aaaaaaaa i got mentioned
im sorry T_T
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
aaaaaaaa i got mentioned
im sorry T_T
- Location
- Earth
We stan a genderfluid icon.
Nah, they are min-maxing their gender by going all fluid in the middle of the level up.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
FNV taught me bisexuality is peak performance.
FFT taught me that nonbinary is hax.
FFT taught me that nonbinary is hax.
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FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
So we've finally gotten to a Final Fantasy game where the music isn't written by Uematsu! So let's talk about it. The tl;dr, before we go any further: Uematsu is a master of melody, Sakimoto is a master of orchestration.
Hitoshi Sakimoto has actually written the music for a ton of games, and from my completely arbitrary and shamelessly shallow dive of his oeuvre I will say that he can be a bit hit or miss and a lot of that depends on the hardware limitations of the system he's writing for. Sakimoto has a really good ear for instrumentation so the more room he has to work with the more likely he is to write a banger. Conversely, when the platform has massive sound limitations he tends to do significantly worse. Or at least, this is how I rationalize the soundtracks for FFTA and FFTA2 being so bad - the GBA and 3DS did not have a dedicated sound chip and handled everything through the CPU. Like, you can hear in these soundtracks all the hallmarks of Sakimoto's writing such as dynamic orchestration and intricate partwriting, but the muddiness of the sound palette available to him resulted in an inferior product.
But if he has access to good synths and room to breathe? Sakimoto can write.
So let's look at the very first thing we as players hear when we start up the game. This is Sakimoto firing on all cylinders - lush orchestration and intelligent, realistic part writing. He starts us off with strings, harp, rain chimes, and celeste to create the opening texture before adding clarinet, oboe, and english horn on what I'll refer to as the FFT 'Heroic' Motiff. Here's what that looks like:
So the big thing to note here is how this motif is shaped: descending interval, ascending interval that puts us higher than the starting pitch, two eighth notes down to and past the starting pitch, and resolving where we began. But the important thing is that we're not actually locked into specific intervals (usually to and from the 2nd note of the motif), because what we're hearing right now is better thought of as Sakimoto introducing and developing this theme as he brings the full orchestra online before he introduces the theme in full. And, because he's a good orchestrator that knows what he's doing, he of course gives it to the low brass to make it properly powerful and heroic (1:01 in the vid). Sure the strings get it on the repeat, but the important thing is that brass got it first
. Here's what that theme looks like:
Sakimoto uses this theme (modified as necessary to better integrate it into the track) throughout the OST so it's pretty rewarding to keep your ears open as you listen. Some examples:
Remnants, at 0:57
Antipyretic, at 0:39, also notable for organically reusing the title theme buildup 1:20.
Random Waltz, right at the start.
None of this is to be confused with the actual Heroes Theme, (literally called "Protagonist's Theme" in Japanese apparently) which is a whole different motif that, again, gets used all over the place because Sakimoto is awesome like that. That's a story for another time.
So yeah. When this guy cooks he makes good stuff, and one of the things I like best about him is his how the parts he writes are actual reasonable parts that make sense for the instrument they're written for (except for harp, but then nobody knows how to write for harp (I'm not joking. I've got several friends that are harpists and turns out a big part of harp performance practice is altering your part into something actually playable. Harp is hard to write for apparently.)) and he holds a special place in my heart because he actually knows when and how to use brass effectively.
Hitoshi Sakimoto has actually written the music for a ton of games, and from my completely arbitrary and shamelessly shallow dive of his oeuvre I will say that he can be a bit hit or miss and a lot of that depends on the hardware limitations of the system he's writing for. Sakimoto has a really good ear for instrumentation so the more room he has to work with the more likely he is to write a banger. Conversely, when the platform has massive sound limitations he tends to do significantly worse. Or at least, this is how I rationalize the soundtracks for FFTA and FFTA2 being so bad - the GBA and 3DS did not have a dedicated sound chip and handled everything through the CPU. Like, you can hear in these soundtracks all the hallmarks of Sakimoto's writing such as dynamic orchestration and intricate partwriting, but the muddiness of the sound palette available to him resulted in an inferior product.
But if he has access to good synths and room to breathe? Sakimoto can write.
So let's look at the very first thing we as players hear when we start up the game. This is Sakimoto firing on all cylinders - lush orchestration and intelligent, realistic part writing. He starts us off with strings, harp, rain chimes, and celeste to create the opening texture before adding clarinet, oboe, and english horn on what I'll refer to as the FFT 'Heroic' Motiff. Here's what that looks like:
So the big thing to note here is how this motif is shaped: descending interval, ascending interval that puts us higher than the starting pitch, two eighth notes down to and past the starting pitch, and resolving where we began. But the important thing is that we're not actually locked into specific intervals (usually to and from the 2nd note of the motif), because what we're hearing right now is better thought of as Sakimoto introducing and developing this theme as he brings the full orchestra online before he introduces the theme in full. And, because he's a good orchestrator that knows what he's doing, he of course gives it to the low brass to make it properly powerful and heroic (1:01 in the vid). Sure the strings get it on the repeat, but the important thing is that brass got it first
. Here's what that theme looks like:
Sakimoto uses this theme (modified as necessary to better integrate it into the track) throughout the OST so it's pretty rewarding to keep your ears open as you listen. Some examples:
Remnants, at 0:57
Antipyretic, at 0:39, also notable for organically reusing the title theme buildup 1:20.
Random Waltz, right at the start.
None of this is to be confused with the actual Heroes Theme, (literally called "Protagonist's Theme" in Japanese apparently) which is a whole different motif that, again, gets used all over the place because Sakimoto is awesome like that. That's a story for another time.
So yeah. When this guy cooks he makes good stuff, and one of the things I like best about him is his how the parts he writes are actual reasonable parts that make sense for the instrument they're written for (except for harp, but then nobody knows how to write for harp (I'm not joking. I've got several friends that are harpists and turns out a big part of harp performance practice is altering your part into something actually playable. Harp is hard to write for apparently.)) and he holds a special place in my heart because he actually knows when and how to use brass effectively.
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Pretty certain either the tutorials or the first visit to the recruiting place mentions the male/female stat differences.
I do find the discussion on Ramza amusing. I would say more, but it would make more sense after Omicron gets farther.
You have nothing to apologize for. It was a fun quest, thanks for running it!
I do find the discussion on Ramza amusing. I would say more, but it would make more sense after Omicron gets farther.
You have nothing to apologize for. It was a fun quest, thanks for running it!
Razma may not be a femboy in canon, but I have 100 dollars in commission money and a lack of shame that says otherwise.
Anyways, I think it's a bold choice to base your more esoteric game mechanics off of Homestuck shipping charts.
Anyways, I think it's a bold choice to base your more esoteric game mechanics off of Homestuck shipping charts.
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
Was Homestuck around in 97?
No, but obviously the devs were time travelers. How else would they know anything about how the War of the Lions really happened?
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Arazlam: "My source is I made it the fuck up!"
No, I just have brain rot.
Ryumancer
Dragons Are Romance
The Ivalice games overall have a bit of lore related to the zodiac chart, but for Tactics specifically, it feels to me like a mixture of 'we did it for the flavor' and 'let's make it tie into the mechanics, to make the gameplay less predictable'.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Now now many ancient historians did try its just 99% of all sources are uh gone.
Final Fantasy Tactics, Part 6.A: Dorter 2, Araguay Woods, Zeirchele Falls
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hear ye, hear ye! 'Tis the year of our Lord 2024, and it has come to pass that Ramza of House Beoulve has once again crossed paths with his old friend Delita.
The Story So Far: Ramza, scion of the noble House Beoulve, was betrayed by his own kin, who allowed his childhood friend Delita's sister to die. Separated from Delita, betrayed by his family, Ramza has abandoned the life of a noble and joined up with a mercenary band. Together, they escorted Princess Ovelia on a peace mission to try and prevent the outbreak of war between Duke Larg and Duke Goltanna. But Ovelia was abducted by a Delita returned from the dead…
Last time, we stopped shortly before entering Dorter again. Our party has been expanded with the inclusion of a Squire and two new Knights. We've also unlocked some new classes through the grueling ordeal of the Ziekden Fortress battle, so it's time for some light changes!
Advancing Thief to job level 4 unlocked the returning Dragoon job. I've always been a cursed Dragoon fan - aside from endgame FF3 specifically, it's just never really been that good a class in any of its incarnations. It's okay, but it's never really more than that. Will this time be different? We'll see!
Notably, it feels like both the Knight and Archer lines operated a lateral shift at the end. Monk unlocked Geomancer, a magic-type class that uses effects based on the terrain they're on, after two ranks of extremely physically focused jobs; Dragoon is a heavily armed and armored job centering on damage and comes after Archer and Thief, which are speedy, light jobs. Still, it does make a certain amount of sense that the class defined by its jumping ability would follow after the class that symbolizes Dexterity.
The Dragon ability menu looks like this:
These are incremental ranks of the Dragoon's Jump Abilities. Unlike most others, it doesn't seem like they're mechanically treated as separate abilities to pick from in a menu; rather, each rank increases the Dragoon's jumping range to their value, if I understand correctly. This would suggest that if you plan on getting Horizontal Jump 8, then spending JP on Horizontal Jump 2, 3, 4 and 5 on the way is just needlessly delaying your access to the real prize by several hundred JP instead of going straight for it, but the cost of going 'straight for it' is spending several battles as a Dragoon who can't jump, which is… weird? Maybe I misunderstand.
We've also unlocked Mystic, which follows after White Mage. Mystic is a new addition to the Final Fantasy jobs and appears to be the offensive counterpart to Time Mage; it's a status-based caster that can cast spells inflicting various ailments. These include traditional ones such as Blind and Silenced, but it also includes weirder ones that are original to FFT's own system, such as spells to lower enemy Faith, which is conceptually very funny. Like, their Disbelief spells inflicts Atheist, which is a status effect. Hilarious.
Alright, let's head into Dorter.
I. Dorter Redux
As usual, we're only given 4 slots because of mandatory story characters. Granted, these story characters are Gaffgarion and Agrias, so, y'know. I'll take it.
Not the slums this time; Dorter is actually kind of pretty in the right places, shame they're exclusively battlefields.
A suspicious knight in golden armor is arguing with a Thief about the price to kill some people.
Knight: "A purse of five hundred gil per head."
Sellsword: "'Tis coin I lack, not wits. Two thousand, or you can stick them yourself."
Knight: "Mayhap you forget the ease with which men are branded heretics."
Sellsword: "Threats, is it? A thousand, then."
Knight: "Seven hundred. I can offer no more."
Sellsword: "Done. Let it never be said that I was aught but a pious man."
Knight: "I pray your newfound piety does not lend itself to mercy. They will be here soon, and I shudder to think of your fate should any of them survive."
[The sellsword turns around to look at the entrance.]
Knight: "Hmph. No sooner speak the devil's name, than he doth appear. You've work to do. Best be about it."
[He leaves. The sellsword looks at us entrance and then goes into a shocked expression, then throws his hat to the ground.]
Thief: "Gods be good, that's Ser Gaffgarion! Seven hundred a head for this!?"
[He whistles, summoning his troops.]
Okay, the thief going 'JESUS CHRIST, THAT'S JASON GAFFGARION" is a very good comedy beat. Dude is regretting his entire life choices right now, I'd bet.
Beyond that, hm. This is, I think, our first indication of the Church being outright sinister, as opposed to Argath just twisting doctrine to justify his prejudices. This Knight clearly just implied he was acting on behalf of the Church, had power over its decisions, and could have someone branded a heretic just for pissing him off. That's a huge escalation in the corruption and threat of the Church - although not a particularly surprising one in a JRPG.
Gaffgarion: "An ambush! This day grows lovelier by the hour."
Agrias: "If you'd not fight, the road home lies behind you."
Gaffgarion: "While I make no habit of charity, I could not well abandon so goodly a wench to rogues."
Agrias: "Do not patronize me, *ser*!"
Once again, we're at the bottom of a rising map. This time, there are two pretty steep housing rows on each side and a wide alley straight in the middle. Our opposion includes two Thieves, two Archers, and two Black Mages; a formation suited for range and speed, so they'll likely set up vertically and play keepaway. Up to us to not let them get away with it. Unfortunately, we're taking three new jobs into battle (Hester just swapped to Monk, which is new for her even if Ramza has been one for a while), so nobody has any Abilities worth a damn… And that's the least of our issues.
But it starts off well. Look at this. This is the range for Ramza's Shockwave, the move where he punches the ground so hard it erupts. Unlike most ranged abilities, Shockwave doesn't strike a point on a diamond grid; instead it strikes in a straight line in one of the four cardinal directions. But its range is ridiculous. It can essentially reach up to the end of the screen in any map I ever took it in, it's ludicrous. It doesn't hit as hard as Ramza's punches, but the range is too good to pass up.
The enemy starts moving down the street in a loose formation, and we start trading spells. A clever bit of timing allows me to have Gillian, now a Mystic but still equipped with White Magic, casting Cure so that she finishes her charging time after the enemy's charging time for Fire, immediately healing the damage even though the damage hadn't occurred yet when she took her turn. Planning, baby!
It still doesn't go super great. I advanced Ramza too enthusiastically, and the enemy ganged up on him and KO'd him.
Then the first painful realization comes.
Hadrian, my shiny new Dragoon…
Doesn't have a weapon.
When you swap to a new class, the character's equipment is automatically 'optimized' according to their new job. As a result, I've never really bothered checking post-job swap equipment until the next town.
So I didn't notice that Dragoons can only equip polearm, which have not been available for purchase up to this point in the game, and so he's just.
Unarmed.
Dealing incredibly weak damage.
At this point I stare at Ramza dead on the floor, my Dragoon fighting bare-handed, and I just give up. It's late. Whatever. I'll try some other time.
