We're on some real thin stretch of land though at the south, so the tide must've carried us a long way. There's a town nearby, so we move towards it.
Cue completely unfair moment of the game: I get into combat and get stoned. Cecil says 'no' to drugs, but he can't resist status ailments. Some accursed bitch of an enemy decides to stone Cecil, and because he's the only character present, it is an instant game over. Grrrrrraagh!
Anyway, that was not a good start to the session. We do eventually reach the town of Mysidia. Hey, isn't that the place where Cecil stole the Water crystal? Awkward.
Let's talk to the friendly locals under Travel Rule #2: 'talk to everyone!'
Noooo, we were tricked! Which... actually makes sense. Good job, game! Thankfully I had plenty of items at hand, so I was alright. I'd never seen the transformation ailments before, with the exception of FFVII. They don't really exist in the later games. The pig is kinda cute.
We explore the village and - as expected - everyone fears us. We even have civilians backing away and literally fleeing in terror as soon as I speak to them. Many of them had barbed words for Cecil.
Thankfully though, their merchants would take coin from whoever!
At the end of town, we enter the elder house. Turns out he's willing to listen to our story.
We tell him all what happened with the King of Baron, Golbez and the Red Wings, and Cecil's own turmoil about following obviously evil orders. The elder of Mysdia had some advice:
This game really has a thing for child mage prodigies. First Rydia, now Palom and Porom. One's a black mage, and one's a white mage, so they're fairly well balanced, even if they're a full fifteen levels behind me at Level 10.
Let's do some grinding!
Next time in FFIV, we scale up Mount Ordeals after crossing the Plains of Grinding and become a paladin.
Well I can't say I was more than a little overleveled for that part of the game. Cecil was level 28 when his Dark Knight career ended, while everyone else was roughly level 23.
Also, I gave everyone the augments I had. Palom was given Item Lore which doubles the effectiveness of items, which made his flame rod attack incredibly powerful. Cecil had Counter on, so he was just auto-attacking like no-one's business. I mainly had Porom on healing duty. Her healing staff move is basically pray only without the MP restoration, so that kept everyone topped up.
Tellah sort of... used Mage Arrows. I don't know. At 90 MP, he's not very fuel efficient.
The next thing we know, we're being treated to a 'meanwhile, in the villain's lair...' cutscene featuring Golbez, Kain and Scarface. No wait, Scarmiglione.
They talk about evil plans, while eating evil ice cream and stroking evil kittens. Unfortunately, Rosa is in a fairly compromising position.
Apparently he's here looking for a spell called Meteor, though why he's here and not, I don't know, some Mysidian library I have no idea.
We also tell Tellah about what happened with Leviathan, and how Rydia and Edward are probably lost at sea. Which probably comes as some surprise to Tellah.
Tellah wants the spell Meteor so he can dish some damage to Golbez for taking his Anna away. Apparently Meteor is a powerful spell, because:
I sense some foreshadowing. But anyway, ever upwards. I may have been slightly overlevelled, but damn Palom can dish out the damage with his flame staff.
There's a usual array of zombies, spirits, and other undead types. They're really not that difficult. Then again, I am playing on Normal as opposed to hard, so
We reach the summit, where we hear a strange hissing sound. Our heroes blame Palom, because they do not know what ominous foreshadowing means.
Wait, the first of the circle? Doesn't that mean you're the weakest?
And sure enough, the battle consists of just defeating his mooks and himself with all-consuming fire. It was over with fairly quickly. Let's see what our studio audience thought!
So anyway, suffice to say he is a little tougher. He has counter moves against physical and magical attacks to be wary of, so I basically made Cecil and Palom my two healers, because they couldn't attack with Scarface responding with status ailments and all kinds of trouble.
This meant Tellah and Porom could have their time to shine, because restorative moves are somehow exempt from his counter mechanics. I just spammed Cura on the guy, who was affected due to him, you know, being undead.
Sure enough, he was defeated. So much for an archfiend!
We're suddenly thrust into a battle with our other self.
No, wrong game! Anyway, Cecil has to defeat his dark self by not attacking. Which makes sense. Easiest boss fight ever! He just darknessed himself to death while I just defended.
I remember being very surprised long ago when the game ended at the top of that mountain. I thought it would be much longer, the moment when Dark Cecil returns and destroys you as you descend the mountain was a real twist.
So what did happen when we scaled back down the mountain? As it turns out, nothing at all. The only drama occured when I realised when Cecil was back down to level 1! All that hard work, wiped away! He hits like he's using wet tissue paper, even against zombies who are weak to light!
There were also some vague and unhelpful hints to be found in Porom's head thoughts:
As it happens, Paladin!Cecil levels up damn fast. He jumped from level 1 to 7 in just one fight, and I spent some time getting him up to speed again. He now has a Cover ability, and he auto-covers wounded allies which is helpful. He also knows some white magic! Though Porom is still undoubtedly the best healer in my team.
