Not Much Left to Do in FFVI

 The World of Ruin - the second half of Final Fantasy VI - is very open. After you spend the first game in a relatively linear fashion, getting introduced to the characters and the various points of interest, the World of Ruin, once you meet up with Setzer and complete his backstory dungeon, the first order of business becomes reuniting all of your old playable characters (by the time you find Setzer, you'll have started as Celes and only been able to get the two Figaro brothers back, leaving even central characters like Locke and Terra as technically optional).

While getting Mog as a permanent party member in the World of Balance half is slightly unintuitive and easily missed (you have to go back to Narshe) there are just two characters you can only recruit in the World of Ruin, Umaro the Yeti and Gogo the Mimic, both of whom are pretty light on backstory (Gogo is practically a blank slate, and is found in a very weird dungeon).

Anyway, re-recruiting all of the party members takes up what I think is the bigger chunk of the World of Ruin, but there are a couple other challenges, like climbing the Cultist Tower (a special dungeon in which only spellcasting is allowed - even forbidding Strago's Lores - but which holds a pretty fantastic prize in the form of the Soul of Thamassa, which gives any character who equips it Dualcast for any of their spells, which pair well with the Golden Hairpin, which halves the cost of any spells).

There's also Deathgaze, a moving world boss who will flee from battle and require you to hunt them down repeatedly (luckily they don't recover HP between fights) and who drops the Bahamut Magicite, which teaches Flare, which is ok but perhaps unimpressive compared to Ultima, but also gives a 50% boost to the HP you gain upon leveling up, which is pretty amazing (paired with the Ultima Weapon found in the first half of the game, which gives a larger attack bonus based on your max HP, this becomes very cool).

There are also eight legendary dragons, most of which you'll come across in dungeons when looking for other stuff (I think the first I fought was the Wind Dragon in Mt. Zozo when tracking down Cyan). I have 6/8, and I believe the last two are in the final dungeon.

Some of the endgame activity here is actually just story-related. I found Gau's father (you have to go to the hut with Sabin and Gau both in the party) and there's a somewhat heartbreaking reveal that Gau's crazy father left his "demon child" in the Veldt (I think the implication is probably that Gau's mother died in childbirth, and the father went crazy and blamed him for it), which is particularly jarring as prior to their presentation to the father, the whole party gets together to gussy up Gau with fancy clothes (you get to see him in various outfits as the party argues about fashion).

In this 16-bit era, there are limitations on just how deep the characterization can go. I haven't played the original VII, but I'm given to understand that the Remake trilogy has done a lot to flesh out both the party and the NPCs, and that makes me all the more eager to see VI get a similar treatment.

Once again, VI feels really different than the preceding Final Fantasy games. While I really liked IV and V, VI feels much more original, and more ambitious in its storytelling. Obviously, these games have grown all the more operatic... and lengthy, as time has gone on. While I think I might have one or more things to do (I haven't done much in the arena, and while I think most of the characters who need to learn certain spells have it, I'll never turn down giving everyone things like Curaga, Reraise, and Arise) I think I'm probably ready to head into Kefka's tower and take the mad clown-god down.

I'm at about 40 hours into the game, which feels respectable, especially for a thirty-year-old game.

Still, not only am I getting that "near the end of the story" melancholy for VI itself, this will also mark the finale of my delve into the Pixel Remasters. There's a good chance I'll be playing the port of the original FFVII as well, but it does feel now like a months-long project/experience is winding down.

Approximately, I'd Guess, 70-75% of the Way Through FFVI

 I'm now not only in the World of Ruin, but I've also got all but one of the playable characters I had gotten in the World of Balance (the holdout being Mog - and I haven't gotten Umaro or Gogo yet).

It's hard to look at Final Fantasy VI objectively the way I think I've been able to for the previous five games, in part because it's a game that I do remember from even before I had an SNES, and on top of that, it's my best friend's favorite video game of all time, so I guess in a kind of empathetic transference I feel a lot of his nostalgia for it.

I've written before about the ways in which the game feels like another step in the evolution of the series, particularly in how it divests itself of a lot of the medieval fantasy tropes that had been present in the first five games (though, unlike VII, it still retains a bit of that, given that a lot of the towns could easily fit in one of the previous games without much change).