And here we are again. We swapped Hester for Osric for some magical punch, and we kept Hadrian a Dragoon because, like, whatever. Sure he's fighting unarmed, but what I've come to embrace in the few hours between these two runs is this:
My team doesn't matter.
I have Gaffgarion and Agrias with me, and they clear any other member of my party. Gaffgarion's Shadowblade hits for 42 damage and heals him for 42 HP, so he effectively cannot lose unless the enemy massively outnumbers him. Agrias's Judgment Blade hits for only slightly less damage but, while it doesn't heal her, it also inflicts Stop. Together, they are unstoppable and I can afford to just let them carry me through the fight.
You can see in the above screenshot that Ramza is KO. This is because I once again had him advance too quickly and too far, so the enemy focused fire on him and brought him down. Not to worry though;
Gillian learned Raise, so she's now able to raise characters at range, and with 50% HP instead of in critical range like Phoenix Down does. Furthermore, enemies on this map have a tendency to clump together at the higher end of the road (I think because not all of their jobs have high enough Jump distance to easily make it to the rooftops. And clumped together enemies mean…
Unleashing Ramuh for maximum damage.
The fight remains kind of messy, kind of sloppy. Agrias's AI is weird and sometimes wastes turns on Fire instead of making the objectively correct move of using Judgment Blade every time. Towards the end we lose Gillian to a Thief's backstab, so we have to hurry to finish the fight before her timer runs down, and the Thieves take that moment to start escaping to the rooftops. Still, the only challenge left there is mopping them up quickly enough.
Thankfully, both Gaffgarion and Agrias's special sword skills are ranged, so they wipe out the last few stragglers and end the fight for us.
This was a real NPC carry moment, I won't lie. Things would have been significantly harder without the two special Knights - though eventually I'd have just reverted my class changes and done it that way, the only real problem was my insistence on using Mystic and Dragoon despite those jobs not having unlocked any Abilities yet.
But you know, you kind of have to do it this way to earn JP to actually use the jobs, y'know?
Once the fight is over, Agrias says we must hurry to find Ovelia, Gaffgarion asks how the hell we're supposed to be doing that, and Agrias says there's only one way her captors could go - "the impenetrable walls of Fort Besselat," and the map opens revealing a new series of nodes.
It looks like we are on a timer, and must intercept Delita before he has a chance to reach that impregnable fortress where our small, fast-moving party has no chance of getting at him.
So of course it's time to take a cheeky month off to run around doing random stuff.
Listen. It's not my fault! The encounters are scaling beyond my ability to keep up, so it's time to hit the gym. Now that we're back on the Dorter node, we get access to the entire node network we previously had; this does include Eagrose, so we can just hit Ramza's hometown and nobody will be wiser for it. And in fact we have to; Dorter doesn't carry equipment for the 'martial' classes - Dorter is a merchant city, Gariland is a Magick city, and Eagrose is a kind of fortified town. That's where we'll find the Javelin, the earliest Dragoon weapon.
If you're wondering right now 'wait, doesn't locking item availability behind story development mean that some jobs can't be used early on even if you unlock them?' and the answer is, well, no. For one thing I can't be sure these are plot unlocks. It so happens that a new set of equipment unlocked with Chapter 2 opening, but this could be instead based on average character level, jobs unlocked, or number of battles fought; I'm sure one of the FFTheads in the thread will know.
However, even if that were not the case - most jobs have access to a support ability called "Equip [Weapon]." By spending a hefty chunk of JP, it's possible to unlock the Ability to use cross-job weapon. So for instance, if I absolutely wanted to use Dragoon in Chapter 1 and it turned out polearms were truly plot-locked, I could just teach my Dragoon the Knight's Equip Swords ability and then use swords. That's fun! It's an interesting wrinkle in the system. I haven't really used it because it costs a chunk of JP but, for instance, an obvious application is that Monk Ramza could learn the Knight's Equip Heavy Armor ability and then go around with the best of both worlds, Monk raw stats and the massive HP bonus from Knight armor. That seems strong!
Anyway, I don't have any of those Abilities for the time being, so we just optimize Hadrian's equipment as well as Gillian's, upgrade everyone to the next tier of armor available to them, and be on our way… To the Tavern.
II. The Errands System
New rumors can be found. "Queen Louveria's campaign to seize total control of the government has proceeded apace," she's stripping everyone who oppose her of ranks, including members of the Council. She's banished the Queen Mother, who is rumored to have been poisoned; it definitely sounds like she's the one behind Ovelia's abduction, trying to remove another potential threat to her son's title. Duke Larg and Goltanna are currently locked in a battle for the title of regent, and Louveria's power isn't secure enough to name Larg, her brother, to the position; Goltanna has a stronger overall base of support and it's rumored his appointment as regent will pass soon.
Additionally, draught in the previous year along with rising taxes have intensified social unrest and have led to peasant riots in the province of Zeltania; a group of former knights calling themselves the Order of the Ebon Eye are said to be stoking the flames. That sounds like it could be Wiegraf's new joint, and this renegade Order the new Corpse Brigade; it's certainly his MO.
Additionally, here's a curious new tab:
In the Errands tab, we find little flavor blurbs for requests by people who need the help of sellswords such as ourselves.
I remember what those are from Tactics Advance. They're not traditional sidequests in the form of 'get an objective, head to a place, do a fight.' Instead, they're sort of how the game incentivizes keeping a wider roster of units than your main five?
The way it works is, we have a little fluff description of what our guys are needed for (in this case, investigating a gold vein in the volcanic Mount Gulg [FF1 ref spotted]). Then, we get a menu where we can assign up to three units to the task:
Then, the Tavernmaster tells us how long he thinks the task will take; in this case, 15 to 16 days. We choose how many days we want to give our guys to do the thing (always the maximum allowed, for better chances of success), we pay a small fee, and then our guys just… Leave. We'll need to come back to this Tavern when the duration has elapsed to find their report.
When they get back, we'll get an after action report and rewards, which include JP! This could be a very handy way of leveling up our Jobs.
It's a little tricky, however, because in order to pass time, we have to travel between nodes. And while I'm pretty sure I've identified at least one pair of nodes that's encounter free (moving between Orbonne Monastery and Dorter back and forth never seems to trigger a battle), for most of the map we risk running into monsters. So that means we can't afford to lose 3/5 of our main team.
Which is, I think, another reason why the game gave us Ladd, Lavian and Alicia after the timeskip; so we can engage with Errands immediately, either by sending them to do the task or by sending some of my main party and using the new guys as replacement while they're gone.
Here, I decide to send the new guys just to test the stuff. This ends up probably not being the best use of the Errands system I could have made, but whatever; I'm experimenting. Afterwards, I travel around a little, checking the other towns' shops and Errands and running into random battles until the 16 days have elapsed. Which turns out to be just the one battle.
Having access to a polearm brings out Hadrian's damage potential.
It turns out there's a good reason to use Dragoon even before unlocking any Jump abilities; polearms have a range of 2 tiles (not like I did in that above screenshot. Ignore that screenshot.). This means that Dragoon can attack enemies without triggering Counter. Which is useful against Monsters, and should be against some Knights and Monks. Mostly though it's just a decent chassis of damage and HP.
I did try the Jump Command. It's accessible before unlocking any of the range increases, it just only has a range of 1 tile. And the thing is, it does inflict considerable damage. Or at least the forecast window says it does, higher damage than an already solid physical attack.
The problem is that Jump has a delay. Same as in any other game. But it is not keyed to the enemy unit it targets. If you enter the Jump Command, you must aim at a tile, and then if your enemy moves, then the Jump whiffs. As it has every time I tried to use Jump, because Jump's delay is ungodly. Oh, and unlike spellcasting, I can't seem to access the timing menu while selecting a Jump, so I have no idea if Jump will fire before the enemy acts.
So that sucks. But hey! Spears!
Oh, and I've unlocked Gillian's first Mystic spell - Quiescence, which inflicts Silence. I've suffered too much at the hands of Black Mages to allow them to hurt me any further (I will proceed to encounter nothing but physical units for the rest of the update).
Having culled the local monster population, we head back to the Tavern.
We actually get a little in-character report alternating between the characters that went on the Errand, which is neat!
Ladd: "We departed Eagrose in high spirits. We were dead set on mining Mount Gulg's riches."
Alicia: "The stars were with us from the outset."
Ladd: "Our surroundings hid ferocious beasts aplenty. Nonetheless, we remained committed to our goal. Eventually we uncovered a rich vein. We toiled endlessly, extracting a great deal of ore. Among our finds was a large, peculiar rock. We quickly examined the contents. Sealed within was a treasure beyond compare! Ouf fortune could not have been greater."
[A picture of the treasure appears, which I will show in a moment.]
Lavian: "I pray all our missions meet with such success."
Ladd: "I've nothing more to report."
Tavernmaster: "That's quite a find you've got there. It's a treasure, alright, and worth quite a bundle. I think you can consider yourself a treasure hunter! From this day forth, you're a lv 1 treasure hunter!"
Alright! Amazing success for our first Errand. We get a page summarizing all our rewards:
The Gil is nice, but it wouldn't reason enough to engage with that system on its own. Our bonus reward of Saint Elmo's Fire is mysterious; it does not seem to have any gameplay purpose at this time, and may just be a flavorful victory token. Equally likely, this 'lv 1 treasure hunter' deal is going to be part of a sequence of Errands that build up on one another to some big endgame reward. We can only hope.
The JP, however, is the real meat of things for me at this stage. 113 GP is more than most characters get in the course of a single battle. This could turn out to be a pretty good way to level up jobs… Which immediately makes me want to send my main party on errands, rather than the new guys.
Luckily, there are other Errands in the other two towns. We'll be getting back there after a quick look at our Chronicle menu…
I thought the lore for each Errand would be extremely light, the way I remember it being in FFTA. But actually, the Chronicle menu updates with a little story for each Errand completed, and with description of Artifacts acquired. So here, I learn that far from merely mining some gold and striking rich, my small party had a spooky fantastic encounter with what appeared to be a lady of fire (if you'll remember, FF1's Mt Gulg was home to Marilith) and they built her a shrine. And St Elmo's Fire is a spooky artifact that burns continuously and causes spontaneous combustion in those afflicted by sickness. This is all really cool and I love it, although I may have to gloss over it in actual updates just because there's so much to write about without including four new Errand write-ups in every update!
A battle against three Panthers is completely trivial and only included here for the purpose of keeping track of how many random encounters I am getting into in total.
So next up, I send Osric, Gillian, and Hadrian over on the next mission - "Find gold in Mount Ouroboros" - and load up my party with Hester, Ladd, Alicia and Livian when we inevitably run into another battle while waiting the days to the end of the Errand.
This turns out to be very painful, mainly because a party of these five is only capable of close combat attacks (and literally just the Attack command, not anything fancy aside from Ramza). In fact, Ladd nearly fucking dies just because I have to spend so much time chasing fleeing opponents.
So this was pain, but hey, now my main gang is back. The Mount Ouroboros was also a smashing success ("Our fortune could not have been greater"), and our bonus reward is "Mythril ore profits." We do this a couple more times until we've completed all Errands available at this time, running into one more battle on the way…
…which are all great successes.
Gillian can now learn a new Mystic spell, and I go for Invigoration, which drains HP from the target to heal the caster; as it stands this is her only offensive option, but it means I don't have to give her Black Magicks and can keep her with White Magicks/Mystic Arts with Invigoration for when she needs to do damage instead of debuffing or healing. Something vaguely resembling a build is taking shape! I also unlock Arcane Strength for Osric, a little Support Ability that increases all magic damage, though for the time being he'll stick to JP Boost.
And it looks like Gillian has unlocked a new job.
What the fuck is an Orator.
Okay so apparently there is a whole class centered around 'talk good,' and it can do stuff like convert enemies into allies? It can also modify values like Faith and Bravery, convince opponents to stop, convince opponents to give you money…
…
I'm not going to even touch Orator for the time being, but I just want to highlight something.
I've talked before about how tedious the Tutorials are, and how they're framed as in-character lessons by this one old guy (not Arazlam the narrator, another one) called Master Darlavon. Despite not yet appearing in the story, Master Darlavon actually has an entry in the Dramatis Personae; Darlavon teaches at the Akademy, so he likely taught Ramza, and he is well-liked by students but considered long-winded, and as his entry reveals, served only one tour of duty in the Fifty Years War, giving him very little experience.
The Orator has an ability called "Mimic Darlavon."
It inflicts the Sleep status.
Hilarious.
III. Araguay Woods
Our first destination is the Araguay Woods, where we stumble upon an unexpected scene: A group of goblins have surrounded a Chocobo and are harassing it, likely with the intent to eat it. They're also talking in goblinspeak, which is composed of variations of "Hob" and "Gob" syllables but is clearly a language they use to communicate with each other.
Goblins are sapient and have language and civilization, as indicated by their clothes. Cool.
Agrias: "I've not seen a chocobo so deep in the woods."
Gaffgarion: "An addle-pated bird, to wander in this goblin-ridden place."
Ramza: "1. We should be on our way through the wood."
Ramza: "2. Perhaps we could use him?"
Ramza: [On picking 2.] "Delita once mentioned that wild chocobos were hardier than domesticated breeds. Perhaps we could use him."
Gaffgarion: "You intend to save the creature? I had rather line my purse with gil than feather."
Agrias: "Still, it may help us save the princess."
This is our second dialogue choice in the game! Presumably, as with Argath, this changes the objective between "Defeat the enemy" and "Protect the NPC" and makes the fight harder to win if we pick the latter. Still, I intend to save the birdy, which…
…upon checking out its status windows, it turns out is not just any birdy, but Boco.
Boco was present at the Windflat Mill battle with Wiegraf. This is Wiegraf's own Chocobo, having survived our battle and been stranded alone ever since. Not that Ramza is able to recognize or name him. Wild.