We level up some and re-enter Mysidia. Turns out the townspeople were utterly shocked at my success.
The Elder explains that the Mysidians have been told for generations to prepare for the prophecy's arrival and realisation, and that Cecil may at the heart of the mystery, because of course he is.
In another development, the ancient seals preventing the use of Meteor have been broken, allowing Tellah to use it, just in time for his revenge fantasy against Golbez, who is our next target.
Palom and Porom insist on journeying with Cecil and Tellah to defeat Golbez, because they are so invested in his journey, but also because it would deprive us of two mages and wreck the game balance. The Elder signs off on their assignment and we keep our party as it was!
Turns out this Devil's Road we keep being told is now unlocked for our use, so yay! No more seafaring.
All Cecil needs to do is infilitrate Baron, kill Golbez and save the world. Nothing to it, right?
Next episode (which I'm currently playing as we speak) will cover our infiltration attempt. All we need is some spy music and 'lasers' and we're all set.
This episode begins in the item shop. As it happens, Cecil's Dark Knight armour is very in demand in Mysidia, counterintuitively, and sells for quite a bit. I got 3000 Gil just from the chestpiece!
Also took some time to re-organise my inventory and just generally prepare for the infilitration of Baron. You'll also notice a Window colour change: I thought it appropriate as we've kinda reached a major checkpoint in the game I felt.
Anyway, enough preamble. Cecil and the others enter a mystic portal, just casually lying around in an abandoned house, to the Devil's Road.
Also, the 'Devil's Road' is kinda misnamed, because it's just a straight-up teleport, together with some kinda eerie music as the screen pans across the world map to Baron. It occurs to me that Baron is not well defended.
Security concerns aside, we enter Baron and enter the pub. Teleporting is thirsty work. At the inn, the soldiers are making a right mess of things.
But look who's beside him, it's Yang! Who apparently thinks we're the enemy, and sics his sexist guardsmen on us. They were easy enough to deal with, even if they loved to spam Pig and Mini on us, which was surprisingly annoying to deal with.
After that, we had to beat up Yang, which was also easy to deal with, as he employed no clever tricks and just wanted to kick us to death. I admire his simplicity.
Cutscenes ensue. Turns out Leviathan really roughed him up. He got amnesia and promptly followed orders issued by the King. What a guy.
He is promptly called out on his lack of sense by Palom.
Cecil and the others need to enter Baron Castle, but there's no obvious way through. Thankfully, Yang has a Master Key (which renames itself Baron Key upon reciept). Guess we have what we need to infiltrate the castle!
Before doing that though, let's explore the town some more. We visit Rosa's mother who is still just as anxious as before about her disappearance. We also pop by Cid's house and encounter his daughter:
We also encounter Campingway here, who is now Jammingway, the jamming music rabbit thing. We get to listen to the OST, which is nice.
Anyway, we enter the Ancient Waterway. It's a good thing I picked up a Thunder Rod for Palom, because he's just kicking ass against all kinds of fish and alligators. He's definitely my MVP so far.
I could talk more about the Waterway but it's just a standard dungeon, so let's move on and enter Baron Castle!
We arrive at the moat, of course, and quickly enter the castle proper. Let's check in our party's thoughts:
Which is some fantastic grief counselling, right after his friend's death.
On a question though, how well did we get to know Baigan? He popped up for five minutes in the opening, and didn't say much, so I guess we're supposed to assume Cecil and Baigan regularly had drinks at the local, then. Don't worry Cecil, you'll get another drinking buddy.
At the Throne Room, it turns out I was being far too prophetic.
Surprise! The King is actually another great fiend in disguise, Cagnazzo. Never would have thought.
He even looks more evil. And he transforms into a huge, kinda creepy looking tortoise and is the Archfiend of Water, though his most annoying moves are to spam sleep (I did not have enough alarm clocks for this fight).
It wasn't difficult, per se, just frustrating. He kept spamming status moves which forced me to keep healing, and he cast Slow at one point which affected everyone, forcing me to haste, as Esuna insurance didn't factor in slow.
In the end though, he fell, and Cid escapes from... somewhere to greet us. We give him a plot update concerning Rosa, and compel him to join us on his airship. We're on our merry way before Cagnazzo appears again to crush us against the walls.
What is it with undead archfiends? Just stay dead, damn it!
Just burn the door down with a fire spell! And don't tell me magic doesn't work outside of combat because a fire spell being used to melt down an obstacle was a plot point earlier.
Having failed to think of magic, everyone defaults to Plan B, which is the ingenious plan to push the wall back. Photo evidence above indicates this was a stupid plan.
Turns out Palom and Porom do the only sensible thing and twincast Break on themselves, while also breaking the treasured censorship rule of not killing children. This game just kicked up a notch.
