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[R^2]

Gilgamesh: It's days like this that get you high on life! But you, sirs, are harshing my buzz!


A missable item: if you don't swipe the Genji Gloves from Gilgamesh during this fight, you'll never have another chance to get them. Pound on him enough, and...


Gilgamesh: ...faithful sidekick!
Enkidu: The old man gave me some trouble.
Gilgamesh: Ho? Let's return the trouble... and make it double! Come on!

Did you just


(He did.)


Enkidu starts off with White Wind, capping Gilgamesh off for 4000 HP.


But Zeninage does more than that.

There's a little dialog if you beat Enkidu before Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh brings up "Well, I leave this in your hands!" before turning around and noticing Enkidu is already gone. But Zeninage killed them both at the same time, so...

[R^2]

Xezat: I'm coming! Hang in there!
Galuf: That pun is so bad, I'm gonna fall on purpose...


Xezat: Good timing! Now, it's our turn to strike! Quit hanging around and get over here!
Galuf: Again with the puns...oy.

[R^2]

With the fighting over, Xezat's plan continues unmolested by further interruption.


His plan being to burrow an underwater path to the middle of the continent, sail through it in a submarine, dig upwards into one of the Barrier Towers from below, and disable the force field surrounding Exdeath's Castle.




Xezat goes downstairs to the generator, we go upstairs to the projection antenna.


He also hands over what amounts to a shortwave radio.




Fights in the dungeon are numerous and tedious. Surprise! Reflect Knights have permanent Reflect, so it's a good thing I have a terrible-at-magic party. Magnetites use their magnets to screw with the party's row setup, but don't do anything else until they evolve into Magneton. Travelers teach the blue magic Time Slip, which paralyzes and causes Old status. Old degrades the target's stats at a steady rate as time goes by.


Xezat periodically checks in to remind you you're carrying the Whisperweed.


Eventually, the party reaches the top of the Barrier Tower.


Conveniently, Xezat is doing his thing down at the generator, too.


But it's not that easy.

[R^2]

Atomos is goddamned difficult. He opens the fight by casting Comet repeatedly, which deals random damage to one target. "Random" in this case means "about 3/4 of the target's max HP ranging up to three or four times their max HP in damage."

Once a character dies, Atomos stops casting Comet but starts drawing any corpses towards himself. If a dead character reaches him, he uses Wormhole to remove them from the battle entirely so they can't be revived. If that was the only dead character on the battlefield, he goes back to using Comet until someone else dies.


It's a long, rough slog, because it's almost impossible to beat Atomos before he can slay and Wormhole somebody. You end up reviving whoever dies first at the last possible second and hoping Atomos kills someone else with his next Comet. It's all you can do to buy time.

Or you can cast Dark Spark, which halves Atomos' level. He starts at level 41, and if you half that and round down...


...you get a number divisible by 5.




It's that easy.

[Sharkey]

With this many guys all missing the same eye you've got to start wondering. Does Ferris recruit according to very specific criteria for no established reason? Is it a fetish? Or maybe it's the result of a particularly nasty initiation ritual everyone has to go through? Or maybe a prank-war involving spyglasses and thumb tacks. Or it could be a genetic defect shared by everyone in whatever inbred village they all came from...

Anyway, I just wanted to say I've been digging these.

Also, Galf needs to be a dancer.



I'm pretty sure that's a bare-legged old man wearing high-heeled cowboy boots. I'd like to say that's something I've never seen before. But I can't.

[Brentai]

Apparently the theory that pirates (and by probable extension sailors in general) wore eyepatches to help them switch between decks is not only logical but actually works amazingly well.  So it could just be standard uniform.

Not to disillusion the idea that Captain Faris just stabs all his/her crew in the left eye as a matter of principle.  I kind of prefer that one.

[R^2]

At this point Xezat sacrifices himself to blow up the generator room, because blah blah new Dawn Warriors blah blah works is done blah blah dude you weren't even IN the party so dying to make room for a new character is even more needless than usual. It's not like he had a kingdom counting on him to come back alive or anything oh wait


And I'm skipping the whole scene because holy mother of god Galuf's world is boring.


Good news is, the mission is actually accomplished: the barrier surrounding Exdeath's castle is down.


Galuf's pretty torn up about the whole deal.


Even though we got a totally sweet submarine out of the deal. Now, was there anywhere we needed to go that is underwater...?

[R^2]

Ah, yes. Right in the middle of the map, the entrance to Ghido's cave is still there.






With the occasional exception made for Dark Aspics, Ghido's Cave is almost entirely populated by Metamorphs, which shift form, cast their new form's signature attack, and switch back. There are two important things about Metamorphs.


The first is that their Enchanted Fan form casts Aeroga, making it the first chance blue mages have of picking that up.


The second is that, if slain in their default form, they sometimes drop a Staff of Light. The Staff of Light is a step up from other staves available to white mages, and casts Holy when used as an item. Many single-character or single-job challenge runs stay here and farm out these things to make their lives much easier in the long run.






The textbox says "poke poke" but it looks more like Bartz is spinning the turtle around on its shell. Whatever he's doing, it's needlessly antagonizing.