All the more reason to save the bird, then.
Our opposition consists of five Goblins and one Black Goblin. This is a very weak setup - Goblins can use Spin Punch to hit everyone adjacent to them and they have Counter, but that's about all they can do. In theory we could pick them off at our leisure. What keeps this interesting is the threat to Boco; the Black Goblin, the strongest of the bunch, immediately beelines after the bird and starts whaling on it while the rest of the gobbos attack us. This is a two-pronged threat - we wouldn't want to simply push so hard after the boss that the enemy gets free turns hitting us.
Shockwave continues to be a godsend.
Here you can see Boco retreated to the corner of the map, where the Black Goblin will soon chase it.
Gillian's Invigoration doesn't deal a ton of damage, but it at least gives her some and adds sustainability by making her able to heal herself as she does damage; the only issue is that it has a low rate of success.
Threat to Chocolife aside, this is a straightforward battle. We do a push to the left and up, sweeping the goblins in our way as we advance. The goblins on the other side of the screen close in on us, bringing them into our range and allowing us to dispatch them as they approach. Gaffgarion's Shadowblade continues to be a devastating force. The old man doesn't appear to have any other special skills, but he doesn't need to have any other skills; he is entirely self-sufficient (since he heals himself, I don't need to worry about his health), deals huge damage at range, and his target prioritization is fairly decent. At this point, I worry he may become a crutch. Hopefully he won't leave us anytime soon.
One last Shadowblade takes out the last surviving Goblin, and the fight is over.
Chocobo: "Wa… wark…?"
Ramza: "He seems well enough."
Gaffgarion: "A lucky one, this. Let's hope he's got a sense of gratitude, eh?"
This battle was mostly perfunctory and served one narrative purpose - to get us to recruit our first monster. This ability was advertised from very early in the game, but hasn't been available to us yet; I believe we needed to unlock the Orator and its Speechcraft recruitment ability before we could do so on our own, but even if we didn't, the game throws Boco at us as a way of testing the water with our first monster recruit.
Boco doesn't work like a normal unit; it has no job and cannot learn new abilities. It has to rely entirely on base stats, its native Counter, and its two moves, Choco Beak and Choco Heal - which is still decent, at first glance; it's a unit capable of fast movement, healing, and offense. It's just… Well, this is useful now, but it really feels like giving Boco a full slot on my team is just going to delay the progress of human characters who would eventually far surpass it thanks to Job combinations. We'll see. Chocobos have one other unique feature we'll get to in a moment. For now, I just want to check something…
…huh.
I hadn't thought about this at all, but it is possible to swap Gaffgarion and Agrias out of their Fell/Divine Knight classes. I don't really see a reason to do so, given how powerful they are, but it can be done. Perhaps even more interestingly, they actually have job menus with Abilities they can learn using the JP earned in battle. Gaffgarion's menu is very small (he has Shadowblade natively, and can learn Duskblade which drains MP instead of HP), but he doesn't really need anything else. Agrias, on the other end, actually has a pretty hefty list of special sword moves! She can even learn Northwain's Strike, Wiegraf's move with an instakill chance, plus three other moves we've never even seen before. Does that mean she'll be with us on a permanent basis? There would be no reason to have such a large menu, with so many expensive skills, if she's going to just leave… right…?
The fact that Agrias (who is 22) only has Judgment Blade, whereas Wiegraf (who is 30) knows both Judgment Blade and Northwain's Strike, interestingly suggests that he is a more experienced Divine/White Knight than the younger Agrias and that this is reflected in his broader skillset.
So, Chocobos.
The one unique feature of Chocobos is that you can, in fact, mount them. When you do so, they lose their place in the turn order; instead, the character mounting them has considerably expanded move and jump ranges. That's neat! You are effectively trading one of your unit slots for a special buff to one specific unit, and if that unit goes down, you get a new, smaller unit out of it (the Chocobo doesn't take the damage so you regain control of it). Conceptually this is cool. In practice…
It's a slaughter. I run into several new monster species, of higher level, and the loss of an entire action slot is simply too much for me to keep up. Having my character jump on chocoback and zoom around is fun, but the net result is near total slaughter. I abort this fight when it becomes clear that I won't lose without the permadeath of at least two units.
So, uh, yeah. Boco is staying benched for now.
Now it's time for the actual next step of our journey, and where the plot kicks in in earnest again - to the Zeirchele Falls (which come right after the Araguay Woods so pretend my mouse is hovering over that node below).
Cut for image count.
The Story So Far: Ramza, scion of the noble House Beoulve, was betrayed by his own kin, who allowed his childhood friend Delita's sister to die. Separated from Delita, betrayed by his family, Ramza has abandoned the life of a noble and joined up with a mercenary band. Together, they escorted Princess Ovelia on a peace mission to try and prevent the outbreak of war between Duke Larg and Duke Goltanna. But Ovelia was abducted by a Delita returned from the dead…
Last time, we stopped shortly before entering Dorter again. Our party has been expanded with the inclusion of a Squire and two new Knights. We've also unlocked some new classes through the grueling ordeal of the Ziekden Fortress battle, so it's time for some light changes!
Advancing Thief to job level 4 unlocked the returning Dragoon job. I've always been a cursed Dragoon fan - aside from endgame FF3 specifically, it's just never really been that good a class in any of its incarnations. It's okay, but it's never really more than that. Will this time be different? We'll see!
Notably, it feels like both the Knight and Archer lines operated a lateral shift at the end. Monk unlocked Geomancer, a magic-type class that uses effects based on the terrain they're on, after two ranks of extremely physically focused jobs; Dragoon is a heavily armed and armored job centering on damage and comes after Archer and Thief, which are speedy, light jobs. Still, it does make a certain amount of sense that the class defined by its jumping ability would follow after the class that symbolizes Dexterity.
The Dragon ability menu looks like this:
These are incremental ranks of the Dragoon's Jump Abilities. Unlike most others, it doesn't seem like they're mechanically treated as separate abilities to pick from in a menu; rather, each rank increases the Dragoon's jumping range to their value, if I understand correctly. This would suggest that if you plan on getting Horizontal Jump 8, then spending JP on Horizontal Jump 2, 3, 4 and 5 on the way is just needlessly delaying your access to the real prize by several hundred JP instead of going straight for it, but the cost of going 'straight for it' is spending several battles as a Dragoon who can't jump, which is… weird? Maybe I misunderstand.
We've also unlocked Mystic, which follows after White Mage. Mystic is a new addition to the Final Fantasy jobs and appears to be the offensive counterpart to Time Mage; it's a status-based caster that can cast spells inflicting various ailments. These include traditional ones such as Blind and Silenced, but it also includes weirder ones that are original to FFT's own system, such as spells to lower enemy Faith, which is conceptually very funny. Like, their Disbelief spells inflicts Atheist, which is a status effect. Hilarious.
Alright, let's head into Dorter.
I. Dorter Redux
As usual, we're only given 4 slots because of mandatory story characters. Granted, these story characters are Gaffgarion and Agrias, so, y'know. I'll take it.
Not the slums this time; Dorter is actually kind of pretty in the right places, shame they're exclusively battlefields.
A suspicious knight in golden armor is arguing with a Thief about the price to kill some people.
Knight: "A purse of five hundred gil per head."
Sellsword: "'Tis coin I lack, not wits. Two thousand, or you can stick them yourself."
Knight: "Mayhap you forget the ease with which men are branded heretics."
Sellsword: "Threats, is it? A thousand, then."
Knight: "Seven hundred. I can offer no more."
Sellsword: "Done. Let it never be said that I was aught but a pious man."
Knight: "I pray your newfound piety does not lend itself to mercy. They will be here soon, and I shudder to think of your fate should any of them survive."
[The sellsword turns around to look at the entrance.]
Knight: "Hmph. No sooner speak the devil's name, than he doth appear. You've work to do. Best be about it."
[He leaves. The sellsword looks at us entrance and then goes into a shocked expression, then throws his hat to the ground.]
Thief: "Gods be good, that's Ser Gaffgarion! Seven hundred a head for this!?"
[He whistles, summoning his troops.]
Okay, the thief going 'JESUS CHRIST, THAT'S JASON GAFFGARION" is a very good comedy beat. Dude is regretting his entire life choices right now, I'd bet.
Beyond that, hm. This is, I think, our first indication of the Church being outright sinister, as opposed to Argath just twisting doctrine to justify his prejudices. This Knight clearly just implied he was acting on behalf of the Church, had power over its decisions, and could have someone branded a heretic just for pissing him off. That's a huge escalation in the corruption and threat of the Church - although not a particularly surprising one in a JRPG.
Gaffgarion: "An ambush! This day grows lovelier by the hour."
Agrias: "If you'd not fight, the road home lies behind you."
Gaffgarion: "While I make no habit of charity, I could not well abandon so goodly a wench to rogues."
Agrias: "Do not patronize me, *ser*!"
Once again, we're at the bottom of a rising map. This time, there are two pretty steep housing rows on each side and a wide alley straight in the middle. Our opposion includes two Thieves, two Archers, and two Black Mages; a formation suited for range and speed, so they'll likely set up vertically and play keepaway. Up to us to not let them get away with it. Unfortunately, we're taking three new jobs into battle (Hester just swapped to Monk, which is new for her even if Ramza has been one for a while), so nobody has any Abilities worth a damn… And that's the least of our issues.
But it starts off well. Look at this. This is the range for Ramza's Shockwave, the move where he punches the ground so hard it erupts. Unlike most ranged abilities, Shockwave doesn't strike a point on a diamond grid; instead it strikes in a straight line in one of the four cardinal directions. But its range is ridiculous. It can essentially reach up to the end of the screen in any map I ever took it in, it's ludicrous. It doesn't hit as hard as Ramza's punches, but the range is too good to pass up.
The enemy starts moving down the street in a loose formation, and we start trading spells. A clever bit of timing allows me to have Gillian, now a Mystic but still equipped with White Magic, casting Cure so that she finishes her charging time after the enemy's charging time for Fire, immediately healing the damage even though the damage hadn't occurred yet when she took her turn. Planning, baby!
It still doesn't go super great. I advanced Ramza too enthusiastically, and the enemy ganged up on him and KO'd him.
Then the first painful realization comes.
Hadrian, my shiny new Dragoon…
Doesn't have a weapon.
When you swap to a new class, the character's equipment is automatically 'optimized' according to their new job. As a result, I've never really bothered checking post-job swap equipment until the next town.
So I didn't notice that Dragoons can only equip polearm, which have not been available for purchase up to this point in the game, and so he's just.
Unarmed.
Dealing incredibly weak damage.
At this point I stare at Ramza dead on the floor, my Dragoon fighting bare-handed, and I just give up. It's late. Whatever. I'll try some other time.
And here we are again. We swapped Hester for Osric for some magical punch, and we kept Hadrian a Dragoon because, like, whatever. Sure he's fighting unarmed, but what I've come to embrace in the few hours between these two runs is this:
My team doesn't matter.
I have Gaffgarion and Agrias with me, and they clear any other member of my party. Gaffgarion's Shadowblade hits for 42 damage and heals him for 42 HP, so he effectively cannot lose unless the enemy massively outnumbers him. Agrias's Judgment Blade hits for only slightly less damage but, while it doesn't heal her, it also inflicts Stop. Together, they are unstoppable and I can afford to just let them carry me through the fight.
You can see in the above screenshot that Ramza is KO. This is because I once again had him advance too quickly and too far, so the enemy focused fire on him and brought him down. Not to worry though;
Gillian learned Raise, so she's now able to raise characters at range, and with 50% HP instead of in critical range like Phoenix Down does. Furthermore, enemies on this map have a tendency to clump together at the higher end of the road (I think because not all of their jobs have high enough Jump distance to easily make it to the rooftops. And clumped together enemies mean…
Unleashing Ramuh for maximum damage.
The fight remains kind of messy, kind of sloppy. Agrias's AI is weird and sometimes wastes turns on Fire instead of making the objectively correct move of using Judgment Blade every time. Towards the end we lose Gillian to a Thief's backstab, so we have to hurry to finish the fight before her timer runs down, and the Thieves take that moment to start escaping to the rooftops. Still, the only challenge left there is mopping them up quickly enough.
Thankfully, both Gaffgarion and Agrias's special sword skills are ranged, so they wipe out the last few stragglers and end the fight for us.
This was a real NPC carry moment, I won't lie. Things would have been significantly harder without the two special Knights - though eventually I'd have just reverted my class changes and done it that way, the only real problem was my insistence on using Mystic and Dragoon despite those jobs not having unlocked any Abilities yet.
But you know, you kind of have to do it this way to earn JP to actually use the jobs, y'know?
Once the fight is over, Agrias says we must hurry to find Ovelia, Gaffgarion asks how the hell we're supposed to be doing that, and Agrias says there's only one way her captors could go - "the impenetrable walls of Fort Besselat," and the map opens revealing a new series of nodes.
It looks like we are on a timer, and must intercept Delita before he has a chance to reach that impregnable fortress where our small, fast-moving party has no chance of getting at him.
So of course it's time to take a cheeky month off to run around doing random stuff.
Listen. It's not my fault! The encounters are scaling beyond my ability to keep up, so it's time to hit the gym. Now that we're back on the Dorter node, we get access to the entire node network we previously had; this does include Eagrose, so we can just hit Ramza's hometown and nobody will be wiser for it. And in fact we have to; Dorter doesn't carry equipment for the 'martial' classes - Dorter is a merchant city, Gariland is a Magick city, and Eagrose is a kind of fortified town. That's where we'll find the Javelin, the earliest Dragoon weapon.
If you're wondering right now 'wait, doesn't locking item availability behind story development mean that some jobs can't be used early on even if you unlock them?' and the answer is, well, no. For one thing I can't be sure these are plot unlocks. It so happens that a new set of equipment unlocked with Chapter 2 opening, but this could be instead based on average character level, jobs unlocked, or number of battles fought; I'm sure one of the FFTheads in the thread will know.
