The reason Drain/Demi type spells do so much damage to Altima is because they're percentage based.
Ohhhh. I'm used to Demi being percentage-based in the FF games, but Drain threw me off. Thanks.
What are your thoughts on the ending?
Oh, god. I'm glad you asked, because yesterday I decided not to watch through the credits, but when I saw your question I reloaded and watched the after-the-credits cutscene, and that changes everything.
Firstly, I thought Balmafula was already dead, but I guess not.
So many people die in this game (it's such an opera) that I honestly believed it when they said Ramza and Alma are dead. It almost seemed fitting. Delita, a commoner, married Ovelia and became King, probably the first King who was a "man of the people" - the member of the last of the Beoulves who will be most remembered is probably Dycedarg for the atrocities he committed, making the Beoulves a black stain on nobility, so the end of the Beoulve line was symbolic of the dawn of a new age where Delita will presumably promote equality and try to remove any kind of status that people get born into.
The fact that Ramza and Alma survived is kinda nice because most people don't like an ending quite as dark as it would've been without that - but keeping them dead would've been a much bolder move and also would've made a lot more sense, seeing as we have no idea how they escaped Hell.
Presumably something about the death of Altima created some kind of temporary dimensional jump that they rode off from the airship - or, when Altima was trying to get "more power" at the end there, what we really saw was her absorbing the entire dimension of Hell, so Ramza and Alma got sort of shunted back to reality. The thing is, they didn't give us *anything* to really go off of there; it's all just aimless theories. So what we're really left with is the sequence of events from the perspective of Olan, who by now sees them as almost these mythical, larger-than-life heroes, now finished with their calling and off to live their life away from the eyes of the people. Which is also kinda cool, and not altogether unfitting.
I really liked the bit about Olan compiling this story and being executed for it, then Alazlam recovering it and releasing it. Because Alazlam appeared in the "Person" category of the Brave Story section of the menu, I just assumed he was living at the same time as everyone else, but this does add something to the story.
I have mixed feelings on the epilogue. One of my minor gripes with the ending before it was that Delita, for all his good intentions, did go a little mad with power and was acting as though people were expendable, just like everyone else who was vying for the position of King. I didn't necessarily want to see him get his comeuppance, but either he needed to get redeemed, or the game needed to lay the cold truth on us that ruthless people acting in a gray moral area are sometimes necessary, because there's rarely such a thing as a truly good leader, and Delita was the lesser of all evils, bringing about an age that was better than the alternatives but still imperfect and nowhere near making up for the war leading up to it - but an age that at least was peaceful and progressive, so that is the cost.
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bokonon get your sense-making the **** out of this topic now - Cat1001
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