I need to make a thread (259,849 views)

[Mario the black knight]

So I need to tell this story, the story of a very personal revenge quest.

So in Dark Souls 3, there is an NPC called Anri, who is just a fellow Ashen one, on a quest just like you. You see her along the way, she can sometimes help you on bosses and stuff. In one part of the game, she gets separated from her traveling partner, Horace, who ends up going crazy and you have to kill him somewhere else in the dungeon.

Meanwhile, theres another named Yuria, she serves the Darkstalkers, who are like one of the evil factions the player can associate with. She teaches some magic and sells occult items. She aims to turn you into the Lord of all Hollows, and tells you at one point Anri was gonna be your queen, and that one of her associates was grooming her for the role, who we can only assume was Horace. One of her other associates gives you these things called "dark sigils" which are like this curse that makes you go hollow, but also levels you up faster.

Later on she tells you your queen is ready for you in Anor Londo. I finally found her, one of the other Darkstalker people is at the door to where she was, and she was already dead, and they make you do this ritual to take her dark sigils, which is what they meant by "marriage".

At some point in the game, I found an item that lets you heal the dark sigils, but I never thought to use it. After this betrayal, knowing how important the dark sigils are to Yuria and her quest, I decided I would use that item. Unfortunately, I found out I would need 287,000 souls in order to use it.

But I wanted revenge, after losing one of my other favorite NPCs, losing her too was so sad, so I wanted Yuria to know I betrayed her before I killed her. So I went out and grinded those souls.

2 hours and many many dead Silver Knights later, I had the souls. Enough to level like 10 times. But I used them to cure myself of the Dark Sigils, immediately ending her questline with me.

I talked to her right before I tried to kill her, just so she knew what I had done.

After a few attempts to kill her (she is a bit stronger than I am) Justice was served.

[Mario the black knight]

Man, these Lord bosses are so good.

I just got done doing the Yhorm fight. What a good battle!

Having Sigward show up with the Stormking sword from Demon Souls was awesome. He came in there and whooped that ass. I barely did anything. I did get a sick critical hit on him at one point. Won first try, I MIGHT be overleveled for that fight though.... I was probably supposed to fight that fight much sooner than I did....Ah well. It was probably cooler because I won first try, it felt so epic.

Then after the fight, me and Sigward were chatting, and suddenly I got teleported out by...someone...then I got there, that someone died....then crazy dancer lady came in the window, I said "I have 60k souls, fuck this noise" and Homeward Boned out......

....But now I don't know how to get back to where I was....So I mighta did somethin bad...

Also, I went back to the Yhorm room, and like...all of Sigwards gear was there....so I guess maybe he died after the fight? Rest in Peace, brave knight...

[Mario the black knight]

So I found this dragon king guy and found a single instance where the Crossbow was good.

It was a lightning crossbow with lightning bolts, so each shot tore up the dragon. And since I could shoot with one hand, when the boss got far away, I'd pop a few shots off, while it was close, I'd use some gold pine resin and get him with my sword. He was the first boss I ever encountered who talked. Kept rambling about his kid, some Ocelotte. I'm sure theres a Vaati video about it.

After that though, I explored the halls in the next room, and I found a secret passage that led to this crazy area.

It was basically the starting area, but like, all dark. They basically took out the skybox and replaced it with black, and it just looked creepy and unsettling. I followed it through, basically killing a lot of similar enemies to the first area, but slightly stronger, then a suped up version of the first boss, who was actually kinda more fun to fight than the original.

After that, they had this dark, empty version of the Firelink Shrine, but it had the Shrine Maiden still....which was extra creepy. Then behind a hidden wall, which wasn't there in the regular Firelink was a dead Firekeeper with an item called "Eyes of a Firekeeper". Pretty morbid stuff. Really creepy presentation. Felt almost like something I wasn't supposed to find, which is always a slightly unsettling and cool feeling.

I just feel like when I finally binge all of Vaati's DS3 videos, it's gonna be amazing. Theres so much here I feel like I've discovered, and yet so much more I feel like I don't know.

[Mario the black knight]

I got all my major weapons to +10 tonight. My targe is still at +6 but priorities for these slabs.

I'm at the grand archives, and one thing I'm really noticing that 3 has that 2 basically never did is really good level designs, where the levels loop back on themselves in really cool, unexpected ways surprisingly regularly. They just have so many really clever shortcuts you can open frequently, basically allowing you to only have to complete certain areas only once or twice ever, so that basically you can get back to where you were extremely quickly. It's rather nice really.

I encountered the Lothric princes tonight, interesting fight. It felt a bit like some of the other fights, but it is a fun dynamic still. I suspect this is one of the last major bosses, since theres actual dialog in it.

I know I have a few other areas in the game, like the DLC and such, it'll be interesting to see how this all wraps up.

[Mario the black knight]

Oh man, the Painted World DLC in this one is SO good.

I have been working on it for the last few play sessions, and every time it has just impressed me with something new and cool

The first time I entered, I just loved the scenery, it made the snowy world in DS2 look like nothing. It was both serene, and kinda creepy. Then you get into that wolf attack sequence. I love the wolves in this, where they basically circle you and wait for you to make the first move. So cool

Then I encounter the viking guys. I liked the way they used old dated armor to signify these guys have been around for a very long time, especially the old Kite Shields, I don't think any of the previous games had a REAL kite shield, despite having shields they called kite shields, none of them had that proper length or rounded top or vestigial boss on the front, the ones in 3 are the real deal.

I'm also loving how there are sorta darkstalkers hiding everywhere, like the Sable Church is something of a front for them, so they are less of a fringe element than they were in 1, and have their own miracles and such. I thought that one knight you encounter was really cool, until I found out he was actually a servant of the Darkstalkers and I put him down. And how I discovered Frieda was the sister of the woman I killed earlier to avenge Anri when I discovered she was darkstalker scum.

After exploring all the other areas, I finally made it to the Frieda fight. Hoo boy what a fight. The first phase is really fun, they obviously make callbacks to Pricilla in this fight, her using a scythe, and disappearing. I looked for footprints, but there were none this time. Still, fast paced action, and it feels SO good to get a good parry on her.

The second phase is pretty chaotic, but fun.

I love the swerve where it feels like you've won after phase 2, then they reveal that theres a THIRD phase to the fight, and it's INSANE. I still haven't beaten it.

I realized this was really a fight of endurance, and I was running out of Estus by phase 3, so I decided to detour and go find the remaining Estus Shards and Bone Dusts. Luckily there was only a couple left to find in the world, and the last of each was at Smouldering Lake, a place I had barely touched up to this point.

Easily my least favorite area in the game. It's a blatent reskin of Carthus Catacombs, like they just flagrantly reused a section of the catacombs without even trying to make it look too different, just different enemy skins. It was cool to find the remains of Izalith again, but as an area, it's really uninspired. Also, I was super overleveled for it so the only thing that ever killed me was when I'd try to get fancy or I'd just get lazy and not pay attention.

Now I have my Estus Flask fully powered up, next time It's time for another rematch. I don't think this will make a TON of difference, but it might just be the edge I need. My damage is already as high as it's ever gonna get, and I never really find myself wanting for stamina or HP, it's just a matter of execution now.

[Mario the black knight]

Beat Friede, it's much easier when you discover you can summon Slave Knight Gael to help you, all he really does is act as a meatshield to draw some of their fire, which let me get some backstabs in to speed up the second phase, and save me from getting a cut neck from phase 3. Overall, a really great fight

After that, the game just teleports you to the next area, which feels a little jarring and weird, I felt like beating hear would reveal a little more, but instead I'm in this weird place where fall damage is mostly just a suggestion, and it's basically the edge of the world. I just stopped at the Earthen Peak ruins from Dark Souls 2, but they are like....partially falling off the world, which is sorta trippy....

[Mario the black knight]

So I've been stuck on a boss in Dark Souls 3 for quite a while.

I got though a lot of the area after Ariendel, and other than the annoying Angel things always sniping you, it's not bad. But then you get to the boss. The first phase is the 2 on one Man Eater/Gargoyle fight you've come to expect in every Dark Souls game, but a bit easier to manage. Once you get the rhythm of it, it's easy enough, it just takes a while to actually do.

Then theres the second phase. It's a combination of the two demons, so it's a lot of the same rhythm as the first fight, except theres one or two moves that feel really cheap, especially this one laser move where he just beams you and it's 1 shots you pretty much definitely and it's super hard to avoid.

What really takes the fight out of me is it takes like 15 minutes to beat the first phase, since you sorta have to bait out the weaknesses between the two demons in the first round, so it naturally just takes time, and it's hard to be more aggressive than that. So when you do all that and get to phase 2, just to get instantly blasted by the 1 shot laser attack, it just takes all the fight out of you. It was fine the first few days I tried to get past it, but I've put like 3 sessions into beating JUST this boss. And all my weapons are at +10 and my Dex is already at 40 so theres no upping my damage output any further.

I might try and go back another time and try to beat him while Kindled, maybe try and see if theres an NPC phantom for this fight or not, and see if that helps, but that will be another time, I just need to give it a break for now



Early summer always puts me in the classic RPG mood though, so I decided to take a break from Dark Souls 3 and start up Legend of Dragoon.

You can DEFINTELY tell this was designed with the expressed purpose of being a "Final Fantasy Killer". All of the other RPGs in this period were for the most part already from established franchises that go back to before the 5th console generation, so they already had their own established aesthetics like Breath of Fire, Dragon Quest, and Suikoden. There were a few games that came out during the late 90s that tried to capitalize on the RPG heyday started by FFVII, but most of them were super small and didn't really go anywhere, and were usually 2D.

Not many were ambitious enough to try to come at The King and go full 3D, but of all people, Sony Computer Entertainment themselves, the people who made Squaresoft defect from Nintendo to Playstation in the first place, were the ones who made and produced Legend of Dragoon, and they tried their best to compete with Final Fantasy's aesthetic directly, full 3D polygon characters on pre-rendered backgrounds, something I don't think anyone else outside of Square even bothered to try. If anyone had the sort of money to compete with late 90s Square, it was Sony Computer Entertainment, so they were likely the only ones who might have even had the tech to pull it off at the time.

It came out in 2000, which means it was likely one of the games that got tanked by FFIX's release, but it absolutely feels like one of the late PS1 RPGs of that transition period to PS2, Like FFIX, Chrono Cross, Vagrant Story, that time period. Where they had a good handle on what the hardware could do, and were pushing it to the limit.

So graphically, this game looks great. The models have nice textures, especially the battle models are pretty high poly (for the time), the animations are at least solid, and I've even seen them using some similar tricks to what Squaresoft was doing at the time for imitating realtime lighting, which was impossible on PS1, so they would come up with really clever tricks to imitate it, like using vertex shading over the textures to make some parts of the model dynamically look darker than others, really clever stuff.

That being said, it also feels like at times they push the hardware too far chasing some of these effects, some of the cutscenes where they try to use a high poly battle model in a cutscene run a REALLY choppy framerates, like some scenes feel sub 15 frames for sure.

The UIs are definitely not amazing. The color schemes are a bit...harsh. The text boxes are just OK, and the biggest problem is the translation is SUPER not great. They've got a lot of weird syntax errors, and just weird labels in the main menu. Like the equipment menu is labeled "Armed". Just weird stuff like that.

It definitely effects the dialog too. Like there are some cases where translation quirks can make a game endearing, while others that just make a game feel like they did the whole thing with Google Translate or something. So far, the dialog is right in the middle between those two extremes. Like the dialog isn't terrible, it's definitely readable, nothing egregious, it just feels like some of the interactions feel like something was lost in translation, and it doesn't feel like how humans talk to each other. Or occasionally a character will exclaim something that doesn't really make any sense, like they couldn't really figure out how to convey the context of the original Japanese, or went just too literal.

And especially with how they introduced the female character, it feels topically misogynistic, like, ridiculously so at times, for seemingly no reason, almost to the point of ridiculous parody. We'll see if thats the case or not, but it kinda makes Dart feel like a dick a little bit sometimes, and I'm wondering if thats just a translation thing, or if theres more to it.

The story itself is super trope-y as far as the genre is concerned, main character's home village gets destroyed as the inciting incident, theres a big war happening, theres dragons, theres a bombastic villain in a suit of armor being outwardly evil and mysterious hooded figure gloating about how everything is going according to his plan yadda yadda yadda, basic Japanese interpretation of Star Wars stuff. Nothing super compelling just yet, but I'm giving it a chance. And honestly didn't have the highest expectations. We'll see.

