Having fun with this Four Job Fiesta

[Chronicler]

Maybe it's a spoiler to mention this at this point in the thread, but I'm almost positive ExDeath is a robot when you fight him as the final boss of the game. Like a four-legged imperial walker looking thing. So I'm pretty surprised to see he's just a dude here.

They've only described him as an evil warlock so far, so it's not actually incongruous with what I should know at this point in the game.

 

[Chronicler]

There weren't any particularly good spots to screen grab, but quick status update on the quest.

ExDeath has returned and he's gone back to his home planet to cause more trouble. Galuf and his grandaughter have gone home to wage war with him once more. He left the rest of the group behind, because the meteor only had enough juice left for one trip. If we went with him we could never return.

The group gets talking and they decide they're not cool with leaving this unfinished. ExDeath killed King Tycoon, so Farah Lenna want revenge, and more than anything else, "Galuf is one of us". The fact that this is basically a dying world we're leaving behind, now that the crystals are all shattered, doesn't seem to be on anybody's mind at this point in the process.

So we get talking with Cid and the Mid, figure out a way we can combine the remaining power of all four meteors to follow Galuf. We go, we get reunited with Galuf who we see commanding an army, an explosion knocks us far away from everybody, we're stranded in the backwoods of some strange planet. All of our transportation was left behind.

I unlocked my final class, The Samurai, but I picked the Fifth Job option when I started this fiesta, so at a certain point in the future I'm supposed to swap out my earth class for another random one. If I don't like what I get I'm thinking I'll just pay a few bucks to swap it back to Samurai though.

 

[Chronicler]

Moogles would go on to become a Final Fantasy mainstay. Short white-furred creatures with a little pompom on their head and non-functional wings. Sometimes they're helpful sidekicks and sometimes they're playable characters. "Kupo" is their trademark phrase. In some games it's their only vocalization and in other games it's just a little tick at the end of fluent sentences. Probably one of the designs most distinctive to the Final Fantasy franchise.

I thought they debuted in Final Fantasy 6 where they give all the tutorials, but apparently they have a minor role in this game, and pulling up their wiki it seems they were in Final Fantasy 3, and were even planned for Final Fantasy 2 but didn't make the final cut. So that's I guess an idea Square was playing with for a while before it became the tradition that we know today.

Also, apparently this was the concept art for the first moogle. Like looking at early Garfield.

Here's what they'll look like a few games from now when they've settled into the form we know and love.

 

[Chronicler]

I assumed Galuf was like a high ranking general or something. Apparently he's king.

So that makes our group two princesses, a king, and Bartz. I'm pretty sure Bartz isn't royalty, but in flashbacks we've seen that his dad was one of the Dawn Warriors, the group that Galuf sealed exDeath away with, so maybe? He was pretty chummy with royalty at least, which in real life would typically imply you're also of some sort of lineage, but in Fantasy World who knows.

 

[Chronicler]

The moogles in this game are telepathic. Their role was to tell our friends where we are so they could come pick us up.

The royal wind drake was injured, but it came to pick bring us home anyway. It pushed itself too hard, and now it's dying. Only Drake Grass could heal it, but we don't know if that even exists on this planet.

Back on our home planet, wind drakes always nested near Drake Grass, so we speculate that if we go to where the drakes nest here we'll find some around somewhere, but the drakes nest in Drakenvale, which no human has ever entered and lived to tell the tale.

Our entire quest, the battle with the fate of the planet in the balance, has effectively been put on hold so that we can heal this noble animal that's served its king as faithfully as any soldier. I think it's cool when heroes can have those kind of moments of very human kindness. Like it's not all about punching the villains and saving the world. The measure of a man is in the minute and mundane as surely as it is in the grandiose and fantastic. Of course, we're gonna drama up this quest as much as we can, turn it into a journey into uncharted land fighting terrible beasts and such, but it is still fundamentally a trip to gather some herbs to heal an animal, and I think there is a bit of a statement in letting the glorious battle with the world threatening villain with fame and fortune to be earned wait a moment while we tend to this.

 

[Chronicler]

So Bartz has just learned that his father was one of the Dawn Warriors. The player knew that long ago, because he was in all the flashbacks of the Dawn Warriors, but Bartz is just learning now.

His dad actually seems like a pretty cool guy. He didn't like the idea of sealing their planet's greatest evil away for some other less advanced world to deal with, but he agreed to the plan, seeing no other option. After the other warriors went home and called it a day, he stayed in our world for the rest of his days, keeping an eye on the seal and maybe attempting some form of penance, helping the people of this world however he could.