But I think I have a few more observations - some neutral, some positive, some actually kind of negative, about the game.

First, let's talk about its bleakness: even before Kefka blows up the world, the world of VI is pretty dark. Not only do you have a conquering empire crushing everyone under their boot-feel and mind-controlling Terra to act as one of their super-soldiers, but you've even got stuff outside the Empire like Jidoor exiling all of its poor people to the anarchic slum of Zozo (I'm not expecting a lot of sophisticated politics in a 30-year-old SNES game, but I think if they fleshed out this segment in a remake we might get a little better sense of how Zozo got so scuzzy, because as it stands there's a likely unintentional implication that poor people will naturally devolve into violent thugs without an authority to keep them in line).

Of course, the World of Ruin, and particularly Celes' time on the Solitary Isle with Cid, is particularly dark (I didn't get the darkest version of it, because I caught enough Delicious Fish to keep him alive).

Earlier FF games do deal in some dark moments - IV has you begin your adventure as an agent of the evil empire, II sees entire towns wiped off the map by the evil empire, and V, while mostly a bit more upbeat, has a late-game moment in which several towns get sucked into the void, but the ending seems to make it clear that this is all reversed by defeating Exdeath (I'll also throw in there that the reveal of Castle Exdeath's true form is a pretty horrific shocker - the entire series has trained us to understand that the big bad's lair will be all blue crystals, and that's what the castle looks like until the illusion is dispelled and it's shown to be one giant mass of flesh. I guess given that the big bad is ultimately an evil tree, perhaps he thought that turnabout was fair play - if we were going to make our homes out of wood, he'd make his out of meat. Of course, Castle Exdeath is far from the final dungeon, and the actual final dungeon is a little more "cosmic crystal" like the other games).

Next, let's talk about structure:

I have a confession: I've been using a walkthrough. The reason here is just a fear of missing out on things. If it hadn't been drilled into me by my aforementioned best friend, I'd have likely left the Floating Continent before the timer ran out and thus lost Shadow as a party member permanently.

There is definitely a line of breadcrumbs in the World of Ruin that leads you to regaining most of the party members (I didn't even realize re-recruiting Sabin was technically optional).

But there's definitely less of an A to B to C structure in the back half of the game than the World of Balance part. To an extent, this is just the natural consequence of a structure that limits your movements - the very first game basically forced you to play most of it in order because you just couldn't get anywhere else, but then when you get the Airship, the world opens up in a big way.

At the moment, the objective is certainly to get all the party members, but I'm also curious to see how obvious the breadcrumbs are to get, for example, the other Magicites (I've been coasting on the second level -a rank spells for a long time, and I feel like I've got to get the -ga rank ones pretty soon, right?)

I will say that I think there's a double-edged sword to having a really open design. I know that a lot of people love the fact that, for example, the characters' journeys in Baldur's Gate III can go in so many different directions. But I guess I'm someone who really wants to have that golden ending, and isn't really down for replaying a whole game to try to do things differently.

Something I love about a game like, say, Alan Wake II, is that you get the full story if you beat the game (well, you get the full story if you beat the New Game Plus). I honestly think that the reason I fell off of BG3 upon arriving at the eponymous city is that I just became overwhelmed with the need to make sure every character's arc turned out the way I wanted it to - what had begun early on as a casual, "let's see where this goes" way of playing it devolved into "ok, wait, what exactly do I need to do to make sure that Shadowheart chooses not to kill the Nightsong? Say nothing? Really? That actually makes sense but I would not have thought of it."

FFVI doesn't have quite the granularity of different story paths to it that BG3 does, but I can definitely say that I looked up how to ensure that Cid doesn't die at the start of the World of Ruin.

Switching gears: let's talk Magicite.

I... I actually have to be honest here. I don't know if it's my favorite system.

See, on the surface it's great that you can get everyone to learn all the spells.

But I think it starts to homogenize characters that, prior to getting magicite, were very distinct. I'll still use Edgar's Tools and Sabin's Blitzes, but I'm starting to hit a point where basically any fight will have me mostly just casting spells on all four of my active characters. And while Terra is still doing way more with them (I have her double-equipping Earrings and I've had her using Magicite that boosts her Magic stat on level-up) it makes things like Cyan's Bushido feel underwhelming.

