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xyzzysqrlSome Christmas I'm just gonna snap and buy everyone I know a Nancy Drew adventure game.
That Christmas will be known as "The year I stopped having friends".
Anyway! Hi, I'm amazed you're here reading Livejournal here on Christmas, because there's no way you could be doing so any time after the fact. It's not like these posts stay up or any-- This intro is dumb, let's get on with the game.
Last time:
Occuria: "Ashe. You are the Chosen One. Have two glowing swords."
Balthier: "Star Wars joke goes here."
Vaan: "Dibs on Chewbacca! :D"
Penelo: "Beep boop boopy-woo?"
Ashe: "I am going to get some nethicite and kill EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE."
In order to do that, Ashe needs help from Phil LaMarr to find the legendary Sun-Cryst, which is a crystal and not a soft drink. (Or a Cyst. I misread that once. LET'S GO LANCE THIS CYST, EVERYBODY! Yeah no.)
Phil is super-irritable because a bunch of his ships are having trouble with a huge release of Mist out in the waters. He is all cranky and barking orders as the party shows up. They report in all that happened in Giruvegan, and by "all" I mean the parts where they didn't meet Cid but did chat it up with the Occuria, not the parts where I got lost for multiple hours and ran in circles through the same five rooms and got eaten by behemoths.
Phil doesn't really know what's up with this whole Occuria bullshit, and cares even less. The important thing as HE sees it, and as Fran spells out, is that if we hike out to the Sun-Cryst and bust it all up with these nethicite-cleaving swords, it will probably somehow stop all the other deifacted nethicite from working, because of reasons. Nobody knows if the man-made stuff will ALSO stop working, but hey, this is soundin' like a plan!
Balthier presents the opposite course of action, which is to do as the Occuria say and carefully carve a new stone from the Cryst. Then they can destroy everything with it and win the game. Phil is not down with that plan.
"Would you like to know the best use for Nethicite?" he asks, rhetorically. "You pick it up... and you throw it away."
Ah! So... Nuclear magical hand-grenades, then! ...no? ...no. Okay. *sigh*
Vaan points out that in order to do EITHER of those things, they need to actually find where the Sun-Cryst IS. It's in a tower on a far-off shore. Phil, any towers or far off shores, out on the ocean? Funny, that sounds exactly like what his fleet is having trouble with RIGHT AT THIS EXACT MOMENT. There's a lighthouse out on the Naldoan Sea that leaks Mist constantly. Jinkies, that sounds like our next clue! Unfortunately, nobody can SAIL there, and it's in jagd, so airships can't FLY there...
Oh, Phil has a Skystone for Airships that resists jagd effects, stolen from the Imperial Draklor Labs. He loans it off to Balthier. ...well, this would explain how the Imperials keep flying over the fucking stuff to capture our party OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN, wouldn't it? Phil also declares himself a Guest member of the party, so we roll out with him in tow.
This is the part of the game where basically all the guidebooks tell you to piss off and start doing sidequests like tomorrow will never come, but bugger all that I am tired, tomorrow keeps coming, and I want this game DONE before next year rolls around. So there's really only one sidequest I'm doing.
Let's see. We hop an airship from... Balfonheim to Bhujerba, and this Chief Steward is named Sanne, and yes, her flirtatious suitor is a jerk too...
Then we use Balthier's private airship to jump somewhere else, and repeat until we have delivered that letter to EVERY airship steward on EVERY line running. The brothers are defeated, and the sisters can concentrate on work instead of being nagged and flirted with every few minutes. SUCCESSFUL RUN.
Let's go, plot! We board Balthier's ship again and head for "The Ridorana Cataract", where this tower of Mist is. This is basically at the end of the world. As in, it's built on a waterfall cliff, over which the sea drops off into nothingness. I think we must be on a sky-continent or something here.
Phil and Ashe chat about "what if she picks revenge" and how she had better decide on a path damn skippy, because it's getting to be about that time. Meanwhile, Balthier explains to Vaan that Balthier is the leading man, and if he needs to do something "heroic" and doesn't make it out, Vaan gets his airship.
It's kinda sweet. And basically a GREAT BIG WAD of foreshadowing.
That said, Balthier is well to fear for his mortality, because on this particular floating island are DEATHCLAWS. Not, I hasten to add, the Fallout variety of Deathclaw. (Which is a shame.) Instead of reptile-flavored murder, we have insect-flavored murder. They love to just casually claw a character apart. I may need to grind a while.
