Final Fantasy Retrospective: Final Fantasy VI, Part 2

 

Click here for Part 1

 

Celes has played the part of damsel very well, and Setzer locks her in his airship, absolutely convinced that he’s won. However, Celes is somehow already aware of a way for everyone else to sneak into the airship and the rest of the party soon joins her. This might mean that the schematics to the world’s only airship must be popular knowledge by now, and all of the ways in which people can break in can be studied. You’d think, then, that people would be trying to break in more often, or that Setzer would have all the holes in his security patched up. At the very least, he should be employing some kind of guard to keep his property safe, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

To his credit, Setzer is actually pretty quick to realize that he didn’t kidnap the real Maria, and he confronts the party. Celes asks for his help to get to the imperial city of Vector, but Setzer refuses. However, he declares that he’ll only relent… if Celes becomes his wife. If Celes is Maria and Locke is Draco, Setzer may be Prince Ralse, demanding that he be able to marry a woman who doesn’t love him back.

Celes stuns everyone by agreeing, but she has one condition: that it be settled by a coin toss, and appeals directly to his pride as a gambler. Sure enough, he agrees, but Celes has the game rigged and wins not only her freedom, but Setzer’s help in the process. In fact, Setzer is more than happy to help once he sees that he’s been swindled, for he’s impressed that Celes would stoop so low that she would cheat him. Careful, Celes, you’re going to actualy make him fall for you.

The party set down near Albrook in order to not raise suspicion, and they resupply there before heading out. An annoying thing about removing Celes from the party for the opera scene is that the game unequips her automatically, when the developers know that she’s going to be back in the party relatively soon and that maybe the player wants her stuff to still be there.

One of my favourite party members in any Final Fantasy game is one that can steal things, because some games make it worth the player’s while to try to steal from every enemy. A Tiger Mask can very occasionally be stolen from an enemy known as Ralph, and this offers a pretty decent stat boost for Sabin or Gau. Jokers drop Mythril Rods very rarely as well, but no one in the Returners can equip them yet.

There are several cities located around the continent where some equipment upgrades can be found, but the main goal right now is to reach Vector and liberate the Espers. While in Vector, one can’t help but notice the train tracks leading into the Magitech Research Facility. It’s definitely not the case that all trains in the Final Fantasy series are evil, but as will become evident in future games, trains are more often built by the villains than by the heroes, and the more developed the trains are, the more likely they’re evil trains.

Deep in the facility, the party finds Kefka ranting delightedly about draining Espers, gaining magic, and maybe eventually reviving some statues. The party has no context for this yet, but they do see him discard a pair of completely drained Espers, so they pursue the Espers, but are too late to help them. As their last dying action, Ifrit and Shiva turn themselves into Magicite for the party to use.

The battle with Ifrit and Shiva seems designed for veterans of the series rather than newcomers, because they both have pretty strong magic that hits like a truck, and players need to be familiar with each of their elemental strengths and weaknesses. Ifrit, of course, is weak to Ice and gets healed by Fire, and Shiva is the exact opposite. This battle is also a test to see if the player has been using their Magicite effectively. Cure 2, at this point, requires the most Magic Points to learn, and it’s a must have spell in this fight. If players swap Kirin out after a character learns Regen, then no one will have what is the most powerful healing magic they have access to at this point in the game, and both Ifrit and Shiva will walk all over them.

One thing the party needs to watch out for are enemies known as Trappers. It’s very possible that one or more characters will be level 20 here, and Trappers know the Lv.5 Doom spell, which instantly kills a character if their level is a multiple of 5, even from full health. If the Trappers take their turn before the party does, then it doesn’t matter if someone has the Siren Magicite to Silence them, the party is toast. Literally the only reliable way to defend against this is to grind until everyone’s level is not a multiple of 5. Final Fantasy VI has not been a grindy game thus far, but this is potentially a point where the only recourse players will have is to deliberately stop and fight several random battles, especially if they’re running low on Fenix Down. They’ve yet to receive a Magicite with Life on it, meaning that Trappers exist for no other reason than to deplete resources and cause players to hit a wall if they’re unlucky enough to be at a very specific level.

Fortunately, the disposal that Ifrit and Shiva were thrown into is chock full of Flan, enemies which attack in large enough groups that it doesn’t feel like a waste of time to spend a few minutes in there, making sure everyone becomes immune to instant death.

As the party makes their way through the facility, they meet this game’s version of Cid and are confronted by Kefka. Do you remember the scene in The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride when Zira pretends that Kovu was luring Simba into a trap and Simba is a bit too quick to believe her? Kefka tries to pull the same thing with Celes, but she assures Locke that everything will be alright. It’s Locke’s turn to do a trust fall, so to speak, but is he as willing to trust her as she was to trust him?

Celes casts some kind of spell that teleports her, Kefka and the imperial troops he brought with him, Dragon Quest style. They literally just levitate away. Cid, appalled at everything he witnessed within just a few short minutes, decides to stop supporting the war, and vows to convince Emperor Gestahl to end it.

Of course, with Celes forced out of the party again by the plot, her equipment and relics have been unequipped, and we’re just going to be putting the exact same gear back on her when she gets back, so it’s rather pointless. That said, we should probably appreciate that the game does this, because then we don’t get the sense that she’s just taking off with stuff we might’ve wanted to equip someone else with in the meantime. This also prevents anyone new to the game from guessing that she might be coming back later on.

Meanwhile a whole host of new summons have been added to the pile of Magicite the player can bring with them. The developers definitely felt the need to create an entire pantheon of Espers in order to facilitate the magic system they had envisioned for the game. At this point, the brand new summons that have joined the party include Unicorn, Maduin, Phantom and Bismarck, with Shoat and Carbuncle returning from prior games. Notably, Bismarck is a giant whale, and Shoat is also known as Catoblepas in later translations.

This isn’t the first time a Unicorn would appear in the series, but for a beast that’s popular in our modern culture, it shows up very rarely in the series. This is its first appearance as an Esper, and it would first show up in the entire series in Final Fantasy V, but only if players are at a very high level and have the Ranger class and use one of its skills.

Maduin is brand new to the series, and every subsequent use of this character references the Final Fantasy VI version. This is his only appearance in the main Final Fantasy series.

Shoat and Carbuncle have both previously appeared as a summon in Final Fantasy V and while both are potentially missable in that game, it’s at least possible to find Carbuncle along the way as part of the main story quest if one explores well enough. Shoat is an optional encounter that really is quite hard to find unless you already know about it or can stumble upon it by accident.

