Part 55: Part Fifty-Five: World of Darkness I

Part Fifty-Five: World of Darkness I


Finally, the World of Darkness, AKA the extremely good shit in this amazing game.

Oh, and here's a new tune for y'all:






From the central platform, there are four pathways, each one leading to a teleporter.



On the other side of each teleporter is a path that leads to, I'll spoil it right now, a boss.


Enemies: yeah, there are some, like Kage here. Like in the Crystal Tower, they have quite a bit of HP and can hit fairly hard, but they're nothing special as far as tactics go. The biggest hazard is running out of MP to heal, so keep some Elixirs on hand.


There are only four treasure chests in this dungeon.


Every one of the chests contains a Ribbon, and every one is a trap.


When you open the Ribbon chests, you fight a clone of Xande.



They're mini-bosses, and they basically do all the same stuff the real Xande did.


However, they "only" have 39,000 HP.


I didn't use Jump in this fight, and it got Kuja killed.



Anyway, Xande's Clone is a boring enemy and I hate fighting it. At least Ribbons are useful.


If you play this game, you definitely want four Ribbons. They make a big difference in an upcoming fight. Just remember to equip them!


Also remember to heal. If you die here, you have to do the entire Crystal Tower over (unless you're using save states) and that's a huge pain in the ass.




Teleport! Whee!


Here's what the end of every path looks like.



And here's a crystal telling us to fuck off. What's a crystal doing here? We'll find out later.


Right after we deal with the boss, Cerberus.


In the boss fights here, I tend to have Jecht cast Protect in the first round, since being conservative in strategy pays off by you not having to do the tower again. The kids can hold up to bosses in a war of attrition if you're diligent about healing, so it's not the end of the world if you have to dig in and just chip away.


All the World of Darkness bosses have 99,999 HP. It's a big heap, and in the original, they had way, way less (between 23 and 35 thousand).




Cerberus gets three turns per round, and he's tough - probably the toughest of the bosses, and I shouldn't have fought him first. Oh well.


This is why you don't come in here with only 2,000 HP.


Oh, and it happens repeatedly throughout the fight. There are four bosses here, I'm just showing the highlights. Assume the basic strategy of Attack-Curaga-Jump-Bahamut between whatever I mention and you've pretty much got it.


Jump, by the way, is really good once you start getting endgame levels and stuff. Can't recommend Jump enough, it's great. Jump.


Not great: death.


Kuja doesn't manage to make it back before I put this puppy down for good.


Whole bunch of gil we don't need, of course.


The EXP is ehh, of course. I wish every boss would just give you a level, it would make the game better, I think.



And after the fight...it's time for a scene! Hooray!


Here we have one of our counterparts from the last time shit went pear-shaped. Has he just been here for the last thousand years? Is that what you get for saving the world?


Oh, by the way, he has a bunch of stuff to tell us.

Warrior of Darkness: If light and darkness come into contact...they cancel each other out, and nothing is left where they meet... That is the Void. The universe began with the Void, and will return to the Void.

I think this sort of shows up in Final Fantasy V, too, the idea of everything coming from and returning to the Void. It's kind of like entropy, I guess, not necessarily a bad thing, just something that has to happen on a long enough timeline.


Wait, no, of course it's bad, and the solution is hope. I guess I'm wrong, and also dumb.

Warrior of Darkness: In time, the Void will consume the world...but now is not the time!

Okay, wait, I am right, the Void does exist as an entropic state, but hope exists as adding energy to the system, delaying the collapse into nothingness, basically.

Warrior of Darkness: As long as there is hope in the world of light...and here, in the world of darkness. For as long as hope prevails, the Void shall be kept at bay!

You motherfucker. As soon as I work out what's inevitable and what isn't, the game turns it all around. Now we have the Void, which everything is going towards, but that's held back by hope, which slows down the eventual end but can't stop it, and then light and darkness meet to create the Void, but light and darkness both existed in the kids' world, kept in balance by the crystals until Xande threatened to flood the world with darkness, but actually the kids live in the world of light and there's a whole other world of darkness and four people from there came to stop the flood of light, which also affected the kids' world, and at some point someone stopped time for ten years or maybe a thousand and darkness flooded the world but the kids are the warriors of light to stop darkness from flooding the world????????