Despite this he died three years before the shit went down, and it fell on his son to clean up his mess, but isn't that the way of things? I'm sure a lot of people would like to have all the problems tied up in a neat little bow when they hand the world off to the next generation, but damned if anybody's managed it yet.

 

[Chronicler]

Side note, Bartz learns this in a hidden town of werewolves, that are also clearly ninjas. They don't ever call themselves ninjas but these werewolves are all running around doing ninja shit and their shops sell nothing but ninja gear. So that's fun.

 

[Urdnot_Wrex]

Side note, Bartz learns this in a hidden town of werewolves, that are also clearly ninjas. They don't ever call themselves ninjas but these werewolves are all running around doing ninja shit and their shops sell nothing but ninja gear. So that's fun.

Ninja werewolves? Funny, I'd always considered werewolves to be strong and stout, but also kind of clumsy. Now my imagination is running wild, full of images like the werewolf daddy from Hotel Transylvania, all dressed up in black, silently jumping over rooftops and throwing shuriken...

 

[Chronicler]

So, good news and bad news on the "Does the herb we need exist in this world" front.

Apparently it's been a mystery why the wind drakes are facing extinction, so it may be a recent development that the special herb they build their nests around is some kind of crazy monster. Guess that's a problem for another day though.

 

[Chronicler]

I've talked about how they play with gender roles a bit with Faris being the more masculine girl who lived most of her life as a boy, but I think it's cool that it doesn't fall into the trap of denigrating femininity either.

Lenna has a strength of her own. She does things none of the other team members could do. Stuff that would never even occur to them. Any one of us could have slain the grass monster but without her the drake would not have been saved.

 

[Chronicler]

I was like "The reflect knight. There was some reason I wanted to kill those, right?"

So I checked the bestiary and sure enough they drop Reflect Rings, an accessory that grants the Reflect effect, which bounces all spells back at the enemy.

Can't believe the recall on that. We're definitely deep enough into the game that I haven't done any of this in a solid 15 years now.

 

[Chronicler]

Whoa! Exdeath Backstory ahoy!

It wasn't clear I needed to be taking screenshots when he started getting into it. But there's a forest where there are like these holy trees, and one tree in particular was used to seal away evil.

After generations of so much evil being sealed away in it, eventually the tree took on a life of its own. That tree is Exdeath.

Knowing that this is how Exdeath came to be kind of makes it seem extra shitty that they came to our world and sealed him away in our super important crystals... If anything that could've gone way worse than it did.

 

[Chronicler]

So, through much of this game I've been lamenting that there's no world map.

That was one of the features they added for the Final Fantasy 1 GBA remake, so it was weird that they wouldn't have put one in the Final Fantasy 5 gba remake which was made around the same time and is otherwise similar in its treatment of the game. The world can sometimes be really hard to navigate without a map.

Anyway, turns out you open the world map by pressing L and R at the same time in this game. In Final Fantasy one it's Select and B, but here it's L and R. Mystery solved.

 

[Chronicler]

So I'm kind of having trouble understanding this part of the story, but I guess this world has crystals of their own, and they had been limiting Exdeath's power, but we fucked it up somehow so now he has his own crystal power just like we do. As if he wasn't already problematic enough.

We were just doing what the wise sage told us to do though, so I'm not sure why it backfired so tremendously. He seemed like he knew what he was talking about. And Exdeath had worked pretty hard to keep us from talking to him. Sunk the sage's island when we were going to visit him, so we were only able circle back around to that quest once we had a submarine.

 

[Chronicler]

You may remember me saying the game wasn't done shaking up the gender parity of the party yet. Here we are. Galuf dies a hero's death, and passes his share of the crystal power onto his grandaughter.

This is probably my favourite part of the game. The ingenious part is how it responds to the player's own perception of the characters. In a normal run, where you're not doing this four job fiesta thing, you've spent the game up to now customizing each of your characters, having them learn abilities from each of the jobs making them better suited for certain roles. In my first run, I'd had Galuf master the black mage and monk classes, making him supremely powerful at attack spells and punching stuff to death.

When Krile inherits the power the crystals had lent him, the crystals which are the in story explanation for the job abilities, it means she inherits all the jobs he's mastered. This means whatever the player decided this big burly bearded man would be good at, is now what this small girl is good at. So in my run she was this pintsize thing punching dragons to death with her bare fists and throwing fireballs and stuff.

