Part 45: Part Forty-Five: One-Job Town

Part Forty-Five: One-Job Town


After I deal with Odin, my next stop is the Invincible again.


Because this game is weird with equipment lists, the White/Black Robes are the best equipment for magic users, so I grab a Black Robe for Golbez.


Here's how his stats are looking. Except for his Intellect, it's pretty grim here. In the original, the upgraded mages usually had pretty solid stats, but that got excised for the remake. Just to compare, in the original, Golbez would have had about 48 Agility (before equipment bonuses) here.


Anyway, the next thing I do is get back in the Nautilus like a stupid jackass.


See, this is the place where we're going, and the Nautilus can't get there. So that's no good to me, is it?


That lake is way back on the Floating Continent, by the way. There are two places on it that we've not visited yet; we'll be getting to both in the next little while.


First, though, I remembered this cozy little mountain village.


Falgabard! We saw this place mentioned by one of the dying Dark Knights in the Cave of Shadows.


See, Falgabard is the Dark Knight town.


It's similar in purpose to Replito or Duster, meant to give you a chance to set up the class. If I were running a Dark Knight for it, I would have come here before the Cave of Shadows.

I am not, so I didn't, so here we are now, after it's stopped being relevant!


The Masamune has made an appearance in every main Final Fantasy game except Final Fantasy XIII!


This dude over here tells us about Ninjas. Ninjas are okay, but I'm not really falling over myself to use one - they've definitely been downgraded from the NES version.


This is false.


This is also false.


This is not false, but it's something you should already know by now.


Here's the real reason to go to Falgabard: there are a couple little areas to explore, and they both have some decent Dark Knight equipment.


Or, uh, this Blessed Hammer, which is a totally reasonable find.


Why did the designers feel the need to make so many basic passages hidden? I don't understand the prevalence in this game, it rarely adds anything to the design or the gameplay.


There are enemies in this cave, but we've dealt with them before and they're no threat.



Demon Mail is a high-tier piece of armour for Dark Knights. They're honestly one of the better jobs in the game, and I only passed one over because Kuja had a solid stack of job levels in Dragoon. Besides, she can equip this too.


While I'm pissing around, I summoned Ifrit on some trash.

Ifrit's usual attack, Hellfire, is actually his Black Summon in this version of the game.





It's good! Golbez, unfortunately, suffers from the problem all mages do in this game, and his spells won't get a whole lot better than this, so he'll quickly fall behind physical attackers. This is because physical attackers get more and more hits as they gain job levels - each hit on its own is much weaker than a caster's, but once you get higher numbers, the damage stacks up quick.



But I digress. These are the last two treasures in the cave. I grab them and then turn around to head out.


While we're here, let's look at the last elemental summon, Titan.





It's exactly the same as the others, except with earth damage! Yay! Also, Titan the boss is some elf-looking motherfucker while Titan the summon is a buff gigas. The summon is more intimidating, I think.


Fun fact about Falgabard: you can't go in the houses!



But you can go in the waterfall!


And in the water! Which is very clean.




If you go follow the river around, you can find this rock!





And these treasures! I don't know why there are two Blessed Hammers in Falgabard, and the Hi-Potion doesn't really seem thematically appropriate either, but ehh, what'cha gonna do?


Back to the waterfall cave!


There's an old man here.


An old man who wants to fight!


Wasn't there a guy outside who implied that ninjas were, like, extinct? This old man must be really good at hiding things.


Oh, nevermind, he's just a Shinobi. Ninja status: still extinct?


Shinobi is a tough guy, but he only has physical attacks.


And 11,000 HP. This isn't a boss, it's just a regular enemy from a later dungeon fought a bit early.


After taking off most of Shinobi's HP in one turn, I decided to throw Zantetsuken at it to see if it's immune to instant death.




Results: inconclusive. Odin misses a lot anyway, so it's not really worth summoning him ever. As a Summoner, anyway.




Killing a shitty old man ninja isn't an issue.



And the reward is something we already have! I'm so excited I'm worried I won't be able to keep my pants clean!


Falgabard is really a lot more useful if you come here before the Cave of Shadows.


Personally, I've always found the idea of the Dark Knight interesting - they're powerful warriors, but burn through their own life to make use of that power. None of the games have been totally clear on what exactly this means; do these guys die really quickly or does the Souleater ability just literally eat the user's soul? What would that mean if it did?


The presence of stuff like "Demon Mail" being frequently attached to the class means that maybe their powers come from infernal sources, but you can't be sure. The next game in the series has a Dark Knight as its main character, of course, but it never really goes into what makes being a Dark Knight specifically different than any other knight, which is kind of a disappointment.

(This is the Falgabard armour shop, by the way.)


In the weapon shop, they sell a bow that only Rangers can use and an axe that only Warriors can use. Neither one is a top-tier class, so I don't know why they get support this far into the game.


One last thing to show off is that Kuja has already gone beyond the Demon equipment I could have picked up here, so this trip was really completely pointless!

We're done here!

Mognet


Ah, it looks like it's folklore time with Alus! Isn't that fun?