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[R^2]

You can make it all the way to Tule.


There's not much new, although mutant turtles? They're not teenagers or anything, are they?


Another mountain pass has...


What should have been an obvious trap.


Krile: If you hadn't been riding so fast...
Bartz: ...Boko! I say this's all your fault!
Boko: Kweh kweh kweh!
Krile: Don't take it out on him, there's nothing he could've done!




Those claws look pretty familiar...


Yep! It's an Antlion.


It puts up about as much of a fight as Cray Claw did.




After a few moments, someone drops a rope into the Antlion nest...

[R^2]

Each time Bartz makes a grab for it, the rope pulls up.


Bartz even sets up Boko as a platform to leap off of...


But the rope withdraws again, and he smacks his face into the stone wall. WACKY HIJINX






Eventually the mysterious rope-holder relents, and allows Boko to be tied on and hauled up.


Surprise!




Nuh uh!


Nuh uh!


Bartz: But...what happened? Why'd you come after us?
Faris: I'm just not cut out for being a princess, I'm afraid. Pirating's much more my style.






I'm sure it's nothing.

[R^2]

Boko is left behind.


Hey! It's a not-teenage mutant turtle!








Ghido: The shock of the two worlds merging sent everything topsy-turvy... including me! I'm a bit too old to do much on my back, I rue.
Bartz: What do you mean, "worlds merging"?
Ghido: I see you're just as slow on the uptake as before. It's an ancient legend, but I had never imagined it was true... According to the legend, a thousand years ago, Bartz's world and Krile's world were one and the same.
Bartz: The same!?
Ghido: It seems there is quite the echo in here.
Bartz: But... why did the worlds split?
Ghido: To seal the Void.
Bartz: Void...?
Ghido: I fear no matter how often I allude to your ignorance, my dry wit just goes over your head, so I will simply explain. One thousand years ago, there existed a presence of the strongest evil, Enuo. Enuo possessed the power to control the Void. After a long and harrowing battle, the people were able to defeat Enuo with the twelve legendary weapons... However, the Void that Enuo had created could not be erased. As a last resort, the people split the crystals into two. To maintain balance, the world split into two as well. The Void was sealed within the space between the two worlds -- the "interdimensional rift."
Bartz: That means Exdeath was telling the truth... He really did want to return the world to how it used to be...
Ghido: However, without the crystals...
Bartz: The wind's power will never return...
Ghido: Nor will that of the earth, fire, or water.


Well, it's not like our main antagonist has any particular affinity with wood...


Or is... made... of... wood... because he's a tree really...

[R^2]

Exdeath: Now you can understand my true goal: to take the sealed power of the Void for my own!
Bartz: What!?
Exdeath: Why do you think I merged the worlds together? Mwa-hahahahahahaha!!!






Faris: Wait -- so in plain English, you're saying that this Void whatevernot is coming here?
Exdeath: Yes... The Void shall be released from its thousand year prison and into my keeping! The matchless power of the Void will be mine!
Bartz: Not a chance, Exdeath!




Bartz and company get blasted.


Repeatedly.


Meanwhile, the Interdimensional Rift drops a few meteors on Tycoon Castle...


...before sucking it into the cleft between dimensions. Seawater doesn't even flow into the gap left behind.

[R^2]

Exdeath: ...watch as it engulfs all in its path! And soon, it will belong to me!
Faris: Lenna... Exdeath, you...!


Faris charges, and gets zapped.


Then everyone charges together, and they all get zapped. I'm starting to suspect Exdeath threw the fight back when everyone fought him in his own castle.






Suddenly, reptile sage out of nowhere!




Ghido and Exdeath zip around the room, charging into one another any chance they get.




Hey! I made that joke already!




Exdeath flings everyone, Ghido included, away.

[R^2]

There's an oddly specific shout-out to this line in Dissidia. When Exdeath uses his EX Burst in that game, he shouts "To the silent beyond!", a line we'll see the source of much later. But if you level him up and unlock a new voice pack, he instead shouts "Turtle!" as he tries to draw his unlucky target into the Interdimensional Rift.

Exdeath's fighting style in Dissidia is extremely defensive in nature: he's more effective blocking and counterattacking than he is going on the offensive. In other words: turtling. I don't think it's an intentional pun.

To the silent beyond!
Dissidia Final Fantasy - Exdeath's EX Burst

Turtle!
Dissidia:Final Fantasy-Exdeath EX Burst-Turtle!

[R^2]

Bartz: Ghido! You okay!?
Ghido: Exdeath, that cur... He must be stopped before he obtains the full power of the Void, or-- Hmm? By Jove, what's that!?
Bartz: Just the Library of the Ancients...
Ghido: THE fabled Library of the Ancients? My dear boy, have you any idea what an important place that is!? Oh, of course you don't... To think that the Library of the Ancients was here the whole time... Follow close, children! Within the library is a book which describes how to defeat Exdeath!