But in general, theres just been so many things with the way they handle the cutscenes, battle transitions, the whole deal, that borrows SO much visual language from Final Fantasy. Of course, it looks super good, if you are gonna rip somebody off, you could absolutely do worse. Like the third boss is basically just The Midgar Zolom....like...almost exactly. His battle has a little more going on, where he can go and hide in some cliffs and spit poison at you while your melee characters can't reach him, but yeah, it's BASICALLY the Midgar Zolom...

The battle system is simplistic, but intriguing so far, theres no special abilities (at least not yet), but instead they have what are called "additions", where there is like a QTE style rhythm game on your physical attack which if you succeed at it, you can deal additional damage, more or less depending on which addition you pick. It's a fun little way to add something to the physical attack to make it more engaging, and also allow for counter-play against counter attacks, which is pretty cool. It's like a more dynamic version of the Super Mario RPG/Paper Mario system, it's kinda fun. It could be better, but it's not bad. I definitely feel like more depth will be unlocked as time goes on, you can just tell by the menu layout.

On the overworld, control feels pretty smooth, they actually have analog control for movement, so no holding X to run, tilting the stick actually effects walk and run speed. Pretty slick. Also, the encounter rate feels REALLY good, and they have this system where they have an arrow over your head that changes color as you move, once it turns red, you know an encounter is most likely. While it doesn't make the MOST sense in the world, it is super nice for the Random Encounters to not feel entirely random, and the rate with which it builds up feels really good, so the balance between field exploration and encounters has felt almost perfect thus far. In addition they have a potion for reducing encounter rate, so there is a way to further control the encounters. As far as ways for fixing a system as problematic as Random Encounters, it does so almost as well as Fantasian did, but 20 years sooner, so thats one thing Sony did better than Final Fantasy at least.

I knew this was gonna be an interesting one to study for my own research, and I have not been too disappointed yet.

[Mario the black knight]

OK, so the ability system got a little more interesting.

So basically they have a sort of limit break system where some of the characters can become what are called "Dragoons" where they can do a pseudo transformation which gives them access to dragon skills, but instead of being an indefinite transformation like in Breath of Fire, it's basically for a single action, and the power builds off of successive addition attacks. You can either use a Dragon Addition, which has a different timing minigame than the regular Addition, or you can use more traditional style magic, but in this case the spells are absolutely devastating and way more powerful than the average magic you see in normal games. They are the only skill with no associated minigame, besides healing items.

Right now only 2 of the characters have the transformation so far though. I suspect this will change as time goes on.

It's interesting, a lot of this game's growth works the way growth works in my game, where actually using a skill increases it's power.

Also, they did an FMV that exposed some of the ancient history of the universe ingame, and the art they showed as the guy talked were obviously copying the bayeux tapestry, which is such a cool touch and at the time would have been a bit of a deep cut reference. Very cool.

[Mario the black knight]

So pretty much everyone in the party can transform right now. Currently it seems like that is the first chapter maguffin, collecting all the Dragoon Spirits and people who can wield them.

I feel like they are doing a good job with character development, at least with Lavitz and Dart. Honestly theres a bit of misogynistic stuff as far as the way they treat Shana and to a lesser extent Rose, almost every conversation that involves Shana has either been about how weak she is because shes a woman or trying to force romance between her and Dart, even though Dart has made it clear he isn't interested. It's a bit much... I'm hoping it develops into something a little less cringy, we'll see.

They are starting to re-use locations already, which is surprising, usually in the first phase of a story like this, you are on a blitz from one place to the next, getting familiar with all the locations in the game, before making you revisit them later. I'm not sure why that would be so soon.

There is a particular animation I am loving right now. When Dart finishes his Burning Rush Addition successfully, it finishes with him in one of Fiore's guard positions

fightlikefiore.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Sword-One-like-the-other.jpg

I'm not sure if they just came upon the pose by chance, as it's a slight modification of the pose over the other shoulder, but if it is supposed to be a reference to italian longsword fencing, it's another really cool reference to medieval history.

[Mario the black knight]

So I went back to the prison to rescue the King

It consisted mostly of just wandering around lost, because the layout of the place is a mess, but they just revealed the true antagonist, Lloyd (I swear, the Tales of Symphonia people must've played this), who is, get this, a mysterious man in black robes with white hair........yep....Platinum Blonde must've just always been on sale at the bad guy CVS.

Anyway, he killed off Lavitz, Dart's Bro and seeming romantic interest, in a pretty dramatic but ultimately pretty tepid scene. It was clearly meant to put Lloyd over as some sort of badass, because he straight up one-shotted Lavitz, who the game was absolutely smashing over as a badass up to that point, having him get skewered straight through his Dragoon Armor with a weapon which would be revealed to be a Dragon Buster, an anti-dragon weapon, and pretty much everything that kills dragons, also kills Dragoons

King Albert (who, just as a matter of fact, was at one point in his life called Prince Albert.....Given the roughness of the translation, it's likely the colloquialism would be lost on the people who wrote the characters for this game...) Apparently had an heirloom literally kept in his body called the Moon Gem, which represented his right to be king (kind of a cool piece of lore honestly, way cooler than a crown anyway), and Lloyd was after that stone.

This stone used to belong to a people called the Winglies, who were these winged humans who were a sort of ruling class over humans 10000 years ago, and they were wiped out during a war called The Dragon Campaign, where The Dragoons were created, and led the Dragons to destroy the Winglies and allow Humanity to exist as it does in the present day.

With his castle destroyed and his army mostly wiped out, and his one true claim to the throne in the hands of the enemy, Albert decides to join the party and has a last ditch plan to strike directly at the enemy dictator, Emperor Doel. And wouldn't you know it? He was trained by Lavitz, his best knight, to fight with a spear just like he did. And wouldn't you know it, he has identical gear to what Lavitz was wearing when he died, and all the same moves, and the exact same level and stats. Imagine that! Lucky Us!

Yeah.....it kinda takes away from the impact of his "sacrifice" when the party literally loses nothing for his death, and gains back basically a palette swap of the lost party member immediately. Like when Aeris dies, you feel that loss, you literally lose that party member forever, with all of her unique abilities and stats, and given that you had to use her a lot early on because she is a forced party member in almost all of the major story dungeons on Disk 1, shes is gonna be one of your more powerful party members, so losing her is a significant loss.

This? Just felt like whatever, even though they did a good job building him up as a character, like he would be with the party for a long time, so it wasn't predictable. But overall the build up, execution, and aftermath of it felt a bit flat, because it happened WAY too early in the story honestly, as much as we got to know Lavitz, we didn't really know him all that well ultimately, though clearly there was a bond forming between him and Dart, which felt closer than him and the girl he's known his whole life, which really says less about how close they were, and how flacid the relationship between Dart and Shana is. Mostly because her entire personality is basically the fact that she doesn't have a penis and can't get over it.

They do this interesting thing in this game though, in place of FMVs in some more important scenes, like the kind of "half FMVs" they did in FFVII and FFIX, where they would bring in the slightly higher poly version of the field model into an important scene, and perhaps run an FMV in the background. But in this case, what they do is have the scene happen in a battle scene essentially, with the high poly battle models, in a full 3D environment, and instead of using textboxes, they use essentially subtitles, without spoken dialog, allowing them to do more bespoke action beyond what they might have been able to do with the field models. It's an interesting approach, but it's severely limited, since the limit to the number of other items in the environment is super low, it's basically the characters, the ground, and a skybox most of the time, and even then it usually runs at a super choppy frame rate. Even on a PS3 with smoothing and faster load times, it still STRUGGLES with some of these scenes. But the models themselves look great for 1999/2000 peak PS1 level graphics.

I'm definitely interested in learning more of the deep lore of this universe, but right now the characters just sorta feel meh. I'm hoping that changes

[Mario the black knight]

So I just beat the big Climax to disk 1

I am noticing a lot of the dungeons are just so easy to get lost in. and not really in a good way. It's less challenging than it is tedious, it's a lot of pre rendered camera fuckery than it is actually good level design. A lot of stuff just appears in places you can't expect or predict. Theres no visual logic to any of it and you find yourself going in circles a lot. Also, due to the EXTREMELY limited inventory (you can only hold 32 consumable items. Not 32 TYPES of consumable item......32 consumable items of any kind. This includes attack items, of which there are many kinds...) More often than not you come across an item box, you can't pick anything up, so it gives this feeling of no reward for exploring.

There are definitely benefits to limiting how many of an item you can carry, and making those restrictions significant, like less than 10 of any one type of healing item or something, but this is a bit much. Even if they had just set the limit to 64 or something, it might have been a LITTLE easier to manage. Especially with how weird healing is in this game.

The base healing potion heals half your HP, so it scales directly with your HP, making it so healing items are always somewhat viable. In general the game is much more item based, since pretty much all elemental attacks used by the party come from elemental attack items. It would be like in FFVII you had to use grenades and stuff all game instead of Materia if you wanted to deal an elemental attack. A little weird, but honestly it's better than just an inventory that hardcore encourages hording for the sake of it.

But it feels kind of conflicting, having items be such a core component of the battle system, and yet limiting them so harshly.

I suspect part of that fact comes from the fact that they want you to use the defend command. In this game, not only does defending halve your damage, it also heals you a percentage of your HP, meaning it's an at least somewhat viable, if slow method of healing.

So I suspect the thought process was to attempt to severely limit healing items in the hope of making recovery via defending a more viable strategy. But there are probably better ways this could have been accomplished, like for example limiting the stack size of each individual item like Secret of Mana, and plenty of modern games do.

I'm guessing another aspect of it was the fact that this approach is probably programmatically way easier, just clustering all the items into a single array of a known length rather than having to manage item stacking and restricting things that way.

Anyway, I confronted Emperor Doel, who we found out is King Albert's Uncle, because that is so often how royal families work in real life, with Emperor Doel being the one who betrayed Albert's dad, back when King Albert was just a little Prince Albert......that shouldn't be as amusing to me as it is, and yet.....anyway, he broke off, started his own nation, and started a civil war against Basil in the name of taking over and unifying Sedora under his flag rather than his brother's as he saw him as incompetent, yadda yadda, you know how this sort of thing goes.

We fight him in the big epic climactic boss fight, and it turns out he also has a Dragoon Spirit, given to him by Lloyd, the previously mentioned Sephiroth Clone. And it makes sense, since Albert is fully capable of using Dragoon powers, that Doel would be as well, it just feels like sometimes practically everyone we run into has one of these damn things, even though they are supposed to be this rare, ancient power. But I think it's supposed to be a Fated deal, since fate seems to come up over and over again. And the last phrase in the opening FMV is "You may now sever the chains of fate that bind you" so I am hoping they build on this theme.

I have enjoyed some of the ways they have waxed poetic about the senselessness of war rather than glorifying it, something I feel like Japanese developers were really into at the time. Something that really set them apart from the themes of western storytelling, where war is mostly just mindlessly glorified. But I mean, duh.

When we finally beat Doel in almost definitely the hardest fight in the game so far, as he died and revealed to us that Lloyd was in a place on a different continent, and is nothing more but a pawn to a reborn version of Emperor Diaz from the Dragon Campaign 10,000 years prior. The party is skeptical of the possibility of this, but clearly the party hasn't played games like this before.

The game basically warped me to this town, which looks almost identical to the big town in Chrono Cross, and now I guess we are looking for Lloyd. Also, this completely incidental character from Dart's past who has been traveling with us inherited Doel's Dragoon Spirit, so thats neat I guess. He's been looking for his daughter, who happens to have the same name as Dart's dead mom. IMAGINE THAT COINCIDENCE, I AM SURE THIS WILL NOT BE A THING LATER!! Though, to be fair, even characters in the game pointed out how bullshit this turn of events is, so hopefully they are not stupid enough to actually go full Fanfic.

Oh yeah, and apparently PS3s are super finicky about changing physical disks for PS1 games. So thats fun. But what is fun is actually having to change a physical disk for the first time in years for a PS1 game. The last few times I've played FFVII and FFIX, it was digital release, so the disk changes were purely hypothetical, no physical act of changing disks. Theres just something different about actually changing the disks with real hardware...something more authentic...

[Mario the black knight]

So apparently Disk 2 has a fun quirk

The load times for the world map are REALLY long, and sometimes I have to take the disk out and put it back to get it to load. So thats fun...

The world map music is amazing though, so it's not the worst thing ever.