However, even if that were not the case - most jobs have access to a support ability called "Equip [Weapon]." By spending a hefty chunk of JP, it's possible to unlock the Ability to use cross-job weapon. So for instance, if I absolutely wanted to use Dragoon in Chapter 1 and it turned out polearms were truly plot-locked, I could just teach my Dragoon the Knight's Equip Swords ability and then use swords. That's fun! It's an interesting wrinkle in the system. I haven't really used it because it costs a chunk of JP but, for instance, an obvious application is that Monk Ramza could learn the Knight's Equip Heavy Armor ability and then go around with the best of both worlds, Monk raw stats and the massive HP bonus from Knight armor. That seems strong!
Anyway, I don't have any of those Abilities for the time being, so we just optimize Hadrian's equipment as well as Gillian's, upgrade everyone to the next tier of armor available to them, and be on our way… To the Tavern.
II. The Errands System
New rumors can be found. "Queen Louveria's campaign to seize total control of the government has proceeded apace," she's stripping everyone who oppose her of ranks, including members of the Council. She's banished the Queen Mother, who is rumored to have been poisoned; it definitely sounds like she's the one behind Ovelia's abduction, trying to remove another potential threat to her son's title. Duke Larg and Goltanna are currently locked in a battle for the title of regent, and Louveria's power isn't secure enough to name Larg, her brother, to the position; Goltanna has a stronger overall base of support and it's rumored his appointment as regent will pass soon.
Additionally, draught in the previous year along with rising taxes have intensified social unrest and have led to peasant riots in the province of Zeltania; a group of former knights calling themselves the Order of the Ebon Eye are said to be stoking the flames. That sounds like it could be Wiegraf's new joint, and this renegade Order the new Corpse Brigade; it's certainly his MO.
Additionally, here's a curious new tab:
In the Errands tab, we find little flavor blurbs for requests by people who need the help of sellswords such as ourselves.
I remember what those are from Tactics Advance. They're not traditional sidequests in the form of 'get an objective, head to a place, do a fight.' Instead, they're sort of how the game incentivizes keeping a wider roster of units than your main five?
The way it works is, we have a little fluff description of what our guys are needed for (in this case, investigating a gold vein in the volcanic Mount Gulg [FF1 ref spotted]). Then, we get a menu where we can assign up to three units to the task:
Then, the Tavernmaster tells us how long he thinks the task will take; in this case, 15 to 16 days. We choose how many days we want to give our guys to do the thing (always the maximum allowed, for better chances of success), we pay a small fee, and then our guys just… Leave. We'll need to come back to this Tavern when the duration has elapsed to find their report.
When they get back, we'll get an after action report and rewards, which include JP! This could be a very handy way of leveling up our Jobs.
It's a little tricky, however, because in order to pass time, we have to travel between nodes. And while I'm pretty sure I've identified at least one pair of nodes that's encounter free (moving between Orbonne Monastery and Dorter back and forth never seems to trigger a battle), for most of the map we risk running into monsters. So that means we can't afford to lose 3/5 of our main team.
Which is, I think, another reason why the game gave us Ladd, Lavian and Alicia after the timeskip; so we can engage with Errands immediately, either by sending them to do the task or by sending some of my main party and using the new guys as replacement while they're gone.
Here, I decide to send the new guys just to test the stuff. This ends up probably not being the best use of the Errands system I could have made, but whatever; I'm experimenting. Afterwards, I travel around a little, checking the other towns' shops and Errands and running into random battles until the 16 days have elapsed. Which turns out to be just the one battle.
Having access to a polearm brings out Hadrian's damage potential.
It turns out there's a good reason to use Dragoon even before unlocking any Jump abilities; polearms have a range of 2 tiles (not like I did in that above screenshot. Ignore that screenshot.). This means that Dragoon can attack enemies without triggering Counter. Which is useful against Monsters, and should be against some Knights and Monks. Mostly though it's just a decent chassis of damage and HP.
I did try the Jump Command. It's accessible before unlocking any of the range increases, it just only has a range of 1 tile. And the thing is, it does inflict considerable damage. Or at least the forecast window says it does, higher damage than an already solid physical attack.
The problem is that Jump has a delay. Same as in any other game. But it is not keyed to the enemy unit it targets. If you enter the Jump Command, you must aim at a tile, and then if your enemy moves, then the Jump whiffs. As it has every time I tried to use Jump, because Jump's delay is ungodly. Oh, and unlike spellcasting, I can't seem to access the timing menu while selecting a Jump, so I have no idea if Jump will fire before the enemy acts.
So that sucks. But hey! Spears!
Oh, and I've unlocked Gillian's first Mystic spell - Quiescence, which inflicts Silence. I've suffered too much at the hands of Black Mages to allow them to hurt me any further (I will proceed to encounter nothing but physical units for the rest of the update).
Having culled the local monster population, we head back to the Tavern.
We actually get a little in-character report alternating between the characters that went on the Errand, which is neat!
Ladd: "We departed Eagrose in high spirits. We were dead set on mining Mount Gulg's riches."
Alicia: "The stars were with us from the outset."
Ladd: "Our surroundings hid ferocious beasts aplenty. Nonetheless, we remained committed to our goal. Eventually we uncovered a rich vein. We toiled endlessly, extracting a great deal of ore. Among our finds was a large, peculiar rock. We quickly examined the contents. Sealed within was a treasure beyond compare! Ouf fortune could not have been greater."
[A picture of the treasure appears, which I will show in a moment.]
Lavian: "I pray all our missions meet with such success."
Ladd: "I've nothing more to report."
Tavernmaster: "That's quite a find you've got there. It's a treasure, alright, and worth quite a bundle. I think you can consider yourself a treasure hunter! From this day forth, you're a lv 1 treasure hunter!"
Alright! Amazing success for our first Errand. We get a page summarizing all our rewards:
The Gil is nice, but it wouldn't reason enough to engage with that system on its own. Our bonus reward of Saint Elmo's Fire is mysterious; it does not seem to have any gameplay purpose at this time, and may just be a flavorful victory token. Equally likely, this 'lv 1 treasure hunter' deal is going to be part of a sequence of Errands that build up on one another to some big endgame reward. We can only hope.
The JP, however, is the real meat of things for me at this stage. 113 GP is more than most characters get in the course of a single battle. This could turn out to be a pretty good way to level up jobs… Which immediately makes me want to send my main party on errands, rather than the new guys.
Luckily, there are other Errands in the other two towns. We'll be getting back there after a quick look at our Chronicle menu…
I thought the lore for each Errand would be extremely light, the way I remember it being in FFTA. But actually, the Chronicle menu updates with a little story for each Errand completed, and with description of Artifacts acquired. So here, I learn that far from merely mining some gold and striking rich, my small party had a spooky fantastic encounter with what appeared to be a lady of fire (if you'll remember, FF1's Mt Gulg was home to Marilith) and they built her a shrine. And St Elmo's Fire is a spooky artifact that burns continuously and causes spontaneous combustion in those afflicted by sickness. This is all really cool and I love it, although I may have to gloss over it in actual updates just because there's so much to write about without including four new Errand write-ups in every update!
A battle against three Panthers is completely trivial and only included here for the purpose of keeping track of how many random encounters I am getting into in total.
So next up, I send Osric, Gillian, and Hadrian over on the next mission - "Find gold in Mount Ouroboros" - and load up my party with Hester, Ladd, Alicia and Livian when we inevitably run into another battle while waiting the days to the end of the Errand.
This turns out to be very painful, mainly because a party of these five is only capable of close combat attacks (and literally just the Attack command, not anything fancy aside from Ramza). In fact, Ladd nearly fucking dies just because I have to spend so much time chasing fleeing opponents.
So this was pain, but hey, now my main gang is back. The Mount Ouroboros was also a smashing success ("Our fortune could not have been greater"), and our bonus reward is "Mythril ore profits." We do this a couple more times until we've completed all Errands available at this time, running into one more battle on the way…
…which are all great successes.
Gillian can now learn a new Mystic spell, and I go for Invigoration, which drains HP from the target to heal the caster; as it stands this is her only offensive option, but it means I don't have to give her Black Magicks and can keep her with White Magicks/Mystic Arts with Invigoration for when she needs to do damage instead of debuffing or healing. Something vaguely resembling a build is taking shape! I also unlock Arcane Strength for Osric, a little Support Ability that increases all magic damage, though for the time being he'll stick to JP Boost.
And it looks like Gillian has unlocked a new job.
What the fuck is an Orator.
Okay so apparently there is a whole class centered around 'talk good,' and it can do stuff like convert enemies into allies? It can also modify values like Faith and Bravery, convince opponents to stop, convince opponents to give you money…
…
I'm not going to even touch Orator for the time being, but I just want to highlight something.
I've talked before about how tedious the Tutorials are, and how they're framed as in-character lessons by this one old guy (not Arazlam the narrator, another one) called Master Darlavon. Despite not yet appearing in the story, Master Darlavon actually has an entry in the Dramatis Personae; Darlavon teaches at the Akademy, so he likely taught Ramza, and he is well-liked by students but considered long-winded, and as his entry reveals, served only one tour of duty in the Fifty Years War, giving him very little experience.
The Orator has an ability called "Mimic Darlavon."
It inflicts the Sleep status.
Hilarious.
III. Araguay Woods
Our first destination is the Araguay Woods, where we stumble upon an unexpected scene: A group of goblins have surrounded a Chocobo and are harassing it, likely with the intent to eat it. They're also talking in goblinspeak, which is composed of variations of "Hob" and "Gob" syllables but is clearly a language they use to communicate with each other.
Goblins are sapient and have language and civilization, as indicated by their clothes. Cool.
Agrias: "I've not seen a chocobo so deep in the woods."
Gaffgarion: "An addle-pated bird, to wander in this goblin-ridden place."
Ramza: "1. We should be on our way through the wood."
Ramza: "2. Perhaps we could use him?"
Ramza: [On picking 2.] "Delita once mentioned that wild chocobos were hardier than domesticated breeds. Perhaps we could use him."
Gaffgarion: "You intend to save the creature? I had rather line my purse with gil than feather."
Agrias: "Still, it may help us save the princess."
This is our second dialogue choice in the game! Presumably, as with Argath, this changes the objective between "Defeat the enemy" and "Protect the NPC" and makes the fight harder to win if we pick the latter. Still, I intend to save the birdy, which…
…upon checking out its status windows, it turns out is not just any birdy, but Boco.
Boco was present at the Windflat Mill battle with Wiegraf. This is Wiegraf's own Chocobo, having survived our battle and been stranded alone ever since. Not that Ramza is able to recognize or name him. Wild.
All the more reason to save the bird, then.
Our opposition consists of five Goblins and one Black Goblin. This is a very weak setup - Goblins can use Spin Punch to hit everyone adjacent to them and they have Counter, but that's about all they can do. In theory we could pick them off at our leisure. What keeps this interesting is the threat to Boco; the Black Goblin, the strongest of the bunch, immediately beelines after the bird and starts whaling on it while the rest of the gobbos attack us. This is a two-pronged threat - we wouldn't want to simply push so hard after the boss that the enemy gets free turns hitting us.
Shockwave continues to be a godsend.
Here you can see Boco retreated to the corner of the map, where the Black Goblin will soon chase it.
Threat to Chocolife aside, this is a straightforward battle. We do a push to the left and up, sweeping the goblins in our way as we advance. The goblins on the other side of the screen close in on us, bringing them into our range and allowing us to dispatch them as they approach. Gaffgarion's Shadowblade continues to be a devastating force. The old man doesn't appear to have any other special skills, but he doesn't need to have any other skills; he is entirely self-sufficient (since he heals himself, I don't need to worry about his health), deals huge damage at range, and his target prioritization is fairly decent. At this point, I worry he may become a crutch. Hopefully he won't leave us anytime soon.
One last Shadowblade takes out the last surviving Goblin, and the fight is over.
Chocobo: "Wa… wark…?"
Ramza: "He seems well enough."
Gaffgarion: "A lucky one, this. Let's hope he's got a sense of gratitude, eh?"
This battle was mostly perfunctory and served one narrative purpose - to get us to recruit our first monster. This ability was advertised from very early in the game, but hasn't been available to us yet; I believe we needed to unlock the Orator and its Speechcraft recruitment ability before we could do so on our own, but even if we didn't, the game throws Boco at us as a way of testing the water with our first monster recruit.
Boco doesn't work like a normal unit; it has no job and cannot learn new abilities. It has to rely entirely on base stats, its native Counter, and its two moves, Choco Beak and Choco Heal - which is still decent, at first glance; it's a unit capable of fast movement, healing, and offense. It's just… Well, this is useful now, but it really feels like giving Boco a full slot on my team is just going to delay the progress of human characters who would eventually far surpass it thanks to Job combinations. We'll see. Chocobos have one other unique feature we'll get to in a moment. For now, I just want to check something…
…huh.
I hadn't thought about this at all, but it is possible to swap Gaffgarion and Agrias out of their Fell/Divine Knight classes. I don't really see a reason to do so, given how powerful they are, but it can be done. Perhaps even more interestingly, they actually have job menus with Abilities they can learn using the JP earned in battle. Gaffgarion's menu is very small (he has Shadowblade natively, and can learn Duskblade which drains MP instead of HP), but he doesn't really need anything else. Agrias, on the other end, actually has a pretty hefty list of special sword moves! She can even learn Northwain's Strike, Wiegraf's move with an instakill chance, plus three other moves we've never even seen before. Does that mean she'll be with us on a permanent basis? There would be no reason to have such a large menu, with so many expensive skills, if she's going to just leave… right…?