Galuf: Bartz! Stop that!
Bartz: But it's fun! Poke, poke, poke...




Galuf: Sage, I'm so sorry. Please forgive my brainless companion.
Bartz: Wait -- this turtle...
Lenna: ...is the sage?
Faris: By the briny beard of Neptune!
Galuf: And you finally catch a clue! Tarnation, I can't take you anywhere!
Ghido: It's all right, it's all right, no lasting damage... Physically, anyhow.
Bartz: Oh, man, I'm awfully sorry...
Ghido: You should be, boy, picking on defenseless turtles... However, we have more important things to discuss.
Bartz: You mean Exdeath?
Ghido: So, you aren't as slow as you look. What the warlock seeks is within the Great Forest of Moore.
Bartz: The Forest of Moore?


I like Sage Ghido, mostly because when Bartz does that Japanese-RPG-protagonist thing of repeating back the key words in whatever he was just told, Ghido makes fun of him. He'd have a blast in the Metal Gear series, where half of Snake's dialog is repeating what he was just told with a question mark at the end. Alas, he's stuck where he is, never to reappear again after this game.


Ghido: Five hundred years ago, the concentration of evil turned it into a dark creature with a life of its own. That creature is Exdeath. I maintained the seal on Exdeath for five hundred years... However, thirty years ago, the seal was broken.

And despite the villain of this story being... well, a giant evil tree, I like the backstory for Exdeath too. It implies that inside that Golbez-style platemail he wears is just a swirling miasma of spirits too nasty to kill or banish, so they had to be sealed away until they developed a hivemind and broke out.


Ghido: Yes. Don't interrupt. Dorgann and the others fought hard... Finally, they were able to seal the warlock with the crystals. However, somehow, he escaped.
Bartz: That was our fault...
Ghido: Aren't we feeling self-important, taking all the blame, hmm? Had I meant it was your fault, I would've said that. Seals are meant to be broken. It only means that this time, Exdeath must be destroyed!
Bartz: Where is he!?
Ghido: As I said, the Forest of Moore... Something -- exactly what I do not know, so don't ask -- rests sealed within the forest that he wishes to claim.
Bartz: The Forest of Moore...
Galuf: And Xezat's revenge!
Faris: We'll defeat Exdeath!
Lenna: Let's do it!
Ghido: The Forest of Moore is sentient. It does not take kindly to intruders, and will attack all who attempt to enter.
Bartz: ...
Ghido: Take this with you.


Ghido gives us a branch from one of the trees in Moore and sends us on our way.

[R^2]

Before that, we have another stop to make.


Inside the short cave leading from the seafloor to the surface are Ironbacks. They're ridiculously hard for random encounters, given that they have great physical defense and I'm a hit-things-with-swords sort of party, but I catch one.


There's a chocobo forest here!


But the only chocobo inside is a lady, who for reasons of strength or etiquette can't be ridden. It's not like there's anywhere to go from here, anyway.


No, the important thing in this part of the world is Catoblepas, a one-shot random encounter. Catoblepas has only 5000 HP, which isn't much, but counters every hit with a petrifying Evil Eye. So the whole battle is nicking away at its hit points, throwing a Gold Needle at someone, nicking at his hit points, throwing a Gold Needle...




Or you can release the Ironback you just caught for a one-hit kill.


Your reward is a new summon emblem.

[R^2]

Finding a different area to surface takes you to this tiny inland sea.


To the west of it is the town of Moore. To the east is a giant forest. Don't strain too hard to figure out what the forest is called.


The townspeople mostly talk about how awesome the forest is, and how to walk through the forest, and how there are little spirits that go "kopu kopu" or something like that in the forest, and forest forest forest do you know where to go next?

So the big attraction in Moore is the piano to practice on.


Oh, and the new magic that's for sale. To keep black magic on par with any new blue spells you may have learned recently, this is the town that sells Firaga, Blizzaga, and Thundaga.






...opening the path forward, as advertised.

[R^2]

Hope you like RANDOM ENCOUNTERS! They happen every two to four steps in the Forest of Moore. I had a couple of characters equipped with Learning in case the Mini Mages decided to use Lilliputian Lyric, but they didn't, so I didn't learn it. No great loss.


After a truly infuriating number of pointless fights, there's a rumble that knocks everyone off their feet.




Whatever it is Exdeath wanted in the Forest? He doesn't think it's flammable.


This is why Ghido makes fun of you, Bartz.


There's nowhere to go, nothing you can do, and the fires just keep spreading...

[R^2]

You can hide out in a moogle cave for a while until the fire on the surface burns itself out, though. Since this is a fantasy game, that only takes a few minutes, whereas nonmagical fires in the real world can burn for weeks at a time.




The map has changed, but the encounters sure as hell haven't.




It's a tree, Lenna. This is a forest, that is a tree. God, the stupid pervades the entire second world, infecting even those from the first.

[R^2]

The Guardian Branch provides a path into the massive tree.


Inside are... little energy... aura... things...?




Whatever they are, they're attacking!