Right now we are looking for this Lloyd guy. We explored this town, a lot of weird, incidental interactions happened with the townsfolk, probably as a sorta mediocre form of character building, as well as helping us understand the culture of this country, where they worship stars.

We also found out about the Moon that Never Sets. Apparently every so often it sends down this thing called The Black Monster, something Dart has been after his whole life after it destroyed his village and killed his parents. It's basically like the weird thing in FFVIII where the moon occasionally poops monsters onto the planets surface for reasons I wasn't totally clear on when I first played the game.

Oh yeah, and this gang of bandits is running rampant all over this country, trying to take over this other village. And also one of them stole Dart's Dragoon Spirit, so now he can't transform, so now we are trying to track the gang down so we can get that back

We also saw a cutscene with Lloyd. This girl was getting robbed by some bandits, and he comes in and effortlessly wrecks them, acts all ambivalent about it, then disappears, so clearly he is not totally evil and there is more to him than meets the eye.

So now we're trying to get into the very cleverly named Valley of Distorted Gravity. You need permission to go there from the king (even though the bandits somehow live there?) and apparently it's dangerous. Not sure why.

[Mario the black knight]

So we made it through the valley of distorted gravity

First though, we had to get permission from the king to even go there. While we were in the castle, they built more on a story they hinted at previously. One of the two Princesses of the kingdom of Tiberoa started acting strangely recently, acting more rude and cruel, and her sister wants us to look into why, thinking it might be connected to the gang of bandits that has been running rampant all through the country since the end of the war.

Six months prior there was apparently a horse accident, where the horse ran into some forest and bucked her off, and when they finally found her she was acting different, but the sister is not convinced that was all that happened.

We got permission from the king, who seems mostly obvious to what is going on, to go though this place, now with a lot riding on finding these bandits, including finding Lynn, one of the missing villagers in another town, the fate of what happened to this princess, who apparently will be inheriting another lunar item, similar to the one Albert once possessed, that Lloyd went out of his way to take, and of course to get back Dart's Dragoon Spirit.

But before that could happen, we passed though this distorted gravity area. Apparently this place was so screwed up because it was the site of a major battle during the Dragon Campaign, and the amount of magic used there broke the laws of nature, making it so unstable. Which, alright, I like that explanation, just wish it had a better name.

Due to it being the site of a great battle, it of course had something we first saw at another place significant to The Dragon Campaign, and that is another Virage, but unlike the one in the volcano, this Virage was fully intact, and significantly more powerful. Shana had some weird reaction to it, like she did the first one, and her reaction this time was much more significant.

After a grueling fight, one of the hardest in the game so far (not least because Dart has no Dragoon powers), Shana used some bullshit anime girl powers to somehow defeat the Virage and throw it into the abyss. Everyone milled on this fact for a while afterwards, wondering what had happened. This has happened a few times previously, as if she is protected by some power (Kinda reminds me of the deal with Kid in Chrono Cross, but I'm hoping it ends up being way less bullshit), with Rose being the most puzzled of all.

After this, we continued on and finally reached the bandit hideout. As if the stakes weren't high enough, one of the bandits guarding the gate seemed to be using a martial art that resembled Herchel's signature style, one that only a few people know. After confronting him, we discovered that the leader of the bandits was none other than Herchel's disciple going by a new name.

He used his strength to pull a Frog and punch his way through an impossible barrier to let the party pass, but quickly this caught up with him. Or so we thought. The rest of the party went onto explore a cave, while Meru (A new party member from the flower village who is mostly with us to help us find Lynn. Shes basically Yuffie with a hammer) stayed with Hershel, who seemed to be hurt and resting. Once the party was out of sight, he lept up and ran ahead on his own to find this student of his. Now we are chasing both of them

I'ma just call it now. What actually happened is the princess got body switched with Hershel's daughter, and the current princess is being held captive by the bandits or has been sold, as the prospect of selling women came up earlier in the scene where the bandits were trying to kidnap that woman and Lloyd, the villain, saved her. Not sure how it all ties together, but that is my current prediction.

[Mario the black knight]

So I beat the leader of the bandits

After his death, shockingly, SHOCKINGLY, we found out the princess is a body double, and was replaced by the bandit leader 6 months prior.....And that is not at all what I-- Just kidding this is almost literally what I predicted.

After that, the boss triggered a booby trap that nearly crushed all of us, when a previous boss we faced off against twice, one of the most powerful lieutenants of Emperor Doel, a Giganto named Kongol, turns babyface and saves all of us from the collapsing statue by just catching it. He then joins the party to absolutely no fanfare whatsoever.

Then we go into the bandit treasure hoard, and finally find Dart's missing Dragoon Spirit, and the missing kid we came to rescue in the first place, and rushed back to the castle, to find that the ceremony was already underway, so we needed to find the REAL princess (who was somehow apparently hidden in the castle his entire time....because sure I guess?) but first had to tell her sister. Unfortunately, there are now new guards in the castle, ones brought in by the fake princess, who are bandits in disguise, so now we need to sneak around the castle, because for some reason we can't kill them?

Anyway, it has been the single worst minigame in the game so far by a lot. It sends you way WAY back if you get caught, and the guard patrols are really harsh and their vision is really good. So when I reached Princess Lisa (the sister) she said she would come with us, to hopefully get us out of some trouble if we got caught.....

...that wasn't the case. Getting her actually made things worse. Because now there are additional lines of dialog that go along with getting caught, making it even LONGER, and it takes us back to her room instead of the inside of the castle where it was taking me before, which is an even LONGER walk to get back, making getting caught absolutely terrible.

After FINALLY getting to the real princess' room, we found the place sacked, completely looted by the bandits. and began searching for clues, when we found a painting, which, when we interacted with it, it went all Painted World on us and sucked us in, and we got into this weird distorted dimension someone created with this weird broken gap between us and the real princess. They actually did something really smart, and had one of the characters say "why don't we just become Dragoons and just fly over?" and the weird distortions of the dimension made it impossible to transform, which is actually really good that they were able to explain that away in a logical way, rather than just "we can fly in battle, but not here, don't worry, it's fine!"

After figuring out the weird dimension and getting to the princess, we brought her out and she scared off the bandit knights with her politeness and we made our way to the throne room, where the ceremony was almost complete, and the King was just about to hand over the Moon Dagger, when we busted in to stop them.

In the confusion, Fake Princess grabs the dagger and reveals her true form, a woman named Lanus with weird mechanical wings. A boss fight ensues, and she turns out to be capable of powerful magic without the help of a Dragoon Spirit. This reveals that she is none other than a Wingly, one of the superhuman master race that humans went to war with during the Dragon Campaign, she was apparently a survivor of that war, which Rose confirms. She claims to be taking the Moon Dagger for "her love" who I can only assume is Lloyd.

The king of Tiberoa and Albert, now king of Serdio, get to talking, and it is revealed that both the Moon Gem and Moon Dagger as well as another artifact were offerings in exchange for Peace with the Wingles at the end of the Dragon Campaign, each given to the 3 major human kingdoms at the time, and became heirlooms to their royal families.

After her defeat, Lanus flew off the balcony in a direction, towards some bay, which the King is now sending his navy in their most powerful ship to, and will be letting us ride along, as it has become clear that our fates are heavily tied to the events unfolding

Even though the character pool is becoming increasingly diluted with pointless characters like Meru and Kongol, the actual lore and plot of this game are becoming really interesting. Everyone mostly seems to just be following Dart because they are "interested in his destiny" with not too much more tying them together than that. It has honestly limited the screentime the other characters receive, the ones who had any remote relevance to the story. Like at least Hershel got some development, having one of his students be a bandit and all that, but very little actually came of that story really. And honestly, I've basically just used Dart, Albert and Rose the entire time, since theres basically zero incentive to use any of the others at all, especially considering all these new characters don't have Dragoons either, making them significantly weaker, on top of being underleveled. It's not like FFIX where they made you switch up your active party regularly for story reasons which rounded out your characters pretty well for most of the game, or FFVII where very little about the characters themselves really mattered because the Materia got all the levels anyway.

I'm definitely still interested in the story as a whole, because the lore of the universe is pretty cool so far, but you can definitely tell why FF was the king for so long.

[Mario the black knight]

So I got on that boat

They did a really interesting character building segment on the boat, where you basically got to take turns controlling each character, and running around the boat talking to everyone, seeing their perspective. You got to see their personalities, if they had them. Kongol is this game's Amarant 100%. If he had made a noble sacrifice instead of joining the party, he would have been much better off. Instead, he has basically zero character development through that whole sequence. You could tell this whole sequence was mostly meant to build on the romantic relationship element all games after FFVII tried to shoehorn in. And also build a little heat on Rose's character

Before long, we encountered a Ghost ship at sea, which lead to Shana falling overboard. She landed aboard the ghost ship, and we had to rescue her, before exploring the ship. The ghost captain informs us that everyone aboard the ship, including a Princess, was murdered by none other than the cleverly named "Black Monster" that Dart has been after since before the events of the game.

I am actually in the middle of playing now, paused, just to make a prediction here. I am PRETTY certain that Shana is the Princess in question, and possibly has one of the Moon items, and that Rose is the Black Monster. They foreshadowed it twice now with some ghost knights, who did very deliberate actions. They protected Shana from some skeletons when she first fell aboard, and attacked Rose when they saw her, patomiming protecting the princess. It could be a ghost loop type deal, because they have been telling the story of the ship this way this whole time, but I don't think so. Also, Dart and Albert started talking shit on the Black Monster in front of Rose, and she seemed a bit upset.

It's an intriguing twist if true (and it most certainly is), and I am interested in finding out why, or if she even full heel turns on the party at some point, she does seem a little evil sometimes, sadistic even. Anyway, back to the game

...

So I just fought the most insane boss battle

Basically all the knights surrounded us and attacked us, and because they were undead, they added a gimmick to the fight where you had to have all the enemies dead at the same time to kill them all otherwise they'd just keep reviving, of course I thought I just had to kill the commander. And the commander was beefy as hell, he could take everything my Dragoons could throw at him and then some before he finally died, then revived like 3 turns later, which was infuriating. I was running low on healing items, was totally out of status items (this boss used a lot of status effects) and because it was a 5 on 3, we were at such a numerical disadvantage that it was impossible to recover much between rounds from defending

At a clutch moment, I remembered I had this gimmicky random healing item I found, and decided to use it, and it ended up basically being a Mega X Potion, healed EVERYBODY to full HP, and allowed me to push a strategy I was coming up with as I fought, where I got the other guys down to low HP, but not dead, killed the commander, then killed everyone else before he revived, winning the fight. It was awesome.

Also, the major boss theme in this game is cool

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA1Emd9dCPc

After the fight, the commander referred to Shana as Princess....so 1 for 1.

So after a creepy scene with The Princess' manger in the center of the ship, the nanny, put to rest by knowing Shana made it, let the ship sink. And after an intense escape sequence, everyone barely escapes, except Dart and Rose, who fall overboard.

We find ourselves on some deserted island, Dart unconscious, and Rose caring for him. Then she starts talking about someone named Zieg, and how she sees him in Dart, and then theres this absolutely badass FMV with Rose and the other Dragoons fighting in the Dragon Campaign, and pretty much all of the original Dragoons dying off, except for Rose. Zieg was the original Red Dragoon. Clearly they had a thing. But theres tons of scenes of the Virage and Dragons tearing each other up, the Dragoons themselves fighting the Winglys, it's chaos, and the best FMV so far.

So yeah, I am PROBABLY wrong about the Black Monster thing, but it does explain a lot about her character, and honestly, I am more invested now. Shes so somber and no nonsense, but now that we know thats because she is one of the original Dragoons

Anyway, the next morning, a dog finds them in the cave they were hiding out in, and that dog belongs to a kid from the island, who brings them into their little shanty town, mostly built from parts of old ships, which actually looks pretty cool. There we find out theres a path through a cave through a neighboring port town, where they are hoping they can find the ship they were on. but it is beset by some sort of sea dragon. Since we are dragoons, I am sure it'll be fine probably.

[Mario the black knight]

So I made it through the undersea cavern.

We arrived in Fuego with little incident, found the ship being repaired, and all of our friends were at the inn, in one of the most anticlimactic returns to the party in history.

I guess I get it, they needed to get Rose and Dart alone together for this scene to happen, but there could have been a little more to the return arc. I guess they didn't want Rose getting even more overleveled.