The fact that Agrias (who is 22) only has Judgment Blade, whereas Wiegraf (who is 30) knows both Judgment Blade and Northwain's Strike, interestingly suggests that he is a more experienced Divine/White Knight than the younger Agrias and that this is reflected in his broader skillset.
So, Chocobos.
The one unique feature of Chocobos is that you can, in fact, mount them. When you do so, they lose their place in the turn order; instead, the character mounting them has considerably expanded move and jump ranges. That's neat! You are effectively trading one of your unit slots for a special buff to one specific unit, and if that unit goes down, you get a new, smaller unit out of it (the Chocobo doesn't take the damage so you regain control of it). Conceptually this is cool. In practice…
So, uh, yeah. Boco is staying benched for now.
Now it's time for the actual next step of our journey, and where the plot kicks in in earnest again - to the Zeirchele Falls (which come right after the Araguay Woods so pretend my mouse is hovering over that node below).
Cut for image count.
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Final Fantasy Tactics, Part 6.B: Dorter 2, Araguay Woods, Zeirchele Falls
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
IV. Zeirchele Falls
Oh, now that's a dramatic setup, I love it. Delita and Princess Ovelia are stuck on a bridge, caught between two bands of knights, cornered; Delita actually seems to be shielding Ovelia, and two Knights already lie dead on the ground. We are in the middle of a deadly fight, and the situation appears desperate for Delita.
Northern Sky Knight: "Stand aside, ser! You are defeated! Surrender the princess, and no more blood must needs be split!"
Delita: "Do you enjoy the taste of lies? Your orders are to see the princess dead! And once I've watched you feed the falls her blood, I'm to believe you'd let me live, a witness to your crime?"
NSK: "What foolishness is this? We came to save the princess, not kill her! What could we possibly gain by Lady Ovelia's death? We wish only to see her freed from the Black Lion's claws!"
[At this point, Ovelia takes a few steps away from Delita and turns around to the lower falls; our party enters there.]
Agrias: "Your Highness!"
Ovelia: "Agrias!"
Alright.
I'd like to take a little bit of a moment here to refresh ourselves on the setup to all this.
Duke Goltanna is the Black Lion. He commands the Order of the Southern Sky. He is the Council's favorite for regent.
Duke Larg is the White Lion. He commands the Order of the Northern Sky. He is the Queen's favorite for regent, as well as her brother.
We are members of a nameless sellsword group who were hired by the Northern Sky to protect Princess Ovelia. In this process, we met up with Lady Agrias, who is a member of the Lionsguard, the royal family's personal order of guards. There are multiple layers of loyalty at work here. We are pursuing Princess Ovelia, who is unrelated to the Queen and can present a competing claim to the throne against her son. She was abducted by Delita, who showed up with forces bearing the icon of Duke Goltanna. This was an outright abduction; Delita used physical violence to coerce the resisting princess, then fled while we were slaughtering the men we saw him riding in with during the intro cutscene.
Now, Delita has been cornered by forces of the Northern Sky, the same ones who hired Gaffgarion, and they are demanding that Delita surrender the Princess. Delita accuses them of wanting to kill her and silence any witnesses, while the Northern Sky Knights are telling him that this is stupid, they are trying to rescue her from the Black Lion's force, which we know to be the goal we set out on alongside Agrias.
Everyone's caught up? Clear sight of the politics at play?
Okay, then the following should come as no surprise.
Top 10 anime betrayals, all year, every year.
The Northern Sky Knight orders Gaffgarion to kill everyone, and Gaffgarion shrugs, and turns around to draw on us all.
Yeah. I don't doubt that Goltanna's own designs on Ovelia are nefarious, but we know the Queen has been eliminating all threats to her son's claim to the throne, pushed out the Queen Mother into exile (and possibly had her killed), and Ovelia is one such a threat and not related by blood to the Queen. The Northern Sky is commanded by Duke Larg, who is the Queen's brother and her staunch supporter. Therefore, while Goltanna likely wants Ovelia alive to further his own designs to the throne, the Queen and by extension the Northern Sky want her dead. And Gaffgarion (and Ramza) work for the Northern Sky.
It's all falling into place.
Agrias: "You would betray us!?"
Gaffgarion: "Betray you? You have a viper's tongue, milady. I betray no one. I am in the order's employ, and they are of it. My task was to see the princess safely abducted. And theirs, to see the one responsible silenced."
Agrias: "You mean to say the kidnapping was a ruse?"
Gaffgarion: "The princess is an obstacle to the throne. So long as she lives, the threat remains that someone could assert her claim above Prince Orinus's. Two heirs are one too many!"
[The camera pans over to Delita, who is still shielding Ovelia with his body.]
Delita: "If her death is certain, then let it at least not be in vain. Kill her if you must, but let it be held she was taken by Goltanna's men. Do that, and the stroke that fells a problem princess at once brings down a rival Lion. That was no doubt Larg's plan all along."
Delita: "...Or was it his? Such a plot has more the feel of Dycedarg's thinking. Would you not agree, Ramza?"
Gaffgarion: "That one has the right of it, Ramza. Come, let us earn our pay!"
Well.
There's a bit in this exchange that's really weird - when Delita says 'If her death is certain, then let it at least not be in vain. Kill her if you must, but let it be held she was taken by Goltanna's men. Do that, and the stroke that fells a problem princess at once brings down a rival Lion.' This is a truly weird sentence in the context of the scene - it reads fine on its own, but Delita is currently shielding the Princess with his own body, and we are just about to enter a battle in which he is defending her with his life. It seems truly bizarre for Delita to be saying 'fine, kill her if you have to, but at least fuck over Goltanna in doing so,' right? I think - and I'm not using any reference to the PSX script or the Japanese translation or anything here, just me trying to parse the scene myself - that this is just a quirk of the translators assuming that their intent would parse more clearly than it does, and that the key was 'That was no doubt Larg's plan all along.'
Which is to say, everything Delita says up to this point - "If her death is certain, then let it at least not be in vain" - is words that he is putting in Dycedarg/Larg's mouth. That is, he's saying, since Larg/Dycedarg have to have the princess killed anyway, they figured they might as well pin it on Goltanna, so her death is not 'wasted.' Kill the Princess, blame Goltanna, have him disgraced/executed, the Queen and Larg have free reins to power.
At least that's my read, and the only way I can quite make sense of Delita's words and actions in this scene.
But if that's the case, you could have made it incredibly clearer and removed any ambiguity by just adding quotation marks to everything before 'That was no doubt Larg's plan.'
Does that mean the men in the Black Lion coat at the very start of the game were in fact a false flag attack? I considered that possibility, but the intro movie really strongly suggested that Delita rode in with them.
Or… Wait a fucking minute, no it does. I'm getting two versions of the intro confused:
In the PSX intro, we saw several chocobo riders, but the lead rider has his face obscured by a helmet. Given that Delita proceeds to abduct the princess on a chocobo, it's natural to assume he was the leader of the group and split off to sneak into the abbay… But also, that leader in the CGI intro? His armor isn't gold.
Meanwhile, in the PSP intro, we see Delita, face visible, in golden armor… But he's riding alone. Not with any other knights.
So that probably means the false flag theory holds true.
Well, anyway.
Gaffgarion, of course, is Ramza's boss, and he knows that Ramza is a Beoulve, so his last orders are to Ramza - "let's earn our pay," ie, he fully expects Ramza to side with him in following his brother's plan, kill the princess, Agrias, and Delita, get their pay, and fuck off happily to their next adventure.
Unfortunately that was not counting on Ramza's betrayal-related trauma.
Ramza: "No… not again. I will not watch as sacrifices are made of the weak and the innocent. She will not be another Tietra!"
Good on you, Ramza! You're dealing very well with your entire world coming down around you again!
Unfortunately our position sucks ass.
The game just spent the past two main story battles reminding us of the first thing it established at the start of the game, which is that Gaffgarion is a badass far beyond our level. And now he's turned against us, in a battle where we are still restricted to 4 units. Now, it's not all bad; the enemy are exclusively Knights, so aside from minor differences in secondary abilities, they're all going to be physical hitters without many special tools, and Delita is on our side. The problem is: Everyone is going to be trying to murk Ovelia.
And that includes Gaffgarion and his long-range, terrain-bypassing, high-damage, heals-him-on-hit Shadowblade.
Let's buckle up.
The first to go in the battle order is Delita, who leaves the Princess to enter that chunk of the cliff with the three gathered Knights, plants himself in a corner to minimize angles of attacks against him, and…
…
The fuck do you mean, Northwain's Strike. Why does he have Northwain's Strike. Why is it dealing 70 damage on hit.
What. Is. Delita's. Character class.
HOLY KNIGHT!? Not even 'Divine Knight,' not even 'White Knight,' Holy Knight!?
He has more Bravery than Ramza!?
How does this motherfucker get to be Holy Knight and I am standing there like an fucking idiot as a Monk with zero Ramza-exclusive jobs-
Oh, I'm sorry, forgive me, I misspoke, Ramza does have his own unique job, he has a slightly modified Squire job.
Fuck it, I am looking up how to unlock the exclusive new job added by War of the Lions that people have mentioned earlier tonight.
I am incandescent with envy. No wonder this fucking guy went down into history as a hero, motherfucking Holy Knight, here I am standing around thinking 'maybe I should look up how to make Ramza a Ninja like I did Marche in FFTA,' fuck me.
I guess he's the good guy then! 'Holy Knight!' I was wrong about him this entire time!
Whatever.
Gaffgarion predictably opens on a Shadowblade aimed at the princess, which considering that we are on a very narrow map where everything looks larger, feels like he just dropped a nuke on her. It's not ideal. Finally Ramza takes his turn, and it's time for some very hasty reunion:
Ramza: "Delita! You live!"
Delita: "So I do! And you, ever your brother's faithful hound?"
Ramza: "Are you mad? I knew naught of any of this! What of you, Delita? You now play party to their plot?"
Delita: "Surely you jape! I came here to rescue the princess! I would not see her made a tool for others to use to their own ends!"
Gaffgarion: "If you would lie, boy, at least lie well! You are no knight errant! You were paid to take the princess. Do not play the fool with me! Name the man who bought your sword!"
Delita: "I sell my sword to no one! Do not count me among your lot!"
Gaffgarion: "Spare me the lecture, I ask for a name! You'd have me believe some bright-eyed pup caught wind of this plan and rescued the princess in the name of justice!? Who gives your orders? Who told you of this plot?"
Delita: "That is not for you to know!"
I hadn't considered that from Delita's perspective, "Ramza abandoned his name and started working as a mercenary under a man with connections to the Northern Sky" would just parse as… "Ramza's brothers asked him to temporarily take a low profile and go 'undercover' with a group of 'mercenaries' so he could do their dirty deeds while granting them plausible deniability,' but no, it makes perfect sense. Of course he would assume that; it fits what he learned about nobles during the first act, and it's an entirely plausible read of Ramza's actions from the outside. What are pseudo-legitimate sons for, if not to advance the main branch's interests at a remote?
As for Gaffgarion's accusations towards Delita, they are, also, believable. How would he have found out about this plot? Didn't he just use physical violence to abduct the princess? Which could potentially be excused by sheer emergency, but…
We'll figure this out later.
Ramza advances on Gaffgarion, throws a punch, and Gaffgarion just… Blocks it. Because of course he also has godlike defenses.
Ovelia: [To Delita] "Tell me, ser - are you friend or foe?"
Delita: "I am a human being, no different from you."
'No different from you is of course laden with implications, considering that Ovelia is literal royalty and Delita is a commoner; he is making a very strong statement here about his current position, one year after the events of Ziekden Fortress, that he is someone who does not believe in distinctions of class or nobility. This is probably relevant to his motivation!
She already lost a quarter of her HP after only one enemy action, send help.
We have another saving grace, which is that Ovelia is mechanically a White Mage, and she will be using these abilities to protect and heal herself.
Or try to, anyway.
Ovelia prepares Protect and goes into her casting stance. Then the rudest Knight in the world immediately moves in and uses Rend MP on her.
The purple number indicates MP damage. He just depleted 50% of Ovelia's MP. Which should be fine - she still has plenty enough to cast Protect - except then her casting stance fails when she reaches her round count, as if the fail was failing to cast, without any indication why. No matter.
A Knight attempts to strike Ramza, succeeds, and is immediately rewarded for his effort by my newly purchased Counter, hitting him for 60 damage, even harder than he hit me; Ramza is actually exceeding the special Knights' damage with his punches, though unfortunately that does not extend to his other moves and does not come packaged with special effect riders.
Agrias: "Hold on, Your Highness! I am coming to help!"
Gaffgarion: "Do not be so sure of that!"
Agrias: "Have you any idea what you do? The path you tread only leads to perdition! An adopted daughter she may be, but a daughter of kings no less! To lay a finger on her is treason!"
Gaffgarion: "Of that, I am well aware. But your daughter of kings stands in the way of kings-to-be. Princess or no, her worth is spent. And those born of kings do not outlive their worth."
Agrias: "Do you mean to mock her!?"
Gaffgarion: "No more than we are mocked. Have you once seen a man of royal blood stay his hand when a commoner blocked his way? The only difference is that those of royal blood are protected by lackwits like you, who swear fealty without even a thought! Even should the princess live, it would be only as a pawn in another's game. To kill her now is a mercy!"
Agrias: "Then it is a mercy I will not see her done!"
RIP, Agrias/Gaffgarion "vitriolic friends slowly develop a mutual respect for each other while fighting alongside one another trading barbs until eventually they're willingly fighting back to back" arc. You will never see the light of day. For one moment there, I believed…
Ah, well.
"Those born of kings do not outlive their worth" is very much giving shades of ASoIaF's "In the game of thrones, you win or you die, there is no second place." In a way, being a high-ranking member of the nobility in a time of succession crisis is more dangerous than any common life - Princess Ovelia is an asset, and Agrias and Ramza may be the only people in Ivalice who actually care about her life as more than an asset to use (more information on Delita pending).