Ghido: Oho, scholars from Surgate.
Scholar: We've been able to find the second half of the Sealed Tome!
Ghido: Perfect!


There was a mechanism to turn the stairway up to the roof into a conference table. How did Ghido know it was there? Anyway, the Library scholars line up on one side, the Surgate scholars on the other, Ghido at the head, and the party at the heel.

Ghido: As you have probably noticed, the two worlds have recombined into one. Also, the Void is trying to break free from where it has been sealed within the Rift!
Bartz: Then we'd better hurry there and stop it!
Ghido: Bartz, Bartz, Bartz... so enthusiastic and yet so stupid. Along with the Void, many fearsome monsters were sealed in the Rift a millenium ago. They are all incredibly evil, and incredibly strong. I feel safe in saying that as you are now, you kids wouldn't stand a chance.
Bartz: Then, what do we do?
Ghido: Elemntary, my dear Bartz; the legendary weapons used to defeat the warlock Enuo a thousand years ago!
Bartz: Legendary weapons?
Ghido: Sometimes I wonder if you say things like this to spite me...


Ghido goes all infodump at the drop of a hat, but this line redeems him forever.

Ghido: Now that we have both halves of the Sealed Tome, if all goes according to legend -- and I'm certain it will -- the book will show us the way.








Sealed Tome: After Enuo's defeat, the weapons of legend were sealed within the Castle Kuza. To break the seals, the four tablets must be assembled.
One rests alongside spirits of the past, blessed by soil...
One rests within an island shrine, kissed by wind...
One rests beneath the ocean's floor, engulfed by flames...
One rests beyond the river's torrents, protected by water...
Along with the keys to open the seals -- the four tablets -- are sealed our servants. If the tablets are moved, our servants will awaken... The ultimate spells of white and black... The magic of time and space, Meteor... The sea king, Leviathan, and the dragon king, Bahamut... Present this book unto the gate and the way to the seals will be opened...


The book accompanies you on this quest.


Ghido: We are all counting on you. Go and find the first tablet... Blessed by the soil and the spirits of the past... Eureka! It must be the pyramid in the Desert of Shifting Sands! Faris, Krile...and even you, Bartz. You must go at once! The future of the world depends on it!

Whew! That's a lot of expository banter!

[R^2]

Teleport!


Aw, weak.

Much like the Warp-as-soon-as-you-get-Rydia-back bug in Final Fantasy 4, the SNES version of Final Fantasy 5 had a sequence-breaking bug here. If you cast Teleport as soon as you're able, you're warped back outside Ghido's cave (instead of outside the Library of the Ancients, as shown here after the bug was fixed). Boko is outside Ghido's cave. Having Boko lets you run around most of the world, doing sidequests and generally breaking sequence left and right.

Alas, it's something I won't be able to explore in this LP.

[A²]

From what I remember about playing Dissidia, Exdeath was also EXTREMELY slow moving. You had to use some teleport to move anywhere quicker, as opposed to everyone else who could just jump and fly. Much like, you know. A tree.

Dissidia was a lot of things, but a bad game wasn't one of them. In contrast to the mess of 13, a hell of a lot of love & care by people who dug deep for injokes went into both Dissidia games.

[R^2]

Checking the world map makes it even more obvious: the two worlds line up perfectly. The area around Tycoon is a peninsula-ish sort of thing in the first world, but in the second world that part of the map is Exdeath's castle, with forests and swamps around it. So in this merged world, Tycoon has a few extra terrain features around it, including the peninsulas off to the east and the Big Bridge to the west.


Pretty big mistake.


Mildly interesting.


And this guy makes a good point. Might as well just go home, really.


One of the books the sages burned sung a song to them in the flames. So the sages teach me the song.


Outside, Krile is just about the right level to absolutely annihilate enemies with Goblin Punch.

[R^2]

That forest is new. This part of the world lines up more or less with...


The forest of Moore... or what's left of it.




Well, it's trying. There's a giant desert just a few paces west of here, so that might make things difficult.


Faris: Lenna...Papa...
Bartz: So many lives have been lost...
Krile: We must stop Exdeath. The people around the world need us... No, not only the people, but all life...
Faris: Aye...so man sacrifices have been made already... I won't stand by while more lives are lost!
Bartz: Let's go...so there won't be any more sacrifices.






Krile: I guess now that both sets of crystals have shattered, there's not enough power in the earth for it to move...
Faris: Even the ground is getting unstable...