I should note that as I wander around grinding, I pass the "Colosseum" map where Yiazmat is fought. For those of you who have not played this game, Yiazmat is a prime reason why I'm not angling for a 100% completion rate, aside from wanting to stop playing this game sometime this year. Yiazmat is a "superboss", who has something like 50 million hit points. It can instant-death characters at will. He does enormous damage. He takes hours and hours to kill. His arena has a save point in it so you can pause and leave and come back and STILL BE FIGHTING HIM.
100% completion is for people who need or want to wring every single ounce of content out of a game before they can move on. There's a place for that in the world. That place is Youtube, and they can link me a video so I can watch THEM do it and wave a little flag and cheer, because I'm not gonna do it myself. Let's move on.
You know what ISN'T an optional boss fight? AN UNDEAD DRAGON. This thing just loves draining all the magic out of the party and then slapping us around with Sap. It's nasty. We hit it a lot, it dies. Fran notices some writing on the wall after this, reading off things like "He with power, trust it not. He with sight, heed it not." and so on, and REND ILLUSION, and so on. It's a message left by Raithwall, to those who came after him. Ashe seems kinda shocked by the tone of the message.
"Rend illusion, cut the true path." Ashe has a lot to think about on her way further up the tower.
Naturally, this dungeon has a Gimmick. The Gimmick is that it's a maze, locked by "seals", and you have to find a poem in the maze and read it, and then enemies will drop "Black Orbs", which you use to power seal-breaking... thingies... that open doors, and if you don't pick up the orbs fast enough they fly away forever, and then you have to kill more THINGS and get more ORBS and break more SEALS. Again, feel -really glad- I am playing this and you aren't, because I actually like this game and I am kinda ready for it to be DONE already. It's very Aquaria-syndrome.
Opening the Sealed Door finally teleports the party out to some sand dunes, which are very still and very sepia and very obviously some kind of boss arena. I think this may be one of my favorite areas in the game, because it really gets across a sense of... isolated calmness that's creepily unnatural. Also, holy crap the sun is -black- up there. Or eclipsing. Well. It's hard to explain, really! Anyway, there is another giant turtle here for us to boss fight. If there is one thing that defines the Final Fantasy series, it's a rabid hatred of giant turtles.
This particular giant turtle is not too much of a pain, although he does pop a paling halfway through the fight and become totally invincible. When we beat him, the party has to tromp all the way back through the ruins and use a teleporter that was next to the door, but inactive until now.
It's gonna be one of those dungeons, isn't it? The kind I'm just glad to see the back end of.
Oh my god can EVERY FUCKING THING IN THIS TOWER turn the party to stone?
Up and up and up we go. It's a long, long pain in the ass of a trip. I think I'm running out of items. That's never happened before. I may need to get new ones soon.
What the hell is this, the Last Dungeon? I'm on floor 50 and it's still not done. THIS DUNGEON IS A TRAP DEVISED BY SATAN.
Anyway... ugh. I end up needing to teleport out and restock all my items, and then climb BACK UP 50 floors... This is a goddamn trip to Sadism Land Theme Park, is what it is. Deep breaths, though. I'm gonna preservere. I'm gonna MAKE IT AFTER AAAAALL. *throw hat in air*
Okay. Second Ascent is floor 50+, and I can surrender either the ability to use magic, items, physical attacks, or the map. ... Since I have a bunch of .gif map files I'm referencing, this one's an EASY PICK.
*rub eyes* We are now well into hour six of this dungeon crawl, after I have slept, come back, and picked the game back up. Merry Christmas everyone!
For Christmas I get a boss fight against a giant KILLER DRAGONFISH, and then after that a HUGE WHITE TIGER, so what with the dragon/tiger/turtle symbolism I'm thinking next will be a phoenix, for reasons that are behind that link.
On floor 66 I finally find an elevator, and yay for that. Only goes up one floor though.
Next is a teleporter, and then a long run where you have to remember what -symbols and colors- were on the DOORS on the way up here, and if you don't, you get thrown back downstairs and have to climb up again. I start keeping GameFAQs open in a dedicated window around this point.
Okay, another elevator... except it stops partway through the ride so the party can get ambused by HASHMEL, BRINGER OF ORDER, who is a giant lionman(?) with crab-hammers welded to his forearms. Just another perfectly normal fantasy monster here in Ivalice!
Anyway, er... he is pretty damn tough and we nearly wipe the whole party, except Team B saves it again after one team is wiped out. The Bringer of Order goes to Penelo. I want everyone to have at least one Esper, 'cause.
I... guess I was wrong about the whole phoenix thing. ...huh. Oh well.