Phantom is a brand new Esper to the series, but this is the first and last time it would appear outside of nostalgic callbacks in mobile titles.

What’s most interesting about Bismarck is that it appears in lieu of the water summon Leviathan. This is the first time a major summon would be temporarily swapped out for a different one, and it’s unclear why Leviathan was treated this way, nor why they brought it back in the next game and tried to forget everything about Bismarck. It’s not like it would’ve been any more realistic to have a giant floating whale hovering around instead of a sea serpent. The Big Whale from Final Fantasy IV wasn’t even named Bismarck.

This batch of Magicite offers players a greater sense of strategy when it comes to learning spells. Unicorn teaches Cure 2 four times faster than Kirin, so it would seem like a player should swap out Kirin as soon as everything else has been learned. Maduin teaches the tier two elemental spells slower than Ifrit or Shiva (but faster than Ramuh), but also grants additional magic power upon leveling up. Bismarck is great for both strength training and teaching characters how to resurrect fallen allies, making for the interesting notion that the physically strongest character might also become a party medic.

Plus, thinking of the strong man being the one to raise their allies is a pretty good pun. It certainly offers them a good counter to the phrase, “Bro, do you even lift?”

Cid confesses that he raised Celes since she was small, but that because of him, she’s done some pretty awful things in her past, and he cites this as the reason for his change of heart. That said, we never really got a sense that Cid was fully on the side of the Empire. The first time we meet him is when we’re changing his mind about his bosses. Maybe that’s for the best, though. It’s harder to trust someone if we see them on the side of evil for any length of time before they cross over to our side.

Cid hears Kefka’s laughter nearby and panics. He shoves the party into a minecart and it’s time for another roller coaster ride through a dungeon.

At first, I had a suspicion that Kefka would sew fear in the citizens of the Empire by recording his laugh and having it play randomly throughout Vector and all of their occupied towns, so that no one would know for sure if he was nearby to punish wrongthink or not. However, thinking about it more critically… Kefka doesn’t seem very capable of that kind of forward thinking. He just does what he wants, and if you hear his maniacal laughter nearby, then he’s likely actually right there and you have every reason to fear him. Whether you’re following orders or not, if he doesn’t get the results he wants, he throws a fit and you never know if he’s going to take it out on you or not. It’s been established already that he has no respect for human life, both his enemies and his allies. He torched the castle of an ally and poisoned the castle of an enemy who happened to have many of his soldiers captured as prisoners of war. He doesn’t care one whit, he just wants what he thinks is his.

With Celes out of the party, the encounters are tuned for a party of three, although honestly, even a party of two would be able to dispatch everything quite easily.

It’s after this sequence that Setzer joins the party in battle for the first time. Setzer’s gimmick is that he is a gambler, so everything he does has an element of chance to it. Players are expected to play the slots to determine what he does in battle, or they can just have him perform a normal attack. It’s very possible, and likelier than you’d think, to achieve an automatic game over by using Setzer’s slots, a lot more likely than automatically killing the enemies. There are players who claim that certain party members that join later in the game are the worst, but depending on RNG to decide if the player is going to be able to continue or not is a lot worse than, say, having Berserk status on at all times. Berserk at least has positive functions to it that outweigh the negatives. Losing at Slot is like being occasionally pushed down by a bully and having your lunch money stolen, then getting sent to the principal’s office because you were the one caught “fighting”.

The party goes to check on Terra and a piece of Magicite reacts to her. By sheer coincidence, the Esper Maduin is her father, and his essence heals her mind and brings her back.

This is when the player finally has access to Terra’s full kit. She has the ability to turn into her Esper self and increase the potency of her magic for a short period of time. The longer she waits to use it, the longer she’s able to use it in battle, suggesting that she should save it for boss battles.

Maduin’s story is a tragic one. He found that a human somehow made it through to the Esper World and rather than kicking her out, something which likely served them well for almost a thousand years, he instead nursed her back to health, fell in love with her, and they had a child together.

Two years later, more humans breached the barrier between the human and Esper worlds and started abducting Espers. It turns out that the Gestahl Empire has been researching magical legends and investigating their truth, sort of like the real world Nazi party during World War II. There might not have been an intended parallel, especially since the empire is named after the emperor himself in the ports and remakes, and none of the stories the Nazi party investigated turned out to be true. Imagine if the Nazis had been named the Hitler Empire, that might have been a bit too Cult of Personality-ish, even for him.

That’s not to say that empires never name themselves after their founder. Adolf Hitler might not have thought that far ahead, or else maybe he would’ve. It was probably best for the world that he didn’t, because one of the most famous empires that were named after its founder, the Ottoman Empire, lasted for more than 600 years, and another famously long lived empire, the Holy Roman, takes its name from a myth about twin brothers raised by a very patient wolf. She had to be, because wolf pups grow up quickly but human children do not. Wolf pups are weaned off of their mother’s milk after less than two months, but La Lupa Capitolina would’ve had to provide milk for Romulus and Remus for several years before they were ready for something more solid and substantial. If she did exist and did raise two human children, she would’ve had to have been the most patient and self-sacrificing wolf in history, using up several years of her life when she could’ve been raising wolf pups and instead taking on the monumental task of looking after twin humans.

That said, the legends don’t actually say she didn’t also raise wolf pups alongside them, but there were never any stories about Romulus or Remus claiming to have wolves as brothers and sisters, like Mowgli does in The Jungle Book. The famous statue depicting a wolf providing milk to the twins does not depict any siblings, canid or otherwise.

If the Gestahl Empire has those kinds of legends surrounding it, they’re not explored in Final Fantasy VI, nor does the game reveal any of the propaganda the Empire uses to help fight its war in the press. To be fair, this does give the player a bit of a one-sided view of events, but then again, the Empire’s crimes are easy to observe, they don’t do anything to hide them. From the usage of technology designed to steal a person’s agency from them to the poisoning of an entire kingdom, there’s no low that the Empire won’t stoop to. They even force their way into a peaceful kingdom, intending to harvest the people of this kingdom for their magical energy.

In the chaos of the situation, an emotional Madonna got swept out of the Esper’s realm along with Maduin and their child, and in desperation as she laid dying, she begged the nearest human to take care of Terra for her.

And Emperor Gestahl agreed.

In the present, Terra has been healed, physically and mentally, by her father’s Magicite and is coming to terms with her existence. As the child of a mixed race, she has the physical appearance of a human and the powers of an Esper, and can even transform herself into an Esper for a short period of time. As long as she doesn’t think of herself as a monster, she should hopefully be able to weather most storms that come her way.

