Part 8: Part Eight: Incredible Drama

Part Eight: Incredible Drama

Last time, we lifted the Djinn's curse, but when we went back to Kazus, Kuja's dad took her away from us.


Oh well, guess I just have to beat the game with three characters. Let's talk to Cid.


Yup, there we are. About to talk to Cid.

: Good work! I knew you'd pull it off the moment I saw you! I'm guessing you can make better use of my airship than I can myself!

Yeah right. If there's anything I've learned from these games, it's that I'm going to have to walk to half the places I want to go. If the airship's not wrecked in twenty minutes, I'll have to park it to go through a cave that leaves me stranded halfway across the world.

: But first, I want you to take me back to Canaan. Mrs. Cid's been waiting a mighty long time for me to come back!

Sure, whatever.


Cid's in our party now. Like Princess Sara, he has two battle actions. His first action is that he can hit one enemy with his hammer. I'll show it off later. His second action is casting Fire, and just like with Sara, I'll be the Pope before I get him to actually do it.


One thing I can do reliably is get Cid to talk to me. He only has one scene here.

: She was...but her dad took her back home.
: Huh. At least it's good to know she's safe and sound.
: But that's no good! She was supposed to come with us on our journey!

Jecht is the only person who's really worried about Kuja just leaving the Light Warriors to go home. But can we really be surprised about that? It's not like she's known for her commitment to her work.


Anyway, there's only one place to take Cid right now.


I guess Cid and Takka are pretty familiar with each other. I don't think Cid was hanging around Kazus for much longer than a couple days, but maybe he makes frequent trips up here or something.

: Yeah, I hear ya. Say, Takka, we were thinking of busting that rock in Nelv with the airship... But I reckon we'd need a mythril ram on the ship's bow. Think you can hack one together?


Takka ponders Cid's request a moment.

Takka: A mythril ram, eh...? Sounds feasible... Wait here, and I'll smith you one in no time!



Takka heads off to start work on the ram. I don't think Kuja is very happy about being roped into this.


Time passes while the two are off smithing stuff or whatever. I didn't think I actually took a shot of the completely black screen used to show that, but hey, what do you know?



: Sterling handiwork as always, Takka. And fast, too. Let's set 'er up and bust some boulders!

Looking at screens for this, it amuses me that the entire party is in them, just standing around and watching Cid and Takka talk.


If I talk to Takka now, this is all he has to say. You know what I don't see here? His daughter. For someone who was fretting and weeping about losing her last update, he's surprisingly nonchalant about her now.


But you know whose problem that is now? Someone else's. I have a rock to bust.


Oh, look who it is! Just hangin' out on my airship again, huh?

: Wha--? But I thought... Shouldn't you be...?

Just want to remind you: Kuja wasn't hanging around with Takka. Where did they think she went?

: We all promised the crystal we'd go on our journey. And...I don't want to be a smith just yet.

I don't think that excuse would fly with your dad. "I can't learn how to hammer metals, I told the crystal I had to go hang out with my friends."


Look out guys, it's time for a big plot twist!

: Wait...you're an orphan, too?
: "Too"? You mean--




THEY'RE ALL ORPHANS! WOW!

: It can't be a coincidence...the crystal must have known!

This would be a hell of a way to find out you're adopted. Also, why orphans, crystal? Did you think that no one would be sad when they died?


Cid's more concerned with that rock than the dramabomb. He's old, he's already seen the old "we're all orphans with a destiny" thing a dozen times.


He also has a new scene available.

: Now let's go show that rock in Nelv who's boss, eh?


Before I actually move the plot on, I have to go back to Kazus for a few things. The first is to talk to this moogle.


See, moogles are access points for this game's "online" component, Mognet.


What Mognet lets you do is send mail to other people, either real people who own Final Fantasy III and have exchanged friend codes with you, or various people in the game.



As you can see here, I have nothing in my inbox right now. For most people, that's how it's likely to stay. I'll explain that in a second, here.