On the way past floor 91, the party stops to ponder and eye Ashe from behind while she walks, about whether she'll REALLY try to destroy the empire, and how revenge is okay but it doesn't bring people you love back, and how Penelo can still see her parents when she closes her eyes (BECAUSE SHE'S AN ORPHAN! It's her one and only point of characterization, y'all! It's back for a repeat performance!) and so on. Ashe shows amazing personal restraint by not whipping around to point out that this conversation, particularly Phil LaMarr's part of it, is happening very loudly -directly behind her back- and would they all please shut up and let her think.
On floor 98 there's a save point, and then on floor 100... the Sun-Cryst, projecting god-rays like nobody's business. "Years ago," Ashe begins, "King Raithwall stood before the Sun-Cryst with this sword in hand..."
"But you're going to use it to destroy the Sun-Cryst, right?" Vaan asks.
"...Don't interrupt me, Vaan." Ashe glares. KINDA MAKIN' A SPEECH HERE, Y'KNOW?
Unable to remember whatever she was going to say next, Ashe hefts her Treaty Blade in the air, and elements start gathering outside the tower, and the Mist production goes into overdrive. Rasler's ghost appears again, as if to urge her on. This time, EVERYONE sees it. Basch is kinda freaked out. Just as Ashe is trying to figure out what it wants from her... Destroy the Empire? Revenge? -Really-? Gabranth shows up! He is doing the Evil Villain Urge-The-Hero-To-Do-Dumb-Shit routine. "GRASP YOUR RAGE! IT IS A WEAPON MEANT FOR YOU! I KILLED YOUR FATHER AND ALSO THAT SCRAWNY KID'S BROTHER!" Vaan flips out and charges, but Phil is there with his two swords first, blocking Gabranth's way.
Phil gives a little speech about how ONCE: THERE WAS A MAAAN. A JUDGE! WHO TOOK NETHICITE IN HAND AND BLEW NABUDIS AWAAAAAAY. AT CID'S ORDERRR! Gabranth recognizes him as Judge Zecht, and there is more talk from Phil about revenge and forsaking his name and really this is his big scene so it's forgivable but he is just EATING the scenery alive here. He ends up with a bit how we MUST ESCAPE THE PAST, but Gabranth smacks him across the room. It is IMPOSSIBLE to escape the past, he offers as his opinion on the subject. "Do the dead not DEMAND REVENGE?"
Ashe eyes Rasler's ghost again. He always has this kind of dippy smile on his face.
Vaan, meanwhile, takes up Phil's sword, but doesn't go running straight at Gabranth like he might've earlier in the story. He looks over at Ashe. Ashe looks over at him. Gradually, they stop having "HATE AND KILL" faces and start softening up. Ashe turns back to Rasler and apologizes to him, but... "You were NEVER the kind to take base revenge!"
And then Ashe slices Rasler's ghost in half with the Treaty Blade. He staggers around, looking shocked, then glares and starts screaming at her in the voice of the Occuria. From what I can tell, they've been trying to guide her down the path of using the nethicite since the first time they appeared to her in Rasler-form. She stabs the hell out of that ghost. What Ashe -wanted- was the return of a country that would never have to use nethicite, she's decided. So she's not going to use it to get that back! And she's CERTAINLY not going to be led around by the nose by the Occuria!
Welcome back to the light side, Ashe. It's good to see you again. Gabranth is not so pleased. "THE DEAD DEMAND JUSTICE!" he insists.
"You're wrong." Vaan replies. Which visibly shocks Gabranth, who had apparently forgotten he was there.
"I can't help my brother now. He's gone. He's dead!" Vaan adds. ("But around my neck, he lives on through me! VAAN THE SKY PIRATE!" okay no this is not a Gurren Lagann scene, sorry.) Ashe agrees. The past is unchangable, but the future matters. She casually dumps the Dawn shard on the ground.
Finally it's Basch's turn, and as he steps in we start a duel with Gabranth. Gabranth starts ranting that Basch can never reclaim his honor, because he left his home and his kin. (Which would explain why he's on Dalmasca's side and Gabranth is with the Empire.) Sadly for him, he keeps trying to pull off moves with nasty-sounding names like "Sentence" and "Guilt" and "Circle of Judgement", but the party is -really- optimized towards one-on-one combat, so we beat him straight on down.
Gabranth is panting and grunting, but a new voice rings out: "ENOUGH, I can bear... NO MOOORE."
Oh look, Cid! Who expected that?
I did. I expected that.
Cid casually shoves Gabranth out of the way, a neat trick considering Gabby's in like seventy pounds of armor. Gabranth wasn't supposed to outright ATTACK the princess. He waves Gabranth off and... basically fires him from service.
When he attacks Vanat in anger, Cid nearly fires him out the tower window, too.
Cid, meanwhile, is -really- pleased by Ashe. She's turned her back on the Occuria! The reins of history, hands of man, blah blah. Now give him the nethicite. ... Nope, Ashe isn't playing THAT way either. She's tired of owing people things. "Sun-cryst be DAMNED." she declares.