I also don't love that you're basically penalized if you level up when not using a stat-boosting Magicite.

I think if I were to redesign the system, I'd probably have the Magicite give a percentage bonus to that stat while it's equipped, and then perhaps grant the spells it offers while equipped, but not teach them permanently. Maybe Terra and possibly Celes would be exceptions here, where they get to actually learn those spells permanently.

Again, games have gotten more sophisticated over time, and this was certainly a big, experimental leap (and likely taking inspiration from V's Jobs system).

I think in a revamped version of the game, you could also evolve the characters' unique abilities to grow and develop in fun ways over the course of the game. Sabin and Cyan learning new techniques is very cool (and is basically like the way that the VII Remake series has had characters learn their unique weapon abilities).

Anyway, Magic is also easy to use a lot of because once a character has Osmose, they basically will never run out of MP. Mind you, I don't hate that, but it does de-emphasize physical attacks.

VI is shaping up, even with its flaws, to be very likely my favorite in the first six of the series, and I say that knowing that I genuinely liked both IV and V (I appreciated I-III, but they all felt sort of proof-of-concept-like, with III being the first game that felt like it was approaching true ambition, but which got blown away by IV's confident arrival in the 16-bit era). There's a decent chance we'll be getting whatever the latest port of the original FFVII, so when I finish this one I might have to check that one out (and will compare it to the preceding six games and to its decades-later remake series - which have genuinely been some of my favorite games ever).

How to Do a Final Fantasy VI Remake

 I'm roughly halfway through (I think) Final Fantasy VI, currently (unchanged since my last post) cleaning up various things before I go to the Floating Continent and... well, see the game change significantly for the back half. (Spoilers for a 30-year old game?)

I do think I need to temper some of my reactions to the game given that this is the first one really filtered by nostalgia, but I also know that the general consensus surrounding VI at least in the U.S. is that it's the best (even if VII is also deeply beloved). And folks at Square Enix have talked about how they dream of making a similar from-the-ground-up remake of VI the way that they've done with VII.

The biggest challenge, they say, though, is the cast. After games like IV where Cecil is very clearly the main character, and V where the cast does share the spotlight fairly well, but there's only five total party members (and only four at any given time,) VI's guiding philosophy was that all the characters were the main character. Granted, I might give privileged positions to Terra, Locke, Celes, and maybe Edgar and Sabin, but the goal was to ensure that everyone had something of an arc.

Now, I know that the second half of the game is where a lot of these personal stories get resolved, so I'm still in a bit of a set-up phase, but I am getting a sense of the game's overall shape.

Speaking with my best friend, whose favorite video game of all time is VI (though he's never beaten it! He's working his way through V's Pixel Remaster for now - we've been doing this in parallel) he suggested that if we had an expanded remake like VII has gotten, he would put the end of the first game at the big battle at the Narshe mines.

This does feel like a natural spot - while the game starts in Narshe, you have the separate legs of the journey trying to get Narshe to join the Returners, Locke meeting Celes in an occupied South Figaro, and Sabin coming to understand the depths of Kefka's depravity before he, Shadow, and Cyan take their trip aboard the Phantom Train, and then later meet Gau on the Veldt.

The funny thing, though, is that as a place to cut, you actually wind up ending the game before the mechanic of Magicite even enters the picture. That could actually be great - you could basically not have to worry about it when designing the first game, and instead focusing in on the characters' individual powers.

I'd guess, then, that the second game (assuming this would be a trilogy like VII) would likely begin with the search for Terra, eventually getting your first Magicite in Zozo, Celes' starring turn in the opera, and then the trip to the Magitek facility in Vector, the opening to the world of the Espers, meeting Strago and Relm, and finally the Floating Continent. That might be a lot, but it's actually kind of similar to VII's remakes where you cover a lot more ground in the second game.

It's actually sort of funny to me that VI is generally agreed to sit alongside VII as the best of Final Fantasy's entries (I've heard a lot of people putting the MMO Final Fantasy XIV alongside them, but I can only really do one MMO and also I think it's PC only and not on Macs anyway) but unlike VII, which has had tons of prequel games and a sequel movie, as far as I know they've never returned to the world of FFVI, other than various remasters of the original game.