Tellah finally thinks to use magic, but to no avail, because of a helpful message pop-up.
I'll miss those two, not only because they provide some nice comic relief, but they're far more clever than they initially let on and their combat power is incredible.
Now all I have a physical monk, a decent fighter in Cecil who barely knows any white magic and a powerful, if terribly fuel-inefficient mage.
Meanwhile, at the villain's lair, Rosa has lost all circulation in her arms at this point, yet is still managing to put on a brave face:
Kain and Golbez hatch a plan to convince Cecil to retrieve the Earth Crystal in exchange for Rosa but - surprise surprise - they plan to kill him afterwards. Because they're nefarious villains, of course.
Still curious as to why Golbez is collecting these crystals. Is it just for the power?
Kain promptly shows up after we get the Starship Enterprise and parlays with us.
Not much for us to do but turn up at Troia and hope for the best then! And maybe phone up the elder and inform him that Palom and Porom are dead. Whoops.
Tune in next time while we fly around our airship, go to some optional areas, and generally forget that we need to get to the Earth Crystal quick before Rosa's arms drop off.
The guards are very apologetic that they allowed an evil Archfiend to usurp the throne. Which does beg the question of who actually runs the Kingdom of Baron.
We explore a bit and uncover some treasures that were previously hidden in the east wing of the Castle, but heading down into the basement, we stumble upon a fascinating discovery:
Hey! It's the actual King of Baron! I'm guessing Cagnazzo chained him down here, but that still doesn't explain why he needs us to visit this land. I mean, he seems healthy enough. Can't he rule now? So many questions!
We leave Baron and revisit Mysidia to tell the elder that - whoops! - we killed his child apprentices.
He takes the news surprisingly well, all things considered.
We get some augments from the elder, who promptly decides to continue gazing into the sky and presumably suffer from eye damage from starting into the sun. As opposed to, I don't know, fetching Palom and Porom's statues. I can only imagine what the guards are thinking back in Baron.
Next up, we visit the Town of Troia to meet up with an old and soon-to-be annoying friend, Namingway.
We decide to help Cheatingway along by stalling with the first date while he 'deals with' the second, presumably by dumping her body in the bottom of the well.
This small sidequest is simple enough, and actually reminds me a bit of the kind of humour you'd find in FFVII during the Midgar segment. So anyway, we try to stall the first lady, who turns out to be the bartender. Well, this'll be easy, bartenders love small talk. And it's a bar so they'll have plenty of drinks available.
After enjoying the many pleasures of Troia, Cecil and the others make way for the town of Mythril, which - you guessed it - sells Mythril equipment. Located on the far eastern archipelago of whatever FFIV calls 'the world', Mythril is home to the land of transmogrified people.
Yup, Mythril is full of tiny folk, pigs and frogs, who presumably couldn't afford a healer to just cast Esuna on them.
Anyway in Mythril we pop by the shops and get what we need. We also encounter upon an interesting event.
Cheatingway becomes Puddingway, the most annoying of his nine lives.
So he asks us to find a Rainbow Pudding, which sounds nice, but can only be found on flan-type enemies, and they have a 0.4% chance of dropping. Per battle.
Now I'm sure veterans of FFIV were saying "oh Formy just do it later when you get treasure hunter". Which is a good point, except you get treasure hunter after completing all the maps, so that basically makes it an endgame thing, and I'd be damned if I was just going to ignore a major sidequest for over half the game.
In this episode, we conclude the optional side-tracking that we started last episode, exploring the strange town of Agart before we visit mysterious Eblan Castle early on to raid some juicy goodies from the castle!
But first, we roam around Agart, talking to the locals and getting a feel for the area. I mean, we might as well be a tourist while we're here.
Let's talk to the friendly locals about what Agart has to offer!
Beyond talking to the villagers, we also restock in Agart and complete some of the bestiary in the surrounding area. I snag Cecil a really awesome Stoneblade from one of the monsters!
After doing that, Cecil and the others go off piste and travel to the lonely southwestern island. There's a really freaky looking tower:
But what we want is further south. A castle is there, utterly abandoned. It's fairly creepy. There aren't even any random encounters. We venture deeper into the castle, and the twin towers possess several goodies, including a Blood Lance, and a few dry ethers!
There's a few monsters hiding inside boxes, though. Exactly how they could fit inside these chests is beyond me, but there you go. We fight some mad ogres, lamias, coeurls and more. Ordinarily, these would be very difficult fights at this stage of the game, but I leveled up some from the pudding hunt so it was okay.
Even with the levels though, probably the best strategy is Stop+Break, which all these enemies were susceptible to. In the end, the castle raid is complete, and I get some great goodies for it.
Next time, we visit Troia Castle and defeat the evil Dark Elf (so fantasy) to rescue the Earth Crystal!