In this plot-heavy episode of FFIV, we enter the mysterious Tower of Zot and say farewell to a party member in tragic if predictable fashion.

We board our airship and immediately are visited by Kain.


Soon enough, we find ourselves at the Tower of Zot. Weirdly, the Tower of Zot appears to reside in the skies; our airships travels vertically and fades to black to get to the tower.

Inside the tower,Kain challenges us to scale the tower towards Rosa, who is naturally on the top floor of the Tower. Unfortunately, Rosa doesn't have long hair for us to climb up, so we're gonna have to do this the traditional way: killing a ton of enemies.



This place is pretty swish, going through it. It's got a nice steampunky gear vibe. The dungeon's music's only average though.




The Tower of Zot is surprisingly small. It only has roughly five floors to it, and there's no hidden gimmicks like super-secret passages or invisible treasure. Just a floor, a few branching paths, and some chests. And enemies. The enemies were fine.

One interesting enemy is called the Soldier...ess? I mean that term doesn't even exist. A female soldier is a soldier, and is called as such.



Also their outfits are dumb. Just saying.

On the penultimate floor of the Tower, some strange women suddenly appear before us.



They're pretty evil. Also, they're The Magus Sisters! FF experts, do they appear in a previous game, or is this their first appearance? Because I only know them from their rather more insectoid appearance in FFX.

Anyway, so their Delta Attack, unlike in FFX, is far less deadly. All it involves is Sandy casting Reflect on Cindy, while Mindy bounces off that magic. I mean, it all sounds highly convoluted. They'd be better off just attacking.

Their 'killer' strategy is also easily dismantled.



So what I did here was silence Sandy so she fails to cast silence. Unfortunately for Cindy, Mindy doesn't realise this and casts a cool blizzara on her own ally.

Suffice to say it was all too easy. They were tripping themselves up with their strategy and that gave me plenty of time to just wail on them with my strongest attacks.

Gotta say I'm appreciating how status ailments play a factor more in this game. I've already had to use Slow, Break, and now Silence proves really useful.

Anyway, they're defeated, and we move on to the top floor.

Once we arrive, huge cutscene! We approach Golbez, demanding Rosa. He gives the classic villain response.



Tellah's had enough and finally decides to enact Super-Mega-Revenge-Plot. Let's see how that pans out.


Golbez develops a growth spurt between the cutscene and the battle. He positively dwarfs Tellah.

Well, I say 'battle', because unlike other plot battles we can't even do any actions. We just watch Tellah cast -ga tier spells like they were small gusts of wind.

Eventually Tellah decides to go for it and unleah Meteor. It's got a pretty badass animation.



This goes exactly how you'd expect.



Despite appearances, Golbez is actually slightly wounded from Meteor, causing his mind control of Kain to break.


Despite his injuries, Golbez opens a can of whoopass on Cecil but strangely decides to stay his hand for as-of-yet unknown reasons.

Golbez leaves us to grieve Tellah, who is clinging to life. Cue a sad cutscene, undercut by Cid's cartoonishly large mouth and voice.



And so that's the end of Tellah's revenge plot. As revenge plots goes, it was pretty obvious where it was going. His hate-filled revenge was never going to go well.

At least we didn't have several chapters of teen angst, like the other FF revenge plot I can recall.

Anyway, we wake up Kain, who is full of apologies and doubt about whether his actions were all mind-controlled or not.

We quickly scale the Tower to save Rosa.



I'd only just realised just how skimpy Rosa's outfit is. She's basically wearing undergarments with a nice flowy cape.

Anyway, the happy couple embrace.



Creepy.



Good ol' Cid here with the lampshade hanging.



Anyway, Kain explains his (also intensely creepy) motivations. "I just wanted you by my side, all tied up."

Now that we have Rosa and Kain back, I take the time to re-equip everyone and dole out some augments. I got three augments from Tellah, and I gave some of those to Yang. Rosa got Dualcast, so she can buff and heal more more efficiently.

Anyway, we no sooner enjoy this moment than the next archfiend appears: Barbariccia.



The main gimmick with this fight is when barbariccia enters her tornado form. Foreshadowed in the cutscene before the fight, our returning ally Kain is the only person who can break through the form. His Jump attack knocks her out of the potentially deadly form, disabling her from using her strongest attack.

All in all, another easy-ish fight. Honestly the main concern at this point is Rosa's astonishingly low health. Other than that, the fight was easy enough after Yang focused three times.

After the fight is ended, Barbariccia gloats that we won't be able to fight the fourth (and presumably strongest?) archfiend. That, and she decides to do the age-old trick of destroying the Tower. Rosa gets us out of a bind by casting Teleport and we land in Cecil's bedchambers. Case of Freudian Magic, perhaps?

Either way, Kain reveals a shocking surprise: turns out there's four Dark Crystals in the underworld, of all places.

What's this all for? Kain has some news for us as well:


So, Golbez's plan is to gather the crystals and go to the moon because... there's clearly something bigger at play here.

So our path is set: find a way into the underworld and capture the Dark Crystals before Golbez does. If I know my RPGs, I sense we'll ultimately try hard and fail to do so. No harm in trying though, right!

Tune in next time where we re-visit a place we've been to before, uncover the entrance to the underworld and say hello to yet another old friend.