Save me Agrias
Agrias drops the judgment sword on a Knight, dropping him into critical range, which is nice because as you can see two Knights are closing in on the Princess faster than I can actually reach her. The situation is extremely bad!
Thankfully, my turns, stacked towards the end of the queue though they may be, are finally coming up, and now it's time for Hadrian, Osric, and Gillian to move in and do their jobs. Hadrian just stabs people with his spear, Gillian is on healing and light magic damage duty (unfortunately I cannot position her in range of the Princess to cast cure), and Osric is our limited use nuke.
Ramuh is once again MVP, hitting all three enemies who clumped up to get at the Princess without hurting her, dealing considerable damage and taking out our first Knight today.
Summoner is kind of a risky job to deploy - summons are very powerful, but consume a ton of MP and have low speed, so there's a risk of enemies moving before it is cast and wasting a very expensive move. The latter issue can be mitigated by closely watching the queue window and timing casts accordingly, while the former can be mitigated by having cheap spells to fall back on. In Osric's case, that is Moogle (the cheapest Summon, which is an AoE heal that I presume won't heal enemies) which he just now unlocked, and his Time Magick, namely Haste. In any given fight, Osric can either cast Ramuh twice, or cast Ramuh once and then some combo of Moogle and Haste. Which is plenty!
…or it should be. Let's put a pin in that.
Delita, the bane of my existence and my eternal nemesis, unveils yet another supermove, Cleansing Strike, which conjures a giant sword of light and obliterates another enemy; meanwhile, Gaffgarion retreats to the hilltop from which he can Shadowblade the Princess unimpeded.
That's half of her HP gone.
Ramza: "You knew of this from the start! How could you dirty your hands with such tainted coin?"
Gaffgarion: "Dirty? A man cannot sell his blade and think to keep it clean! I do what I am paid to do, and question not the details! That is the way of a sellsword."
Ramza: "Why did you not tell me!?"
Gaffgarion: "What would you have done if I had? Stopped me? The job would have been done, by our hands or no! It makes no difference in the end! Lives end every day with you none the wiser. You cannot save them all! Or are you so foolish as to believe you can?"
Ramza: "But… but this isn't right!"
Gaffgarion: "What of it? You are still a child - a child who will not see the world for what it is. A man does not turn his eyes from the truth. A man accepts it, and walks the path he must. Do not chide me, when you cannot even choose a path for yourself!"
A lot of Gaffgarion's excuses there are just trite deflections - 'I just do what I'm paid to do,' 'if not me then someone else,' 'people die every day, you rube, you imbecile, you absolute buffoon,' none of them really have any moral validity. The stuff directed at Ramza though, that actually hits him - our boy just spent a year in a murder fugue as a mercenary, and now just as he's starting to find some semblance of his old life (Delita is back) and moral grounds (protect princess), he's betrayed by a trusted figure of authority yet a-fucking-gain, and that guy is now hitting him while he's vulnerable by pointing out to his fragile nascent hero complex. Of course Ramza can't save everyone, a sellsword in the middle of a war of succession is hardly poised to be a hero, but he's too shook to have any answer when Gaffgarion points that out and then adds - correctly - that Ramza does not even know his own path. Does not even know himself. So how can he make a moral stand?
(The answer of course is that murdering girls because they're politically inconvenient is always bad.)
To my great confusion, the Knight's Rend MP seems to have just disabled Ovelia's magic entirely. She still has 27 MP, you can see it in her status window every time she takes a turn, but her Protect never fired, and for the rest of the fight she just uses Potion on her turn every turn. Which is a problem, because Gaffgarion deals more damage than her potion can heal, to say nothing of the Knight. At least Delita is basically holding up the entire left side of the chasm on his own!
Doing a solid job of it, too.
Agrias's Judgment Blade also appears to completely ignore terrain elevation, which it is growing increasingly apparent is one of the most useful thing for a ranged ability to do. Like, check out this range diamond:
I can't fucking do that. Even if I had a spell that hit that far, its range would be stuck in the river Agrias is currently waddling in, because none of my spells or ranged attacks can hit at 9 levels of elevation. But she can just park herself safely down the stream and blast half the map.
I'm not looking forward to her sudden and inevitable betrayal and the battle that follows.
What? I can notice a trend!
Thankfully, Agrias's Judgment Blade takes out the last knight on our side, and that means we're free to pursue Gaffgarion up the stream.
I thought I'd be really clever and use Quiescence on Gaffgarion to Silence him and see if that neutralized Shadowblade. Unfortunately, the miss chance on Mystic Arts is incredibly painful. It's labeled as 73% against Gaffgarion, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's still entirely possible to miss twice in a row, as happens to Gillian, so I'll never know if Silence would have even worked (or at least I won't know until someone in the thread tells me).
Like here's the thing: FFT battles are fairly big productions that take a solid chunk of time… But because of how many characters there are, in absolute terms they don't take that many rounds. Many characters are going to act, like, three or four times total, if you don't include 'turns spent moving in position' under 'act.' Here, Gillian cast Invigoration once (it whiffed) and Quiescence twice (it whiffed both times), and that's her entire contribution to the fight, and that means,
*heavy sigh*
*steeples hands*
She didn't get a single JP so far. Because JP is only awarded on successful actions.
This is just deeply frustrating and making me reconsider Mystic as a whole just because this fucking sucks ass, man. If you don't get JP you don't unlock new Abilities and if you don't get new Abilities you're just stuck with Abilities that whiff and don't get JP so this is just. A hell cycle.
Whatever. This is fine. Because I still have my secret weapon. I said earlier Osric was a limited use nuke, because he can only summon twice per fight, but I just told you that characters often only go three times in a full battle, so twice is actually plenty, you follow me?
Time to fry Gaffgarion with lightn-
…
What.
The fuck.
…
When I did a run on the shops upgrading my equipment. I grabbed the best armors available. And I used the Optimize command on everyone without checking the fine print.
So it equipped Osric with Ringmail, the highest currently available item of clothing, and Headgear, the highest currently available non-heavy headpiece, both of which increase HP, instead of the Red Hood and Silken Robe he had on before that increase MP.
So he only has 31 MP. He can summon Ramuh once, and then he's just dead weight for the entire rest of the fight. Unable to even cast the lowest tier spells of Time Magick or Black Magick or whatever.
I'm just going to scream at a wall for a few minutes now.
…
I'm back.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't. Matter. It doesn't matter that I have a Mystic who whiffs all her status spells, a Summoner who can only cast once, and a Dragoon who can't jump (I tried jumping in this fight again, it whiffed, again). I have Ramza, Agrias, and Holy Knight Delita on my side and it's the only thing that matters.
Also Hadrian still does some serious damage.
We manage to drive Gaffgarion to the peak of the map, where Overlia is outside his Shadowblade range. This means we have effectively secured the Princess (all the Knights on our side are dead and Delita is still occupying the ones on the other side of the bridge) and now the only question is whether Gaffgarion can kill us faster than we can kill him - and as previously mentioned, Shadowblade's healing properties make that a tough call.
In the end, to my incredible surprise, it's actually Gillian who puts the lie to my words from earlier and seals the fight. Seeing as Mystic Arts have proven worthless, I have her sneak up behind Gaffgarion and hit him with her staff for trivial damage… Except because she is wielding a Fire Rod, this triggers a point-blank Fire which deals an extra 38 damage.
And that's enough to drive him into critical. Predictably, we will not slay Gaffgarion today; but the old man whispers a 'Damn it…' and teleports away, just as Wiegraf did before him.
The rest is just another turn of mopping up the two surviving Knights who are stranded on separate sides of the map; one is in close range of Delita and the other of Agrias, so this is swiftly done, and our victory sealed.
At this point we are pretty much drowning in money.
And now… Cutscene time.
V. Delita, the New Man
Delita: "Let the princess with me. She will be safer in my care."
Ramza: "What is this game you play with us, Delita?"
Delita: "Game? I do no more than speak the truth. You've made an enemy of the entire Order of the Northern Sky. Where would you take her?"
Delita: "This was Duke Larg's plan - and he would not act without counsel of the queen. You cannot trust the Crown. Would you then run to Goltanna? No, that would be folly. He would only offer up you heads in hope of keeping his own."
Agrias: And what, ser, would you propose to do?"
Delita: "I would do only that which you, my lady, cannot."
Ramza: "You speak in nothings."
As weird as the model's compositions get, I love the composition of this scene - Delita standing alone on one side, the waterfall dwarfing everyone, Ramza standing, unsure, Agrias holding the princess protectively. We could maybe have found a setup that doesn't look so much like 'both women cower behind Ramza's back' but at least it's not really what's happening - this is Agrias in her role as the Princess's defender and Ramza as a figure stranded between the two, unsure where he stands.
Delita: [He turns around, looking at the waterfall, then at Ramza again.] "So I do. But pay it no mind. I shall leave her with you for yet a while longer."
[Delita turns around and starts to leave.]
Ramza: "Delita." [Delita pauses.] "I did not think we would meet again, but… I'm glad we have."
[The camera stares at Delita's back, then after a moment, to his profile. He looks up.]
[Sad piano music starts playing. The screen fades to black.]
Delita: "It was Tietra."
[A vision of a bird across the sun, and Delita holding up his hand, holding a pendant against his palm.]
Delita: "She watched over me then… As she does now."
Ovelia: [She stands up.] "Know that you go with my thanks, Ser Delita."
Delita: "Ramza. I hope this meeting is not our last."
Agrias: "I owe you my thanks as well. But he's right. The Northern Sky will not be long in falling on us now."
Ramza: "This is the path I've chosen."
[The camera pans to the other end of the bridge, where Delita is gone.]
Girl, you absolutely do not have to 'hand it to' Delita, dude punched you in the gut so hard you passed out so he could abduct you on a chocobo. And then he somehow got lost in the wilderness for the *checks notes* month and a half it took me to run errands before getting back on his trail.
Anyway. This is a sweet scene, well-shot, with good music, but it's cast in the shadow of ambiguity - none of these characters can really afford to trust Delita, and he won't explain himself, so he can't earn that trust. Just like Ramza before, the pillars of Ovelia's life have come crashing down, and everything has changed again, they are all now cast adrift in the tide of history.
And I don't trust Delita either. 'Holy Knight' he may be, but his motives are wrapped in secrecy. His approach to Ovelia was shady as hell, he used outright violence and - 'Tis your birth and faith that wrong you, not I'? Birth is now obvious - Ovelia is getting fucked over because her position in the royal line of succession makes her a threat - but faith? We still know so little about the Church of Glabados, and Delita is specifically a Holy Knight, and we know the church hailed him as a hero and a saint for centuries after these events while concealing Ramza's contribution to history; there's something sinister there.
But for now, we can't afford to pause and think about it.
Ramza: "But what now? Delita spoke true. We've no allies to whom we can turn."
Agrias: "We could entreat Cardinal Delacroix for aid. The Church of Glabados rules in Lionel. Surely they would not refuse us."
Ramza: "We'd be beyond the reach of the Northern Order there as well. Very well. We make for Lionel."
Well what do you know! Just as I say this, it turns out we're most likely about to learn more about the Church!
The map does a really neat trick there, where our previous destination, Fort Besselat, gets erased from the map, instead replaced with a new path to the south, towards our next destination.
And that's where we'll be leaving off for today. Exciting new developments! We covered three main story battles in a row because I got tricked in exactly the way the game planned to - by showing us three nodes ending at Fort Besselat, it seemed natural this part of the arc would end when we reached the Fort, only for the game to pull the rug on us and have Gaffgarion betray us.
Absolute banger of the twist, by the way, my frustration with the systems aside. There's a lot of moving parts that fired off wrong at the same time and any of them I could have taken in stride, but they all accumulated in a way that left me pretty frustrated with the battle as a battle - but as a story beat it was great…
Even if things are starting to get murky enough that I'm worried about the game sticking the landing on the next part. Delita was initially introduced as a villain, now it's revealed he's maybe not, but maybe? We thought he worked with the Southern Sky and Duke Goltanna, but he just said that Ovelia wouldn't be safe with him? Is he working with the Church? That's my current theory. Hopefully we'll find out more soon.
No new job unlocks (we still have Orator that I haven't touched), but Osric currently has a hefty 437 JP to spend and (after having modified his equipment for bonus MP and saved the game so it wouldn't screw me over when I restart) I'm wondering which Summon I should buy him next. Acquiring Ifrit or Shiva, summons of similar power to Ramuh, seem redundant given how limited JP is and how Ramuh already does the damage AoE job well enough; there are other support summons like Sylph and Faerie, or I could save up JP… We'll see.
Additionally, Princess Ovelia has now joined our party roster as our second guest unit, replacing Gaffgarion. Her job is Princess, and mechanically she appears to be basically a White Mage.
Oh, and Boco just produced a kid by spontaneous generation.
Chocobo egg.
We'll find out more about this when it hatches, I'm sure.
For now, let's just prep for our next update by checking out Cardinal Delacroix's Chronicle entry:
Hmmm.
I'm interested in where this game is going with its Faux Catholic Church, for sure. Interesting that Delacroix is noted as an inquisitor, but also beloved of the people. What does the Church need an inquisition for? What does it mean to be a heretic in this world?
I suppose we'll find out soon.
This after-action report from a successful errand reminds me of the mysterious, kind of melancholy results of the planetary explorations in the first Mass Effect game.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The road to Lionel.
Main Story Battle Count: 13
Random Battle Count: 15
Oh, now that's a dramatic setup, I love it. Delita and Princess Ovelia are stuck on a bridge, caught between two bands of knights, cornered; Delita actually seems to be shielding Ovelia, and two Knights already lie dead on the ground. We are in the middle of a deadly fight, and the situation appears desperate for Delita.
Northern Sky Knight: "Stand aside, ser! You are defeated! Surrender the princess, and no more blood must needs be split!"