Shana was pretty distraught of course, so when we did find her, there was a long embrace, followed by some classically Japanese awkwardness with the rest of the party trying to be quirky and comedic but it mostly falls flat as usual. The translation here in particular is really rough. It hurts the whole thing pretty badly.

Anyway, some drunkard outside told us where to find the villain.......and I wish that was somehow made up, but no, we went outside looking for information, and literally there was some guy stumbling around outside and just sorta told us where to go.......it was weird.

So we went there, but the mayor was keeping the way there blocked by filling part of the cave with water, with an actually really clever description of how he did it, even if the plan itself was simple, so it didn't feel like why we were doing this silly fetch quest was pointless.

We opened the way, and explored this cave, which just SCREAMS the aesthetic of Forgotten City from FFVII. Like apologetically. Like the battle scene feels like a damn near ripoff.

We get to this menacing part at the center of the cave, to find that surprise, Lanus' lover is none other than Lloyd himself. Here he reiterates that he is working for Emperor Diaz again, the seemingly dead emperor Doel also claimed to be helping. He also tells Darts that he is the one who torched his village, though it is unclear whether he means his childhood village or Seles, which were both torched, so....We'll see what the game really meant.

He literally tells us where he's going before he flees with the Moon Gem and Moon Dagger, taunting us before he leaves, as if to goad us. He intends to go to Mille Sesaeu, which is supposed to be the third major kingdom who received reparations from the Winglys in the form of a Moon item, making obvious what he intends to do.

Lenus then seemingly transforms into Dragoon Armor and we fight her, along with the Sea Dragon we heard so much about since we came to Tiberoa.

...And then the game froze when I won the battle.....

Soo uhh...I'm refighting the fight now.

So we beat her, and for whatever reason, Lenus had a dragoon spirit, which went to Meru of all people, because I guess at this point we are just handing these things out.

I'm sure Kongol will just find one in the dirt somewhere offscreen, and just show it to us in a scene later or something, as Kongol does.

Kind of a sad thing when I got back to the save point. Whenever I play a PS1 game on my PS3, I just make a new Memory Card just for that game, so I can have 15 blocks of storage for each game for free pretty much, since each PS1 Memory card is only 15 kb to make, and I have a 1TB HDD in my PS3, so why not? I could have a hundred of these things and it would literally not even be noticeable by my system.

Anyway, I basically cycle back and forth through the 15 saves, and I came upon the last save with Lavitz in the party, so that was sort of a sad moment.

So we made it back to Fuego with little incident and on reporting to the boat's captain that we didn't get the Moon Dagger back, the captain of the ship asked us to become a man of the sea....and I don't even think he wanted to do gay stuff...probably, the way he asked us, it really could have gone either way. But it seems like we are more than likely gonna either sail back to the castle and tell the King we couldn't get his shit back, or we're just gonna head straight back after Lloyd, and we MIGHT be getting control of the boat as a vehicle? But the world map is super limited in this game, so I'm not sure vehicles will be a thing.

We'll see though.

[Mario the black knight]

So when I stopped last time, I wasn't far off from the end of Disk 2.

We basically sailed back to the Tiberoan castle, where there was a huge banquet held in our honor, for having basically failed at our mission of rescuing the Moon Dagger....because OK? But I mean we did also beat the Sea Dragon, making the waters safer, beat the Bandit Gang, and rescued the Princess, so thats pretty good too

Speaking of the Princess, once we got back, The King Formerly Known as Prince Albert was spitting MAD game on her. Like everyone split up before the party, and I knew EXACTLY where to look for him; up in her room. And DAAAAWG he was in there! Reciting poetry in shit. Damn.

Meanwhile Shana and Dart's relationship is progressing. They were through an awkward moment of trying to profess their love for each other, being repeatedly interupted, with a couple of actually hilarious animations of them getting more frustrated as it happened.

Before the ball, the princesses had dresses made for the female members of the party, but of course Meru is too "energetic" (see also: annoying) and Rose is too emo for a dress, so Shana was the only one who politely accepted hers. But of course, none of the male characters got costume changes, so whatever.

Before that though, Rose is brooding by herself in a room before you find her for the party, and she actually chuckles to herself thinking about something, something she said she hadn't done in years, due to this choker she was wearing. It was interesting, like she was trying to hold onto her mind. Reminding herself she is a hero. She previously referred to being a Dragoon as a form of insanity, so maybe this is an extension of that, but it definitely has my interest, like maybe shes just been alive so long that shes losing her mind, which is pretty interesting.

Anyway, it was a pretty stereotypical setup to reveal what she looked like, you wandering around the party and can't find her, before the big reveal. And of course Albert is STILL spitting game like a total pimp to Princess Emilie at the party, her promising she would wait for him forever. He tryin to give her that Rod Typhoon, naamsayin? ....It's one of Albert's moves.....he uses a spear......nevermind.

Anyway, Rose helps Dart find Shana, they stand together on the balcony watching some shooting stars, and make wishes and urrrp....blerggghhh you know, corny stuff.

They actually kiss though, something that rarely happened in any of the Square games. At least in this era.

After that, disk change, and now we are back on the Boat, and likely bound to Mille Sassau, the next nation, which is where Dart was apparently born, so it hopefully we start to get more backstory on him here, as well as the climax to the maguffin collecting arc of the story, as honestly I thought it would be resolved before we reached Disk 3, but the disks have been pretty short so far. But they've put a lot more focus on fancy graphics and pretty high poly cutscenes, though less FMVs than I was expecting. By 2000, I feel like those had become much cheaper to do in terms of disk space. But there is a lot of rough edges in this, so I can believe there is a major lack of optimization in that department.

Anyway, now we are in this cool looking river town named Furni, and it looks like a bunch of Mercs have gathered to collect a reward to fight this legendary wolf named Kamuy (Perhaps a play on Kamui, which is likely a piece of Japanese Folklore, since it was later in Okami) and to find this missing child. Of course, our fame from our accomplishments in Tiberoa has already made it here, so lots of people are hyped to meet us

The Mayor of course is happy to see us and wants us to solve his wolf problem, and even wants us to stay at his house, because that seems to happen a lot, people just like us I guess.

In some ways, theres something charming about these little side stories, running around killing monsters for people, defeating bandits, whatever. But sometimes it feels a little like we lose sight of the main quest, and we haven't really learned anything about Lloyd or what he's up to, other than the fact that we know he was doing a Wingly at one point, and he has some vague desire to possibly reignite the war between humans and Winglies, possibly on behalf of a previously thought to be dead emperor, somehow using some fancy items he is taking from the Royalty of each of the human nations. But it feels so incidental right now compare to just chasing around and squashing jabronis. And of course we have some character arcs advancing, I guess I am just hoping we pick up the pace a little with some of that stuff.

[Mario the black knight]

Goddammit. Sometimes I hate when I am right.

So remember way back to the beginning of Disk 2, when we found out Dart's mom and Haschel's daughter had the same name? And then we found out Dart was originally from Mille Sassau?

Well, Shana was just singing a lullaby to the Mayor's daughter, and it was a song that Dart taught her, that he said his mom used to sing to him. We get a flashback of Haschel's daughter singing that song 27 years prior.

It might have been less bad if they hadn't done the stupid Claire Bridge thing, and this was how they revealed it, it might have had more impact and felt less like a fanfic.

So as we are chasing this monster around in the forest, Rose and Meru just randomly decide seperately "You know what, I just remembered I had other stuff to do, see ya later!" and just leave the party! Like, with Meru, who cares, shes kinda lame, but like, Rose is one of the better party members, and she gives literally no reason for her leaving. Meru says shes visiting her parents, but like....who cares? Also, is everyone in the party somehow from Mille Sassau? Dart apparently is, Haschel is, and now Meru is? Albert and Shana of course are from Serdio, and we don't actually know where Rose is from, but it's possible shes from here too, and who gives a shit about Kongol, so it just seems weird that they all seem to be from here. I wonder if this will play into the story, theres a not zero possibility that it does.

Anyway, we find the kid cornered, we fight the wolf, then Shana heals the wolf, and he's just perfectly back to normal, then the kid and the wolf just go back to town with no fanfare whatsoever, it was about the lamest quest in the entire world. The wolf fight was a little harder, but mainly because I had to use Haschel for the fight, and he has no levels whatsoever. I switched him out for Shana after the fight, because while she sucks possibly worse than he does statistically, at least I don't have to learn an Addition with her, so it's easy peasy. Also, she has the only other healing move on her Dragoon now that Rose is missing.

And now...I'm honestly kinda lost. We got back to the village and everyone was like "yay, Kamuy is all better, the day is saved!" and I got a lame ass reward of 500g....which is like....5 battles worth of gold...so like.....whatever....and then nothing really happened to give me any sort of sense of what to do next..... so that was weird.

[Mario the black knight]

So I have wandered aimlessly to Denningrad. And wouldn't you know it? It's cold here.

So after solving that little wolf quest, there was no clear indicator from anyone for what to do next, so I just sorta wandered around the woods for a bit until it became clear that the only new way to go was out of the woods to the next town.

The music is awful. it's like the mixed Ode to Joy and Hail to the Chief in the most aesthetically unpleasing way humanly possible. The soundtrack for this game is so hit or miss, no middle ground. Either really good, or absolutely terrible.

So we found our way to a church, and it made me realize that each civilization has it's own religious beliefs, which is kinda cool and not something you really see. Serdio is mostly just generic Christian-esque monotheism, Tiberoa worships the stars, and apparently in Mille Sassau, they worship a big tree. So you can check Yggdrasil off the "Generic 90s RPG Tropes" Bingo Card. They haven't said the name yet....but come on, it's a big tree, and it made all the living things, it's Norse Lore, same as any other RPG from the period.

While speaking to Bishop Dille, the seeming religious leader of this city, we were treated to a pretty cool FMV as he explained the origin myth of the Divine Tree, which showed the tree being born from a seed that descended from the stars, by someone named Soa, who it seems still protects the tree with his Signet. Which I mean, checks off the "Aliens" square on the bingo card if you are playing at home as well. Basically took VII and IX and mushed them together there a little bit.

Afterward, the priest invited us to visit the Mille Sassau National Library, which made Albert about have an orgasm, so we promptly headed right over.

There, we did research, learning more about the lore of the world, and trying to make connections about the things we know so far, the fragments we know about the Dragon Campaign as well as the Moon Items.

There, a Librarian with an EXTREMELY unfitting voice treated us to YET ANOTHER FMV, explaining that the Winglys became supremely powerful, even more powerful than the gods themselves. Part of the Dragon Campaign included freeing the gods themselves from The Winglys, which lead to them leaving the world, and going to the Moon that Never Sets to watch over the Age of Humans, which has gone on for the last 11,000 years.

Afterward, The Librarian informs us that there is a reference room, which includes historical artifacts, and is surprised to find out Dart is a survivor of the destruction of Neet by the Black Monster. He has artifacts from the city's destruction. He also informs us there was another survivor of the destruction of the village, The Second Sacred Sister of Mille Sesaeu, Sister Luanna.

After that, we got YET ANOTHER FMV about The Black Monster and something called The Moon Child. The Black Monster is apparently a creature of chaos who was created by the gods. The pictures in the FMV depict appearances of The Black Monster all throughout history in different paintings and sculptures and stained glass and such. Meanwhile every 108 years, The Moon that Never Sets glows red, and a Moon Child is born. This Moon Child has the destiny of reviving the gods on earth, but The Black Monster hates the Moon Child, so it hunts it down and kills it whenever it is born, and wreaks havoc and chaos in the meantime.

After this FMV, we cut to Neet, and see Rose arriving in Neet, saying "Nothing has Changed."

I"M TELLING YOU! SHE IS THE BLACK MONSTER!!!

Despite being this powerful entity of chaos, we've not encountered it yet...At least in any form that resembles what we know as it....But what if she is among us, trying to confirm if one of the party member is the Moon Child?

I would guess either Shana or Dart is the Moon Child, definitely betting more on Shana, since her first Dragoon Spell is called "Moonlight" and shes the special girl and all that. And Rose on the other hand has all Dark attacks. But Rose has had chances to kill Shana, and hasn't. So....We'll see what that means.

There in Neet, we take control of Rose, and find Sister Luanna, having a vigil for her mother. We also find out she is blind

They show the events in question, and The Black Monster is hunting for the Princess Louvia, who they suspect is the Moon Child. The Black Monster traps a child version of Luanna and her mother in a building, where the mother reveals that the princess left the city for the sea. The Black Monster at this point has wings....that look suspiciously like Dragoon Wings...................