With Terra back in the party, she of course needs to be re-equipped. This includes choosing her first Magicite. It’s interesting that, at this point in the game, she already has spells like Fire and Drain, as well as Life. This might make Ifrit seem like the logical first choice in order to get a fast Fire 2, but Ifrit comes with a Strength bonus, and players might want Terra to be a bit more of a mage, despite that she can be equipped with swords.

In fact, equipment doesn’t seem to be restricted to any particular character in the game. Many characters, both male and female, can use swords and armour, meaning that players are free to decide who gets to wear what and who they want to prioritize for the strongest gear. If someone wants to make Terra focus on her swordsmanship, then Bismarck seems to be a good bet, given its Strength+2 attribute.

The game seems set up to discourage such an idea, though. Not only does Terra already have Life, which would have required 50 Magic Points to master, Bismarck also teaches Fire, Ice and Bolt, all of which require only five Magic Points and one of which Terra also already has. It wouldn’t make sense to equip Bismarck for at most only five battles, especially since she would still need to equip Shiva for Rasp and Osmose, and she would still need to equip Ramuh for Poison. It would be more efficient to just not bother with Bismarck at all, unless she desperately needs to be able to cast Bolt within the next couple battles for some reason.

Ifrit is also discouraged as an idea. At first, it looks appealing because of the aforementioned Fire 2, which is available for a mere 20 Magic Points, but again, that Strength+1 attribute might be a deal breaker. Instead, it’s slower, but Terra might actually be better off equipping her father’s Magicite. It seems tailor made just for her. It has all three tier two magic spells, Fire 2, Ice 2 and Bolt 2, and it teaches Bolt 2 faster than Ramuh does. It also offers to increase the magic power of whoever equips it by 1 point per level up, for those players who want to focus on a magical Terra build. Last but certainly not least, Maduin also uses a non-elemental magic attack in battle when summoned. It feels like the obvious choice to give Terra the Maduin Magicite, at least as her first.

Terra also automatically learns Fire 2 at level 22, meaning that even if she did want to equip the Ifrit Magicite, it would still be more efficient to equip literally anything else unless she desperately needs to be able to cast Fire 2 at level 20 for some reason.

The party returns to Narshe to check up on things and this time they’re welcomed as allies. It probably helps that Celes isn’t with them, but given how much she’s sacrificed to help the Returners and the stubbornly neutral city of Narshe, the citizens there should be more than grateful. At least Narshe is no longer staying neutral. It’s amazing how quickly minds can be changed when a neutral city gets attacked by a warmongering nation. To continue the World War II analogies, Narshe is like the United States in that regard, since a direct attack on the United States pushed them to fully commit to fighting the Axis powers instead of merely sending supplies to the Allied powers. It’s not a perfect analogy, since Narshe isn’t even willing to be seen as showing support to the Returners in order to avoid falling under the Empire’s scrutiny. But it doesn’t matter that Narshe refuses to get involved. Having the Empire attempt to invade anyway has pushed them over the edge and they join the war effort against Gestahl.

Banon is worried that they don’t have enough manpower, so they decide they need to enlist the aid of the Espers. They want to force open the Sealed Gate that the elder of the Espers sacrificed his life to erect and have Terra beg the Espers to understand, to see that there can be a bond between their two races.

However, if Narshe is the United States, then the Esper World is Switzerland. In World War II, the Germans regularly violated Swiss air space and acted like they had every right to do so, going so far as to try to attack Swiss airfields in order to stop German planes from being forced down. Switzerland didn’t tolerate this sort of behaviour from the Allies either, and were especially angry whenever the Allies would get their geography wrong and bomb a peaceful Swiss settlement instead of a German one.

The Espers have been trying incredibly hard to stay out of human affairs, since they see both sides of a war as being equally bad, and given their past experience with human conflict, they have every right to be wary. Even though players are supposed to be on the side of the Returners, especially since none of them have actually committed any wartime atrocities like the Empire has, it feels wrong that they want to involve the Espers. Banon acts like they have no choice if they want to have a chance of defeating Gestahl, but considering how much the Returners have been able to do thus far, there’s no reason to think that Terra, Locke, Edgar and everyone else wouldn’t be able to hold their own and save the world. Looking at things from the point of view of the Espers, a group of humans tried to force them into giving up their power in order to fight a war, and now another group of humans are trying to use the Espers power to fight the same war. It doesn’t matter that the Returners aren’t wanting to actually steal this power, they still want to use the power for themselves, in a way.

The party’s next destination is an imperial base on the eastern edge of the Empire. If players visit this base earlier in the game, it’s crawling with troops, but upon visiting it now, it’s completely and suspiciously empty. This makes it extremely easy to pass through and journey onward to the cave leading to the Sealed Gate.

The cave is a great place for players to learn about exploiting elemental weaknesses and being mindful of elemental strengths, since Sabin’s best weapon at this point in time is fire-based, and certain enemies in the cave are healed by fire. The same enemies that absorb fire also absorb poison, making his next best weapon also useless. However, several enemies here are weak to holy and the Kaiser is a holy weapon. Despite being a whopping 39 points weaker than the Fire Knuckle, the Kaiser cuts through everything here like butter.

It’s admittedly a lot easier to exploit a weakness in later versions of the game, since the Bestiary is a great place to look these things up. Otherwise, players would’ve had to either buy the strategy guide or get by on trial and error, since this game was released before the Internet was a great source of this sort of knowledge.

The cave seems to want players to bring Cyan and Setzer with them, as there’s a weapon for Cyan and a Relic for Setzer sitting in treasure chests. It shouldn’t matter who comes along, though, since everyone can be a valuable party member at this point. The game doesn’t stop providing equipment for certain party members when others join, like how Final Fantasy III treated its early game jobs. This is probably why there’s so much overlap when it comes to weapons. Sure, there are characters who exclusively wield specific weapons like Sabin’s claws, but it almost feels as if the game is a mix of two design philosophies.

Sabin falls under the first design philosophy. He has only one weapon type he can equip, and they’re a weapon unique to him. He was specifically designed to only wield that weapon. Characters like Terra, Edgar and Celes, however, fall under the second design philosophy. Although they have unique skills, they share weapon types with each other and with many other characters in the game. If a claw is discovered in a treasure chest, it would seem to indicate that Sabin is supposed to be in the party at that point, and if he’s not, he’s still being specifically supported by the game in order to help him catch up to other characters. If a sword is discovered in a treasure chest, it could go to any number of characters as a direct upgrade in order to shore up one of the weaker sword-wielders.