Delita: "Do you enjoy the taste of lies? Your orders are to see the princess dead! And once I've watched you feed the falls her blood, I'm to believe you'd let me live, a witness to your crime?"
NSK: "What foolishness is this? We came to save the princess, not kill her! What could we possibly gain by Lady Ovelia's death? We wish only to see her freed from the Black Lion's claws!"
[At this point, Ovelia takes a few steps away from Delita and turns around to the lower falls; our party enters there.]
Agrias: "Your Highness!"
Ovelia: "Agrias!"
Alright.
I'd like to take a little bit of a moment here to refresh ourselves on the setup to all this.
Duke Goltanna is the Black Lion. He commands the Order of the Southern Sky. He is the Council's favorite for regent.
Duke Larg is the White Lion. He commands the Order of the Northern Sky. He is the Queen's favorite for regent, as well as her brother.
We are members of a nameless sellsword group who were hired by the Northern Sky to protect Princess Ovelia. In this process, we met up with Lady Agrias, who is a member of the Lionsguard, the royal family's personal order of guards. There are multiple layers of loyalty at work here. We are pursuing Princess Ovelia, who is unrelated to the Queen and can present a competing claim to the throne against her son. She was abducted by Delita, who showed up with forces bearing the icon of Duke Goltanna. This was an outright abduction; Delita used physical violence to coerce the resisting princess, then fled while we were slaughtering the men we saw him riding in with during the intro cutscene.
Now, Delita has been cornered by forces of the Northern Sky, the same ones who hired Gaffgarion, and they are demanding that Delita surrender the Princess. Delita accuses them of wanting to kill her and silence any witnesses, while the Northern Sky Knights are telling him that this is stupid, they are trying to rescue her from the Black Lion's force, which we know to be the goal we set out on alongside Agrias.
Everyone's caught up? Clear sight of the politics at play?
Okay, then the following should come as no surprise.
Top 10 anime betrayals, all year, every year.
The Northern Sky Knight orders Gaffgarion to kill everyone, and Gaffgarion shrugs, and turns around to draw on us all.
Yeah. I don't doubt that Goltanna's own designs on Ovelia are nefarious, but we know the Queen has been eliminating all threats to her son's claim to the throne, pushed out the Queen Mother into exile (and possibly had her killed), and Ovelia is one such a threat and not related by blood to the Queen. The Northern Sky is commanded by Duke Larg, who is the Queen's brother and her staunch supporter. Therefore, while Goltanna likely wants Ovelia alive to further his own designs to the throne, the Queen and by extension the Northern Sky want her dead. And Gaffgarion (and Ramza) work for the Northern Sky.
It's all falling into place.
Agrias: "You would betray us!?"
Gaffgarion: "Betray you? You have a viper's tongue, milady. I betray no one. I am in the order's employ, and they are of it. My task was to see the princess safely abducted. And theirs, to see the one responsible silenced."
Agrias: "You mean to say the kidnapping was a ruse?"
Gaffgarion: "The princess is an obstacle to the throne. So long as she lives, the threat remains that someone could assert her claim above Prince Orinus's. Two heirs are one too many!"
[The camera pans over to Delita, who is still shielding Ovelia with his body.]
Delita: "If her death is certain, then let it at least not be in vain. Kill her if you must, but let it be held she was taken by Goltanna's men. Do that, and the stroke that fells a problem princess at once brings down a rival Lion. That was no doubt Larg's plan all along."
Delita: "...Or was it his? Such a plot has more the feel of Dycedarg's thinking. Would you not agree, Ramza?"
Gaffgarion: "That one has the right of it, Ramza. Come, let us earn our pay!"
Well.
There's a bit in this exchange that's really weird - when Delita says 'If her death is certain, then let it at least not be in vain. Kill her if you must, but let it be held she was taken by Goltanna's men. Do that, and the stroke that fells a problem princess at once brings down a rival Lion.' This is a truly weird sentence in the context of the scene - it reads fine on its own, but Delita is currently shielding the Princess with his own body, and we are just about to enter a battle in which he is defending her with his life. It seems truly bizarre for Delita to be saying 'fine, kill her if you have to, but at least fuck over Goltanna in doing so,' right? I think - and I'm not using any reference to the PSX script or the Japanese translation or anything here, just me trying to parse the scene myself - that this is just a quirk of the translators assuming that their intent would parse more clearly than it does, and that the key was 'That was no doubt Larg's plan all along.'
Which is to say, everything Delita says up to this point - "If her death is certain, then let it at least not be in vain" - is words that he is putting in Dycedarg/Larg's mouth. That is, he's saying, since Larg/Dycedarg have to have the princess killed anyway, they figured they might as well pin it on Goltanna, so her death is not 'wasted.' Kill the Princess, blame Goltanna, have him disgraced/executed, the Queen and Larg have free reins to power.
At least that's my read, and the only way I can quite make sense of Delita's words and actions in this scene.
But if that's the case, you could have made it incredibly clearer and removed any ambiguity by just adding quotation marks to everything before 'That was no doubt Larg's plan.'
Does that mean the men in the Black Lion coat at the very start of the game were in fact a false flag attack? I considered that possibility, but the intro movie really strongly suggested that Delita rode in with them.
Or… Wait a fucking minute, no it does. I'm getting two versions of the intro confused:
In the PSX intro, we saw several chocobo riders, but the lead rider has his face obscured by a helmet. Given that Delita proceeds to abduct the princess on a chocobo, it's natural to assume he was the leader of the group and split off to sneak into the abbay… But also, that leader in the CGI intro? His armor isn't gold.
Meanwhile, in the PSP intro, we see Delita, face visible, in golden armor… But he's riding alone. Not with any other knights.
So that probably means the false flag theory holds true.
Well, anyway.
Gaffgarion, of course, is Ramza's boss, and he knows that Ramza is a Beoulve, so his last orders are to Ramza - "let's earn our pay," ie, he fully expects Ramza to side with him in following his brother's plan, kill the princess, Agrias, and Delita, get their pay, and fuck off happily to their next adventure.
Unfortunately that was not counting on Ramza's betrayal-related trauma.
Ramza: "No… not again. I will not watch as sacrifices are made of the weak and the innocent. She will not be another Tietra!"
Good on you, Ramza! You're dealing very well with your entire world coming down around you again!
Unfortunately our position sucks ass.
The game just spent the past two main story battles reminding us of the first thing it established at the start of the game, which is that Gaffgarion is a badass far beyond our level. And now he's turned against us, in a battle where we are still restricted to 4 units. Now, it's not all bad; the enemy are exclusively Knights, so aside from minor differences in secondary abilities, they're all going to be physical hitters without many special tools, and Delita is on our side. The problem is: Everyone is going to be trying to murk Ovelia.
And that includes Gaffgarion and his long-range, terrain-bypassing, high-damage, heals-him-on-hit Shadowblade.
Let's buckle up.
The first to go in the battle order is Delita, who leaves the Princess to enter that chunk of the cliff with the three gathered Knights, plants himself in a corner to minimize angles of attacks against him, and…
…
The fuck do you mean, Northwain's Strike. Why does he have Northwain's Strike. Why is it dealing 70 damage on hit.
What. Is. Delita's. Character class.
HOLY KNIGHT!? Not even 'Divine Knight,' not even 'White Knight,' Holy Knight!?
He has more Bravery than Ramza!?
How does this motherfucker get to be Holy Knight and I am standing there like an fucking idiot as a Monk with zero Ramza-exclusive jobs-
Oh, I'm sorry, forgive me, I misspoke, Ramza does have his own unique job, he has a slightly modified Squire job.
Fuck it, I am looking up how to unlock the exclusive new job added by War of the Lions that people have mentioned earlier tonight.
I am incandescent with envy. No wonder this fucking guy went down into history as a hero, motherfucking Holy Knight, here I am standing around thinking 'maybe I should look up how to make Ramza a Ninja like I did Marche in FFTA,' fuck me.
I guess he's the good guy then! 'Holy Knight!' I was wrong about him this entire time!
Whatever.
Gaffgarion predictably opens on a Shadowblade aimed at the princess, which considering that we are on a very narrow map where everything looks larger, feels like he just dropped a nuke on her. It's not ideal. Finally Ramza takes his turn, and it's time for some very hasty reunion:
Ramza: "Delita! You live!"
Delita: "So I do! And you, ever your brother's faithful hound?"
Ramza: "Are you mad? I knew naught of any of this! What of you, Delita? You now play party to their plot?"
Delita: "Surely you jape! I came here to rescue the princess! I would not see her made a tool for others to use to their own ends!"
Gaffgarion: "If you would lie, boy, at least lie well! You are no knight errant! You were paid to take the princess. Do not play the fool with me! Name the man who bought your sword!"
Delita: "I sell my sword to no one! Do not count me among your lot!"
Gaffgarion: "Spare me the lecture, I ask for a name! You'd have me believe some bright-eyed pup caught wind of this plan and rescued the princess in the name of justice!? Who gives your orders? Who told you of this plot?"
Delita: "That is not for you to know!"
I hadn't considered that from Delita's perspective, "Ramza abandoned his name and started working as a mercenary under a man with connections to the Northern Sky" would just parse as… "Ramza's brothers asked him to temporarily take a low profile and go 'undercover' with a group of 'mercenaries' so he could do their dirty deeds while granting them plausible deniability,' but no, it makes perfect sense. Of course he would assume that; it fits what he learned about nobles during the first act, and it's an entirely plausible read of Ramza's actions from the outside. What are pseudo-legitimate sons for, if not to advance the main branch's interests at a remote?
As for Gaffgarion's accusations towards Delita, they are, also, believable. How would he have found out about this plot? Didn't he just use physical violence to abduct the princess? Which could potentially be excused by sheer emergency, but…
We'll figure this out later.
Ramza advances on Gaffgarion, throws a punch, and Gaffgarion just… Blocks it. Because of course he also has godlike defenses.
Ovelia: [To Delita] "Tell me, ser - are you friend or foe?"
Delita: "I am a human being, no different from you."
'No different from you is of course laden with implications, considering that Ovelia is literal royalty and Delita is a commoner; he is making a very strong statement here about his current position, one year after the events of Ziekden Fortress, that he is someone who does not believe in distinctions of class or nobility. This is probably relevant to his motivation!
She already lost a quarter of her HP after only one enemy action, send help.
We have another saving grace, which is that Ovelia is mechanically a White Mage, and she will be using these abilities to protect and heal herself.
Or try to, anyway.
Ovelia prepares Protect and goes into her casting stance. Then the rudest Knight in the world immediately moves in and uses Rend MP on her.
The purple number indicates MP damage. He just depleted 50% of Ovelia's MP. Which should be fine - she still has plenty enough to cast Protect - except then her casting stance fails when she reaches her round count, as if the fail was failing to cast, without any indication why. No matter.
A Knight attempts to strike Ramza, succeeds, and is immediately rewarded for his effort by my newly purchased Counter, hitting him for 60 damage, even harder than he hit me; Ramza is actually exceeding the special Knights' damage with his punches, though unfortunately that does not extend to his other moves and does not come packaged with special effect riders.
Agrias: "Hold on, Your Highness! I am coming to help!"
Gaffgarion: "Do not be so sure of that!"
Agrias: "Have you any idea what you do? The path you tread only leads to perdition! An adopted daughter she may be, but a daughter of kings no less! To lay a finger on her is treason!"
Gaffgarion: "Of that, I am well aware. But your daughter of kings stands in the way of kings-to-be. Princess or no, her worth is spent. And those born of kings do not outlive their worth."
Agrias: "Do you mean to mock her!?"
Gaffgarion: "No more than we are mocked. Have you once seen a man of royal blood stay his hand when a commoner blocked his way? The only difference is that those of royal blood are protected by lackwits like you, who swear fealty without even a thought! Even should the princess live, it would be only as a pawn in another's game. To kill her now is a mercy!"
Agrias: "Then it is a mercy I will not see her done!"
RIP, Agrias/Gaffgarion "vitriolic friends slowly develop a mutual respect for each other while fighting alongside one another trading barbs until eventually they're willingly fighting back to back" arc. You will never see the light of day. For one moment there, I believed…
Ah, well.
"Those born of kings do not outlive their worth" is very much giving shades of ASoIaF's "In the game of thrones, you win or you die, there is no second place." In a way, being a high-ranking member of the nobility in a time of succession crisis is more dangerous than any common life - Princess Ovelia is an asset, and Agrias and Ramza may be the only people in Ivalice who actually care about her life as more than an asset to use (more information on Delita pending).
Save me Agrias
Agrias drops the judgment sword on a Knight, dropping him into critical range, which is nice because as you can see two Knights are closing in on the Princess faster than I can actually reach her. The situation is extremely bad!
Thankfully, my turns, stacked towards the end of the queue though they may be, are finally coming up, and now it's time for Hadrian, Osric, and Gillian to move in and do their jobs. Hadrian just stabs people with his spear, Gillian is on healing and light magic damage duty (unfortunately I cannot position her in range of the Princess to cast cure), and Osric is our limited use nuke.
Ramuh is once again MVP, hitting all three enemies who clumped up to get at the Princess without hurting her, dealing considerable damage and taking out our first Knight today.
Summoner is kind of a risky job to deploy - summons are very powerful, but consume a ton of MP and have low speed, so there's a risk of enemies moving before it is cast and wasting a very expensive move. The latter issue can be mitigated by closely watching the queue window and timing casts accordingly, while the former can be mitigated by having cheap spells to fall back on. In Osric's case, that is Moogle (the cheapest Summon, which is an AoE heal that I presume won't heal enemies) which he just now unlocked, and his Time Magick, namely Haste. In any given fight, Osric can either cast Ramuh twice, or cast Ramuh once and then some combo of Moogle and Haste. Which is plenty!
…or it should be. Let's put a pin in that.
