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.


I'm so going to enjoy kicking his ass.


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.



What about Rydia and Edward? Edward's whereabouts are unknown, but he gives us an update on Rydia:



That seems pretty fatal.

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:



Hmm, trouble at the castle? That matches up with what the pub barkeep had to say:



Talking about shop owners, we also pay a visit to rob the weapon and armour merchants of their hard earned money. Poor guys never suspected a thing.



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:



I'm pretty genre savvy. I can sense something happening to the King from the very beginning of the game. I've got a theory: let's see if it holds.

But the castle is eerily quiet. It's so quiet, we can even afford to sleep in Cecil's bedchambers without any repercussions.



Sure Cecil, infiltrate the castle, have a nap. Seems right.

After Cecil's nap, we venture into the castle towards the main hall. Hey, it's Baigan!



He's soooo going to betray us, right?

Almost immediately, Palom and Porom see through him.



Turns out all it took was some shade from Palom for Baigan to show his true colours: a weird, twin-snake armed dancing freak.

I'm sure his battle had a gimmick to it, but I just spammed Twincast twice and ended the battle amid a flurry of falling stars:



After the battle we get some sage life advice from Palom:



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!



Our heroes do their best to be blundering idiots, as short-sighted heroes are wont to do in these situations:



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.