As soon as the party finds the Sealed Gate, but before Terra can work her charm, Kefka shows up. It turns out that the Empire has been following the group, meaning that the suspicious lack of resistance in the imperial base they passed through is nothing more than a trap.

Terra is successful in opening the gate, however briefly, and several strong Espers emerge and attack everyone in sight. The Espers, like the Swiss during World War II, are tired of being in the middle of wars and don’t differentiate between Kefka and the Returners. As soon as the Espers fly out, the gate shuts once more and this time, a rock slide buries the gate even further. Every time humans try to disturb the Espers and use them for their own ends, the Espers respond by sealing themselves away even more. At this rate, any further human incursions into the Esper World would probably result in the Esper World disappearing into another dimension entirely. What more do the Espers have to do to get through to humans that they don’t want to be disturbed and don’t want to help humans fight?

The Espers fly off towards the Empire’s capital, and so the Returners head to Vector as well with no real goal in mind. The Espers attack the airship and it crashes down near the town of Maranda. With the airship out of commission for the moment, the party has no better ideas, so they decide to go to Vector again, this time on foot.

Or rather, that’s what the player is expected to do. It doesn’t seem very intuitive, and perhaps the game intends for players to explore the continent again, but the end goal is for them to arrive back in Vector somehow. Rather than just making the next plot point happen, the developers decided that players needed to walk across the southern continent first, gaining more experience and money. Considering how much optional content there is to do that’s coming up later on in the game, they didn’t really need to make the Returners walk from Maranda to Vector here.

Arriving in Vector, the Returners are shocked to see it in ruins. The Espers did not leave anything to chance, they destroyed as much as they could. Even more shocking, a defeated Emperor Gestahl confesses that he’s lost his will to fight. This is actually where the World War II metaphors start to break down. For reasons that will soon become apparent, the Gestahl Empire isn’t actually experiencing what Japan did at the end of World War II, but I get ahead of myself.

One thing the player is expected to do before sitting down at the table with Emperor Gestahl for a celebratory feast that is not at all a suspicious thing to invite people who were your enemies yesterday to, is to go around and demoralize all of the rest of the empire’s troops. It’s presented as the Returners telling everyone that they don’t need to fight any more, but you’d think it would be more effective coming from the emperor himself. Imagine still wanting to fight and seeing the enemy tell you that the fighting’s over. Wouldn’t that feel like a trick to you?

It’s just as bad for the Returners, having to go around telling the enemy soldiers the fighting’s over. What’s stopping any of them from getting in one last free kill and pretending that they didn’t know they’re not at war any more? Worse, the Returners are in enemy territory, so if they tried to retaliate, they’d be blamed for reigniting hostilities, and the actions of the soldier would be hand waved as a terrible accident.

It turns out that yes, some soldiers are itching for a fight, which can and will eat up a little bit of extra time, but the party should be able to dispatch each enemy soldier in about one turn, no matter if they’re armoured or not.

In writing these retrospective articles, I’ve been debating how much I want to research outside of the game. It’s specifically because of events like this which make it hard to just wing it and write what I observe about the game and its balance. This is part one of a two part minigame which has a time limit and which expects you to find as many of the Empire’s soldiers within that time limit. There’s a hidden points system and I’ve always assumed that the reward players receive after they attend their dinner meeting with the Emperor is earned during this event only, but I learned while writing this that the player’s conduct during dinner also contributes to the final score. I would not blame anyone wanting a perfect score to just look up a guide, because anyone who is honest to their own feelings and chooses what dialogue options they think is right will likely not score the most or even know that there are ways to accidentally decrease the score, too.

In my game, I was only able to talk to 16 people because I didn’t study the most efficient means to talk to every soldier, and I had some of my time wasted by accidentally visiting Kefka in his jail cell. There are definitely ways in which this portion of the game is rigged to waste the player’s time and prevent them from scoring as much as they possibly can, but I never got the impression that it was particularly malicious. As far as I can tell, for those playing the Pixel Remaster, mastering this event is probably not necessary to Platinum the game on PlayStation 4.

During their dinner with Emperor Gestahl, he claims that he’s come to his senses and wants peace, due to the overwhelming power of the Espers. They’ve headed towards Crescent Island, and the Emperor begs for a favour. Even though it sounds exactly like a trap, the Returners are invited aboard the Emperor’s airship to travel to Crescent Island and try to calm the Espers down. In any other Final Fantasy game, it probably would be a trap, but this time he appears to be sincere. He even invites General Leo along to accompany the Returners. As seen earlier in the game, General Leo has a reputation for fairness and justice, even towards the Empire’s enemies. The poisoning of Doma would never have happened if he hadn’t been called away.

Despite that Emperor Gestahl seems desperate for peace, something about this rubs Locke the wrong way, so he accompanies Terra while the rest of the party stays behind. Terra is going because she’s the only one who can bridge the gap between humans and Espers, and this leaves two slots in the party empty.

The game tricks players into thinking those two slots are going to be filled by a couple long lost party members that Leo hired in town. He introduces us to Shadow, not realizing that we’ve met already… and also General Celes. It was probably pretty obvious that the two would return to the party at some point, considering players can still buy equipment for them and they still appear on the shopping screen.

Sadly, Celes seems very reluctant to talk to Locke. Whatever happened to trust falls? I’m sure Locke would catch you in an instant.

Anyway, upon arriving near Albrook, General Leo announces that he plans on dividing into two smaller groups, and he’s going to take Celes with him. The party only inherits Shadow, but it’s enough to know that Celes is alive. Locke doesn’t stick around to talk to Celes and it’s clear that there are suddenly trust issues between them.

The party arrives in Thamasa, where the inn charges 1500 gil to stay overnight. Apparently, he doesn’t trust anyone he hasn’t met before, but charging the moon to stay there will just make no one want to stay there, especially if they’re tourists from out of town. Then again, all it takes is one desperate rich person and the inn can stay in business for another couple weeks or so.

As the party wanders around town, they find that the citizens might know more than they let on about magic. A kid practices fire spells out of sight of everyone, but runs away when he’s spotted. A mother is about to cast a cure spell on her child but then stops herself and wanders off while displaying some of the worst acting anyone’s ever seen as she pretends she wasn’t about to use magic. Even Locke wasn’t that bad when he found himself suddenly on stage earlier.