Delita, the bane of my existence and my eternal nemesis, unveils yet another supermove, Cleansing Strike, which conjures a giant sword of light and obliterates another enemy; meanwhile, Gaffgarion retreats to the hilltop from which he can Shadowblade the Princess unimpeded.
That's half of her HP gone.
Ramza: "You knew of this from the start! How could you dirty your hands with such tainted coin?"
Gaffgarion: "Dirty? A man cannot sell his blade and think to keep it clean! I do what I am paid to do, and question not the details! That is the way of a sellsword."
Ramza: "Why did you not tell me!?"
Gaffgarion: "What would you have done if I had? Stopped me? The job would have been done, by our hands or no! It makes no difference in the end! Lives end every day with you none the wiser. You cannot save them all! Or are you so foolish as to believe you can?"
Ramza: "But… but this isn't right!"
Gaffgarion: "What of it? You are still a child - a child who will not see the world for what it is. A man does not turn his eyes from the truth. A man accepts it, and walks the path he must. Do not chide me, when you cannot even choose a path for yourself!"
A lot of Gaffgarion's excuses there are just trite deflections - 'I just do what I'm paid to do,' 'if not me then someone else,' 'people die every day, you rube, you imbecile, you absolute buffoon,' none of them really have any moral validity. The stuff directed at Ramza though, that actually hits him - our boy just spent a year in a murder fugue as a mercenary, and now just as he's starting to find some semblance of his old life (Delita is back) and moral grounds (protect princess), he's betrayed by a trusted figure of authority yet a-fucking-gain, and that guy is now hitting him while he's vulnerable by pointing out to his fragile nascent hero complex. Of course Ramza can't save everyone, a sellsword in the middle of a war of succession is hardly poised to be a hero, but he's too shook to have any answer when Gaffgarion points that out and then adds - correctly - that Ramza does not even know his own path. Does not even know himself. So how can he make a moral stand?
(The answer of course is that murdering girls because they're politically inconvenient is always bad.)
To my great confusion, the Knight's Rend MP seems to have just disabled Ovelia's magic entirely. She still has 27 MP, you can see it in her status window every time she takes a turn, but her Protect never fired, and for the rest of the fight she just uses Potion on her turn every turn. Which is a problem, because Gaffgarion deals more damage than her potion can heal, to say nothing of the Knight. At least Delita is basically holding up the entire left side of the chasm on his own!
Doing a solid job of it, too.
Agrias's Judgment Blade also appears to completely ignore terrain elevation, which it is growing increasingly apparent is one of the most useful thing for a ranged ability to do. Like, check out this range diamond:
I can't fucking do that. Even if I had a spell that hit that far, its range would be stuck in the river Agrias is currently waddling in, because none of my spells or ranged attacks can hit at 9 levels of elevation. But she can just park herself safely down the stream and blast half the map.
I'm not looking forward to her sudden and inevitable betrayal and the battle that follows.
What? I can notice a trend!
Thankfully, Agrias's Judgment Blade takes out the last knight on our side, and that means we're free to pursue Gaffgarion up the stream.
I thought I'd be really clever and use Quiescence on Gaffgarion to Silence him and see if that neutralized Shadowblade. Unfortunately, the miss chance on Mystic Arts is incredibly painful. It's labeled as 73% against Gaffgarion, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's still entirely possible to miss twice in a row, as happens to Gillian, so I'll never know if Silence would have even worked (or at least I won't know until someone in the thread tells me).
Like here's the thing: FFT battles are fairly big productions that take a solid chunk of time… But because of how many characters there are, in absolute terms they don't take that many rounds. Many characters are going to act, like, three or four times total, if you don't include 'turns spent moving in position' under 'act.' Here, Gillian cast Invigoration once (it whiffed) and Quiescence twice (it whiffed both times), and that's her entire contribution to the fight, and that means,
*heavy sigh*
*steeples hands*
She didn't get a single JP so far. Because JP is only awarded on successful actions.
This is just deeply frustrating and making me reconsider Mystic as a whole just because this fucking sucks ass, man. If you don't get JP you don't unlock new Abilities and if you don't get new Abilities you're just stuck with Abilities that whiff and don't get JP so this is just. A hell cycle.
Whatever. This is fine. Because I still have my secret weapon. I said earlier Osric was a limited use nuke, because he can only summon twice per fight, but I just told you that characters often only go three times in a full battle, so twice is actually plenty, you follow me?
Time to fry Gaffgarion with lightn-
…
What.
The fuck.
…
When I did a run on the shops upgrading my equipment. I grabbed the best armors available. And I used the Optimize command on everyone without checking the fine print.
So it equipped Osric with Ringmail, the highest currently available item of clothing, and Headgear, the highest currently available non-heavy headpiece, both of which increase HP, instead of the Red Hood and Silken Robe he had on before that increase MP.
So he only has 31 MP. He can summon Ramuh once, and then he's just dead weight for the entire rest of the fight. Unable to even cast the lowest tier spells of Time Magick or Black Magick or whatever.
I'm just going to scream at a wall for a few minutes now.
…
I'm back.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't. Matter. It doesn't matter that I have a Mystic who whiffs all her status spells, a Summoner who can only cast once, and a Dragoon who can't jump (I tried jumping in this fight again, it whiffed, again). I have Ramza, Agrias, and Holy Knight Delita on my side and it's the only thing that matters.
Also Hadrian still does some serious damage.
We manage to drive Gaffgarion to the peak of the map, where Overlia is outside his Shadowblade range. This means we have effectively secured the Princess (all the Knights on our side are dead and Delita is still occupying the ones on the other side of the bridge) and now the only question is whether Gaffgarion can kill us faster than we can kill him - and as previously mentioned, Shadowblade's healing properties make that a tough call.
In the end, to my incredible surprise, it's actually Gillian who puts the lie to my words from earlier and seals the fight. Seeing as Mystic Arts have proven worthless, I have her sneak up behind Gaffgarion and hit him with her staff for trivial damage… Except because she is wielding a Fire Rod, this triggers a point-blank Fire which deals an extra 38 damage.
And that's enough to drive him into critical. Predictably, we will not slay Gaffgarion today; but the old man whispers a 'Damn it…' and teleports away, just as Wiegraf did before him.
The rest is just another turn of mopping up the two surviving Knights who are stranded on separate sides of the map; one is in close range of Delita and the other of Agrias, so this is swiftly done, and our victory sealed.
At this point we are pretty much drowning in money.
And now… Cutscene time.
V. Delita, the New Man
Delita: "Let the princess with me. She will be safer in my care."
Ramza: "What is this game you play with us, Delita?"
Delita: "Game? I do no more than speak the truth. You've made an enemy of the entire Order of the Northern Sky. Where would you take her?"
Delita: "This was Duke Larg's plan - and he would not act without counsel of the queen. You cannot trust the Crown. Would you then run to Goltanna? No, that would be folly. He would only offer up you heads in hope of keeping his own."
Agrias: And what, ser, would you propose to do?"
Delita: "I would do only that which you, my lady, cannot."
Ramza: "You speak in nothings."
As weird as the model's compositions get, I love the composition of this scene - Delita standing alone on one side, the waterfall dwarfing everyone, Ramza standing, unsure, Agrias holding the princess protectively. We could maybe have found a setup that doesn't look so much like 'both women cower behind Ramza's back' but at least it's not really what's happening - this is Agrias in her role as the Princess's defender and Ramza as a figure stranded between the two, unsure where he stands.
Delita: [He turns around, looking at the waterfall, then at Ramza again.] "So I do. But pay it no mind. I shall leave her with you for yet a while longer."
[Delita turns around and starts to leave.]
Ramza: "Delita." [Delita pauses.] "I did not think we would meet again, but… I'm glad we have."
[The camera stares at Delita's back, then after a moment, to his profile. He looks up.]
[Sad piano music starts playing. The screen fades to black.]
Delita: "It was Tietra."
[A vision of a bird across the sun, and Delita holding up his hand, holding a pendant against his palm.]
Delita: "She watched over me then… As she does now."
Ovelia: [She stands up.] "Know that you go with my thanks, Ser Delita."
Delita: "Ramza. I hope this meeting is not our last."
Agrias: "I owe you my thanks as well. But he's right. The Northern Sky will not be long in falling on us now."
Ramza: "This is the path I've chosen."
[The camera pans to the other end of the bridge, where Delita is gone.]
Girl, you absolutely do not have to 'hand it to' Delita, dude punched you in the gut so hard you passed out so he could abduct you on a chocobo. And then he somehow got lost in the wilderness for the *checks notes* month and a half it took me to run errands before getting back on his trail.
Anyway. This is a sweet scene, well-shot, with good music, but it's cast in the shadow of ambiguity - none of these characters can really afford to trust Delita, and he won't explain himself, so he can't earn that trust. Just like Ramza before, the pillars of Ovelia's life have come crashing down, and everything has changed again, they are all now cast adrift in the tide of history.
And I don't trust Delita either. 'Holy Knight' he may be, but his motives are wrapped in secrecy. His approach to Ovelia was shady as hell, he used outright violence and - 'Tis your birth and faith that wrong you, not I'? Birth is now obvious - Ovelia is getting fucked over because her position in the royal line of succession makes her a threat - but faith? We still know so little about the Church of Glabados, and Delita is specifically a Holy Knight, and we know the church hailed him as a hero and a saint for centuries after these events while concealing Ramza's contribution to history; there's something sinister there.
But for now, we can't afford to pause and think about it.
Ramza: "But what now? Delita spoke true. We've no allies to whom we can turn."
Agrias: "We could entreat Cardinal Delacroix for aid. The Church of Glabados rules in Lionel. Surely they would not refuse us."
Ramza: "We'd be beyond the reach of the Northern Order there as well. Very well. We make for Lionel."
Well what do you know! Just as I say this, it turns out we're most likely about to learn more about the Church!
The map does a really neat trick there, where our previous destination, Fort Besselat, gets erased from the map, instead replaced with a new path to the south, towards our next destination.
And that's where we'll be leaving off for today. Exciting new developments! We covered three main story battles in a row because I got tricked in exactly the way the game planned to - by showing us three nodes ending at Fort Besselat, it seemed natural this part of the arc would end when we reached the Fort, only for the game to pull the rug on us and have Gaffgarion betray us.
Absolute banger of the twist, by the way, my frustration with the systems aside. There's a lot of moving parts that fired off wrong at the same time and any of them I could have taken in stride, but they all accumulated in a way that left me pretty frustrated with the battle as a battle - but as a story beat it was great…
Even if things are starting to get murky enough that I'm worried about the game sticking the landing on the next part. Delita was initially introduced as a villain, now it's revealed he's maybe not, but maybe? We thought he worked with the Southern Sky and Duke Goltanna, but he just said that Ovelia wouldn't be safe with him? Is he working with the Church? That's my current theory. Hopefully we'll find out more soon.
No new job unlocks (we still have Orator that I haven't touched), but Osric currently has a hefty 437 JP to spend and (after having modified his equipment for bonus MP and saved the game so it wouldn't screw me over when I restart) I'm wondering which Summon I should buy him next. Acquiring Ifrit or Shiva, summons of similar power to Ramuh, seem redundant given how limited JP is and how Ramuh already does the damage AoE job well enough; there are other support summons like Sylph and Faerie, or I could save up JP… We'll see.
Additionally, Princess Ovelia has now joined our party roster as our second guest unit, replacing Gaffgarion. Her job is Princess, and mechanically she appears to be basically a White Mage.
Oh, and Boco just produced a kid by spontaneous generation.
Chocobo egg.
We'll find out more about this when it hatches, I'm sure.
For now, let's just prep for our next update by checking out Cardinal Delacroix's Chronicle entry:
Hmmm.
I'm interested in where this game is going with its Faux Catholic Church, for sure. Interesting that Delacroix is noted as an inquisitor, but also beloved of the people. What does the Church need an inquisition for? What does it mean to be a heretic in this world?
I suppose we'll find out soon.
This after-action report from a successful errand reminds me of the mysterious, kind of melancholy results of the planetary explorations in the first Mass Effect game.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: The road to Lionel.
Main Story Battle Count: 13
Random Battle Count: 15
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GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
Delita working for the church would explain why a Church knight was hiring mercenaries to stall you - Gaffgarion was secretly after Ovelia's head so buying time for Delita to escape with her was a good move.
Emy
Artificial Defender
Yeah, it's definitely irksome not having the same timing info that every other ability gives you. I can give a rule of thumb for the delay, though.
The Lancer lands in the equivalent of 50 CT worth of time, if the jumper and target are of the same speed. So if you target enemies with <50 CT (visible when you put the targeting cursor over them) you'll generally land hits.
- Location
- Spain
Well, there is one use for this.
When Gaffgarion turns against you, he keeps the exact same gear and class you left him with - So you can completely cripple him by leaving him gearless and with an skillless class.
An extremely lame move if you ask me, but possible nonetheless.
I FUCKING KNEW IT
Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
Oh wow, I didn't realise equipment gives bonus mp, just hp and stuff like dodge chance or attack. That's interesting. Much like I didn't realise X Rods actually cast the spell they're named for when you bonk someone with them, heh.
Gaffgarion's betrayal actually caught me off guard initially. I wasn't expecting the mercenary known for war crimes to betray us, for some reason.
Gaffgarion's betrayal actually caught me off guard initially. I wasn't expecting the mercenary known for war crimes to betray us, for some reason.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Look, nicking the gear of temporary party members is a time-honoured CRPG tradition!
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
Raise: "Spirits of life, return us! Raise!"
Quiescence/Silence Song: "Conjurors seek truth in silence! Silence Song!"
Invigoration/Life Drain: "Lost energy... raise the heartrate! Life Drain!"
Moogle: "Kupo! Round and round you go! Moogle!"
Cleansing Strike/Split Punch: "The devil's spirit of restlessness... Split Punch!"