I've been a massive fan of VII's Remake trilogy so far, and frankly wish that future Final Fantasy games would use its combat system much as many of the pre-X games more or less re-used IV's Active Time Battle system. Seeing the world of VI fleshed out and detailed as the VII remakes have done with that game, and seeing those characters rendered in modern, realistic graphics with more space for performances and voice-acting... really it would be freaking awesome.

Given that this is the last of the Pixel Remasters, I'm trying to stop and smell the roses as best I can. I feel like I'm clearing a massive backlog of classic games while also walking through a kind of museum of game design.

On the Cusp of a World of Ruin

 I think I'm about halfway through Final Fantasy VI, which would suggest the game is actually shorter than V. Given the degree of familiarity I had with earlier parts of the game, I believe in my original attempt at this about 18 years ago, I got stuck at the boss of the Magitek Research Facility, which is funny because this time around it posed essentially zero challenge.

Indeed, one of the slight disappointments here is that some of the most iconic fights have been over too fast. My fight with the Ghost Train ended in only about two rounds (I did manage to get a Meteor Strike, which is what the Pixel Remaster calls Suplex, I assume as a more faithful translation of its Japanese name, off on the train, fulfilling the meme) and similarly my second bout (of which I'm now through three) with Ultros at the opera house was tragically short, I think this one only going three rounds.

I'm now in a clean-up phase, exploring on the Blackjack to try to get everything I can out of the World of Balance. But the floating continent is now floating, and that means that we're near VI's big midpoint shift. I only hope that the World of Ruin is as substantial.

To be sure, I imagine I'm getting through this content quickly in part because I'm so familiar with it.

Another goal of my check-in with the midpoint of the game is to let some of the lower-level characters catch up. Poor Gau is still in the teens, while folks like Terra and Strago are 25. Speaking of Strago, I'm also trying to amass things like his Blue Magic (I've only learned a single spell he doesn't start with, and it's... Self-Destruct) and Gau's Rages (of which I have many, but I guess there are some really powerful ones to pick up). I also picked up Mog, and got him a bunch of environment-based dances.

Well, I guess if it's over too quickly there is a port of VII you can get on a PS5...

Final Fantasy VI: Espers, Operas, and Another Leap Forward for the Series

 So, while I had never played very far into it, Final Fantasy VI was the first game in the series I was really aware of (though the dark-clad knight in some cardboard cutout that I recall vaguely from early childhood might have been Cecil from IV, then known as II) and so I'm a little biased toward it as "the" classic Final Fantasy game.

But, to be fair, by reputation and by what I'm now experiencing playing the game, it is earning that.

I've now worked out a deal with future party-member Setzer to use his airship to travel to the southern continent and confront the Empire and rescue some Espers from a Magitek factory.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Square seemed to pull out all the stops when conceptualizing VI. I should note that, graphically, the Pixel Remaster has made some changes and embellishments on what released for the SNES (and I'll talk about the Opera in a moment) but in terms of art direction, there are some huge departures from the previous games. Yes, there have always been elements in these games of high technology, most notably the sci-fi environments encountered in IV. But while there are still some castles to be found in VI, they have ventilations shafts in their towers.

Zozo, in particular, feels hugely different.

At one point in the game - after a lengthy journey where the characters get split up (one branch of which includes the segment on the Phantom Train) and then reunite for one of the game's "multiple parties" segments (which, as a WoW player, I think of as "raids") a few characters need to go looking for Terra, and this takes you to the wealthy town of Jidoor, which has a classic medieval Final Fantasy town vibe, but where the lower class citizens were all banished, and were forced to go create a new town up in the mountains called Zozo. And it is there that we discover Terra was last seen.

Zozo, unlike any other town I've seen in an earlier Final Fantasy game, feels modern (well, modern for the mid-90s). While, being a video game settlement, it's tiny, the town has the vibe of a dense urban slum, with tightly-packed apartment buildings. Zozo doesn't really function as a town the way that most towns in these games do, as you'll be attacked anywhere in there and the "stores" don't actually have anyone who will sell you anything.