The four nameless oozelike things are largely the same, but with different elemental affinities. They have 7777 HP each (and are level 77, making Level-based blue magic chicanery tricky at best). All of them are immune to ice, poison, and holy damage. One absorbs fire, one absorbs earth, one absorbs water, and one absorbs wind. At low health, each of them gets a new move based on their elemental affinity: Firaga, Earth Shaker, Aqua Breath, and Aeroga, respectively.


So if you use powerful moves that hit all enemies, you'll be sucking all four of those attacks at once. So don't do that.


The trick is to take them one at a time, so you have a chance to recover between super-attacks. Or you can whittle each one down just a little and then Zeninage them all to death at once. That works too.










Sure enough, the formless oozes reveal themselves to be the four elemental crystals of Galuf's world. So... why are they so tiny? The ones in the first world were four or five times bigger than a person.

[R^2]

Exdeath uses his previously-demonstrated sorcery to command the crystals, and once again uses it to try to kill the party.






A blast of magic from offscreen!


What would we do without your Mary Sue powers, Krile?

[Zaratustra]

Pity Krile and Rydia never get to duke it out.

[R^2]

Nothing beats my plot-contrivance powers! Tee hee!




Exdeath is about as sick of this godmodding bullshit as everyone else.




Exdeath slings Krile around Orlouge-style.


But Mary Sues don't die so easily. All he's done is piss off Galuf!




Exdeath tells Galuf that to keep moving will shatter the crystal. Galuf does anyway. The crystal shatters, freeing Galuf to shove Krile out of whatever spell that is she's caught in.


Galuf charges! And to Galuf's credit, Exdeath takes a step back when he does.

[R^2]

In a very Tellah-versus-Golbez sort of fight, Exdeath blasts Galuf with powerful magic -- all the -aga black magic spells, Gravija, and so on -- while Galuf pounds on Exdeath with physical attacks. This remains the case even if you've made Galuf a physically weak job who'd be better off using special moves, like a black mage or summoner.


Galuf keeps on truckin' at 0 HP, although the drama is ruined somewhat by Magic Shell going "Oh hey, you're below the critical HP margin, I'd better activate!" every turn.


Exdeath follows this boast with Holy, Flare, and Meteor.


And Galuf just keeps kickin'.


Galuf: Takes a lot more than that... ...for me to kick the bucket! I'll destroy you, Exdeath... even if it means I have to take you into the afterlife myself!
Exdeath:  Fool! All the hatred in existence would never be enough to defeat me!
Galuf: This...isn't anger...isn't hatred...it's...
Exdeath: Then...what...?

[R^2]

Exdeath, too injured even to stand, still has enough magic left to collect the crystals and teleport away.


Galuf can't teleport or regenerate, so he's in worse shape.


Faris: Hold on, we can--
Galuf: No good... 'S too late...f'r me...
Bartz: Galuf! Don't talk like that!
Lenna: Galuf!
Faris: Get up, you old bat! Quit playing around, this isn't funny!
Krile: Wake up... wake up, please!
Galuf: Bartz... Lenna, Faris... My dear Krile... Exdeath... Exdeath... Destroy...him...
Krile: Grandpa--! No! You can't die, you can't!!!
Bartz: Galuf! Curaga!
Lenna: Please... Raise!!!
Faris: Open your eyes! Phoenix Down! Elixir! Anything!


It's not enough, Galuf's too far injured to do more but croak out his last words. But you know? Points for trying. Cloud doesn't even look for a Phoenix Down when Aeris gets stabbed.




You're free to move about the inside of the tree, but the crystals are gone and Krile is too agonized to talk.

[R^2]

But you can't leave the tree without MARY SUE POWERS ACTIVATE






Galuf... borrow its power to speak to you. I don't have long. I want to give you my strength... C'mon, Krile... don't cry... Stand with Bartz and the others, be strong, and fight!
Krile: No! You do it, come back! Don't leave me alone!
Galuf: You know I can't do that. But you're not alone, Krile. You understand that, don't you.


Her Mary Sue powers amplified by the Guardian Tree, Krile gets to skip a damned lot of ABP grinding. Every level Galuf had before, she inherits now.


Galuf: I'll be in your heart, always.
Krile: Grandpa... ... ...I understand. Huh? Exdeath is...?


Bartz: Krile...
Krile: Grandpa told me that right now, Exdeath is trying to destroy the crystals. We've got to hurry to Exdeath's castle! The wind drake!




Moore Forest is no mo-- uh... isn't there anym-- is gone.

[Sharkey]

Gohn.

No, wait. We used that one already. Like you'll ever be going back to it.

Final Fantasy is essentially all about showing you fantastic locations a few minutes before they get burned to the fucking ground. I tend to prefer the ones that send you back to witness the immediate aftermath, and by that I mean IX and VI. I'd throw VII in there if the follow-up weren't a two hour long cell phone commercial that saved me the trouble of pushing buttons.

V never looks back, until the end when the few places that weren't wiped out in the first round get a chance to get their shit wrecked. It's probably the one that could have best sustained an aftermath sequel if anyone gave half a shit about it. Nah, let's do that with the one that made a point of describing all the happily-ever-afters and married half the cast to each other at the end. Fuckin brilliant.