EDIT: AND MOTHERFUCKER I JUST REALIZED PRINCESS LOUVIA WAS WHO WE CONFIRMED SHANA WAS ON THE GHOST SHIP!!! SO YEAH, THAT MEANS PRINCESS MIRANA AND LUANNA AND ALL THAT ARE HER SISTERS HOLY FUCK

In the present, Luanna reveals that even though she is blind, she can see into peoples souls and heal their pain through some god given power

Rose offers to help Luanna get back to Lenin--Deningrad, as she says there are monsters along the way

We then cut to Meru.....

She comes through some strange portal, and is met by a man with wings who shoots fireballs at her before he recognises her.....Meaning he is a Wingly!?!

He tells her that while he is happy to see her, others in the village may not be, as leaving the "forest" is a taboo in this village. Meru laments about who cares about the taboo, other than "the Humans outside" suggesting she isn't human!?! She resolves to go speak to someone called "The Ancestor" about it

My mind is fucking blown. MERU just became interesting!

She of course is ostricised by the other Winglies, including the Ancestor, being told because she left the forest realm, she cannot return and has been shunned pretty much. Her parents come to see her, but her dad forces her mom to go along with it rather than visit with her.

After accepting her fate, the Wingly she met at the entrance grabs her and takes her somewhere to talk privately.

He tells Meru that everyone is feeling tense in the village right now due to the fact that the earth is experiencing some form of surge, and that another Dragon is coming, The King of the Dragons, one with Seven Eyes, the Divine Dragon

Likely more Nordic stuff, no doubt, Nidhoggr and all that

Meru reveals that she knows about the Dragon Buster and another weapon, the Dragon Blocking Staff, which are clearly Wingly Tech, but clearly she DOESN'T know that apparently Lloyd has at least the Dragon Buster.

But apparently both are missing, from a place only the Ancestor had access to. So clearly shes not spying for Lloyd and at least she is unrelated to him, so possibly there are factions among the Winglys?

After Meru leaves, theres YET ANOTHER FMV (I've seen more tonight than I had this whole game so far, which is pretty wild), this time of some Volcano somewhere. Deep inside, there is a chained up Dragon, likely the one they are speaking of, who is chained down, but breaks those chains. Ominous.

We then cut back to Dart and the crew back in Deningrad, chatting outside the library.

They resolve to try to track down Lloyd, but the Librarian suggests we go visit Neet, if nothing else but for Dart's sake. And we might discover something, according to him. Jeez, I wonder what?

At that point, Dart has a weird shiver that comes over him. Albert senses it as well. Luckily, we are standing next to a Save Point, surely that should come in handy.

Of course, right at the gates of the city, Rose saunters in with the Sacred Sisters, so of course we gotta have a chat and catch up

Rose is awfully cagey about why she was in Neet when asked, and Luanna has nothing new to give Dart in terms of info about the Black Monster.

She does however inform us that our powers are in turmoil, sensing we have powers beyond being human, and that some influence over us is anticipating the liberation. Super cryptic.

Suddently, Dart gets another shiver, a much bigger one, from his Dragoon Spirit, and the room starts shaking.

ANOTHER FMV! This time, we see a dude who looks like he's riding a Ton Ton from Star Wars in the snow, when a GIANT Dragon cruises over, the one from the Volcano, chains still hanging from him. He cruises over Deningrad, chains wreaking havoc on the city.

Man, shit is POPPIN OFF tonight!

Meru just jaunts in after we go outside to see whats up, she is of course panicked, knowing what she just got told. Rose of course recognizes the dragon right away as the Divine Dragon. Even her cold, indifferent demetor is broken by this sight, she makes it clear this is no joke.

Luanna asks how we know so much, and we tell her we are the Dragoons and all about our power, and she tells us to go see Queen Theresa, so that perhaps we can help her conquer this threat.

Upon speaking to the queen she of course asks for our help, but Rose says we may need one of the ancient Wingly weapons, either the Dragon Buster or the Dragon Block Staff, previously mentioned to be missing by Meru's Wingly Friend

Meru is shocked to find out that Rose knows about those weapons, but obviously can't reveal why. But Rose presses her on the question and she cracks almost right away, revealing the existence of the Wingly Forest....despite being told the weapons aren't there...but like, OK?

They decide they are going to the Wingly Forest, but as they leave the Throne Room, Shana stays behind.

We find her in the Chamber of the Signet, which is apparently a former chamber used for a sealing ceremony by the Winglies years ago. When we find her, she is unsure how she got there. Luannas older sister decided she was gonna follow us before we left, and upon entering the chamber, Shana's Dragoon Spirit left her, and went to Miranda instead! Shana then passes out in the chamber, after the spirit left her.

When Shana wakes up, she pretty much instantly resolves that she is not strong enough anymore (I mean.....even with a dragoon spirit she was not that strong anyway but--) and that she was quitting the adventure staying in the castle. News the party took.....surprisingly well.....Like no argument from anyone...Like I was expecting a little pushback from Dart...but I dunno. To be fair, she seems to be bedridden again. When she originally got the White Dragon Spirit, it was because of a form of poisoning, so perhaps this is part of that?

Anyway, they pulled the exact same trick with Miranda as they did with Lavitz where shes literally just a palette swap of Shana, even literally took her equipment, which I imagine was pretty awkward for a still living Shana.

So next time we go crash the Wingly's party....this should be not entirely awkward at all. But after feeling kinda lost in the sauce after that weird wolf storyline, shit went CRAZY!!

[Mario the black knight]

So here we are, in the forest of winglys.

The Winglys happened to be debating cooperation with humans when we arrived, the Ancestor himself declaring that he wanted to meet the humans Meru had brought by.

But some of the Winglys were not so keen on this, and one tried to ambush us in this Wingly healing machine (Wingly HQ seems to check the "Ancient Future Technology" Bingo Square, for those playing at home). He tried using magic on Dart, who transformed into a Dragoon to block it, causing the Wingly to cower in fear right away, and for Rose to drop one of the most badass lines in this game so far:

"The ones who flaunt their power disappear when the truly powerful appear."

The brother of the Wingly we just handily bitchified was hiding nearby, and has sworn vengeance against us. So that should go well.

We then meat Ancestor Blano, who seems to be wise to everything happening, and has decided he wants to join forces with The Dragoons, fearing that everything will be destroyed if the Divine Dragon is allowed to roam free. He tells us of course that the Dragon Buster is missing, but they still have the Dragon Block Staff. However, they seem to have lost the ability to use the Dragon Block Staff, and are hoping we can somehow figure it out....which does not bode well...

He sends us on the way to go find the staff, but he and Meru speak alone first. She basically doesn't wanna be shunned anymore, he says he can't end that right now, but in the future he can (though I mean, her being shunned doesn't seem to matter since she can come and go as she pleases either way...but you know, whatever)

Blano muses after Meru leaves about her leading the Winglys out of exile, but wondering where the humans are leading her and the rest of the world to.

We all arrive on top of the forest, and Blano tells us that the staff is in an ancient forgotten ruin called the Forbidden Land, which used to be the Wingly's Capital called Kadessa. And opens this crazy Stargate looking thing to let us travel there. He says it was where the prosperity of the Winglys was supposed to be born, but is now a ruin of it's former self.

It looks a bit like some of the stuff we saw in the FMV with Rose fighting in the Dragon Campaign. I think even MORE shit is about to go down. It also has it's own special regular battle theme, which is interesting.

We come to an area which appears to be a large colleseum. Meru tells us that the Ancestor told her stories of how the dominated humans would be forced to fight each other to the death here for the Wingly's amusement. She laments the horror of being the offspring to such a race. What the fuck why is Meru suddenly an interesting character!?

So after some exploring, we stumble upon the Dragon Block Staff. it is this strange stick hanging from the ceiling of a room. Rose tells us that even with this weapon, and the Dragoons, we will be lucky if we beat this threat, and even just seal him away again, since the divine dragon is basically invincible and insanely powerful. Albert wonders if Lloyd intends to control the Divine Dragon, to which Rose responds that theres absolutely no way Lloyd is powerful enough to pull something like that off, and therefore this might not have anything to do with what he's doing. On that note, Albert asks Miranda about her nation's Moon Item, to which Miranda is extremely cagey and says she doesn't want to talk about it, and wants to focus instead on getting the Dragon Block Staff home.

Meru flies up to take the staff, but after pulling on it, it turns out the staff is attached to some crazy ass monster and a boss fight starts

Of course, like a genius, I go into dragoon form, as I usually do for boss fights....but it's the Dragon Blocking Staff.....so naturally he wrecks us hard right away. it's sort of annoying, because I can't actually revert form, so I am stuck just getting wrecked until Dragoon ends.

And.....thats my first game over.

He absolutely spammed the fuck out of us with magic and obliterated us even after the blocking effect wore off. This boss is absolutely crazy. He saps your levels, he can attack like 20 times in a row, I ran entirely dry on healing items and lost. It was looking close for a second, like Dart alone could pull it off, then he did a full heal move, sapped 10 levels from me, then rained hellfire on me until I was dead.

Sooo yeah...probably gonna try again....another time...

[Mario the black knight]

So I won the rematch

Still a hard fight, it's just winnable without dragoon form

After the fight, we retrieve the staff, and leave the ruins, but before we escape, we see the Divine Dragon

Upon returning to the forest, everyone knows it's on it's way to Deningrad. So the Ancestor tries to warp us directly there before the Dragon, but he fails, so the other Winglys join in, including Meru's parents and her seeming love interest, to finish the warping magic.

However, as we get warped, we see an FMV of the dragon arriving in the city, and going all Bahamut on that shit, with neck missiles and his Gigaflare laser thing. He shoots the palace with the laser, shattering it (it's made from crystals) which sends this beam to the Moon that Never Sets.

We arrive in the city after it's destruction, and race to the palace.

There, Sister Miranda takes charge like right away. She finds the two younger sisters are safe in the main threshold of the palace. She slaps a knight to figure out the status of the Queen, who is apparently secure, then orders him to take care of her sisters. She might have Shana's stats, but she doesn't have Shana's meek personality.

Upon reaching the throne room, Shana is glowing in a blinding light, levitating over the queen. She stops when we arrive, she seems confused by the situation, seeming entirely unaware of what happened. Both are OK, but Miranda weeps, in fear for her queen.

After futher inquiry about the light, theres a flashback to the moment before the attack, where Shana basically just walks into the room in this weird possessed way, right before the attack, talks to the queen a little before the light starts emanating.

Shana somehow feels responsible for it all, laments that it was all somehow her fault, then faints, being caught by the other two sisters. The last thing she says is "who am I?"

Without a second thought, Dart just decides he wants to go to the Mountain of Mortal Dragon, which is supposed to be where the Dragon lives...even though we last saw him outside Deningrad...but whatever...

He asks Miranda to stay with Shana, but she reminds us that she is a Dragoon just like the rest of us, since Shana lost her power. So I guess we just leave Shana with the Queen of a nation, because like, she has nothing better to do I guess, her capital city in ruins and all.

We leave Shana in the ruins of the Inn, where the injured are being triaged. She is still all mopey about not being a Dragoon, but Rose is in double bitch mode today, so she questions Miranda's ability as a Dragoon, before Shana says she is probably a better one anyway, to which Rose responds "Lets hope so" like dayum.

Miranda isn't impressed, while Shana takes it as her being concerned. I appreciate that Miranda has a spine at least.

Then Kongol lets Shana know he's leaving, and says "good for you"...because he's an idiot and no one likes him so he has to interject himself into the conversation to say nothing useful

Not to be outdone, Dart just says "I am Leaving" and literally nothing else. Kinda cold considering they were in like a romantic relationship like a disk ago.

Anyway, we're now off to the Mt. Dragon Tomb.

You can really see a lot on Disk 3 that they were clearly trying to save data, They reuse the forest area like 3 times so far, and in this Dragon Tomb, they have used this pre-rendered hallway 4 different times to connect 2 different areas. It feels like this region is literally just a town, a forest, and a dungeon or two, about what I want to do for my current proof of concept demo. They probably needed to conserve the space for all these FMVs, since pretty much all of them are on Disk 3 thus far.

Upon reaching the top of the mountain, Rose asks if anyone wants to turn back right after the obvious "boss fight is up ahead" savepoint, and we hear swords clashing, which leads us to believe someone is fighting the dragon before us.

When we arrive, none other than LLOYD is the one fighting the dragon.

That I didn't see coming...

