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[R^2]

Onward, into the deepest depths.


Which look a lot like the end of the Dimensional Rift.


You only get one Ultima Weapon, after all. Mutsunokami is no slouch, as katanas go... but like axes, katanas can't be enchanted. Even if the bosses down here have bullshit ways of making !Rapid Fire useless, !Spellblade is still a good use of MP.


Naturally, monsters down here are just ridiculous in both power and frequency.


And there's a guardian before you get to the end.


An actual Guardian, mind you. He's just like the Soul Cannon in the Ronkan Ruins (rather than the one in Phoenix Tower), and takes several turns to charge up his Wave Cannon. Since you're given some measure of mercy in this fight, I assume his Wave Cannon does 9999 damage to everyone for an instant game over.


Not that he got the chance. What do you think this is, amateur hour?

[R^2]

Enuo... Enuo... why does that name sound familiar?

Enuo: Humans, is it? To have come all the way here, the ending point of both light and darkness... What do you seek from this place? Power? Fame?

An end to this LP, since the postgame content is dull as dishwater.

Enuo: Foolish humans. Those do not await you here. Here, there is nothing. No past, no future, no present. All that is sealed within this beautiful darkness is the stillness of eternity. I see you've begun to understand my glorious existence here.

Yeah, now I remember. You're the guy who got killed off 1000 years ago. Did anybody really need extra closure on your plot hook? You traded immortality for the power of the Void, got yourself killed by twelve heroes with twelve weapons, the monsters you set loose during your reign of terror got sealed up in a big tree in Moore, etc. etc.

Enuo: Yet, perhaps it is best if you see for yourself my power... Power that held the whole world in fear... ...the power of the Void!




How come you get a big dramatic fight entrance, but stronger monsters like Omega Mk.II and Neo Shinryu just pop up like everything else?


Like almost every other boss in the Sealed Temple, Enuo has a defense against !Rapid Fire. But it's the same as Neo Shinryu's: there are two invincible targets in this battle, Enuo's hands. Each of them casts spell independently, so it seems like he's pummeling the party with a crazy huge number of spells when in fact they're besieged by three spellcasters at once.


Enuo can be Slowed, but his magic defense is too high for a Slow spell to work. You need some other way to inflict it on him, like by firing it out of a cannon. (As I recall, mixing ammunition with Turtle Shells gives Slowing shots, but it's not a detail worth looking up right now.)


Enuo is pretty good at Blue Magic, if you've somehow made it this far without Aeroga or Aqua Breath.


He has some spells we've never seen before, though.


We're pretty good at magic, too.


This message indicates the second half of the battle has begun. Enuo refills his 60,000 HP and gets automatic Protect and Shell, sheds his vulnerability to Slow and Stop, but also loses the extra targets in his hands.


But with those two targets gone, there's nothing stopping good ol' Flareblade !Rapid Fire. Bartz is equipped with both the Ultima Weapon and the Brave Blade, with Faris using the same attack with Apocalypse and... eh, whatever it was Faris had in her other hand.


60,000 HP does not last long under that kind of barrage.


Enuo was slain by the twelve legendary weapons, consumed by the Void, slept in stasis for 1000 years, and woke up just in time to be slain by even better weapons than the ones before. Raw deal, but what do you expect when you try to rule or destroy the world with the ultimate magical power?

[R^2]

A crystal shard? That one looks kind of funky though...






Just like when we got the other three not-in-the-SNES-version jobs, someone helpfully runs in to explain what the new job does. Nobody bothered with this sort of explanation for Blue Mage or Dancer or Chemist!


The Necromancer job has seven levels. The first teaches !Oath, which works a bit like !Animals, but summons demons and undead to attack foes instead of helpful forest critters. Oath calls a Skeleton, a Flaremancer, a Rajiformes, or a Zombie Dragon to use Thunder, Flare, Aqua Breath, or Evil Mist (respectively).

The next five levels teach the five levels of !Dark Arts, the Necromancer's job command. Dark Arts have been used on the party by a few new monsters in the postgame dungeon, but this is the first chance we get to use them ourselves. By killing specific monsters with a character in the Necromancer job, the Necromancer learns a new Dark Art spell.

The last level of Necromancer gives the Undead innate, which makes the character into an undead creature for the purposes of Cure, Raise, Death, and other spells that work differently for dead things than they do for the living.


The monster this guy keeps blathering on about is a Mind Flayer.


...and defeating a Mind Flayer with a Necromancer teaches the first Dark Arts, Drain Touch. Hooray, we have sidequesting to do!


Oh, we also open up the post-postgame dungeon dungeon. The Cloister of the Dead is a boss rush and nothing more, but before that, we have a new skillset to fill out.


First, to Phoenix Tower, where Lemures teach Dark Haze.


Liquid Flames here teach Meltdown, too.


Exdeath's Soul teaches Dark Flare.




And some damn breed of Unknown teaches Evil Mist. (Turns out it's the pink rectum with green slime.)


Objet d'Art teaches Hellwind.


The rest are monsters you run into in another Sealed Temple run, because the game assumes you haven't beaten Omega Mk.II and Neo Shinryu yet I guess. Assassins teach Deep Freeze.


Binding the soul of a Mini Satana teaches Chaos Drive.


Ironclads, who like to do an opening attack right when I take a screenshot of them, teach Curse.


And in the darkest depths previously occupied by Enuo himself, the monster Hades teaches Doomsday.


And Movers... don't teach anything, but they still give a lot of ABP for one easy fight, so I can master the Necromancer job quickly.

