At long last, I’ve got all my party members together, and it’s time to take on Joker the Evil Clown!
But wait! Since a major portion of this game is devoted to rounding up and then re-rounding up a cast of fourteen, let’s get some sound bites from our assembled war band! I’ll be slipping in some wrap-up game commentary and character analysis; I hope I don’t bore you.
Whew! I got bogged down rounding up all my scattered party members — seriously, we just lived through the end of the world and everything, but did they have to be difficult and run off and join weird cults and get themselves lost on mountaintops, in the depths of monster-infested catacombs and so on? — so this playthrough is once again tardy.
Hey, it wasn’t that long since my last post.
So, last time in my Let’s Play Final Fantasy VI, the world went to Hades in a haversack. Miraculously, the crustal ruptures we saw in that exciting end-of-the-world cutscene did not result in Siberia-sized lava outpourings, a planetwide blanket of sulfuric acid fog/rain, or other Permian-Extinction-style armageddon. (Geology porn… bookmark for later!)
Instead, as this is Final Fantasy, Celes awakens in a blasted world that’s creepy and sad and fragmented. FFXIII-2 riffed on this trope again 17 years later, and the music from its Dying World fits nicely:
Yeap, it really is that bad.
Last time on “Let’s Play Final Fantasy VI,” Emperor Gestahl, baby snatcher, ravager of towns, enslaver of Espers, told us that, “After all I have put them [the Espers] through, it is up to me to set things right. That is why… I need to borrow Terra’s power.” So he’s asked us to take him to the Espers to apologize.
This screencap is boring, apart from the unusual combination of lobster and sushi rolls and roast turkey, but I just want to stress that he said we.
Because…well, you’ll see shortly.
And we’re off! We head to the southern continent (map) to infiltrate the Magitek Research Facility in Vector, capital of the must-be-evil-since-it-has-no-name Empire.
Our goal is to rescue the Espers who are being drained of their power as fuel for Magitek.
I love seeing how Final Fantasy rings changes on its ever-accruing mythology from game to game. The draining-Espers idea evolved from Cid’s innocent mistake in FFV, in which the machines he created to amplify and collect power from the Four Crystals of Light inadvertently damaged them. FFVI fuses the concept of crystals, which existed right from the start of Final Fantasy, with the separate FF concept of summons, originally a job class ability like geomancy. We’ll see beings turning to crystal again in FFXIII’s L’Cie, while ShinraCorp, Odine Enterprises and Draklor are all spiritual successors of FFVI’s Esper-juicing factory.
Before I jump in with the next segment of the walkthrough, I need to back up and reiterate something that commenter inked_compass observed about the last scene, when our scattered party reunites in Narshe: “More of the Returners talking about Terra rather than to her. Good job guys.”
It’s also true of Celes. Locke bursts in to report that Celes told him there’s an Imperial army marching on Narshe. Celes doesn’t say a word then or when Locke, Cyan and Edgar argue over whether she’s an Imperial spy:
The ex-general’s silence raises an intriguing question: Has she joined the Returners? All she’s said in-game is that she is, or was, General Celes, now “nothing but a traitor.” Those could be the words of a loyal soldier smitten with shame or sorrow at having been cast out. And Locke strikes me as the sort to assume the best of people.
Whatever Celes is thinking, I hope to see her and Terra speak up for themselves and display more autonomy soon.