The dense town of urban decay - which literally has bodies lying out on the street - has a vibe that I think was popular in my childhood, an era when the cyberpunk genre was really big (a genre that, all apologies to modern cyberpunk authors, I think is almost redundant given how we're already in a society dominated by the internet where megacorporations dictate how we live). It's honestly something that I think as a kid I would have found kind of off-putting and depressing, but thirty years later kind of hits a note of nostalgia. Zozo is scuzzy to the extreme.

But it's also here that one of VI's major progression systems is introduced. Terra is being tended by Ramuh, one of the Espers that, being basically human in form, can pass as human and live in secret. Ramuh escaped from one of the empire's Magitek laboratories, and is hoping to enlist the Returners in liberating his fellows. Ramuh's three companions, Siren, Cait Sith, and Kirin, didn't make it, but transformed into Magicite upon their deaths. Ramuh allows the same to happen to him, and thus we get our first Magicites.

Each character can have one Magicite equipped at a time, and as you battle things, the Magicite will (permanently) teach you spells - for example, Ramuh gives you, if I recall correctly, Thunder, Thundara, and Poison. Additionally, some Magicite will also affects your stats when you level up - I believe of the first four you get, one has your Stamina go up an extra point with each level, another increases the HP gains you receive by 10%, and another increases your Magic attribute by 1 when you level up. Finally, each of these Espers can be summoned once per battle by the person who has them equipped.

At the moment my strategy has been to try to swap them out so that everyone learns as many spells as possible - especially Cure (taught by Kirin). But I think in the long run it'll also be important to have Espers equipped that will give certain character the attributes they most need. Celes and Terra, as the two native spellcasters, will probably be characters I focus a lot of Magic stats on.

Right now the Figaro brothers are profoundly powerful with their unique abilities. I got the Chainsaw on Edgar (which I must confess I got some online help with) and between that and Sabin's Meteor Strike (which in the SNES version was just called Suplex) I can dish out a ton of damage in single-target scenarios. And in fact, both have powerful AoEs as well. I wonder if these will remain as powerful moving forward.

Indeed, very few characters, it seems, have much reason to just use the standard "attack" command. Celes does when she's not casting spells (I haven't encountered a ton of spellcasting enemies, so her Runic command doesn't get a lot of use). Locke was doing this until I got a relic that changed his "Steal" to "Mug," and while given that he wasn't putting out much damage compared to the Figaros anyway, having him focus on combat larceny has been a pretty standard practice.

Following Zozo, and needing an airship to get to Vector, the imperial capital, another of VI's iconic sequences (and there do seem to be a lot of those) takes place - in which Celes takes the place of an opera singer whom she looks like as bait for a scoundrel gambler who happens to have an airship and intends to kidnap the singer.

Now, the fact that this kidnapper is a future party member is... a bit intriguing, as he's a full-on villain here.

But this opera sequence is where I think the Pixel Remaster went really hard. I do have vague memories of this in its original SNES form, and while it was a real spectacle, in the Pixel Remaster they do a couple things I genuinely didn't expect.

The first is that they play with camera angles. All of these games have had the top-down (or slightly-tilted top-down, maybe more tilted in VI) perspective, but we get shots of the stage from various angles, with the sprites redesigned to show off... well, angles that we don't usually see them from. It's not constant, but it's a sort of shocking vision as we're reminded that, oh yes, we're actually in 2024 right now (at least as I'm writing this) and video games have definitely figured out how to show off a 3D environment.

The other is that the singing in the opera has full voice acting. As in, it's really sung, with, like, lyrics being sung by voice actors in English.

Now, the SNES did have very occasional voice acting - think about the opening of Super Metroid "The Last Metroid is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace." But that was seriously exceptional, and I don't think it was really until the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation that voice acting in video games became the rule rather than the exception. So yeah, this really knocked my socks off.

Playing through all these iconic moments, though - Suplexing the ghost train, having the second Ultros fight on the opera stage - the one thing is a little surprising is how easy things have been. Both of those fights only lasted like two or three rounds, and while with Ultros I probably did do a little grinding (trying to learn various spells and such) with the Phantom Train I really didn't at all (ok, I spent long enough in the Veldt to have Gau do his thing one time, but that hardly seems excessive).