"WHOOOOH-HO! BE SURE THAT IT IS!" he agrees. "For what other purpose are you here-ahhhh?" This dude is a living ham sandwich. Seriously. Cid warns Ashe that the Sun-Cryst is so full of Mist, destroying it might be a BAD IDEA. Cid instead grabs up the Dawn shard and stuffs all THREE shards into the Mist, using Vanat to charge them up while laughing like a goddamn loon. Balthier accuses him of wanting to become a God, and Cid denies it. He wants to SURPASS the Gods. "REVEL IN THE GLORY OF MY TRIUMPH!" he demands, and leaps at the party headfirst.
Cid is a pretty tough fight. At one point he pulls out the largest gatling gun I think I've ever seen that wasn't a giant robot add-on and blazes wildly away at the party. At about half health he goes invincible and summons up the Esper "Famfrit", and this becomes a duel with that. All the while Cid is steadily whipping out new and nastier kinds of BFG while Famfrit just straight-out spams attacks like crazy. I nearly wipe here too, but I press on, desperate not to have to do that ENTIRE SEQUENCE AGAIN.
Finally, FINALLY, Cid goes down. He drags his death scene out as long as he possibly can via strained groans alone, and then flops. Then he GETS BACK UP to keep talking at us. Curiously, the first thing he says is to Vanat, at how much he's enjoyed the past six years with him. Only then does he turn to address... y'know, his son.
"Was there no other way?" Balthier asks.
"Spend your pity elsewhere." Cid sniffs. He's so full of nethicite, he more or less just melts away into a cloud of mist. Thank goodness he didn't EXPLODE or anything. Fran topples over, and Penelo is first to her side to gather her up. "The Mist BURNS." Fran protests, so I know we kinda have to get out of here in a hurry before A: Something does blow up, or B: Fran starts kicking people's heads off. "The Sun-cryst will burst! Run, as far as you can!"
Penelo only moves from holding Fran when Balthier comes over, so she can see him instead. Fran seems to expect that the group will just sort of leave her there. I have no idea WHY that would be the case, but she's in kind of a bad spot to be thinking clearly. Anyway, Balthier doesn't agree. Vaan and Ashe grab up the blades and push towards the Sun-cryst, but they're visibly making no progress at all against the Mist and wind. You know who IS strong enough to take a sword and get to the Cryst, though?
Phil LaMarr! Who CONDEMNS THE CRYST TO OBLIIIVIIIIOOOOOOON and then it explodes and so does he. Somehow the party escapes while he's holding off the explosion with his forehead. Mist-sensitive cultures all over the world go "WTF was that", Phil's men lament his passing and realize he was looking for somewhere to die all along, and Al-Cid shows up casually hanging out in Phil's office to chill.
Man, Al-Cid, the dude is DEAD. Wait at least a couple days before you put your shoes up on his desk. Seriously.
"The war begins now." he informs Ashe. It turns out that his generals nodded when he told them to stand down, and then ran off and joined the Resistance. You cannot find good help these days, seriously. Anyway, they didn't take any of the Rozarrian flags or anything off their airships, so NATURALLY the entire country is now officially at war.
The cards all now lie with Vayne, and the Sky Fortress Bahamut. Ashe declares that she'll defend her country from Bahamut... and Vaan chips in that THEY'LL defend it. It's their home too, as Penelo notes. And Balthier's father designed the Bahamut, so it falls to him to help, and Fran's coming with because they're partners, and Basch isn't letting the princess go alone, so... yeah, we're not splitting the party up NOW of all times.
Ashe gives her first genuine-looking smile since the wedding scene.
At 99 and a half hours into playing the game, the party can now (at any time) proceed to the endgame dungeon. I'm gonna do some offscreen grinding and... Hopefully, the next update will be the last one.
That Christmas will be known as "The year I stopped having friends".
Anyway! Hi, I'm amazed you're here reading Livejournal here on Christmas, because there's no way you could be doing so any time after the fact. It's not like these posts stay up or any-- This intro is dumb, let's get on with the game.
Last time:
Occuria: "Ashe. You are the Chosen One. Have two glowing swords."
Balthier: "Star Wars joke goes here."
Vaan: "Dibs on Chewbacca! :D"
Penelo: "Beep boop boopy-woo?"
Ashe: "I am going to get some nethicite and kill EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE."
In order to do that, Ashe needs help from Phil LaMarr to find the legendary Sun-Cryst, which is a crystal and not a soft drink. (Or a Cyst. I misread that once. LET'S GO LANCE THIS CYST, EVERYBODY! Yeah no.)