[R^2]

As the Sealed Tome warned, the entrance to each tablet's resting place is guarded by Gargoyles. They only have 5000 HP each and don't have much in the way of strong attacks, but they'll revive one another if they can. If possible, defeat both of them with a single attack to save yourself some Purobolos-style headaches.


In the worst dungeon in the game!


It's got spike traps...


...tides of sand that wash you into detours...


...hidden passages...


...dozens of scripted encounters...


...traps that send you sliding backwards and do HP damage...




...roaming mini-boss style encounters...


...and no shortage of random encounters. You start to wonder if the sealed weapons are really worth all the trouble after a while.

[R^2]

Oh, and since Lenna got sucked into the Void with the rest of Tycoon castle, she's not available for any of this. You're a character short for this tedious slog of a dungeon.










...the peninsula at the center of the world map sinks into the sea...


...because it's actually a giant goddamned dragon. You didn't think this hellish dungeon would let you out without a boss fight, did you?


Well, it does. Bahamut flies off to North Mountain instead of engaging the party now. Which is, uh, definitely a good thing.

[R^2]

Remember, we parked the airship on that mysteriously dragon-shaped peninsula to enter the portal leading to Galuf's world.


So now that the peninsula sank, the ship drifts conveniently over near Surgate, just north of the Library of the Ancients.


One small convenience of being shunted to the Pyramid roof for that scene is that you're free to just walk down the side of the Pyramid and leave, rather than backtracking through any part of the interior.


How ridiculously unlikely! The only wind drakes left alive are in Bal and Tycoon!




Uh... this one must be from Tycoon, then. It drops Lenna's corpse in front of us.

[R^2]

If there's any puppy-kicking getting done, you can be sure Exdeath will show up to make sure you know he's the one personally doing it.




As Exdeath gloats, whatever it is possessing Lenna continues to keep the party subdued with whatever magic that is she's using.






He sure does love that "Mwa-hahahahaha!" laugh.

[R^2]

Every scholar in the Library, as well as Sage Ghido, get sucked into the Void.


As with Tycoon, not even the sea fills the extradimensional hole left in the world.

[R^2]

Melusine's shtick is that she can use WallChange to alter her elemental weakness. She shows off which one it is with some -ga level magic of the opposite element, but only casts right before she uses another WallChange, so the reveal is somewhat useless.


She always starts out weak to fire, so I deplete as much of her HP as possible with Firaga sword and Ifrit.


Eventually she whips out a Blizzaga, which only hits one person because the two others are wearing Flame Rings...


...and I switch to armor-piercing non-elemental attacks because ain't nobody got time to be casting Scan over and over again.










Well, sort of. Having Melusine forcefully ripped from her body leaves Lenna in pretty bad shape.

[R^2]

Upon boarding the airship, Lenna helpfully points out how to enter the final dungeon.


But upon taking off...








Walse? Gone.


Istory? Gone.


Moogle Village, which I'm not going to show on the world map because it's been relocated to the middle of a mountain range and isn't recognizable? Still gone.


Lix? Aw man, Bartz isn't gonna like this, but it's gone.


"You guys remember that was Bartz's hometown, right? Did you go there in the first world at any point?"






Bartz temporarily overcomes his acrophobia and spends a while redlining the airship around the world before everyone steps in to stop him.

If the sequence-break at the Library of the Ancients still worked, it's possible to wander the world and revisit Walse and Istory. You can't normally, since they get destroyed as soon as you get the airship. (Lix and the Moogle Village are surrounded by mountains, so they're unreachable with Boko.) It's no great loss unless you missed Shiva, since they're all the same as they were in the first world.

You can also, with a bit of work, go to a later scene that demands Lenna be in the party. Lenna is added to the party to make it work, meaning that you can then return to the Pyramid, complete it, and have Exdeath strike in front of the Guardian Tree. In this case, Lenna will fight Melusine to save herself.

[R^2]

The Chancellor of Tycoon and a few scholars from the Wind Shrine are hanging out in Kuza now.


They don't say much of importance, giving oblique hints to where to find the rest of the dungeons with tablets in them, so I'm skipping them and going straight for the goal.




"Each tablet gives you three of the twelve weapons. Choose wisely."


How about the one anyone can equip almost regardless of job...


...a bitchin' rad katana...


...and a magic-boosting rod for my mage-centric party?


That's a big attack power boost.

[R^2]

Once you claim your first set of weapons, though...


Shit, that's a lot of monsters.

Exdeath: Seek them out and kill them! They must not be allowed to obtain the fabled weapons that destroyed Enuo...


Three of them step forward to volunteer.


Leaving the Sealed Castle is a bit more difficult, because that scene releases Exdeath's Souls into Kuza to replace the Shield Dragons. They can use Doom, Death, and a unique instant-kill move. Yay.