All the while, everyone they ask about Espers seems to be unfamiliar with the word at all. Even Strago, a man who comes with a naming screen and everything, claims that he has no knowledge of them. His granddaughter, Relm, also comes with a naming screen and brings with her one of the loveliest character theme songs in the entire game. Even Interceptor, Shadow’s dog, is taken with her, and he hates everyone.

Now that the party has met Strago (and Relm), the innkeeper has decided they’re alright and charges one gil for a stay. There’s no way they can stay in business by charging so little, and there’s no way they can attract business by overcharging either. Thamasa must be so isolated that they’ve figured out ways to get by without money, especially if the innkeeper doesn’t know how to price his rooms properly.

A room for a single gil is too good an opportunity to pass up, even if the party only needs to have their MP topped up. That night, though, a desperate Strago shows up and wakes the party (except Shadow, because bed gravity can be hard to overcome). Relm’s in danger, having become trapped in a burning building and Strago knows he needs all the help he can get. Despite the mayor having forbidden magic, Strago is desperately trying to cast a flame retardant spell on the house. The rules mean nothing when his granddaughter’s life is at stake. When the rest of the town joins in and it proves less than effective, he steels his resolve and charges in.

It turns out that Strago is a magician of sorts. Blue Magic makes its return from Final Fantasy V, this time being the specialty of a single character instead of a job that anyone can do. Unlike its previous incarnation, Strago only has to see the spell to learn it, but just like before, there are many Blue Magic spells in the game. Here, Blue Magic is called Lore and covers elements that Black Magic does not. Whereas Black Magic is divided into the typical fire, ice and lightning magic the series is known for, a spell like Aqua Rake does water and wind damage.

The one weakness to Blue Magic, of course, is that in order to make the most of it, either Strago has to be in the party at all times just in case they come across another Blue Magic spell, or the player needs to look up a guide ahead of time to find out where all the Blue Magic is, so that players can swap him in and out efficiently.

Within the burning building, the party can encounter fire-elemental enemies, but ice and water both deal massive damage, so this is a rather easy sequence of events. It’s likely meant to be a tutorial level for the player to get used to Strago’s style of magic, so the enemies are rather easy to deal with here. The FlameEater boss, however, can hit surprisingly hard and players who hesitate will find themselves getting killed rather easily. The boss summons Bomblets and the Bomblets will explode after a couple turns. After a few turns, the boss will cast Reflect and Safe on himself, basically decreasing physical damage and preventing all conventional magic damage, but Aqua Rake isn’t affected by Reflect. Eventually, a Grenade is summoned, which has a lot more HP than a Bomblet. All the while, FlameEater is constantly using Fire and Fire 2 spells.

Even though the party manages to defeat the FlameEater, they collapse and Shadow comes in to save the day, teleporting everyone out with a Smoke Bomb, because apparently those are actually teleport items and not just a distraction to keep people from seeing the ninja running away.

It’s pretty interesting to me that the burning house isn’t a timed mission, but other situations are. I guess houses can burn forever in the Final Fantasy universe, and young girls don’t die of smoke inhalation no matter how long it takes to find them.

With the immediate crisis over, another one potentially takes its place. There was, after all, a reason the village has been hiding their magic, they would rather outsiders not exploit it for their own needs (doesn’t that sound familiar?). The cat is out of the bag, though, and it turns out that Thamasa is a village full of what Strago calls Mage Warriors. Mage Warriors are the humans who used Magicite to gain magical powers during the War of the Magi. As far as I can tell, though, Strago must have gained his powers from a very rare kind of Magicite, since Blue Magic works so much differently than the magic Terra and the rest of the Returners have been learning. Other villagers have Cure and Fire, but Strago’s magic can’t be taught to him by magic rocks.

It turns out that most of the Mage Warriors were hunted down by non-magical humans and killed, and the few that remained founded an isolated village and hid from the rest of the world. Making open displays of magic forbidden was pretty much the only way they were able to survive the thousand years since the war.

Strago is level 24 when he joins the group to help search for the runaway Espers, and they travel into the mountains, where it’s said the Espers were first created. Shadow takes off again, seemingly only having come along to Thamasa so that players would have three party members in battle until Strago joined, and to subtly hint at some of his backstory upon arrival.

Venturing through the mountains, players might notice Relm sneaking along behind them, trying to stay out of sight. She was never going to stay behind, of course, and since she’s a nameable character, players would probably be expecting that she’d be playable at some point.

The party soon happens upon a set of statues, three of them, said to be the source of all magic, and it’s here that our favourite octopus attempts to cause the party some more mischief.

Ultros is easier than FlameEater, especially if players remember his elemental weaknesses. Soon enough, the battle music changes to Relm’s adorable music and she drops in, but apparently to do some sketching rather than to fight. Ultros doesn’t fall for her cutesy act and rejects her offer of a free sketch, but the rest of the party shames him for it and he eventually gives in.

He should’ve trusted his instincts because Relm’s magic is unique. She’s what would later become known as a Pictomancer, a mage with the ability to bring their pictures to life to attack their enemies. This is basically her unique gimmick, along with the paintbrush she uses as a weapon. She joins at level 23, suggesting that she’s already at a similar power level as her grandfather. Unfortunately, in the original SNES version of the game, her power has one very dire consequence.

If there’s a universal truth about the Final Fantasy series, it’s that the developers made sure to iron out as many of the obvious glitches as they could before releasing each game. If you bought a Final Fantasy game, you could be reasonably certain that they work well enough that you can make it from the starting screen to the end credits without seeing any glitches.

But that’s the thing. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. One of the things a lot of reviewers or video essayists love to bring up when talking about the very first game in the series is that in the original version on the NES, half of the spells don’t work. This isn’t so big a problem that players can’t make it through the game, and unless someone were to tell you the spells are useless, you likely would have next to no way of knowing.

That’s true of most games in the series, actually. There are glitches and players will likely have interacted with some of them and not realized at the time that they found a glitch. They might not have even noticed anything was wrong. In Final Fantasy VI, for example, Evade doesn’t work, as was already mentioned in part one of this article. What wasn’t mentioned is that Magic Evade works too well, pretty much pulling double duty as the regular Evade stat as well. If players want to dodge most attacks, they should therefore equip as many pieces of gear with Magic Evade as possible. This is the kind of glitch I’m talking about. It impacts the player directly, but there’s not a lot they can do in game to notice it’s happening and players won’t have any trouble making it to the final boss whether they interact with this glitch or not. It’s something that most players only find out when reading about it online.