Phil is super-irritable because a bunch of his ships are having trouble with a huge release of Mist out in the waters. He is all cranky and barking orders as the party shows up. They report in all that happened in Giruvegan, and by "all" I mean the parts where they didn't meet Cid but did chat it up with the Occuria, not the parts where I got lost for multiple hours and ran in circles through the same five rooms and got eaten by behemoths.
Phil doesn't really know what's up with this whole Occuria bullshit, and cares even less. The important thing as HE sees it, and as Fran spells out, is that if we hike out to the Sun-Cryst and bust it all up with these nethicite-cleaving swords, it will probably somehow stop all the other deifacted nethicite from working, because of reasons. Nobody knows if the man-made stuff will ALSO stop working, but hey, this is soundin' like a plan!
Balthier presents the opposite course of action, which is to do as the Occuria say and carefully carve a new stone from the Cryst. Then they can destroy everything with it and win the game. Phil is not down with that plan.
"Would you like to know the best use for Nethicite?" he asks, rhetorically. "You pick it up... and you throw it away."
Ah! So... Nuclear magical hand-grenades, then! ...no? ...no. Okay. *sigh*
Vaan points out that in order to do EITHER of those things, they need to actually find where the Sun-Cryst IS. It's in a tower on a far-off shore. Phil, any towers or far off shores, out on the ocean? Funny, that sounds exactly like what his fleet is having trouble with RIGHT AT THIS EXACT MOMENT. There's a lighthouse out on the Naldoan Sea that leaks Mist constantly. Jinkies, that sounds like our next clue! Unfortunately, nobody can SAIL there, and it's in jagd, so airships can't FLY there...
Oh, Phil has a Skystone for Airships that resists jagd effects, stolen from the Imperial Draklor Labs. He loans it off to Balthier. ...well, this would explain how the Imperials keep flying over the fucking stuff to capture our party OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN, wouldn't it? Phil also declares himself a Guest member of the party, so we roll out with him in tow.
This is the part of the game where basically all the guidebooks tell you to piss off and start doing sidequests like tomorrow will never come, but bugger all that I am tired, tomorrow keeps coming, and I want this game DONE before next year rolls around. So there's really only one sidequest I'm doing.
Let's see. We hop an airship from... Balfonheim to Bhujerba, and this Chief Steward is named Sanne, and yes, her flirtatious suitor is a jerk too...
Then we use Balthier's private airship to jump somewhere else, and repeat until we have delivered that letter to EVERY airship steward on EVERY line running. The brothers are defeated, and the sisters can concentrate on work instead of being nagged and flirted with every few minutes. SUCCESSFUL RUN.
Let's go, plot! We board Balthier's ship again and head for "The Ridorana Cataract", where this tower of Mist is. This is basically at the end of the world. As in, it's built on a waterfall cliff, over which the sea drops off into nothingness. I think we must be on a sky-continent or something here.
Phil and Ashe chat about "what if she picks revenge" and how she had better decide on a path damn skippy, because it's getting to be about that time. Meanwhile, Balthier explains to Vaan that Balthier is the leading man, and if he needs to do something "heroic" and doesn't make it out, Vaan gets his airship.
It's kinda sweet. And basically a GREAT BIG WAD of foreshadowing.
That said, Balthier is well to fear for his mortality, because on this particular floating island are DEATHCLAWS. Not, I hasten to add, the Fallout variety of Deathclaw. (Which is a shame.) Instead of reptile-flavored murder, we have insect-flavored murder. They love to just casually claw a character apart. I may need to grind a while.
I should note that as I wander around grinding, I pass the "Colosseum" map where Yiazmat is fought. For those of you who have not played this game, Yiazmat is a prime reason why I'm not angling for a 100% completion rate, aside from wanting to stop playing this game sometime this year. Yiazmat is a "superboss", who has something like 50 million hit points. It can instant-death characters at will. He does enormous damage. He takes hours and hours to kill. His arena has a save point in it so you can pause and leave and come back and STILL BE FIGHTING HIM.
100% completion is for people who need or want to wring every single ounce of content out of a game before they can move on. There's a place for that in the world. That place is Youtube, and they can link me a video so I can watch THEM do it and wave a little flag and cheer, because I'm not gonna do it myself. Let's move on.
You know what ISN'T an optional boss fight? AN UNDEAD DRAGON. This thing just loves draining all the magic out of the party and then slapping us around with Sap. It's nasty. We hit it a lot, it dies. Fran notices some writing on the wall after this, reading off things like "He with power, trust it not. He with sight, heed it not." and so on, and REND ILLUSION, and so on. It's a message left by Raithwall, to those who came after him. Ashe seems kinda shocked by the tone of the message.
