Well, it took me longer than I had
hoped to get to this, but I've got what I hope is a good reason for
that.
I think I've mentioned having a few
rather stressful things going on in my life right now, and that I
should keep the details to myself until I get more of them at least
figured out, if not resolved. I'm still going to stick with that,
for the time being, save to add that I think all this is giving me
more health issues in addition to the ones I'm always going on about.
I'll keep the gory details out of these posts, especially, but I
will say that while I wasn't a well man before, I do believe things
have gotten worse recently, to the point where it's affecting my
ability to do the things I enjoy doing, like this. But that's a
story for another time, so on to relatively happier things.
Largely because of the grinding I was
talking about last time, I believe I'd gotten Amarant's abilities
caught up at least enough to where I could advance the plot again,
which meant going into the Iifa Tree again, for the purposes of
confronting Kuja when he shows up again. This doesn't take long, of
course, because Kuja was on his way to investigate the end of the
Mist soon as it happened, much as Zidane had predicted. We see him
come swooping on in on his Silver Dragon, which actually kind of
looks green to me, but that could just be the way the colors display
on my screen, which is a good fifteen years newer than what this game
was likely meant to be played on.
We're given the first of a couple
chances to adjust the party and equipment loadout before going in
after Kuja, who decided to take up a position on the main trunk of
the Iifa Tree while he waited for whomever was coming for him to get
there. All I did was switch out Vivi for Eiko because I'm pretty
sure Amarant's not the only one who's pretty much where he needs to
be for this point in the game, and I figured having a Black Mage
would be more useful than having two healers.
I'm not really sure how much it
matters, in the end, though, as the party stops before they go past
the main trunk, opting instead to climb directly up to where Kuja is
instead of finding another way or taking a Gargant, which is an
option too, now, I guess. Since Zidane and Amarant are the only ones
who can climb, they carry the others. Amarant takes Eiko and Vivi
since they're small while Zidane takes Dagger.
When everybody gets there, there's
another chance to adjust the party and equipment, but I stuck with
the one from earlier, mostly for convenience. Kuja tells the
assembled heroes that he'll deal with them in due time, but for now,
his big target is Her Yugeness herself, Queen Brhane, because she's
got one last Eidolon he needs to take on his real
nemesis, who is apparantly someone we haven't met yet. I'm not sure
if we were supposed to think it was Zidane before, but either way, we
find out that there's more to Kuja than we were first made to think.
Kuja
goes on to explain that Brhane wasn't exactly always the pillowy ball
of love and sweetness Dagger had been taking her for all these years,
and all it really took was his giving her a few nudges in the right
direction, as it were, to get her to go to war with the rest of the
world, which, in turn, got him what he needed.
And
just as our prettyboy on a dragon explains that he knew the Mist
Continent wasn't going to be enough for Her Yugeness, the lady
herself shows up with her navy and several shiploads of Black Mages
to prove him right. As the battle of baddies begins, Kuja uses some
of the remaining Mist to create a new monster called the Mistodon to
sick on the party so he can go duke it out with the queen.
One
might think that this new monster would be a boss, but it's just a
regular monster that we'll run into here and a few other places in
the near future. This is an excuse to have different monsters show
up in the secon half of the game, which will be starting shortly.
For now, though, we've got what's mostly cutscene to deal with.
I like
the way this plays out. Brhane has a decent strategy for a change,
having the ships lay down some cover fire to keep Kuja busy while she
uses the Black Mages to help her summon Bahamut. It's a nice enough
plan that it actually almost works. Turns out, though, that both
forces are fairly evenly matched, and the one big spell that the
queen and her mages were working on finally gets cast after the ships
had blown all their ammo keeping Kuja busy.
The
sad part here is that with how things worked out, Bahamut is only
just powerful enough to give Kuja his first and possibly only
confirmed head injury of the game. Once that happens, Kuja does his
own spell, which makes this big eyeball thing appear in the sky and
turn Bahamut to his side, making him use his Mega Nuke attack on
Brhane's navy.
Meanwhile,
Dagger decides to go get the Eidolon that's sealed away in the Tree,
thinking it will help her save Brhane, who Dagger sees as a mother.
Turns out, this new summon is Leviathan, who, along with Bahamut, is
one of my favorites. Unfortunately, Leviathan is useless for this
cause, as it does water attacks, and the person we want to save is at
sea right now.
The
leadup to the end of disk two has Vivi monolouging about how he
doesn't know how to feel about what just happened. He's confused
because he wanted to see the queen dead about as badly as anyone, and
now that she is, he feels kind of bad about it. It's partly because
he knows it didn't have to end the way it did and partly because
Dagger's a wreck over having lost her family again.
From
here, we'll essentially be getting teleported back to Alexandria,
where Dagger is mere days away from being crowned queen herself. The
disk ends with the princess arriving at the castle and paying trubute
to her now deceased mother.
I did
play a bit into the thrid disk, just to make sure I was actually
there when I pick up next time. We're in control of Vivi, for now.
There are a few Active Time Events showing us Eiko checking out the
castle, Artemecion the Moogle getting scolded for not delivering the
mail like he's supposed to, the bull headed guys that I don't think
I've bothered mentioning before, and one that ties into the main
plot, Zidane being all broken up over having lost Dagger.
We're
going to have to help him deal with that, of course, but doing that
will have to wait until next time, which I hope won't take me two or
three weeks to get to. I think there's a play we have to go see in
Ruby's theater before Zidane will open up about how he's really and
truly broken up over this because it's the first time he's ever
really and truly been in love with someone, and now he's really and
truly lost her because she's out of his league.
But,
like I said, that's for next time, because, as always, I was doing
all this way too late at night. So, until then, stay safe, have fun,
keep gaming, and DFTBA!
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