FF6 O_o - Page 8

No spoilers please, as usual. I tried to make the categories relatively spoiler-free but understandable if you have finished the game as to what I'm talking about.

This will only be a small section, unfortunately. It's about 12:40 AM right now. More will come.


I felt like previously I was a bit chaotic on certain terminologies. From now on the 'party' refers to all the available characters while the 'group' refers to the characters being controlled by me. This is consistent with the game.

Recall from the previous section that Terra was transformed into an Esper and flew off. Now the party decided to find her. To do that, one group was needed.



I chose Celes, Locke, and Edgar. Celes was obviously required as I needed a caster who could heal; Edgar's tools were the most useful abilities at the time; as for Locke... well.... I just felt like it. In retrospect this was the perfect choice, as seen below.

Anyways, to go west, the group first went to Edgar's castle. There was nothing new about it except Edgar could buy a couple of new Tools. The important one was Flash - it was more or less an upgrade of Bioblaster.




Sigh, why did you do that, Edgar... why not rule your subjects with an iron fist and save me a few gils....

Anyways, through talking to an old man in an area in the castle which could not previously be accessed, the entire freaking castle submerged into the sand - then reappeared in a different place on the world map. The group then left the castle and walked to the next available town.



It appeared that some townsfolk had seen Terra previously.



This girl talked about the OPERA (OMG EPIC INCOMING)



O well. The town was quite standard, with a shop for most things. However, in the weapon/armor shop there was him...



Shadow! No wonder why the game required a group of 3 instead of 4. Unfortunately he did not want to join the group for free:



What kind of food does his dog eat, anyways? Well, it's just 3000 gil, so why not....



I guess it was the karma. I had just enough gil left to buy everything I needed (including two Full Moon for Locke).

After the spending-spree, one NPC yielded one interesting piece of information.



Who is this Rachel anyways? This was revealed to me after entering a random house in this town. I believe (but I have not tested) that the following scenes would not have happened if Locke was not in the group.



This "her" Locke was referring to turned out to be Rachel. In a flashback, Locke and Rachel went into a cave to explore.




While Locke was walking on a wooden bridge, Rachel noticed something.



She pushed Locke aside, but she took a fall.



Immediately I thought she died from the fall. But it turned out she didn't - she did suffer amnesia, though.



And this marked the end of their relationship.




So Locke left Rachel. Later on he discovered Rachel was dead.



(... Imperial attack.). In an overly dramatic fashion, she uttered Locke's name as she passed away.

Rachel was never buried, however.



The reason, presumably, was to try to find a way to bring her back.



Silly Locke, just use Phoenix Down. This was probably why Locke wanted to be a "treasure hunter" - to find some sort of artifact to be able to her back.

There didn't seem to be a lot of other things to do in this town. Sadly there was almost no hints as to how to proceed either (GRRRRR). Alas, there were other towns nearby, as well. Time to visit all of them.

a second time.

Other than seeing Rachel, there was almost no information as to where to go next. Thus I decided to go north for the next closest town. It was relatively simple, unfortunately.



There was an old man inside who mentioned something about a Colosseum - but it was still a work in progress. But it was not a wasted trip. In the house I found a hidden Hero's Ring.



This ring increases physical and magic damage... but an unknown amount. Meh!

After this stop, the group went south to a town called Jidoor. The random encounters along the way was very annoying, but nothing Edgar's Tools could not handle.




The only interesting thing about Jidoor was that I could buy some improved equipments. However, there was a large house at the north end of Jidoor. While inside, the resident there mistook Celes for someone called Maria - an opera singer.



Upstairs of that house, there were many paintings...



South of Jidoor is the opera house. Unfortunately it was closed so there was nothing to do there except leaving. Too bad the group was not able to meet this Maria everyone in Jidoor was talking about.




There was this flashback around this part, too.



Who is Clyde? O well... moving on. The only other place to visit now is a town slightly north of Jidoor - ZoZo.




While it did seem like a town, ZoZo was special in the sense that there were random encounters here. Such as this one which immediately got triggered as the group entered.



It actually gave me a lot of trouble. It had good amount of HP and damage. Although Locke could steal the Atlas Armlet from it, he was usually too busy trying to stay alive than to steal. Anyways, after this first monster was defeated, Shadow left the group.



O great. His departure made a difficult section even harder. There were many close calls...



Another annoying thing about ZoZo was this monster, which kept stealing my gils.



Anyways, this town's sadistic encounter rate and the difficulty of the monsters made it very depressing to continue to play. After some struggles, however, there was a beacon of hope.



O shit. Could he be referring to Terra???!!! Let's go up that place then!

One thing I want to note is the following steal.



The Thief Knife is awesome. It has very good damage, very good mods (+evasion and speed), and has a chance to steal when Locke attacks (think Mug). Previously, I used Steal very rarely because of the horrible success rate (seriously, Locke is worse than Zidane without Master Thief). But with this weapon, Locke could get a chance to steal while doing damage. Sweet!

The group encountered this fellow near the top of the building.



It turned out he was joking (WTF??!!) and the group actually had to fight him. It was not *that* hard.



After the battle, the group finally reached Terra.



But Terra was practically unconscious. Then a voice appeared.



O fuck. Ramuh! As he manifested himself in physical form, Locke was eager to know if Terra was alright. Ramuh gave somewhat an odd response, though.




It was no surprise that Ramuh was an Esper. In many FF games, Ramuh is a summoning spell that does lightning damage. Rameh gave out a lot of information about the backstory of the universe.

Ramuh claimed that Humans and Espers could not live together. A long time ago, Humans and Espers were friends. Then the War of the Magi came, where Humans with the power of Espers (or power of Magic) infused in them fought the Espers. The Espers later had to fashion a new realm to live peacefully.

However, the Espers' realm was discovered by Humans 20 years ago.





But Ramuh escaped to avoid this fate. Then he sensed Terra and brought her to this place. Locke asked Ramuh if Terra was an Esper, and Rameh replied that Terra was more special than that.

Ramuh then mentioned that the Empire was not extracting magical power correctly. The only true way to transfer an Esper's power was through the Magicite, created after an Esper passed away.




"Ouch" is all I can say here. It's quite sad, really. After this, Ramuh gave the group 4 Magicite - including himself.




The biggest change at this point was that everyone could equip Espers and learn magic. For example...



Also, some Espers gave the character a bonus to some statistics at level up. More on this later.

At this point, everyone came to Narshe and met up. I was given the chance to reform my group, if needed. However, this time Celes and Locke had to be in the group.




Next stop - Opera House :D