We find him using the Dragon Buster on the dragon. He claims he nearly has it beat. It seems he may have been the one who released the dragon just so he could fight it, which is sort of insane.

We get an FMV just for the intro of the fight itself, which is sorta cool, big fight feel. Lloyd bails, then the fight begins

Dart starts the fight by using the Dragon Block Staff, which shatters, but still reduces the strength of both the dragon, and our dragoon forms, so we have to fight the fight straight up. This is clearly gonna be a battle.

Annnnnd I got roasted. REMATCH!

It took a few tries before I realized it was like the Sinspawn Fight from Operation Mihem in FFX, where the dragon had multiple body parts with each attack, once I figured that out, it was effortless, just disabled all his best attacks, and it became a physical attack DPS race to the finish.

After we dealt the final blow, Lloyd jumped in and stabbed the dragon in the eye with the Dragon Buster, and ripped out the Divine Dragon's Soul, revealing what was essentially a Dragoon Spirit, a much bigger, much more powerful one.

Apparently the Dragoon Spirits are the spirits of Dragons, released in the moment before they die. He likely unleashed the Divine Dragon just so he could fight it and get the Dragoon Spirit. Unfortunately for him, it doesn't sparkle in his hand like the others for real Dragoons

But this doesn't bother him, he only simply wanted to claim it as a "prize", just for the sake of it. He claims "I don't need additional power to destroy the world"

He only saw the Divine Dragon as an obstacle to his true ideal.

He then taunts Albert, because he took his Moon Gem much earlier, and again taunts the party with the fact that he 1 shot Lavitz. Dart, hearing the name of his true love spoken in such a tone is greatly offended.

Lloyd then does that villain thing where he says "it's too early to fight here" and teleports away.

The chase continues

As we get to the base of the mountain, apparently running is faster than his outright teleportation, because we pretty much get there on foot just as he gets there

He deploys his wings, revealing the obvious fact that he is a Wingly, and shoots magic at the party, blowing Dart and Rose off a cliff. They wake up next to each other again, Dart is fine, but Rose is clearly out. She slightly comes to, clearly thinking Dart is Zieg again. She tells him she thought he was dead, and she used dark power to take this world back from them.

We then flash back to Neet, 18 years ago

I FUCKING CALLED IT, I BET

Anyway, we see a shadowy wing figure murdering a Mille Seseau knight. We then see the scene we saw earlier, of Dart's parents taking him to out of the village. Dart's Father goes back into the village, followed by Dart's Mom, and then the next day Dart finding nothing but his dad's Dragoon Spirit.

The flashback ends, and Dart recalls the words spoken by the librarian about the relationship between the Moon Child and the Black Monster. and Dart wonders what Rose really knows. She is still mostly unconscious when Meru finds them. She flies down and picks the two off the ledge, before saying "whew, I'm beaten!"

This translation. Makes you appreciate FF that much more

After everyone is safe, they turn to the question of Lloyd's next objective, and the final Divine Moon Item. Miranda is still cagey about it, before finally revealing the truth. The item for Mille Sesaeu is called the Moon Mirror, and the throne itself is the secret to opening the seal to it

We realize the queen is in danger and rush immediately back to the palace

Upon arrival in the forest, a small contingent of knights with Sister Wink are coming to back up Miranda and Dart, hoping they are alright. But before they can arrive, they are ambushed by Younger Bartel, the brother of the Older Bartel, the Wingly Dart and Rose bitchified back in the Wingly Forest. He effortlessly slaughers the knights, and just as he is going to kill Wink, FUCKING LLOYD shows up AGAIN and blocks the attack! WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS GUY'S DEAL!?!

He then becomes a huge fucking badass, Bartel starts absolutely RAINING magic spells on him, which he completely brushes off like nothing, while walking up to him, cutting a promo on him about how "I have made sacrifices for my ideals, while yours cannot be achieved without Annihilating everything?" Bartel responds with how he just wants to kill humans, so Lloyd goes "You should not be alive then." and stabs him in the chest with the Dragon Buster. Before he dies though, he suicide bombs on Lloyd, blowing up the whole area. Wink is protected, but Lloyd looks a little winded...which is not terrible considering the size of the explosion he just ate.

Wink notices that Lloyd is wounded by the attack, and says "please come to the palace where we can give you some treatment!"

Goddammit. Played her like a damn fiddle.

We arrive at the same place to find one of the injured knights coming from the palace to tell us The Queen has already been captured by Lloyd, and that Miranda's sisters are at the palace waiting for us.

Next time, we'll see what happens when Lloyd more than likely gets all the Moon Maguffins in one place. The story is heating up!

[Mario the black knight]

So apparently it took us a week to walk back from the Dragon's Cave.....which I mean....it sorta did I guess, it's been a week since I played

Anyway, when we got to the throne room, there was a flashback to the events of after the dragon was defeated, and Lloyd fooling Wink into getting him into the castle.

She explains what happened to her on the trail, before Lloyd arrives, and bows before the queen.

We are also reminded that Lloyd was the one who saved Wink from the bandits in the village in Tiberoa, which because this game doesn't even bother to texture anyone except the main characters, and everyone else is just vertex shaded, I hadn't even realized....

The blind sister Luanna is the one who perhaps ironically sees through the ruse. She questions whether it was a coincidence that Lloyd was always in the right place at the right time to save Wink. She sees his murderous intentions, as she can read peoples souls, as noted before.

Of course, once Lloyd realizes the gig is up, he teleports past the guards, and grabs the queen, and teleports away, saying he just desired the power to create a utopia, and that she was gonna take him to the Moon Mirror.

Presently, Dart asks Miranda where the Moon Mirror is located. She reveals it's in the Tower of Flanvel, to the west of the Kashua Glacier.

At the end of the glacier, we encountered a token boss, named Windigo, who we absolutely trashed, because he was ice element, and Dart is fire element, and one of his magics is a spell called Red Eye dragon which absolutely ate him alive. He wasn't a terribly impressive boss, mostly just a damage sponge.

Past that is a really scenic view of the Tower of Flanvel. According to legend it was once a flying fortress that belong to the Wingleys during the Dragon Campaign, now frozen into the ice.

After an extremely easy climb sequence that mostly consisted of these Sonic-esque circular warp pipes, or possibly I got lucky and skipped most of the dungeon and missed a ton of loot, We got to the top, where the Moon Mirror Chamber was located. The divine dragon soul resonated from that area, meaning Lloyd was there, which means we likely have him cornered.

But one can't help but wonder why he picked up basically a jewel that allows us to track him like this, unless he wants to be tracked.

Perhaps he wants us to bring the Dragoon Spirits to him.....

Upon reaching the chamber, he is clad in what looks like Dragoon armor. He has all three Moon Items together, and claims that the world will now be reborn into the Utopia that he and Emperor Diaz desire.

Quoting the lore from the Deningrad religion, the plan laid out by Soa for the Divine Tree, Humans are the 106th spieces, and Winglys are the 107th. Lloyd desires the utopia created by the final, 108th species.

But before we can learn anymore, he challenges us, and the fight begins.

And his animations, of course, are fucking crazy, and he is WHOOPIN my ass.

...And of course..he has an insta-kill move on anyone who transforms into a Dragoon because he has the Dragon Buster....and I hadn't considered that...and I used the special move that turns everybody into Dragoons at the same time.......and he just went down the line and wiped us out because you can't leave Dragoon form once you transform.....so yeah....not great...

AND AGAIN

Oh...and he counters all magic attack too....thats neat....glad I spent the whole game gathering those up...

Pretty by the numbers fight if you don't use Dragons. Disk 3 has basically been like that, all the boss gimmicks have basically nullified the fun mechanic of the game and you just have to rely on your ability to do Additions.

After the fight, we go into one of those High Poly but not quite FMV scenes with Dart and Lloyd fighting, Lloyd is getting ready to deal the final blow, when Wink comes up the little elevator Sonic tube thing, and sees what is about to happen, and jumps in the way, and gets cut down by Dart. Pretty brutal.

Apparently everyone else just FUCKING LEFT before this sequence!? They're all just sitting down in the bottom part of the elevator, saying "I trust Dart will do the right thing" and it's like....did they pass Wink in the elevator? What the fuck? WHY DID THEY LEAVE!? this is fucking stupid.

Anyway, Lloyd wonders why Wink saved her after everything he did. She forgave him anyway, and she was basically returning the favor. They didn't phrase it that way, they were more clunky about it, because fucking translation.

Then as Wink slowly dies, she relays the message to Dart that Shana was kidnapped for the 57th time by Emperor Diaz. Honestly, Miranda is cooler anyway, it's fine.

She says for Dart to bring the Divine items to Vellweb.

...And Lloyd JUST FUCKING GIVES THEM TO US!! He says "My Utopia will be built either way, I have done my tasks." What the fuck is this scene right now?

He tells Dart to kill him, and that he dedicates his death to our departure.

Dart drops his sword and punches Lloyd in the face, and tells him his death won't bring everyone he killed back. And tells him he's gonna make him see it through to the end....does this mean he's gonna make Lloyd destroy the world?

Dart just sorta leaves. Lloyd just sorta sits there....and Wink is just there....not dying...just standing there...wounded...it's fine....

Dart tells everyone what happened to Shana, and they decide together they are gonna save her....because like...why wouldn't they? Anyway, the Queen waxes poetic about Soa's plan and Humanity's role, and some concept of fate? It's all very vague.

We then warp down to the bottom of the tower, where we see some Deningrad knights help Wink to just sorta limps away....Dart didn't even say sorry or anything.....just pointing that out.....

Lloyd is there too, still in his armor. Dart asks him a question. He asks why he actually saved Wink. He says he had no reason for doing it. He responds "I see." And thats the scene. Yep.

Then Lloyd does that thing where he walks into Dart like he's a party member. But he's not in the battle party. And then we get all the Moon Items. Neat.

They really didn't think the design of this glacier area though either. The background is the same color white and blue as the attack indicators for the Additions, making landing the complex Additions I have right now REALLY hard...

Upon arriving at the bottom of the mountain, Lloyd tells us that Vellweb isn't in the direction of the city...so thats great....couldn't you have told us sooner, asshole?

For now I'm just gonna go to the world map and save, because I am tired and don't feel like finding Velwebb right now

Next time, we find Velwebb.

[Mario the black knight]

You know whats REALLY annoying about this dungeon? The indicators for executing your Additions are blue and white. You know what color the snowy glacier background is? blue and white......

Same shades too. It;s not well thought out...

So after some exploration, I found that the giant tower doesn't have as many paths as it seemed, and it's mostly just a railroad, except for this one particular area which is guarded by a scary man who wants to kill us. They use all of the video game hints in the book to say "this is probably a super boss, don't fuck with it."

But theres a save point outside, so I'm gonna fuck with it.

Upon further inspection, why yes, I should not infact fuck with it. The battle started and he instantly casted 3 spells, killed Dart instantly, and we barely escaped with our lives.....sooo clearly wherever I have to go, it's not that way....The guy claims that below is the "Land of Taboo" so whatever is down there is probably pretty good.

After wandering around blind for a bit, eventually I found an area I thought I could access because the background made it look inaccessible. This is something that has happened a few times now, where either a background element makes something look accessible that isn't, or makes something that is accessible look inaccessible. It's particularly prominent on this particular map, it's kinda frustrating.

Once we finally reached the Snowfield on the way to Velwebb, Lloyd tells us he needs to talk to us about Diaz

We take shelter from an ongoing blizzard, and cut to a flashback to 3 years prior, in the Wingly Ruins with Emperor Diaz and Lloyd.

Diaz drops this great line, saying "The World is rotten like fallen fruit." Just so poetic, it reads well, and has the multiple meanings, from both the literal and the metaphorical given this World Tree concept starting to be exposed, it's WAY above this game's typical dialog level.

Anyway, he mentions a Wingly dictator named Melbu Frahma, who he says was the last one to make the world smell, playing on the fallen fruit thing

Man, this guy is just good. He then goes on to say "This World, driven by Inertia, where the easy path leads to Devolution, the overture to destruction has already begun."

Lloyd asks if this "devolution" is why the magical power of Winglys is diminishing, to which Diaz says it's not just Winglys, and that all of the species have fallen into this slump

Lloyd asks how he is supposed to regenerate the world, and Diaz reiterates the previously spoken on idea that Wingly's are the 107th species of the Great Will of Soa. He claims the 108th species is the Last God, who will regenerate the world, and bring about Utopia

Lloyd repeats the legend of the Moon Child, and says the Moon child is the Final Species, and it is the god that gives Holy Bliss to the world.

