. Figaro can go back and forth, so once you see the character scenes feel free to go with whoever.
Also:
Absolutely this. FFVI never requires grinding, but if you're having trouble getting yourself a bit of breathing room is fine. Long as you're not grinding to level 40 or whatever on the leafers outside Narshe, you're gonna be fine.
So, this actually isn't true, though it's definitely not something you'd discover without going way out of your way. All the various passages Sabin used to get to the Veldt? They all still exist. You can, right after the Narshe battle, go south to the Figaro cave, through Mt. Kolts, to the Returner hideout, where you can get back into the river Lethe which takes you to where Sabin washed up before. You can take the same route south (though you just pass the Imperial Camp on the overworld, you can't go back in) and jump back down the waterfall to get to the Veldt again.
At least, you could back on the SNES. Admittedly, I didn't try it at this point during my own Pixel Remaster playthrough.
I've definitely never bothered maxing out Gau's Rages because you absolutely do need a guide for that (if you think Gau's mechanic is insane, the mechanics behind how the Veldt rolls encounters would make you throw your keyboard) but several very easily accessible ones can give Gau a real suite of workhorse options.
Each Rage actually only has one special move that it uses, so when he selects it for a rage Gau either does a basic attack, or the one special attack from that Rage. The Stray Cat was already mentioned as a great pickup for the Cat Scratch move, but certain other Rages can give you spells way earlier than you 'should' have them. Of things you could get right now, one gives you Fira, another gives you something between Thundara and Thundaga in power, for example. Gau also gets certain statuses from some rages. The various magitek armor varieties, for instance, also give Gau Protect when he uses them.
Heh, remember how you were complaining at the game designers for sticking you on the Phantom train with no shop (that you found
)? This fight here is actually where that complaint used to be warranted. That bucket with the recovery water in it was a PR addition. In the SNES version, the squad shuffle to move equipment around was there but it was possible to find yourself stuck in this fight without having restocked on items, and no way to recover before the battle and to just be stuck without enough endurance to make it through. Tough luck if you didn't have a backup save file.Iteration! Fail Faster!
Okay, so first off I should ask if you have the option set for monster ATBs to pause while you're in a menu turned off? Because that's a thing in FFVI. If that's on, then monsters can issue commands while you're in a menu. Even with that off, it can look like they're issuing commands while you're in a menu, but that's just the game playing out the animations of moves that were already queued up before you opened your Blitz menu or whatever. That's relevant here because FFVI barely has actual cast times, but the animations can get backed up so that you'll enter the Runic command, and that puts it into the queue behind whatever other commands are already set to go. The only two exceptions to this are Fight, and Item, which more or less fire instantly. Other than that, as far as I know Firaga, Holy, or the simple Cure spell all have more or less the same delay.
Now, I explained all that to get to this: anything that's a counter stance, of which Runic and the Sky Bushido both are, actually last until you issue another command. So, even if Celes misses a spell with Runic because something else was ahead of it in the queue, you can have her sit on her full ATB guage until she blocks the next spell, and then have her immediately take another turn. Obviously at some point waiting too long is a detriment, but unless you're waiting long enough to fill up her ATB bar again you're still doing fine in action economy because an enemy spell is still getting blanked.
I mostly plan to stay out of suggestions like this, but I'm making an exception here because if you take Sabin and Edgar to figaro right here, you get a special scene with them that is pretty crucial to their story, and it is completely missable. Likewise, there's a scene for Locke in Kohlingen, but you've already got him in mind to go. Figaro can go back and forth, so once you see the character scenes feel free to go with whoever.
Also:
Absolutely this. FFVI never requires grinding, but if you're having trouble getting yourself a bit of breathing room is fine. Long as you're not grinding to level 40 or whatever on the leafers outside Narshe, you're gonna be fine.
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Gau is the most.
Raised properly, he's one of the strongest characters in the roster. Even right now he can get some second tier spells, an even stronger Wind-aspected magic attack from Guard Leader (the first boss Locke and moogles fought) and the ultimate physical attack from Stray Cat*, and it just gets better from there.
