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.
Holy Chocobo! We’re in the home stretch of FFV! Let’s pause a moment to ogle the closing FMV from the PS1 version.
It’s a fine recap of some exciting moments in the game: pyromaniac Exdeath setting the Moogle forest on fire around the Guardian Tree, Galuf’s attack on Castle Exdeath thwarted by the barrier and his friends showing up to spoil everything, Krile on her trusty dragon seeking the perpetually lost party, Faris losing her beloved Syldra the Sea Dragon all the way back on Disc One, the shade (?) of King Tycoon playing hide-and-seek with us, the Lonka/Ronka ruins flying up into the sky, and a couple endgame battles we still have to look forward to (or flee, if we have any sense).
Symbolism ahoy! I’ve totally lost track of which crystal / element / attribute goes with what in this FF installment, and I don’t know why I care, but I’m puzzling over them, particularly hope = fertility? I also marvel at how quickly graphics look dated, and how awesome Faris and Lenna look in trenchcoat and court attire with matching katanas.
All right! Sidequests before saving the world.
We have acquired the legendary airship, the Lunar Whale! All aboard for our voyage of discovery!
Exploring our shiny new airship, we find… we find…
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
Before we finish off Final Fantasy III’s endgame, here’s a rare video: the original Japanese FFIII.
Note that whoever did this somehow replaced Luneth’s sprite with one of the Four Old Men sprites, and a couple battle sprites are scrambled. Nevertheless, it shows the NPC storylines are all here, except for the individual friendships with particular party members.
As with Final Fantasy I, it seems that original FFIII presented the party as a blank slate upon which we could project our own character development, dialog and proficiencies, while the world and NPCs were at least somewhat fleshed out. Again, this mimics old tabletop RPGs and D&D, in which the game master provided the story, world, and npcs, while the players were in charge of their characters’ histories and development.
We’ve gotten so accustomed to games that create the player characters for us that we’ve quite forgotten the original strong distinction between PCs and NPCs.
Now, back to our playthrough of Final Fantasy III and the grand finale.