Relm, however, has the potential to cause errors in the game’s memory to manifest if she uses Sketch in specific situations, and numerous effects can occur, including scrambling the player’s inventory to the point where it’s a mess of random equipment. As such, she’s a character that needs to be approached with a bit of caution, but fortunately the glitch doesn’t show up in later versions of the game. Players should be able to use her as intended on the Game Boy Advance and in the Pixel Remaster.

Upon catching up to the Espers in the mountains, the party finds them penitent. It seems they’ve come to their senses and they realized that the city they destroyed had a lot of innocent people living in it. It’s one of the worst aspects of war, honestly. A country goes to war on another country, but it’s the ordinary citizens who usually suffer the most, especially if one or both sides have no problems committing war crimes. Kefka, earlier in the game, pretty much slaughtered the entirety of Doma and didn’t care one bit about the innocent people living within the castle.

This scene perfectly illustrates the differences between Kefka and the Espers. Kefka may have had no problem committing war crimes, but the Espers never wanted to make innocent people suffer. Emperor Gestahl seems to be on the same page, if the peace conference is anything to go by, so the Espers meet up with General Leo in Thamasa.

This, however, is a trap. Kefka shows up with soldiers in Magiteck Armor and starts opening fire, not caring if he hits Returners, Espers, or General Leo’s men. It is here that he gives away the game: he’s acting on the Emperor’s orders. Peace was a sham, a trick to get the Espers to willingly come to the slaughter like sheep. Kefka is powerful enough by now that he can kill an Esper in one shot and reduce them to Magicite.

As if to further illustrate just how evil Kefka is, he orders Thamasa burned to the ground for no reason other than because the village isn’t aesthetically pleasing to him.

In the years since the release of this game, rumours have persisted of ways in which General Leo could be made a playable character in the game, or ways in which he could defy his fate, and it’s all because of this one sequence where the player takes control of him in order to confront Kefka. He’s level 28 when the player assumes control of him, but since he doesn’t come with a naming screen, it’s clear he’s not intended to be a playable character. So the question becomes, why do players get to play as Leo for this scene?

Possibly it’s due to the developers wanting to show the depravity of Kefka and the Empire. The soldiers accompanying Kefka have orders to open fire on General Leo and are specifically shielded from his attacks, taking zero damage from him, meaning this trap was likely in the planning stages for a while. Kefka and Emperor Gestahl knew that Leo wouldn’t be on board with the kind of war they wanted to run and made preparations just in case they needed to eliminate him.

What’s interesting here is that Leo comes with what looks like a lightning-based Shock attack and he hits the enemy four times if he uses his physical attack, but we sadly don’t get to make much use of either skill. They would’ve been very powerful to use in battle, as evidenced by how much damage he does to Kefka, because unlike the Magiteck troops, Kefka does take damage from Leo’s attacks.

What’s interesting is that the battle music here is the normal music, not a boss theme. Apparently to someone as powerful as Leo, Kefka is nothing more than a random encounter. And yet Kefka has tricks up his sleeve. Knowing how loyal Leo is, Kefka shows Leo an illusion of Emperor Gestahl and distracts him enough to demoralize him. To further demoralize the general, Kefka reveals that it was his shadow that Leo was fighting before finally murdering him.

This is when the rest of the Espers hiding away in the Esper World attempt to do something about Kefka, but it is far too late and this proves to be a costly mistake. The tragedy is that it’s not a bad thought to try to avoid a war at all costs, but when the entire world is at stake, it’s incredibly risky to refuse to choose a side. The Espers had good reasons to not want to become tools used for war, but the end result of this decision turned out to be their extermination.

With all of his plans falling nicely into place, Kefka’s having the time of his life, laughing in the faces of the oncoming Espers because he’s absorbed enough power that they no longer pose any sort of threat to him. He’s able to neutralize their powers, but the waves of energy he uses also completely destroys his Magiteck troops. Note that these are troops who were developed specifically to completely resist Leo’s powers, but Kefka’s are far too powerful to resist. Kefka is such a monster at this point that he’s willing to kill even troops loyal to him in order to get what he wants.

The scene ends as Kefka reduces the attacking force to Magicite and withdraws. Oddly enough, Thamasa still stands, having not been burned to the ground. The Flames Be Gone spell from earlier must’ve worked too well, because it also acted as fire retardant against any new fires.

General Leo is buried with honours in Thamasa and the Returners mourn him, the only truly honourable man left in the Gestahl Empire. (Other than Cid and Celes, of course.) With him gone, there’s nothing stopping Kefka and Gestahl from getting what they want and taking over the entire world.

Except, of course, the Returners. With most of the world explored and a large playable cast already recruited, it seems the end game is about to begin. However, if players look at the clock at this point, they’ll see the game’s barely fourteen to fifteen hours in, and thirty hours has been the norm in prior Final Fantasy games. Either the final dungeon is going to be stupidly long or there are a few surprises in store for players.

With the Sealed Gate open due to the Espers’ last desperate attack, Kefka and Gestahl enter the Espers’ World. As the planet groans in pain, a mass of land wrenches itself out of the ground and floats up into the sky. As set pieces go, it definitely has that final dungeon aesthetic, where players must desperately fight their way through in order to stop Gestahl and Kefka once and for all.

There’s no time left to prepare. Gestahl and Kefka stand before the three statues that are the source of all magic. Three beings of pure power that neutralized each other and sealed themselves away, and if they’re taken out of alignment at all, the imbalance would devastate the world.

One thing I wish the game would do here is warn players before they form a party of four that only three characters are allowed on the Floating Continent for… reasons. (Read: they’re going to have a fourth party member railroaded in.) After forcing players to leave one carefully curated character behind, players are unable to back out of a scripted sequence where the Empire’s air forces try to stop them, which would’ve been nice because then the player being left behind could’ve had their Esper removed, their relics unequipped and possibly their weapons and armour swapped out as well, to make them available to the mystery party member they’re about to receive.

One good thing about this battle sequence is that if players bring Locke along, he can steal Tinctures from the enemies, and occasionally also Elixir. This will help keep the party’s MP topped up, and the battles keep coming, so if players feel the need to grind, they can.

During this aerial assault, Ultros appears for no real reason other than to once again make trouble for the party. Honestly, who knows what Ultros is ever thinking? He does what he wants.

Ultros loses easily because his weaknesses don’t change, but since the last time the party saw him, he’s made a friend named Chupon. “Chupon”, by the way, is a complete butchering of his name, and later translations give his name to be Tyhpon.

