Well, not quite, but there's another
major plot point that happens here.
As I may have mentioned back in the
first issue, we're finally headed back to Mysidia, and this time,
it's Cecil's life that's really going to change.
So here's how this starts off. As the
party, now minus Rosa, sails from Fabul to Baron, they begin
discussing what they'll do once they get to Baron. Cecil suggests
they should go see that Cid guy I may also have referred to back at
the beginning of the game because he can and will help them get an
airship. As they do, a sea monster called Leviatan attacks. Rydia
is knocked clean off the boat and Yang jumps in after her. Edward
goes down like the pussy he has a reputation for being. And none of
that matters because the ship sinks in the attack anyway.
Some time later, Cecil comes to on a
beach someplace to find that he's alone again. Once he figures that
out, he heads for the nearest town. Turns out that the nearest town
is Mysidia, and everybody's pissed at Cecil. They've got good reason
to be, of course, and use their rage to yell at our hero and hit him
with every negative status effect they can. Fortunately, we're
carrying heal potions for just such an occasion.
In the village's temple, the Elder
tells Cecil that what he did as captain of the Red Wings was
unforgivable, but he'd be willing to consider it anyway if Cecil can
survive going up Mt. Ordeals and come back as a Paladin. Cecil
accepts because he has no other choice and the Elder assigns twin
siblings Palom and Porum, black and white mages respectively, to go
with him because having magic will be a big help. He's right, of
course.
The trip to the mountain is one of
those fifty-three-mile hikes that CLG's
Apple is
always lamenting when he does LPs of this sort of game. I'm inclined
to agree in this case, mostly because this was a situation where I
had the same random encounter about 27 times along the way.
Fortunately, it was with Ravens, which Cecil could pretty much
one-shot with his sword, which has an insty-kill effect to it. This
is probably the only instance where having such a thing has ever been
more than marginally reliable and useful.
Before I start talking about my trip up
the actual mountain, I should mention the Chocobo Forests in this
game. This was the first time that US players had encountered these
now-iconic birds When the Chocobo originally showed up in Final
Fantasy 2, which was an NES game that didn't get released outside of
Japan until it was ported to the Playstation in the late 1990s or
just after Y2K, there was only one place to get them, and there was
only one yellow bird there. In this version, there are several
places to get them, several types, and several in one place. There
are, of course, the most familiar yellow ones, but here there are
also white, black, and in the game's own words, fat. As it pertains
to this particular entry, I'm at the Mt. Ordeals Choco-Forest to use
the Fat Chocobo, who will hold items in reserve to clear up the items
inventory. To get the Fat Chocobo, we need a carrot, which can be
found either in the forest itself or in quite a few item shops. Once
that's done, I'm also after the white one to refill the twins' MP.
The mountain itself is blocked by a big
fire, which Palom puts out with an ice spell. This leads to a
cutscene where Golbez talks to Kain and the kidnapped Rosa about how
Cecil is becoming a problem and how he's going to sic his Four Fiends
of Elements on the heroes to stop them. In this case, Golbez has
complete faith in the Earth Fiend, Milon. I know most of these guys
have different names in the Japanese version and later releases
overseas, but I'm gonna go with the names used in the initial US
release.
Once I started up the mountain, I had
the strangest luck. It's not that Mt. Ordeals is full of undead
monsters, which, as anyone who read my presently incomplete Text Play
of Breath of Fire knows, I'm not especially fond of. It's that
Palom, the black mage, died almost right off, in part because it
seemed like the monsters had an unusual vendetta against the twins
this go-round. That's odd because I don't think I've had him die in
a fight that I can remember since my first couple playthroughs.
On the other end of the spectrum, I had
some remarkably good luck, too. I wound up getting a rare item
called the Cursed Ring from a fight shortly after seeing Palom die
the first time. I haven't equipped it yet, because I don't know what
it does, exactly, and don't want to wind up screwing myself. I'll
make a separate save file for things like that and tell you next
issue.
But this brings up something worth
mentioning. As I may have said, I've been through this game a ton of
times over the last twenty years or so, and thusly, I'm just breezing
through it. As a result, I may have to wind up doing some grinding
and/or farming just to get my levels up to where they need to be.
There are side quests along the way meant to help with just this
issue, but I usually take those as a matter of course, just because
they seemed part of the game's natural flow to me. So, I may wind up
going after the Imp summon, after all, and another special item I
know of on Ordeals, the Zeus Gauntlet, just for the sake of getting
an extra level or two. If I do an issue about that, I'll just put it
all in one and say how I decided to end it.
More or less halfway up the mountain,
Tellah rejoins the party, where he will remain until he fulfills his
role in the plot. What that role is shouldn't be much of a surprise
to anyone reading this, but let's just pretend it is for now.
There's a reason why his MP will be fixed at 90, after all.
At the top of the mountain, we actually
meet Milon and have to fight him the first two of three times we'll
have to over the course of the game. He's not what I'd call easy
either time here, but harder the first because the undead monsters
he's got with him reduce the damage he takes until they're removed.
After the second time Milon is beaten,
he falls off the mountain. He'll be back, of course, but not for
awhile. From there, it's on to Cecil's class change to Paladin,
which takes place in an odd building atop Ordeals.
The key to making this work is simply
not attacking the Dark Knight Cecil has to go one-on-one with until
the entity that lives in the building says the fight's over and Cecil
is a Paladin as a result.
This puts Cecil back at level one, and
as a result he levels up like a maniac on the way back down the
mountain.
I'll pick up with what happens back in
Mysida next issue. That'll be ready to go soon, I hope.
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