You know, back when I started this Text
Play, I said there were a lot of interesting ideas in it, even if
they didn't go together very well. This specific mission brings in
one that I tend to forget about unless I'm going out of my way to
think about the details of the game. This is the only one of the
Final Fantasy games I've played where I have to specifically purchase
fuel for the vehicles. I don't recall that being an issue in any of
the other games. Hell, in Final Fantasy IV, you could fly one of the
airships to the moon and back as often as you want and never have to
worry about refueling. In this game, though, you can actually run
out of gas, at least for the land vehicles. I know we get what
passes for an airship in this game somewhere in the last third or so
of the story, but I don't know if the whole gassing up thing works on
that, too.
I bring it up because I had forgotten
about that bit when I sat down to get going on the missile base, and
ran out of gas for the troop transport Selphie and her team had taken
when I got lost on the way there. So, even though I could still
kinda-sorta move the car, I just reset, found the map in the strategy
guide I bought with the game quite some time ago, and found my way
there. Along the way, I found myself at Deling City, so I went into
town to buy some extra gas, just in case. There's a gas station
right near the entrance to the city, but the guy running the place
says he's closed. Fortunately, there's an items shop in the town's
business district that sells gas, too, but it's a little pricey. The
item shop wanted 3000 gold for a unit of gas, though I'm not sure the
actual gas station would have been any better. Either way, it brings
back memories of the NES version of the Ghostbusters tie-in game of
the day. It was a cheap gimmick then, and seeing it done again
fifteen years later didn't help any.
While I was there, I also talked to a
few people, General Caraway included. Some soldiers say that they're
on guard because of a group of SeeDs who had tried to whack the
Sorceress, and that they're glad they don't have to face her wrath.
One random citizen says he saw how President Deling died, and while
he didn't like the guy, it sucked to see what happened. General
Caraway wants us to keep Rinoa safe and offers to tell us about the
Sorceress and recent events. He says that back in the day, during
the whole Sorceress War with Galbadia's one big rival in the world
stage, Eshtar, Galbadia invaded as many nations as it could to build
a force against Eshtar, which was run by a sorceress named Adel,
later established as Sorceress Edea's predecessor, and since then,
things have been getting progressively stranger, leading up to his
attempted assassination of Edea.
Caraway also says that he has a Triple
Triad card of his daughter that we can win from him, but we actually
have to wager our Ifrit card and beat him at the game to get it.
Since I'm not doing the card game aspect of this, I just skipped it.
When we finally get to the missile
base, the guy guarding the gate just lets us pass, because I guess
all he needs to see is the Galbadian National Seal on the side of the
vehicle. If I understand the progression of events here, Selphie and
the others don't even put on the conveniently properly-sized military
uniforms they found in the vehicle until they get out once they're
already past the gate. How did this military make Galbadia one of
this world's superpowers, anyway?
Continuing with this amazing luck, once
the trio gets inside the base's main facility, they're only
momentarily blocked by a locked door. Said door can be opened by a
pass card that Zell, in this case, just happens to have found in his
pocket when they got out of the car.
It seems the soldiers at this base are
all stupid or just want a Galbadian equivalent of 9/11 to happen or
something. There are a few decision points where we can choose
between fighting, talking, and running away. The first one is a
guard that if we make the choices to quite literally (ding!) walk up
to him and try to bluff him, he'll say our parents did a good job of
raising us because we're all walking single file. Must be a Japanese
thing or something.
Once we're past that, we'll have to be
messengers between two teams of techs prepping the launch bay for the
attack on Balam. There's one guy who says he needs to hear from
another team before he can proceed. This other team is too busy
playing with themselves or something, and eventually, it's decided
that Selphie, Zell, and Irvine are the ones who will go make sure the
base's power systems are all green. It's the first chance they'll
have to screw with things by knocking the base's main power offline.
It's all controlled by a computer, and even back in 1999, young
people like the heroes in this game, and myself at the time, really,
were expected to know a thing or two about computers. Instead,
Selphie's plan is more like Moe's plan for beating the evil computer
and launching himself, Larry and Curly-Joe back to Earth was in Have
Rocket, Will Travel.
Once
the power's out, some higher-level techs come along to fix the
problem. We're presented with the same Fight/Run/Bluff option set
again, so I pick bluff, and it works again. Of course, Selphie leads
the others back in to kick the techs' asses so they don't turn the
power back on.
Once
we're done with that, the techs around the launch bay realize they're
going to have to put the last missile battery on its rails manually.
Just about this time, our party comes along, and one of the guards
notices that at least one of us looks a little small to be working at
the base but asks us to help anyway. After a button-mashing event,
the head tech in the launch bay tells us to go make sure the computer
console outside the launch bay door is set correctly. This is our
chance to mess things up a little more by cranking the error rate up
as high as we can get it. Why bother trying to redirect the missiles
for someplace like, say, Deling City or the D-DISTRICT prison or
something, right?
After
getting that taken care of, we're off to the firing control room to
tell them that everything's all set to launch, and finally, we run
into the one guard in the whole place who's smart enough to figure
out that Selphie and crew aren't Galbadian soldiers. He says it's
because they gave the wrong salute after giving their report. I can
see that the base commander got his position because he's the
smartest one, but I'm not sure that's saying much.
Because
they've been caught, Selphie and crew reveal themselves in a blinding
flash of white light, accompanied by a scream from the base
commander. Apparently our heroes look worse naked than I do in spite
of the fact that I've never been in nearly as good a shape as they
are. Naturally, there's a fight here, and once these three are down,
Selphie and the gang are off to set the auto-destruct sequence on the
base. This is one of those timed things, but I'm really not sure how
much the timer really matters in this case. I've had lots of time
left over after beating the last boss at the base, and I've been
right down to the last second before winning, and in all cases, it
seems like so long as I can get through the battle results before the
timer runs out, these three heroes are trapped at the base as it
explodes. We're supposed to think that whoever was in that party is
dead now, but as a long-time fan of the series, it had been my
experience even when this game came out that playable characters
don't die unless the plot actually calls for it.
One of
the sadder things about this game is that the plot doesn't make you
think it calls for it for very long, nor does it do a very good job
of it for the time it does.
Anyway,
with this brief moment of tension going on, we'll catch up with
Squall, Rinoa and Quistis, who arrive at Balam Garden thinking that
things are OK there because the place is still standing and it's all
quiet at the front gate next time. See you then, folks.
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