Rose objects to this explanation...because of course she does (SHES THE FUCKING BLACK MONSTER!!!!!)

Lloyd theorizes that The Black Monster wants to stop the Evolution, because it would be scorched to death by the blessed light of the last species.

Dart then asks Lloyd what the connection is between the Moon Objects, and the Moon Child.

He claims that fearing the the end as the dominant species, they sealed the 108th species away, and that the keys to dissolving that signet are the Gem, Dagger and Mirror.

Lloyd believes if he doesn't release the Last God, someone else will eventually, because nothing can escape the fate determined by Soa, not even the Last God.

Dart lashes out, wondering why then Lloyd kidnapped Shana and took her to Velwebb, which Lloyd responded would be revealed when we got there....

This is sorta cool, the seeming antagonist traveling with the party, sorta holding them hostage while slowly revealing his plan, while not being hostile either. I am invested in this reveal, it is being done really well

It also aligns Lloyd and Diaz against the Black Monster, which is an interesting twist, the degrees of evil are being revealed in a way I didn't totally expect.

And then....I fell off the damn mountain. They let you slip off the cliff and fall all the way down to this ancient ruin, supposedly being a major fort where Diaz declared war on the Winglys with the Dragoons. Seems like it might be optional, but might have some cool lore.

Upon entering the ruins, Rose has a flashback to Diaz giving a speech, and his declaration of War against the Winglys

We reach the center of the ruins, and Rose has another flashback, to a conversation between Diaz and Zieg, the former Red Dragon Spirit Dragoon. They are talking about how Zieg plans to have a wedding after the war is over. As we know, this didn't happen.

In the present, as Rose kneels silently in front of a statue, Dart says he doesn't know if she is the Rose he knows. Not sure what he means, feels like clunky translation

A sword stuck in the statue then moves, and Rose claims some of the souls lost in the Dragon Campaign are reawakening due to the presence of Dragoons, and a boss fight begins.

Annnd he killed me. This is happening a lot more often...

AGAIN

Welp, I'll try this again another day, it's late.

The story really has me intrigued now though

[Mario the black knight]

So upon the rematch, I beat him pretty effortlessly. Guess I was more tired than I thought. I also attacked the sword first this time, instead of just the armor, got a crap sword and a crap suit of armor for my troubles.

Nothing really happened after that, which is a little disappointing.

After climbing back up, we finally reach Velwebb, which is supposed to have been where Humanity mounted it's rebellion against the Winglys. We find this ENORMOUS cannon, which supposidly launched giant arrows at the tower we were just in, which was the Wingly flying fortress. Rose starts rambling, at least in her words, in a way that Dart sees as suspicious.

Then we come across an NPC named Shirley...who we are supposed to remember? I don't really remember this person, but apparently they ascended to heaven last time we met them, but not before handling some business here? He claims the he was here to lay the souls of the 4 dead Dragoons who died in Velwebb during the Dragoon Campaign, news Rose is shocked to hear, leading me to believe Zieg died here?

He then tells us that some death city called Mayfil, which sounds suspiciously like hell, is calling the Dragoons, but he anchored their souls here, so that they might be sent to heaven instead.

He tells us once we beat Diaz (sorta feels like a spoiler, even though we kinda knew we were going to face him) to come back for them, which makes me feel like they might be Superbosses?

We found one of them. It seemed to be speaking to children in a library as a ghost, children who were invisible. Rose claimed that they couldn't recognize us because Shirley was suppressing them, and that we should leave....Suspiciousssssssssss

After exploring the ruins some more, we find Shana, who I had almost forgotten about, that she was the lure to get us here. We give him the Moon Objects in exchange for Shana's life. Rose then says "if you are the true Diaz, then you know what the coming of the Final Species implies?" to which Diaz responds "total destruction"

...We could have guessed this. Lloyd apparently was the only one who hadn't.

Apparently the final species might actually be The Virage. There is a Virage Embryo, which represents the True Virage, which is sealed by the Moon Objects.

Lloyd shows some tepid anger at the fact that he is the biggest idiot in the world apparently, and was fooled by the most obvious plan in the history of the world. Diaz responds with this powerful magic that engulfs Lloyd in flames, and literally smashes him through the platform we are all standing on, high above the rest of the city in this tower, and he plummets to an uncertain fate....though given he is a Wingly, and that Wing is LITERALLY in the name...its not that uncertain....trying to kill things that can fly with fall damage.....true villains....

Then Diaz claims he no longer needs to hide anymore.

Then theres an FMV, of Stereotypical Armored Villain Diaz removing his helmet. We actually get to see the characters in an FMV for the first time, and there is some truly terrible voice acting. It seems the person who has been masquerading as Diaz was Dart's Father all along! And Dart's Father is none other than Zieg!

Dart and Rose are both shocked...while I am like ".....wait...hol up...what?" Not a great twist, since literally nothing foreshadowed it. And last we knew, Zieg died at the hands of the Wingly Dictator. But Zieg claims he will tell us everything.

He starts going over the Soa lore again, explaining that from nothingness, Soa sewed the seed to the Divine Tree, and the fruit it bore was all life on Earth

Gigantos were born from the 97th fruit. And no one cared.

Minintos from the 99th fruit....and I've literally never seen them before....

Dragons from the 105th Fruit...and now we are getting to the interesting stuff

Humans came from the 106th Fruit

Winglys from the 107th Fruit

The Final Fruit was the Virage Embryo.

Zieg believes Soa desired the destruction and regeneration of the world at the hands of the Virage Embryo.

However, 11,000 years ago, Winglys figured out what was going to happen, and sealed the 108th fruit by separating flesh from soul. That Flesh was taken away from the Winglys as the Moon That Never Sets that glows in the Sky. The Soul of the god was captured in what is called The Crystal Sphere, and Melbu Frahma, the Wingly Dictator (Great name by the way) kept it himself.

He apparently used this soul to give himself unlimited magical power Lavos style, and thats what let him conquer the world.

Of course, this didn't last forever, and eventually Humans rebelled, with the power of the Dragoons, and put Frahma in a corner. It was in this moment of victory that Melbu Frahma used a petrification spell on Zieg, and captured him.

After 11,000 years, the spell finally broke, and he was released. Due to the amount of time that had passed, Zieg's time with Rose had felt like an ancient memory, so he moved on in the present, and fathered Dart in the present day.

WE STILL DON'T KNOW HOW ROSE SURVIVED 11,000 YEARS YET, BY THE WAY, I HOPE THIS LITTLE DETAIL COMES UP SOON!!!

Anyway, this story ends with the tragedy in Neet. where the flash back returns to present. AND THIS LITTLE DETAIL IS JUST SORTA LEFT HANGING AS WELL!!

He then explains that at the end of the Campaign, Humans shattered the Crystal Sphere, and released the Soul of the Virage Embryo when they sacked Kadessa. It being free, it could now be born.

It began to wander, to try to find it's body, which exists in the Moon that Never Sets, so that it could be properly born.

Apparently, that soul possesses a human body, and continually tries to find a way to get to the Moon that Never Sets by repeating the "Transmigration" every 108 years... This means the Moon Child is the Soul of the Virage Embryo.

But apparently, there was a Dragoon who found out this fact.

It was HER goal to stop the birth of the Moon Child. By stopping Her own time, she was even called a Demon.....

I. FUCKING. CALLED. IT.

Rose is the Black Monster!!!!

Dart is Stunned....I am not.

Dart is Furious, Rose looks ashamed

Then Zieg uses magic to lift Shana again. And claims he has one more truth to tell. It's probably that Shana is the Moon Child.

You see, when Rose murdered Princess Louvia 18 years ago, what she didn't know...is that she had a TWIN SISTER!!!



SHANA IS THE MOON CHILD!!!!!!!!



Yep.

BUT this sets some interesting interactions in motion, because Dart of course wants Zieg to release Shana and not use her to free the Virage Embryo, to which Zieg responds "what are you gonna do? Kill Shana to stop the God of Destruction, which has Dart super frustrated, and Rose is like "I'll kill her!" and like, is this the heel turn I was expecting!? Do we kill Rose now!? Do we kill Shana!? What the hell do we do!?

OK, this was super predictable, but still decently executed.

Rose leaps to try to kill Shana, but is blocked by some form of magic.

Zieg says "This is the Power of Soa. My hands start the world, and my hands end the world."

Hol up...does that mean...?

Zieg transforms into armor that looks similar to Dart's Dragoon Armor, and flashes away, and everything goes dark, and Dart screaming for Shana. And then it asks if I want to save, meaning this is probably the end of Disk 3.

WWWWWWWWWWHAAAATTTTT?!!? THEY END IT ON THAT!?!!?

Holy shit.

It's interesting, because this game is incredibly basic and rough around the edges, the story is playing on the same Norse tropes every game was playing on some variation of at the time, and it is pretty predictable, but it didn't feed you everything, it gave you breadcrumbs for each of these little story threads, the destruction of Neet, Rose being The Black Monster, Shana being the Moon Child, it gave you bits and pieces of information at a rate that kept you interested without blowing how they were all tied together, and even though Dart technically has no DIRECT tie to the events, he is still what ties it all together. They gave you the broad strokes, and slowly brought it all into focus over time until this point.

But in creating this focal point, it begets even more questions that keep me super intrigued, like now what do we do with Rose? What do we do with Shana? What do we do with Zieg!? And why the hell is Zieg even motivated by this will of Soa, is he possessed by him? Or is he just an insane religious fanatic? And how the hell did Rose stop her aging, and what do we do now!?

I shall start Disk 4 to see what happens next....when the disk finally loads...

The game reloads with a shot of the moon over a desert, and the party, the whole party, including Rose trudging across it. It starts with the useless party members like Haschel, Meru, and Kongol, talking about some Wingly city called Ulara, which apparently Rose told us we need to go to...

The party joins back up with the whole walking into Dart thing they always do when he finally arrives....but Rose takes her time rejoining.....AND ARE WE NOT GONNA TALK ABOUT HER BEING THE BLACK MONSTER NOW!? NO!? OK!

We enter a cave, where Albert begins waxing poetic about the whole situation, wondering if this world has ever ended before, and Dart reminds him that it's not guaranteed to end, not as long as they are here.

it is at this point I realize how late it is. That should be enough for now

Next time I shall wander through the desert, and wonder why the fuck we aren't addressing the elephant in the room.

[Mario the black knight]

So the desert, as it turns out, is a maze. Like it so often is in these games

Eventually, we find an Oasis, as you so often do, and Miranda asks Rose what the Winglys in Ulara are supposed to know that will help us.

Rose is cagey as hell, saying they will know something she needs to know. Not us, her. But Miranda ain't taking any of that shit. FUCKIN GET HER MIRANDA! Man, she just comes in here and shakes this shit up, I love it.

Rose responds to Miranda's lip by saying we only found out a couple of days ago, and now we think we can judge her. Uh? Bitch we knew since like disk 2.

OH!! OHHHHHHH! MIRANDA IS NOT TAKING ROSE'S SHIT TODAY!!!

So she quips about what she is trying to do not being as easy as tracking down a single Wingly, surely in reference to Lloyd, and MIRANDA FUCKING SLAPS HER!! TAKE. NO. SHIT.

Incensed, Miranda responds You say it was "Easy"!?

Albert intervenes, and starts cools the situation down, saying that this won't lead us anywhere.

Dart FINALLY says something here, "That's why... We are going with you"

He's clearly not super pumped about the situation in general, he adds "If you have the strength to argue, we can go on". I'm not sure if he is implying they could continue arguing, or leave her behind, but either way, it's cold.

Everyone then does the awkward "walk into the protagonist" thing, except for Rose again, and Dart asks "There is no other way, is there?", reaching out a hand to her. She says nothing and walks into Dart. Kind of an interesting way to use the game mechanics to do a little storytelling, to show the clear tension between the two, having her be the last one to begrudgingly "follow".

Annnnnd then back into the maze.....

I kinda hate these sorts of sections. Theres nothing really clever about it, it's just like, you turn wrong, you start over, theres no skill, nothing to really figure out. it's just brute force. At least in FFX if you bothered to learn Al Bhed, you can just read the signs.

I do like that they put visible encounters in this area. It makes sense to force the player to move towards the pitfalls, and it allows you to avoid fighting if you want to. It just reaffirms my belief that visible encounters are always better than random encounters.

YESSSSS!! FINALLY FUCKING OUT OF THERE. What a slog.