When Chupon takes enough damage, he uses Sneeze on the party to eject them from the fight, and as they fall from the airship, the party finds themselves fighting another aerial gun from the Gestahl Empire known as the Air Force. The biggest thing to worry about here is that the boss will launch a Speck that absorbs all magic cast while it’s active, including curative magic aimed at the party. It’s basically an enemy that uses Celes’s Runic power on the party. If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense that something built by the Gestahl Empire would have this power, it probably got it from the same source that Celes was given hers.

The Speck also has very high defense and will count down to a powerful Wave Cannon attack that does a lot of damage. The party then has a limited amount of time to cast healing magic before another Speck will be launched. The best they can do at this point is deal physical damage to the Air Force in the hopes of killing it, but players have to be careful because the cursor will always default to the Speck whenever it’s active.

Once the Air Force is defeated, the party will find itself on the Floating Continent and will find Shadow there. Shadow, who had earlier been presumed dead when they found Interceptor alone and injured, had been disposed of by the Empire once they no longer had any use for him, but he’s a survivor. At this rate, it feels like nothing will permanently kill him off. He joins up as the fourth party member as they make their way towards Kefka and Gestahl at the centre of the continent.

One of the most annoying enemies on the Floating Continent is the Behemoth, which counters anything used against it with a powerful Take Down attack that does several hundred points of damage, often more than half of a character’s health.

Eventually, the party finds the Atma Weapon, a powerful boss seemingly standing guard, keeping any and all adventurers from interfering with Gestahl and Kefka’s plans. Of course, they’re just standing there, laughing and rubbing their hands with glee until the party catches up to them, so take as much time as you need. If you feel the need to level grind, Gestahl’s going to wait. Kefka doesn’t look like a waiter, of course, but Gestahl has always seemed like a patient man.

Atma Weapon has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, including poisoning everyone by casting Bio on the party and occasionally using the Flare spell, but heavy damage should defeat it. Once it’s gone, there’s nothing standing in the way of the party confronting Gestahl and Kefka and preventing the end of the world.

Shadow, once again, leaves the party (you’re going to have to stop doing this, Shadow), leaving the rest of the group to face Kefka and Gestahl as a party of three. When the party confronts the villains, they witness Gestahl starting to receive the power of the Statues. You can be forgiven if you’re shouting at the Returners, “Do something! Do anything! Stop this! If you don’t act now, the bad guys will win and the world will end! Do you want that? No! You don’t want to be the characters that let the world end! Fight them! Defeat them! Just do something, anything to keep this from happening! You’re as useless as 70% of all players who queue into Frontline in Final Fantasy XIV!”

Celes confronts Gestahl and attempts to get him to see reason, but Gestahl counters with an offer to rule the world together with himself and Kefka. All she needs to do is kill her allies. Kill… Locke.

Admittedly, most players will have their own preferred party that they’d take onto the Floating Continent, and even Celes is optional, although Shadow leaving the group is meant to make room for her if players didn’t take her along. If they did, they’re stuck with a group of three characters to face Kefka and Gestahl. Having Locke along makes this scene all the more impactful because this becomes the definitive point where Celes must choose between her old allegiance and her growing relationship with the roguish treasure hunter.

Perhaps it was the memory of her trust fall with Locke beneath South Figaro that drove her to this, but when Celes receives a sword from her former allies to use on her new friends, she turns and drives it deep into Kefka, although it’s not enough to actually kill him. She should’ve gone for the head.

An angry Kefka attempts to force the Statues to give him their power, but even Gestahl starts to think Kefka’s going too far. Gestahl attempts to stop Kefka but none of his spells land. Kefka, meanwhile, just stands there and laughs at Gestahl’s attempts, for he’s standing close enough to the Statues that they’re shielding him from the Emperor’s magic.

Kefka then commands the Statues to strike Gestahl down and although it takes a few attempts to accurately command their power, Gestahl is finally struck down with a bolt of powerful lightning. He tries to plead some sense into Kefka, right to the very end, but is too weak to keep himself from being thrown off the edge of the Continent. This is the end for him, and he falls to his death.

With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, the party confronts Kefka for the final time, and the battle to determine the fate of the world begins.

Nah, I’m kidding. With Celes’s friends paralyzed by Gestahl and Kefka, and Celes unwilling to do anything but reason with Kefka, he easily subdues her and starts to move the statues around. This has the potential to upset their balance, but suddenly Shadow returns and tries to trap Kefka with the Statues. He tells the rest of the Returners to run, for the world still needs them. The Statues have begun their chain reaction and the Floating Continent is soon going to be destroyed. Shadow promises he’ll see them again and thus begins a desperate six minute race against the clock to escape the continent as it falls apart all around them.

During this sequence, enemy encounters don’t have anything to steal and are highly susceptible to fire spells, so the party can quickly deal with them as they attempt to escape.

Given the short time frame for escaping, the fact that there’s a boss battle during this sequence may make your stomach clench with dread, but the boss is actually fairly weak to physical attacks and goes down even faster than the random encounters. Once the party beats it and reaches the farthest point of the continent, they can jump onto their airship and escape. There really isn’t any obvious reason to linger, and it’s easy to see why players would choose to jump off, due to both the timer constantly ticking down and the continent already breaking up behind them. It would take about four and a half to five minutes to actually make it to the point where players can leave, but players who choose to wait will soon be rewarded with the clock disappearing as Shadow approaches. Players certainly can jump off early and leave, but if they do that, they’re actually killing Shadow off for real. There would be no way to get him back, and nothing in the game even suggests this to be the case. It’s assumed that players might be curious about the significance of choosing to wait, but that’s the only reason anyone would have to remain on the continent. Shadow himself had told everyone to leave, and promised that they’d see him again. He didn’t say “Hey, hold up a moment before you go, give me time to catch up.” Instead, the game has pretty much told players, “It’s okay to jump off now, you’ll see Shadow again later,” but it’s all a lie.

Whether they have Shadow or not, the party can only watch helplessly as the Statues’ power starts to reshape the world below, breaking continents apart, causing new mountains to appear, violently wrenching the land to and fro, crushing those unlucky to find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Setzer’s airship is sliced in half, scattering the party to the winds.

The world burns. And burns. And burns.

 

The day the Returners failed to stop Kefka from destroying the world was the day the colour blue became nothing more than a memory. The seas were so red, it was like they were tainted with the blood of the planet itself, having been dealt so grievous a wound that it might never heal. Supposedly the last fire had gone out long ago, but the skies glowed as if the very heavens had been set ablaze by stray embers from the earth. It was a more comforting thought than the notion that the ash and smoke in the air was just the world’s new normal state and not in fact the burned up remnants of the sky itself.

