LogFAQs > #949470378

Lol I remember official player guides always getting things wrong back in the day. Kinda miss it in a way.

Celes, vowing to make Cid proud, takes the raft he kept in the basement (Wasn't gonna tell her about that while he was alive? OK) and sails to what used to be the southern continent. We get a better picture of how life is these days (bad!), and a bunch of leads. Powerful monsters have been let loose, including 8 dragons, Humbaba and Deathgaze. Kefka now resides in a tower built from pieces of land that fell apart, as an almost god-like figure. Apparently he casts his light of judgment on those who speak ill of him, burning their homes and such down. An NPC even mentions having sensed Kefka's gaze shortly before we witness this in Tzen. He's just Sauron now, huh. Somebody made a portrait of the Emperor (I guess Kefka) and of something else, but sent it to Jidoor, and there's a cult of Kefka with their own tower somewhere.

We reunite with Sabin (yay) after a rather embarrassing attempt at rescuing a child from a collapsing home- Celes gets petrified mere steps from the exit, forcing a retry. As I curse the game for this unforeseeable trick, I talk to an NPC I must've missed the first time who warns me about this precise thing. Oops. I figure Sabin is the fixed companion here, and it's not because he was one of my mains/in the Floating Continent party. Still it's nice luck for me, I give him the dual wield relic and he is now very very strong.

Being the rebel that I am, I avoid the game signposting me to Mobliz and instead head up to Nikeah, where we are stopped and told about 4 espers fleeing the Magitek Factory way back when. We also meet a band of thieves led by Gerad, who bears a striking resemblance to Edgar. TBH Celes is apparently a dead ringer for Maria so there's not a guarantee here, but we follow the anagram'd boy anyway over to South Figaro, and then through a cave. It's reassuring to see that the AI gets stuck behind moving NPCs just like I do. Notably Siegfried is in this cave with them.

Hopping over not!Ghido we find ourselves in the basement of the sunken Figaro Castle, with its occupants remarkably still (barely) alive after a year underground. We head through a mini-dungeon and Edgar abruptly drops the facade once the thieves are out of sight (I like how matter of fact he is about it) and the boss is upon us. Thankfully the game auto-equipped him. I play this fight poorly, trying to buff everybody up early when it soon becomes clear the correct way is to just bash at each tentacle until they become a more manageable number, and Haste people when they are Slow'd. We're never really in danger and the boss goes down, and the Figaros are now reunited. Edgar explains he didn't want to freak the thieves out and lets them leave with the treasure, a decision I very much like. Medieval JRPGs often go way too hard on the letter of the law stuff, especially those with monarchist leanings. Go, Edgar (away from women and children)!

The Chancellor and some other characters weirdly repeat their same dialogue from before the world fell apart, but the weirdest part of this whole sequence is how Edgar and Sabin do not address each other once. I guess I could've gotten here without Sabin but until now the game has had a lot of split dialogue depending on who you have with you, and it's just... super weird that these two brothers who are seeing each other for presumably the first time in a year don't say a word. In another game I'd assume this was due to rushed development having them cut corners later on, but this was a retranslation done years after the original and the game has been so solid with this kinda stuff until now. Something to keep an eye on.

Not knowing where to go I head back east and find Terra in ruined Mobliz. She declines to join us, apparently on the verge of some revelation that she doesn't quite reach while we're here. There's a brief fake boss battle with her showing that she has no ability/desire to fight anymore, so we send the Humbaba running and receive Fenrir as a reward. Very interesting to have Terra out of commission again, curious what this is building towards. Or maybe she really is gone from the party! (If she weren't the ostensible lead I could believe this). 19 years old she acts as the de facto mother to the orphans left in this village (The two lovebirds are 17, you'd think they could lend more of a hand!). Sadly the soldier boy has passed, I had figured we'd get some big payoff to his exchanges with his Marandan lover but nope. Maybe I missed a cue earlier or the game is just really laying down how bad life is here.

It takes me far too long to realise my next goal, to take Figaro Castle to Kohlingen. Locke isn't here, he's off looking for the treasure to revive Rachel. We were told ages ago that the treasure was in Vector, but Vector isn't there anymore and it's about where Kefka's (excuse me, Cefca) Tower is. So where is he... We also get info that another friend is up in the new Coliseum, and Cyan has gone towards Maranda. A running theme of this world is each area having some kind of memory flashback to days gone by, not for any plot purpose but just because, a nice touch.

We do find Setzer, and Celes inspires him (and the bartender) to build a new dream of a better world, and he takes us to a very elaborate Tomb of his deceased friend. This is a cool dungeon (with good music), undead spells everywhere but every enemy seems to drop Holy Water so it's no trouble. We solve the gravestone puzzle ('The world is square' backwards, hmm) and get a relic for double XP, and fight a tougher version of the game's very first boss guarding a treasure chest. The actual dungeon boss isn't too much trouble (this game hasn't properly stepped up difficulty yet in the way the others did, I'm scared for whenever that hits), and we get a good scene showing Setzer and Darril's past culminating in the acquisition of our new/Darril's old airship, the Falcon.

Celes is already talking about taking on Kefka (she's come a long way in a short time since attempting suicide, guess she's single minded now), but we are distracted by a pigeon. Locke's bandana, maybe? That'll have to wait for next time. I feel like I'm speeding through things here much faster than before, and the underlying worry of mine is that this section of the game might not be quite as developed as the first part. There's much less meainingful character interaction so far (Terra's sequence didn't even give a character portrait for whoever was talking to her) but the bits we have had are good (Edgar, Setzer), hopefully my fears are unfounded.

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Slowly becoming a Final Fantasy aficionado. Currently playing: FFVI
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