Anyway, I picked the Fifth Job option, so that means at this point in the game I lose the samurai class and gain the chemist. Probably for the best. The chemist class looks pretty complicated to use but my party has like no support abilities and this should address that.

 

[Chronicler]

We're finally invading Exdeath's castle. After we reach a dead end, Krile sees that this is all just an illusion. She shatters the illusion, revealing the castle's true form.

This is honestly pretty graphic for the Super Nintendo's family friendly standards. You can't see it in the still image, but the walls move like a beating heart. In motion it all comes across as very meaty/bloody.

I've thought this a couple times throughout the game. There was a pretty explicit alcohol reference in one town, where Galuf and Bartz tried their famous brew. And they've also occasionally dropped mild swears like "Crap". It's not like the most adult thing ever but similar contemporary games had things like "Milk Bars" and "Soda Bars" where people would act like they were getting drunk but not strictly be drinking alcohol, so it stands out as noteworthy to me.

 

[Chronicler]

So right now, I'm kind of, a little bit stuck.

I got to the end of this dungeon, but I don't think I can beat the boss as I am.

But this game doesn't have any "Immediately exist the dungeon" item, and I can't access the spell that does that with these classes. I used a bunch of healing items to get this deep into the dungeon and it's going to be really tricky to get back out with what I've got left.

I'm sure this is a really rookie mistake that could've been avoided but it is what it is.

 

[Chronicler]

I have successfully escaped the dungeon. Had to use some expensive resources I don't like to spend, but nothing irreplaceable. These shurikens cost an arm and a leg but I can make more money.

Not... entirely sure what I need to do about this boss. Thought once I visited the town shop I'd see something handy that could turn the tide here but it seems like I'm already pretty well equipped...

 

[Chronicler]

Finally beat the boss battle. Had to learn how to better use my chemist.

So, Exdeath starts monologuing about his evil plan and it rapidly becomes clear that we don't really actually know what he's been up to all this time. Like we know he's the evilest of all evil guys but nobody's ever actually gotten around to filling us in on what his goal is. We actually kind of come across as remarkably simpleminded once Exdeath points this out.

We fight him, and it looks like things are going well, but then his crystals break, and everything goes all whooshy, and we wake up and

We seem to be back in our homeworld. But how could that be?

We drop in on castle tycoon and the chancellor wants to throw a big banquet to celebrate the return of their princesses. Apparently he's learned that Farah is Lenna's long lost sister while we were gone. He calls her by her birth name and has her dress in a big pink dress and she seems pretty uncomfortable.

While the princesses are occupied Bartz and Krile decide to go out and try and investigate what's going on. Why we're home now.

I didn't cover this, but Bartz has a trusty chocobo named Boko. Chocobo's are kind of large flightless birds that you can ride like a horse. This bird's been with him through thick and thin, but he had to leave Boko behind at the start of this whole journey. So since we're in the area we decide to start our investigation by checking in on Boko and seeing how he's doing.

Surprise! Boko's found a wife while we were gone! And they've got two children on the way! Also, Krile apparently speaks chocobo "but just a bit", which isn't something that's previously been referenced as being possible. She spoke Moogle but despite only saying "Kupo" they were kind of implied to be an intelligent species. They had like a small town with like infrastructure and stuff they'd built. But the chocobos thus far have only been treated as dumb animals, so maybe they're smarter than they let on or maybe she's got a bit of a Disney Princess thing going.

Boko agrees to help us out with our adventure but makes it clear as an expectant father he'll have to get back to his family before too long. He's not a drifter like Bartz anymore. He's set in his roots.

 

[Chronicler]

So Farah ducked out of the party and rejoined us, and we found the wise old sage, so he's giving us the lowdown. The wise old sage is a turtle. I never mentioned that. When Galuf first tells us about him he's like "The Great Sage Ghido is over 600 years old", and we assume it's through some magic or gnostic meditation or something, but it turns out it's because he's a turtle. We make an ass of ourselves when we first meet because treat him like a turtle before we realize what the deal is, but it seems like that's really on Galuf for not telling us the situation more clearly.

Turns out another seal is to blame for all this. Because of course it is. They reiterate that by destroying the crystals, Exdeath has doomed both worlds, which is a plot point we haven't revisited for a while, all to claim the power of the void for himself. To what ends? Who even knows. Having total power over a dead and empty world seems like a hollow victory to me, but he's a tree imbued with pure evil, one can only guess at how a thing like that thinks.