Not all the fights have been easy - I took on the second bout with Kefka (which comes after defending Banon from several waves of imperial soldiers - though there's a recovery bucket you can return to between fights) with Locke, Gau, and Edgar, I believe, and well after I'd set Gau to one of his Rages, Locke and Edgar were both knocked out by a single attack, meaning I had to just sit there and cheer Gau on to finish the fight (he did prevail, but with a fairly small number of hit points left) but I wonder overall how much of a challenge the game will wind up being. My general rule (and this is probably the subject for a whole post) is that I like a game that is difficult enough to get me to engage in its game systems - you don't want something where you can just hit the basic attack over and over and succeed - but not so difficult that it feels impossible (yes, I know that I play FromSoft games, and for some reason they feel like an exception to that second rule, probably because of some sort of "tough but fair" philosophy).

Anyway, I'm still playing through stuff that feels relatively familiar to me. But I'm running out of big moments that I already know pretty well.

Final Fantasy VI Kicks Off With Unprecedented Creativity

 It's a small detail, but Final Fantasy VI might be the first in the series in which the first or second monster I fight is not a goblin.

From the beginning, the Final Fantasy games always flirted with some divergences from the medieval fantasy genre. Fantasy, of course, does not need to adhere to the historical limitations on technology (and in fact, there are often some "rules" to medieval fantasy that aren't actually historical, like I think guns pre-dated full plate armor in our reality). We had the sort of technological city in the sky in the first game, and certainly by IV we had what were clearly high-tech elements, such as the futuristic Tower of Babel and Lunar Whale.

But VI feels like the first game that truly sets aside the D&D inspirations of the series and sets out to do its own thing. Yes, there is still a big castle you go to early in the game, but it's actually a big mechanical fortress that can bury itself in the desert.

I haven't gotten my hands on any Magicite yet, so at this stage in the game the characters are limited to what they inherently can do, but what that is is pretty fun. Terra is the only spellcaster at this point, but Edgar has an array of tools that are quite effective in combat (though I'm given to understand he'll need upgrades over time). I think in my previous runs at this game, I didn't appreciate the Noiseblaster and Bio Blaster, defaulting to his Auto-Crossbow, which does the most direct damage. I'm not sure if it's ever ideal to just take the "Attack" action on him - perhaps if he gets a weapon that's better than any of his tools - but I'm fine with that.

My most recent addition to the crew (I'm a little over an hour into the game) is Sabin, Edgar's martial artist brother, and boy has the Pixel Remaster made him easier to play - his unique ability is Blitz, which gives him various attacks that seem inspired by fighting games. Using them requires you to input a specific button combination, and you'd have to memorize them after reading the combinations in the pause menu. Now, in the Pixel Remaster, you select the Blitz you want and then get a prompt in-combat that tells you which buttons to hit, which I am extremely grateful for.

Anyway, I also find it interesting how Kefka is introduced - he's a lieutenant of the evil Emperor Gestahl, and going by the tropes of this sort of game, you'd really expect him to be some tough but ultimately subordinate boss, like the Turks in VII, or I guess the elemental lords in IV.

Another note is how the town of Narshe, which is where the game starts, really feels like it has a more distinct personality than a lot of the towns in previous games - you really get a sense of the extremes of temperature, between the snowy cold outside and the heat of all the steam-powered machinery.

Also, the way the world map works is different - the angle is sort of tilted and the camera is much more zoomed in. This does make it feel a little more like you're exploring a big world, but it will take some getting used to (and especially the change to a "behind the character" rotating camera angle when using a Chocobo, and I assume later the airships, which actually reminds me of Secret of Mana when you get Flammie the Dragon to ride on - a game where I think you only ever see the overworld when flying above it, outside of non-controlled transport like the big cannons).

Environments in this also feel like they're a little more three-dimensional - a departure in the art design that shows an evolution toward the modern 3D environments we're now used to.

V Down, I to Go

 Well, that's the penultimate entry in my Pixel Remaster run of the early Final Fantasy games.

Final Fantasy V is a great game - I honestly don't know where I'd rank it compared to IV, which I consider good praise. Mechanically, the game is certainly more complex than IV, but the Jobs system in V takes the ideas introduced in III and really makes them work a lot better - though that is not to say that there isn't room for improvement.