"Rend illusion, cut the true path." Ashe has a lot to think about on her way further up the tower.
Naturally, this dungeon has a Gimmick. The Gimmick is that it's a maze, locked by "seals", and you have to find a poem in the maze and read it, and then enemies will drop "Black Orbs", which you use to power seal-breaking... thingies... that open doors, and if you don't pick up the orbs fast enough they fly away forever, and then you have to kill more THINGS and get more ORBS and break more SEALS. Again, feel -really glad- I am playing this and you aren't, because I actually like this game and I am kinda ready for it to be DONE already. It's very Aquaria-syndrome.
Opening the Sealed Door finally teleports the party out to some sand dunes, which are very still and very sepia and very obviously some kind of boss arena. I think this may be one of my favorite areas in the game, because it really gets across a sense of... isolated calmness that's creepily unnatural. Also, holy crap the sun is -black- up there. Or eclipsing. Well. It's hard to explain, really! Anyway, there is another giant turtle here for us to boss fight. If there is one thing that defines the Final Fantasy series, it's a rabid hatred of giant turtles.
This particular giant turtle is not too much of a pain, although he does pop a paling halfway through the fight and become totally invincible. When we beat him, the party has to tromp all the way back through the ruins and use a teleporter that was next to the door, but inactive until now.
It's gonna be one of those dungeons, isn't it? The kind I'm just glad to see the back end of.
Oh my god can EVERY FUCKING THING IN THIS TOWER turn the party to stone?
Up and up and up we go. It's a long, long pain in the ass of a trip. I think I'm running out of items. That's never happened before. I may need to get new ones soon.
What the hell is this, the Last Dungeon? I'm on floor 50 and it's still not done. THIS DUNGEON IS A TRAP DEVISED BY SATAN.
Anyway... ugh. I end up needing to teleport out and restock all my items, and then climb BACK UP 50 floors... This is a goddamn trip to Sadism Land Theme Park, is what it is. Deep breaths, though. I'm gonna preservere. I'm gonna MAKE IT AFTER AAAAALL. *throw hat in air*
Okay. Second Ascent is floor 50+, and I can surrender either the ability to use magic, items, physical attacks, or the map. ... Since I have a bunch of .gif map files I'm referencing, this one's an EASY PICK.
*rub eyes* We are now well into hour six of this dungeon crawl, after I have slept, come back, and picked the game back up. Merry Christmas everyone!
For Christmas I get a boss fight against a giant KILLER DRAGONFISH, and then after that a HUGE WHITE TIGER, so what with the dragon/tiger/turtle symbolism I'm thinking next will be a phoenix, for reasons that are behind that link.
On floor 66 I finally find an elevator, and yay for that. Only goes up one floor though.
Next is a teleporter, and then a long run where you have to remember what -symbols and colors- were on the DOORS on the way up here, and if you don't, you get thrown back downstairs and have to climb up again. I start keeping GameFAQs open in a dedicated window around this point.
Okay, another elevator... except it stops partway through the ride so the party can get ambused by HASHMEL, BRINGER OF ORDER, who is a giant lionman(?) with crab-hammers welded to his forearms. Just another perfectly normal fantasy monster here in Ivalice!
Anyway, er... he is pretty damn tough and we nearly wipe the whole party, except Team B saves it again after one team is wiped out. The Bringer of Order goes to Penelo. I want everyone to have at least one Esper, 'cause.
I... guess I was wrong about the whole phoenix thing. ...huh. Oh well.
On the way past floor 91, the party stops to ponder and eye Ashe from behind while she walks, about whether she'll REALLY try to destroy the empire, and how revenge is okay but it doesn't bring people you love back, and how Penelo can still see her parents when she closes her eyes (BECAUSE SHE'S AN ORPHAN! It's her one and only point of characterization, y'all! It's back for a repeat performance!) and so on. Ashe shows amazing personal restraint by not whipping around to point out that this conversation, particularly Phil LaMarr's part of it, is happening very loudly -directly behind her back- and would they all please shut up and let her think.
On floor 98 there's a save point, and then on floor 100... the Sun-Cryst, projecting god-rays like nobody's business. "Years ago," Ashe begins, "King Raithwall stood before the Sun-Cryst with this sword in hand..."
"But you're going to use it to destroy the Sun-Cryst, right?" Vaan asks.
"...Don't interrupt me, Vaan." Ashe glares. KINDA MAKIN' A SPEECH HERE, Y'KNOW?