Also, the game doesn't explain it properly, but Gau also gains all innate properties of the monster he Rages. Turning into a bird gives him Float, turning into an undead makes him an undead, with everything that implies, etc. Some enemies have inherent Protect status, for example, others are immune to instant death effects.
There are, however, several massive drawbacks that, judging by your attitude towards similar classes in FFV, would probably prevent you from utilizing him:
- Firstly, you can't control him in Rage. It mostly doesn't really matter that much and can actually be beneficial since he doesn't lose time selecting an option from the menu, but there are actually some enemies where timing of attacks matter, which can fuck you over with Gau. Also sucks if you pick Fire-using Rage against fire-absorbing enemy, especially since there is no way to stop the Rage other than KO'ing Gau.
- As you mentioned, Gau can only Leap in Veldt, probably due to scripting difficulty. Aside from the obvious drawbacks, the issue with Veldt is that all encounters accumulate here, so after awhile it can literally take hours to hunt down the one enemy whose Rage you want to unlock.
- The trial and error bullshit is no joke: Gau has something like 50 Rages, and it's hard to say which ones are useful without a guide or a lot of free time on your hands. I mean, some of them are obvious: an enemy using Fira will give you Fira, that's good. Others, however, are far more tricky, especially since Gau uses his stats in damage formulas, which can either elevate originally lacklaster attack to greatness or bring down an impressive one instead.. Normally, Stray Cat is not a remarkable encounter, but it gives you one of the best Rages in the game, for example.
As a result, whether or not you should use Gau depends massively on your tolerance to clunky old-game bullshit. His design is certainly ambitious, I give him that: with him, it's clear that the devs were flexing their ability to craft truly unique characters, which also comes across in Sabin and others less strongly. But it's also a really awkward design that just doesn't care on a fundamental level about being player-friendly.
*For those who want to get it without killing cats, note that the encounters appear in the Veldt so long as you, well, encountered them. Running from battles is valid for that. And Gau's Leap command ends the fight without killing the enemies.
Well, you actually can go to Veldt at any time by going back to the Returners' base... You'll just have to repeat the whole raft sequence (minus boss fight) and then the whole sea sequence to get back.
You know, hypothetically, if you just realized you've missed a great Rage.
Fun fact: each time you fight Hell Rider after party wipe, it's technically a new enemy. Which, given that your party just respawns near healing bucket and that, unlike other enemies, Hell Rider doesn't move away from Kefka, means you can create a party of lonely Locke, steal Mythril Vest, wipe, go back, steal another, and repeat as many times as you want.
You've touched on it back when the game branched into three scenarios, but I think this is a better place to talk about it. FFVI is an ensemble game. This ties back to what I was talking about when I said that 1-3-5 and 2-4-6 games could be thought of as two separate if intertwined franchises.
In FFI, our party consisted of personality-free interchangeable blobs with zero dialogue. In FFIII, the party sorta had a collective characterization, though individual characters were still interchangeable. FFV ditched that completely in favor of fully realized characters. All of those games, however, gave you a permanent party you raised from first level to the last (with the twist of Galuf's death, but then Krile took his place right away and was mechanically identical to him).
In contrast, FFII and FFIV had a far more dynamic party. In FFII, you had three permanent members and a constantly rotating fourth spot, and FFIV would just give and take away characters as plot demanded, with only Cecil remaining through the whole game.
FFVI goes farther than even that, with your whole party now being chosen by you, with no character being more important than the other (well, in principle. In practice, Gau is just Some Guy who decided to stick around and has no personal investment in the conflict). I think the ability to chose your own party is really symbolic of the whole approach to the narrative FFVI does. Hopefully, it also means we won't see quite so many cheap sacrifices.
Of course, one problem with "chose your own party to venture forth" mechanic is that often there is no in-universe reason to not take everyone (is calibration that important to you, Garrus? Is it really? Well, OK then). For now, the game has provided justification to split the party, but I wonder whether it would be able to continue to justify it throughout the game.
Nope. It's because you have to get him back in the Veldt. Modders worked around that with very little issue or even turned it into a Blue Magic-alike where if he's in the encounter with a formation he can Leap he learns the appropriate rages at the end of the encounter.