Ultimately, when I got to the final dungeon (which, at least in its first half, is actually a really cool trip, taking you through what at least was the 16-bit equivalent of a surreal journey through locations both familiar and semi-familiar) I had most of my characters going as "Freelancers," gaining all the passive benefits of their various classes. This wasn't quite as crucial on Bartz and Lenna, whom I had using, respectively, Black and Time Magic and White and Blue Magic (as cool as Dualcast was, I really couldn't go in without someone that could cast Curaga, Arise, and Esuna). Faris and Krile had mastered several classes (I did actually get the latter's Mystic Knight mastered in the final dungeon) and so Faris was my biggest damage-dealer, using Spellblade and Rapid Fire while dual-wielding I think the Brave Blade and either Excalibur or Ragnarok. Krile I had Spellblade on but rather than having her Rapid Fire she took care of Summoning magic - and honestly, Golem's Earthen Wall and Odin's Zantetsuken both played important roles in the final fight.

Exdeath as a villain is actually a kind of cool inverse of your typical Final Fantasy bad guy. In a lot of cases, you have some ambitious and arrogant human (or human-adjacent fantasy person) who has been transformed into a hideous abomination through some magical corrupt. Exdeath, though he appears through most of the game as an armor-clad knight (not unlike Golbez in IV, whom we discover near the end isn't really the bad guy), turns out to be not even remotely human, and is instead a great tree that was used as a kind of dumping ground for evil magic and essences, which then amalgamated as this singular entity.

Thus, the final boss has two phases - the first one has you face off against Exdeath, no longer bound in armor and appearing as a monstrous, branchless, twisted tree-trunk with a nasty face. Even then, though, you can see that the wood (twisted to have multiple mouths) is just barely covering up the demonic presence inside. When that is beaten (which took me shockingly little time - I might have been a little overleveled, but not by a ton) the wooden facade is stripped away, and we get what I think might be first really true Final Fantasy body-horror amalgamation final boss, where a bunch of demonic entities are kind of melted into one another, trying to pull all reality into the void (a void out of which it is reaching - a cool and scary visual).

In fact, the boss has four targetable points to attack, some of which are weak to certain effects - like one can be Petrified and another can be insta-killed by Odin.

I've noticed that, since my mother died seven years ago, I've been more sensitive than before about any kind of emotional element in pretty much any medium. So even with old 16-bit sprites, I'll confess that Krile mourning her grandfather (and the rest of the party mourning their friend) kind of got to me. Galuf and his Dawn Warrior companions are a kind of cool element in the game - you can imagine some unmade prequel that was the story of their defeating Exdeath the first time. (We don't need that prequel, or... you know, most prequels.)

I think some folks at Squaresoft regretted not releasing this one in America, and I think it probably would have been well-received.

The game is also way longer than previous ones - IV was certainly a step up in narrative, but still a relatively tight story. I put 30 or maybe more hours into V, which feels like a decent time for a modern game (I bet I spent less time in Alan Wake II, at least on my first play through it). Part of that time was definitely grinding (I spent a long time trying to steal Murasame off a Rukh, and there were moments where I turned the Pixel Remaster's ABP boost all the way up and fought enemies to master various Jobs - my rule was that I only used the boost when I was grinding anyway, though I broke that rule with the Magic Pots in the Phoenix Tower) but I also think there's just more content and story to get through. I was intrigued by the game's two worlds - I love that when you arrive in Galuf's world, there are different enemies and the environments all look a little different. I kind of love that feeling of "new world means a whole new set of fantasy elements to discover" and then I was fairly shocked when those two worlds merged into one (I never beat that freaking turtle in the Gil Cave, which vanishes after the worlds merge). Seeing the maps fit together was really cool as well - the notion that this merged world was actually the original one, and that the two other worlds were so similar yet different because they had been separated. It's genuinely a cool fantasy concept. I might have liked a phase of the game where you could travel between the two before they merged, but it's already a long one.

Anyway, with this under my belt, I'm eager to move on to VI, which is my best friend's favorite game of all time and one that I believe goes farther off the beaten path of traditional medieval fantasy. Mechanically, I get the sense that it kind of gives you the solid character-mechanics of IV but with some customizability in the form of Magicite that was maybe a kind of evolution of the Jobs system.

Given that I beat V at around 11:30 tonight (last night?) I decided not to embark on VI until tomrrow.