Unable to remember whatever she was going to say next, Ashe hefts her Treaty Blade in the air, and elements start gathering outside the tower, and the Mist production goes into overdrive. Rasler's ghost appears again, as if to urge her on. This time, EVERYONE sees it. Basch is kinda freaked out. Just as Ashe is trying to figure out what it wants from her... Destroy the Empire? Revenge? -Really-? Gabranth shows up! He is doing the Evil Villain Urge-The-Hero-To-Do-Dumb-Shit routine. "GRASP YOUR RAGE! IT IS A WEAPON MEANT FOR YOU! I KILLED YOUR FATHER AND ALSO THAT SCRAWNY KID'S BROTHER!" Vaan flips out and charges, but Phil is there with his two swords first, blocking Gabranth's way.
Phil gives a little speech about how ONCE: THERE WAS A MAAAN. A JUDGE! WHO TOOK NETHICITE IN HAND AND BLEW NABUDIS AWAAAAAAY. AT CID'S ORDERRR! Gabranth recognizes him as Judge Zecht, and there is more talk from Phil about revenge and forsaking his name and really this is his big scene so it's forgivable but he is just EATING the scenery alive here. He ends up with a bit how we MUST ESCAPE THE PAST, but Gabranth smacks him across the room. It is IMPOSSIBLE to escape the past, he offers as his opinion on the subject. "Do the dead not DEMAND REVENGE?"
Ashe eyes Rasler's ghost again. He always has this kind of dippy smile on his face.
Vaan, meanwhile, takes up Phil's sword, but doesn't go running straight at Gabranth like he might've earlier in the story. He looks over at Ashe. Ashe looks over at him. Gradually, they stop having "HATE AND KILL" faces and start softening up. Ashe turns back to Rasler and apologizes to him, but... "You were NEVER the kind to take base revenge!"
And then Ashe slices Rasler's ghost in half with the Treaty Blade. He staggers around, looking shocked, then glares and starts screaming at her in the voice of the Occuria. From what I can tell, they've been trying to guide her down the path of using the nethicite since the first time they appeared to her in Rasler-form. She stabs the hell out of that ghost. What Ashe -wanted- was the return of a country that would never have to use nethicite, she's decided. So she's not going to use it to get that back! And she's CERTAINLY not going to be led around by the nose by the Occuria!
Welcome back to the light side, Ashe. It's good to see you again. Gabranth is not so pleased. "THE DEAD DEMAND JUSTICE!" he insists.
"You're wrong." Vaan replies. Which visibly shocks Gabranth, who had apparently forgotten he was there.
"I can't help my brother now. He's gone. He's dead!" Vaan adds. ("But around my neck, he lives on through me! VAAN THE SKY PIRATE!" okay no this is not a Gurren Lagann scene, sorry.) Ashe agrees. The past is unchangable, but the future matters. She casually dumps the Dawn shard on the ground.
Finally it's Basch's turn, and as he steps in we start a duel with Gabranth. Gabranth starts ranting that Basch can never reclaim his honor, because he left his home and his kin. (Which would explain why he's on Dalmasca's side and Gabranth is with the Empire.) Sadly for him, he keeps trying to pull off moves with nasty-sounding names like "Sentence" and "Guilt" and "Circle of Judgement", but the party is -really- optimized towards one-on-one combat, so we beat him straight on down.
Gabranth is panting and grunting, but a new voice rings out: "ENOUGH, I can bear... NO MOOORE."
Oh look, Cid! Who expected that?
I did. I expected that.
Cid casually shoves Gabranth out of the way, a neat trick considering Gabby's in like seventy pounds of armor. Gabranth wasn't supposed to outright ATTACK the princess. He waves Gabranth off and... basically fires him from service.
When he attacks Vanat in anger, Cid nearly fires him out the tower window, too.
Cid, meanwhile, is -really- pleased by Ashe. She's turned her back on the Occuria! The reins of history, hands of man, blah blah. Now give him the nethicite. ... Nope, Ashe isn't playing THAT way either. She's tired of owing people things. "Sun-cryst be DAMNED." she declares.
"WHOOOOH-HO! BE SURE THAT IT IS!" he agrees. "For what other purpose are you here-ahhhh?" This dude is a living ham sandwich. Seriously. Cid warns Ashe that the Sun-Cryst is so full of Mist, destroying it might be a BAD IDEA. Cid instead grabs up the Dawn shard and stuffs all THREE shards into the Mist, using Vanat to charge them up while laughing like a goddamn loon. Balthier accuses him of wanting to become a God, and Cid denies it. He wants to SURPASS the Gods. "REVEL IN THE GLORY OF MY TRIUMPH!" he demands, and leaps at the party headfirst.