The Disk 4 World Map music is disappointing compared to Disk 2 and 3. But probably still better than Disk 1.

And finally, we arrive at Ulara, which is clearly some Wingly ruins. It's here that Rose explains how she stopped time for herself. The choker she alluded to way back on Disk 2 is apparently how she stopped time for herself.

She says that the magic in that choker is also what reveals the town. After revealing the town, she asks Dart if he is afraid, to which Dart responds "I think you are." OHHHHHHHHHHH.

Man, it is Burn Rose day, and Rose forgot to mark it on her calendar.

She admits she might be.

Dart says they are standing by her, to which she responds "I know" which is an interesting deescalation. The relationship here is COMPLICATED. But in an interesting sort of way.

We are met at the other side of the teleporter (because Winglys sure love their teleporter tech) by a Wingly who tells us she is a good friend of Rose. Interesting, considering Rose is from the time period where humans were brutally enslaved by Winglys and was right at the front of the Dragon Campaign.

Rose tells her it's been a long time, to which Caron, the Wingly, notices that Rose is starting to recognize the passage of time, and feels that perhaps she has regained many other things.

Dart asks if it was Caron who stopped time for Rose, but Rose responds that it was someone named Charlie Frahma....interesting that this person shares a last name with the old dictator...

Caron then drops this dramatic line "Rose has been carrying the fate of the world all alone while shedding tears of blood. Edgy.

Dart then says he has settled things with the Black Monster, and that all thats left is to complete this journey with his companions. So clearly he and Rose at least somewhat settled things, either in this moment, or at some point between the climax of Disk 3 and now.

We meet a Wingly in a garden of....Piranha Plants from Mario? I dunno. Anyway, Rose asks where Charlie would be, to which the Wingly, named Miata responds Charlie is preparing herself...because well, the things we didn't tell you about. But apparently Zieg told us, which perhaps means they know about our encounter at the ruins.

Rose in a desperate fashion inquires about the Moon Signet, which is one of the things Zieg told us about. Miata explains that the Signet is the Signet Sphere, which is like a last ditch safeguard, incase the Moon Child somehow reached the Moon.

Rose quips that these Winglys are really scary people, to which Miata responds that Zieg is scarier, as at the moment, he is trying to destroy the Signet Sphere, using the Divine Moon Objects.

Dart kind of kicks the logic of this entire system directly in the nuts, and asks why then if they were so set on preventing the birth of the God of Destruction, did they create tools that could destroy the Signet?

Miata just tells us to talk to Charlie about it, since it was decided between the "siblings"

Then, in talking to a random fucking NPC, he just decides to tell us the entire history of the Wingly Leadership. Because you know.....random unnamed NPCs just do that sort of thing in this town apparently.

So there are two leaders, the first is Melbu Frahma, the leader of the Winglys during the Dragon Campaign. He is the younger brother of Charlie.

This, by extension, made him the ruler of the entire world, in this NPC's perspective. Which is interesting, since he is indeed a Wingly and would see it that way.

He goes on: "He professed that only Winglys had the right to live, and he ruled over the other species physically and mentally. As such, the grievances of the other species accumulated and the Dragon Campaign began."

Damn. Usually this translation can be super rough and weird, but sometimes it really nails it.

Melbu fell after the destruction of Kadessa, by Zieg himself, a fact we knew. It's cool that different people refer to the old Wingly capital by different names, like it seems people who are older remember the name Kadessa, while the modern Winglys remember it as ruins basically.

The other leader of the Winglies was Faust, a name that sounds familiar, but I can't remember in this exact moment.

He was feared by other Winglys, and considered a "Wizard", with incredible magic powers. He could even create his own "Apparition", a double.

Melbu was uneasy with the existance of this apparition, so he created something called the Vanishing Stone.

Apparently this stone can make the Apparition disappear.

Faust was in charge of the Flanvel fort, the flying fortress where we faced Lloyd I believe, the one frozen in the glacier.

Apparently this fortress was meant to defend the other flying cities, but Faust used it to destroy the other species.

As we know, it was shot down by that big weapon, referred to here as the "Spear Shooter"....which is hilariously lame. This is where he died. And where this NPC's story ends.

After some further exploring, this game has to remind me of it's ridiculous misogyny.

We come up to a nice little flower garden. Dart comments that Shana would like this. Miranda also seems to like it, to which Haschel remarks "I didn't know you liked flowers Miranda. I guess there is some woman in you."



I hope Miranda slaps the fuck out of him.



Nope. Instead, she says "Roses make her puke." On one side, it feeds into the stereotyping, which I don't like....but also slightly amusing since she just got done slapping the shit out of someone named Rose a little while back.

...

She then says "Do you know why Roses have thorns? It's to bring out their own red using the blood of the people they hurt. They'll do anything for their own happiness."

Really dumb. Like...We JUST had those great lines...WHY game, why do you need to feed me delicious meal, then follow it up with a dessert of shit? Like, WHY!?

I mean, I get it's probably supposed to be some sort of foreshadowing or something, but it's just so clumsy compared to what we JUST got done with.

Anyway, we finally find Charlie. and boy howdy is she....something?

She refers to Rose and Rosie, and Dart as the son of Zieggy.... Not what I was expecting from the older sister of the former dictator of the world. And like....Zieggy was the one who murdered her brother.....so like.....this should be something..

She just calls out the elephant in the room right away, the fact that she is fighting alongside Dart, who is SORTA like her stepson, and is fighting Zieg, who was her fiance.

Rose responds to this by saying "Do you want me to give you a knuckle sandwich", spoken like an 11 year old, not an 11,000 year old.....

This game man....SO hit or miss.

She just makes clear that she is just trying to lighten an otherwise grim situation

She then tells us shes been waiting for us, so she could tell us everything.

It must be noted that she is in a Princess Peach-esque dress.....It's like we've been teleported to the Mushroom Kingdom....it's so strange.

She explains the Signet Sphere again, and it's purpose.

Apparently, the Signet Sphere is not a single object, but each sphere used to exist in one of the floating cities mentioned before. However, only 3 of those signets remain. These correspond with the 3 Moon Objects.

Of the 2 that were destroyed, one was wrecked during the destruction of Kadessa, while the other was destroyed by the Divine Dragon when he attacked the Crystal Palace, meaning there were 4 until recently.

Charlie muses about how Zieg could possibly even know about the Signet Sphere and Rose furthers this, wondering how he knew Shana was the Moon Child. I would speculate by not being an idiot. Though, clearly he's known since before we started our journey, so he didn't need to see the obvious foreshadowing to figure it out.

In reference to the Moon that Never Sets, she says that it is infact the 108th fruit dropped by the tree, which we already knew. She then reiterates the events Zieg told us about how the Crystal was broken, and how the Moon Child is born. And then she reminds us of "Rosie's important task", which it seems Dart is...surprisingly OK with?

Dart then asks about his father, and why he wants to destroy the world, the one thing we all are dying to know, and would otherwise not be repeat information, and....she has no idea.

Then this line made me laugh out loud, in reference to Rose and Zieg, "They crossed both swords and love, just looking at them made me feel embarrassed." What a weird, ridiculous, hilarious line.

Rose obviously puts a quick stop to this.

After all this, we were able to ask about why in the blue hell they made items to break the Signet.

She says that she didn't want it to be possible, but Melbu insisted.

Rose does not accept this explanation.

She explains further that the whole reason for capturing the soul of the Virage Embryo was to do the whole Lavos thing and syphon magical power from the soul and allow the Winglys to rule the world.

Charlie didn't want Melbu to be a dictator, as Charlie has a more chilled out perspective than Melbu did obviously.

Apparently, Charlie created the Signet Sphere in order to weaken the magical power of the Crystal Sphere.

While the Signets helped protect the Moon that Never Sets, they also restrained the magical power flowing from the Moon to the Crystal Sphere.

Of course, Melbu found out, and wasn't happy about it, and created the Divine Moon Objects to be able to destroy the Signets, he apparently just never did.

OK, that is a good explanation, it doesn't feel hand wave-y, the logic for it all is there.

Next we ask where the remaining Signet Spheres ended up.

She tells us that the three spheres are located in the ancient cities, The Magical City Aglis, the Law City Zenebatos, and Death City Mayfil, that hell city the spirit person told us about before we met Zieg.

Rose is surprised to find out the cities are still alive.

They were damaged during the war, but still exist

Dart then asks how we get to them, to which Charlie vaguely responds "Go to Rouge. Then your way will be open."

Haschel then wakes up and realizes he hasn't done anything relevant to the story since like Disk 2, so he exclaims "Rouge!? Thats my hometown!" telling us we may actually tie off that loose end of Haschel's daughter PROBABLY being Dart's mom.

Charlie then tells us it will be night soon, so we can continue to look around the city until tomorrow.

We cut to control again, with Rose talking privately with Charlie, both telling us to go outside.

We get to the strange Super Mario garden, and Dart says to himself "Now our way is opened. Shana, I'll be there soon." OOOOHHHHH SHIIT, MAYBE SOMEBODY DIDN"T QUITE MAKE PEACE WITH MS. BLACK MONSTER!!!

Just then, this creepy music plays, and Rose walks up behind Dart. It's finally just them!!

OHHHHH SHIIIITTT!! THIS FUCKIN GAME!!!

Rose FINALLY just comes right out and asks "Your really Forgive..."

Dart replies "Don't say anything. It's, already in the past" with the most awkward comma in the world.

We then cut to black, and Dart saying "Take your sword."

WWWWWWHAT!?

We then cut to a scene in the dessert at night. It's unclear whether this is a flashback or present day. Rose and Dart are dueling, but the music is still creep and calm.

Rose comments on how strong Dart has become, and says he can take care of himself.

She puts her sword away. And asks Dart to kill her. WHAT!?!!?!

He holds the sword up to her for a second.....then puts it away.

Rose, looking stunned, asks why.

Dart claims that The Black Monster is dead now.

He says they only have a companion who is on the same road now.

We cut back to the garden, clearly this was a flashback.

Rose tells us that she misses the time when Dart was being chased by Feyrbrand in the forest, the scene from the opening segment of the game, which feels so long ago now.

Dart, despite having nearly been eaten by a dragon, agrees.

Dart laments that he knew nothing back then, and that the world is so frail.

Rose says the world is created so that it can perish at any time, The creator Soa can recreate one at any time. And that the people living in that world can either accept that fate, or struggle against it.

SEE!?! This shit right here, back and forth between this really poetic musing, and shitty lines like "Do you want me to give you a knuckle sandwich?" THE SAME PERSON DELIVERED BOTH OF THOSE LINES!!

Anyway, Rose claims that she stuggled in order to protect this world which was taken back by friends who gave up their lives.

Dart tells Rose that she is no longer alone. He tells us we need to go see everybody, and that this is only the beginning. Ominous.

We go to the rest space to find Miranda and Haschel talking. She is still going on about roses...

Shes says everything she said before was untrue, and that the truth is that she sees her mother in roses. Well, thats something to come back to.

She goes on about how her mother never looked at her directly, as if she was hiding something. PROBABLY the fact that she missed your sister Shana.

Oh.

"And she beat me up."

Oh.... Uhh...just goin there then, huh? YEESH...

She says she always remembered that there were roses behind her mother when she was beating her.

Well FUCK. Just get heavy like that out of nowhere. I'm just tryin to use the teleporter here.

I had also forgotten that Miranda was adopted, so the mother that beat her wasn't the queen, it was someone else. The fact that this is coming up tells me this is going to matter soon...

Haschel asks why her mother left, and Miranda gets cagey again, and changes the subject.

Now, I'm gonna go out on a bit of a limb here. I think Miranda is going to end up being Dart's sister, and Claire is going to end up being her mother, and we are gonna find out Claire was a great big terrible bitch and we're gonna have to kill her. Like whatever made Zieg crazy made her crazy too, and then when she had Miranda, this stuff happened.

We'll see, but I've had a pretty good track record so far.

Haschel says Miranda's story reminds him of his past. To which Miranda responds "About your runaway daughter, right?"



Haschel then speaks directly to me when he says "You are so sharp that it hurts."

Dart and Rose then show up, and they all chat for a bit, with Rose wanting to talk to Miranda, perhaps to smooth things over a bit. But we don't see any of it.

Of course, now it is much later than I anticipated it would be, because we just got a HUGE info dump after that awful desert section, so I'm just gonna save and find the rest of the party next time.

Next time, we go to Rouge, and probably find out about Dart's mom, and possibly Miranda's?