Then again, it wasn’t exactly comforting to think that the sky was slowly being swallowed up by fire.

On a solitary island in the middle of the vast, poisoned ocean, there weren’t a lot of comforting thoughts to be had. Not any more. Comfort was a luxury none could afford, these days. In a house that was in dire need of repair, Celes awoke to find that a year had passed since the Floating Continent was brought down. Any relief that she felt from seeing the familiar face of her father figure in the Gestahl Empire would be short lived, though, for Cid was quick to inform her that he didn’t know of any survivors but themselves. It was entirely possible they were the last two people left, and Celes could see the despair on his tired face. He told her of the people who he’d shared the island with, but one by one, they had all died.

He’d kept himself going by trying to take care of her, and he was very, very tired. Now that she was awake, he could rest. He could rest and recover his strength. That’s what he told her, anyway, that he just needed to rest.

Locke… he couldn’t possibly be dead, could he? She pondered this question over and over as she ventured out to the island’s shore to try to catch a fish for Cid to eat. Locke said he was going to be there to catch her whenever she was falling, and she certainly felt like she was falling, tumbling down a dark hole into a world that looked nothing like the one she remembered.

The sound of waves on the shore broke through her thoughts and as she looked up, she was startled to see just how different the seas looked. To her, the water looked angry, ready to claim vengeance on the people who had polluted it beyond any hope of recovery. Could she trust that the fish she was going to catch would help Cid recover his strength?

There weren’t a lot of options for food, either. The soil was long dead, baked and dry. Despite being surrounded by ocean, it didn’t appear that it had received any moisture for months. She couldn’t even find any attempts at a garden, although Cid assured her that one had been started. Perhaps it had been destroyed in a fit of rage or despair, the last act of a desperate man before his death.

Whatever had been in the house when the world ended was likely already eaten, long ago. The last truly good food, gone. She and Cid would have to make do with whatever was left, whatever they could find.

It took some doing since she was a general, not some skilled fisherman, but she managed to finally catch a fish. She was surprised to find that, despite being in a coma for a year, she wasn’t all that hungry. Or at least, she was willing to let Cid have the first fish. It was the least he deserved for keeping her safe.

“Granddad, where are you? I have dinner!” It wasn’t a long walk back to the house, and she called out to Cid when she arrived. She didn’t know why she started calling him Granddad, she’d certainly not used the term of endearment before, even when he raised her, but it helped her to feel better, helped her to feel like she had family in the world, a life that she was living, maybe on a farm or a remote village. There would be a town nearby she could go once a week for supplies and to meet other people, maybe see how Locke was doing. It would be a nice peaceful life, with no need to be a general or a soldier or to fight in a war…

“In here,” he called out. Following his voice, she found him in the very same bed she’d woken up in.

“Granddad, here’s a fish!” Had she remembered to cook it? Or did it matter any more? The world felt like an oven, the fish could just as easily have cooked on the way home. …right?

Over the course of several days, she dutifully caught fish for Cid and fed them to him. He was always a bit slow to eat, but he ate each and every one of them. Cid seemed to be getting better, too. He just… needed to get more sleep than normal because of how long he spent taking care of her. That’s all. And his ragged cough was just because of the ash in the air. Surely it would eventually dissipate when the ash stopped falling.

If the ash stopped falling.

A few nights after she’d woken up from her coma, Celes began hearing an eerie keening, almost a wailing as if from a banshee. Right when she was about to sleep, she heard it cry out again. What fresh hell was this, that this ruined earth was serving up for her? Was this it? Was the spectre of death coming for herself and for Cid, the only two humans who had thus far eluded it?

She must’ve fallen asleep at some point during the night because she awoke with a start to the sound of silence and realized she had to get a fish for Cid! She glanced at the clock on the wall, but it had been broken either during or before her coma. The sky didn’t give her much indication of the time either, it was almost impossible to tell where the sun was through its red haze. It could’ve been morning, or it could’ve been evening and she was woefully late feeding her Granddad.

She didn’t seem to have much trouble catching fish any more, this one seeming even easier than the ones she’d caught before. She was clearly getting better at fishing, so maybe this meant taking care of Cid and nursing him back to health would be a breeze.

Cid didn’t answer when she arrived home, but she knew where he would be. As she approached him with her fish, she told him in a cheerful manner, “I have a fish for you, Granddad! This one might be the tastiest one yet! Eat up, and you’ll get better!”

There was no response.

“…Granddad? Cid?!” She dropped the fish and gently shook him, but he lay still in bed, unmoving and breathless, his mouth open and eyes scrunched shut.

Perhaps for the first time since she woke up, she took a good look at him and felt her heart leap into her throat. “Granddad!” He was actually much skinnier than she had first noticed, she could practically see the bones on his arms, and his face was gaunt. He felt significantly more fragile than she remembered him being, and felt like she might break his arm if she held it too tightly. Even his hair was ragged, thinner than it had been before. How could she have not seen? This man who had watched over her while she slept must’ve used himself up to save her.

She lived, but at the cost of his life.

Wait a minute, he’d said there were others, what did he say had happened to them? They… died of boredom and despair? Seeing the only other human left on the planet, lying dead in front of her… she felt like her heart and soul were broken in two. She was on the brink of letting despair finish her off and wondered if this was how everyone else had felt when they died. “N-no,” she cried out. “You promised you’d stay here with me!” She begged him to wake up, to tell her that he was just joking, to say something, anything to give her some indication that she somehow wasn’t the last person left on the face of the earth.

In her despair, she fled from the house and journeyed north. There was something Cid had told her about the cliff on the north side of the island. “Those others that were here. When they were feeling down, they’d take a leap of faith from the cliffs up north.” A leap of faith…

Locke. Of course. He would know what to do. Cid might have broken his promise, but Locke was better than that. Locke would keep the promise he made her. All she’d need to do is to trust him, to perform a leap of faith into his arms. A trust fall, and he would catch her, tell her it would all be alright, that the world was not beyond hope. She couldn’t possibly be the last human left as long as Locke was there to catch her.

“Please, Locke,” she whispered through her tears as she stood at the top of the cliff, arms out to her sides, her back turned away from the long fall she was about to take. She would be with Locke soon enough and things would be right once more. “Please, I desperately need you to keep your promise. I need to feel your strong arms around me and hear your voice tell me we’re all okay.” Her eyes closed and she felt herself tip backwards, and could no longer feel the ground beneath her feet.

“Locke… catch me…”

 

 

 

To be concluded…