Cid is a pretty tough fight. At one point he pulls out the largest gatling gun I think I've ever seen that wasn't a giant robot add-on and blazes wildly away at the party. At about half health he goes invincible and summons up the Esper "Famfrit", and this becomes a duel with that. All the while Cid is steadily whipping out new and nastier kinds of BFG while Famfrit just straight-out spams attacks like crazy. I nearly wipe here too, but I press on, desperate not to have to do that ENTIRE SEQUENCE AGAIN.
Finally, FINALLY, Cid goes down. He drags his death scene out as long as he possibly can via strained groans alone, and then flops. Then he GETS BACK UP to keep talking at us. Curiously, the first thing he says is to Vanat, at how much he's enjoyed the past six years with him. Only then does he turn to address... y'know, his son.
"Was there no other way?" Balthier asks.
"Spend your pity elsewhere." Cid sniffs. He's so full of nethicite, he more or less just melts away into a cloud of mist. Thank goodness he didn't EXPLODE or anything. Fran topples over, and Penelo is first to her side to gather her up. "The Mist BURNS." Fran protests, so I know we kinda have to get out of here in a hurry before A: Something does blow up, or B: Fran starts kicking people's heads off. "The Sun-cryst will burst! Run, as far as you can!"
Penelo only moves from holding Fran when Balthier comes over, so she can see him instead. Fran seems to expect that the group will just sort of leave her there. I have no idea WHY that would be the case, but she's in kind of a bad spot to be thinking clearly. Anyway, Balthier doesn't agree. Vaan and Ashe grab up the blades and push towards the Sun-cryst, but they're visibly making no progress at all against the Mist and wind. You know who IS strong enough to take a sword and get to the Cryst, though?
Phil LaMarr! Who CONDEMNS THE CRYST TO OBLIIIVIIIIOOOOOOON and then it explodes and so does he. Somehow the party escapes while he's holding off the explosion with his forehead. Mist-sensitive cultures all over the world go "WTF was that", Phil's men lament his passing and realize he was looking for somewhere to die all along, and Al-Cid shows up casually hanging out in Phil's office to chill.
Man, Al-Cid, the dude is DEAD. Wait at least a couple days before you put your shoes up on his desk. Seriously.
"The war begins now." he informs Ashe. It turns out that his generals nodded when he told them to stand down, and then ran off and joined the Resistance. You cannot find good help these days, seriously. Anyway, they didn't take any of the Rozarrian flags or anything off their airships, so NATURALLY the entire country is now officially at war.
The cards all now lie with Vayne, and the Sky Fortress Bahamut. Ashe declares that she'll defend her country from Bahamut... and Vaan chips in that THEY'LL defend it. It's their home too, as Penelo notes. And Balthier's father designed the Bahamut, so it falls to him to help, and Fran's coming with because they're partners, and Basch isn't letting the princess go alone, so... yeah, we're not splitting the party up NOW of all times.
Ashe gives her first genuine-looking smile since the wedding scene.
At 99 and a half hours into playing the game, the party can now (at any time) proceed to the endgame dungeon. I'm gonna do some offscreen grinding and... Hopefully, the next update will be the last one.
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no subject
Date: 2012-12-26 12:42 am (UTC)Yeah, that tower is just mostly time-wasting bullshit, and you can go back there to unlock a whole mess of sub-levels under it (which have even more gimmicks to them), with the reward of another summon at the bottom.
"if you don't pick up the orbs fast enough they fly away forever"
Actually they float to a repository on the same floor, but the only clue you get as to this repository is the direction in which the orbs fly, and the fact that there is a repository is never stated in-game, I don't think.
Also, WTF was up with the introduction of Sky-Fortress Bahamut? The justification is "the overwhelming amount of mist has suddenly powered this sucker up." They barely mentioned the fortress' existence before this, and then suddenly it's powered up and ready to go all Death Star on Rabanastre. It really feels like Matsuno had already directed the final cutscene which featured Bahamut, and then they had spent so much money on it, they had to figure out how to shoehorn it in.
Also, Merry Decemberweenmas to you too! I hope you give yourself some nice today.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-26 12:54 am (UTC)...Wow, the repository thing is something I would NEVER have found, but you're right. It exists and ... huh. That would probably help, if I had been gunning for the towers and sublevels and complete stuff. Which I am not.
As to Bahamut... I assume it's just "We need a final dungeon." "How about another airship?" "Let's get that rendered." Good planning on Cid's part, making a design that literally can't fly without huge quantities of Mist and then convincing the party to blow up the Sun-Cryst, releasing a huge amount of Mist.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-26 08:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-26 08:55 pm (UTC)Final Fantasy 12 is a content factory. I could probably spend another hundred hours on it, and then another fifty trying to work out a plan to beat the superbosses. But that would be both counter to my personality AND rather dull to read, blogwise!