Before I leave, I send a letter to Topapa.


Now, you can only send one piece of mail per hour. Well, it's two, technically - one to someone in real life and one to someone in the game - but only one of those is ever going to be useful. For a given value of "useful", anyway.

In a game with a few questionable features, Mognet is pretty much astarter. I think it's likely that most people never saw the content you could unlock with it, and the content is pretty useless most of the time, anyway.

The reason that most people never see that stuff is that you need to send seven pieces of mail to real people in order to unlock the in-game content, and then there are six people to send mail to, each one requiring at least four messages sent to unlock their sidequest (a couple require five messages), which means you end up sending just over 24 messages. Even if you don't forget about Mognet and you take every opportunity to fire off a letter, you're probably going to have to go out of your way to make return trips to moogles after dungeons or remember to turn on the DS every so often just to do another piece of mail, not to mention the fact that it was difficult to find another friend code when the game was new, so you can pretty much forget about doing it now.

I'll be showing off the content, in the name of completion. Not all of it, probably, because I don't feel like doing the grinding that would require, but the major non-grindy stuff.

It's also worth mentioning that Mognet has been removed from this game's more recent iOS and PSP re-releases.



Mognet aside, you can also pop back by Takka's place to get this line. He's really chilled out since he put that ram on the airship.


Now, on to the main attraction in Kazus, the Mythril Mines.


This place has a couple of treasures, but you have to deal with the same enemies you saw in the Sealed Cave to get at them.


We've lost our job levels, so our damage took a hit, but I can still deal with these guys pretty well. They're definitely not the threat they were when I first came to Kazus.




At the end of a fairly linear hallway is find the secret passage the guy at the bar told us about. I don't know why anyone would bother hiding the second floor of a mine. It's not even like there are only monsters on the second level or anything, either, it's just there to slow you down for five seconds.



This is why I came here. Two mythril swords will give Kuja a very nice boost to her attack. Now I can one-shot random encounters even more than I could before.



Oh, and this is Cid's hammer attack. It's just like a regular physical attack from one of our characters, but Cid's doing it instead!




Also available in Kazus: shopping. I update everyone's weapons (except Jecht's, there's nothing for White Mages here) and armour to mythril stuff.


I also pick up a bunch of consumables. Since I bought 12 Potions here, the game's bulk discount system kicked in. To buy Potions individually, or in small numbers (less than 4, I think) costs 50 gil for a Potion, but once you pass 5, there's a small price break, so when I buy 12, I'm only paying for a little more than 11. It's a nice little thing, but generally not much of a consideration.


Now, let's deal with this rock.


I ram the ship into it...


...and both the rock and the airship explode violently!


Everybody dies, game's over. Hope you had fun.


Nah, these kids (and Cid) are incredibly resilient.


Just a sky explosion and the fall that came after, no big deal.

Now we have to walk everywhere, though.


Oh, and we get Cid's third (and final) scene now that the ship's dust.

: ...It's weird. I feel as if we've done this before.
: Did you hit your head or something? We'd never even seen an airship until we met Cid.

Hah, yeah, Sephy probably has brain damage now. If the fall at the start of the game didn't do it, that one certainly would have knocked some stuff lose.


Now that we're earthbound, things are a lot slower, but thankfully, our destination is only a short distance from where we started out.



Walking into town immediately triggers this scene. If Cid's happy, we must be in Canaan.

: I know! You'd probably want to get your hands on a new airship--well, I'm the man for the job!

Great! I'd like one new airship, please.

: But you'll have to meet King Argus, first. See, I only made the airship's hull. The king's the one who knows the secret of creating airship engines.

There's always a catch, isn't there? And besides, didn't Kuja say that she and Takka made the parts for the airship? Was that a lie? Is her whole party membership based on lies?

Kuja how could you do this to me?

: Come see me again once you've spoken with King Argus!



And now it's just the four of us again.


Next time: Canaan!