[R^2]

Sounds like a challenge, yeah.


...


...I am not impressed.

The Cloister of the Dead is six rounds of five fights each. None of the monsters drop items or can have items stolen from them. All this does is round out the Bestiary if you somehow missed a boss monster (which I did, I killed Magissa too fast the first time to get Forza in mine).


But she shows up with Forza outright, here. The first round is Wing Raptor, Garula, Siren, Magissa and Forza, and the Gil Turtle. That's a steep spike in difficulty there at the end!


The second round is Liquid Flame, the Soul Cannon, six Purabolos, Minotaur, and Triton/Nereid/Phobos.


The third round is Byblos, Tyrannosaur, Dragon Pod, holy shit Archaeodemon, and Apanda.


The next round is Manticore, Adamantoise, a single Jackanapes, Calofisteri, and Twintania. Why do you fight Archaeodemon before Twintania?


The next round is Omnicient, Wendigo, Sandworm, Atomos, and Halicarnassus. Omnicient still casts Return after every physical attack. Wendigo and Sandworm are still obnoxious games of whack-a-mole. Atomos isn't as threatening as he was before, because we're strong enough to endure Comet spells now. Halicarnassus is and always will be a joke.


The last wave is the four Crystals from the Guardian Tree, Melusine, Catastrophe, Azulmagia, and Necrophobe.






Holy nested double quotes! There's nothing left to do in the game!

[Zaratustra]

welp

[Metal Slime]

It awaits.

Final Fantasy VI - Omen (Opening Theme)

[A²]

Necromancer, and the Undead ability they grant, have a few nonstandard-for-Final-Fantasy-Undead quirks:

While most healing hurts them, White Wind (and Drain Touch, which is why it's the first thing you learn) heal you as normal.
If you're killed, you can be revived as normal. Raise, etc work on a dead necromancer with no penalty.
Outside of battle, healing functions as if you weren't undead

And finally - thankfully - Freelancer and Mime do not inherit the Undead passive.

The entire bonus dungeon of FF5 is kind of ass. There's a half-hearted attempt to throw some bonus plot at you in the form of Euno, but since you yourself have Bullshit Powers of Rapidfire, the game has to throw its own brand of bullshit at you to make the dungeon anything more than a speedbump. The dungeon would have been far better had it limited you to the 4 bonus classes, or otherwise imposed a cap of sorts that made fights fun and interesting, as opposed to just huge slogs or bullshit.

[Classic]

... Wow, R^2, was that a nearly interminable slog or what?

[R^2]

Remember how, at the final battle, Exdeath sucks a few more locations into the Void to top off a long career of puppy-kicking?


After that whole ordeal, you're given control of the party again, in case you need to swing into the menu screen and swap some abilities or equipment.


You can use this opportunity to bugger right off, in fact.




And if you leave the Rift entirely...








You get a handwave as to why the game doesn't include a world map with Bal, the pirate's den, and the Catapult missing.

[R^2]

I wonder if we can beat Exdeath using just Dark Arts. I guess I should show off what those do anyway.


Drain Touch drains HP from one monster. You probably could have guessed that.


Exdeath ignored Dark Haze. It inflicts Old and Confuse.


Deep Freeze is ice-elemental and procs Stop on one target. For whatever reason, it does about twice as much damage to Exdeath as any other Dark Arts I used. idgi


Evil Mist is poison-elemental and procs poison status.


Meltdown is fire-elemental and procs sap.


Hellwind is wind-elemental and procs petrify.


Chaos Drive is lightning-elemental and procs paralyze.


Curse is this game's Bad Breath, causing no damage but adding as many status ailments as it can to one target.


Dark Flare (more like Dark Megaflare) does a little more damage than the rest and ignores the enemy's defenses.




Doomsday is another giant blast. The enemies' defense counts, but the base power is higher. It's probably a wash to most enemies.

[R^2]

Doomsday is pretty useful against multiple targets, like Neo Exdeath.


Neo Exdeath manages to land a Delta Attack on Krile, and I don't even care.


Most of the ending is the same. The crystals reform, the Void spits out a few places, the Warriors of Dawn show up to congratulate everyone.


But then...








With Krile abandoned to float in the Void for eternity, Bartz writes the letter to Cid and Mid instead.




Most of the ending is the same.




Except that, well, Krile is missing.






And the part about Bartz is in first-person.





























With the party reassembled, the rest of the ending is the same as before.

[TA]

One last burst of Mary Sue before the credits.

[R^2]

So let's do that again, only with fewer survivors.










Naturally, being the only survivor, Faris writes the letter.




By "we" I assume she means "me and the wind drake".


That is the saddest singular pronoun I've ever heard.






Without Lenna to be princess in her stead, Faris stays in Tycoon instead of running off to see her pirate crew.


The bit where Bartz is mentioned is replaced by Faris looking wistfully off a castle parapet.




Faris's grammar has really improved in her grief.


 




Only the missing characters get heroic montages this time around.








The rest of the scene plays out with only a few changes, and once the whole party is assembled, the credits roll is the same as always.

[R^2]

Okay, one more hidden thing, and that's it for this LP.


Rub that magic lamp!




Rub rub rub rub rub




All the way down...


...to Choco Kick.


Which you then repeat 20 times. You might even see the Fat Chocobo alternate summon for doing it so much.




And the result is a dummied-out summon! You can only use the magic lamp so much before it becomes functionally useless, and then twenty times after that it becomes actually useless. Egg Chop never works.

It's a reference to Eggman, a character from a different franchise by a Square Japan game designer.