Part 7: Page 7

We march on Exdeath Castle.

Where I encounter...



Or is it a dead end after all??

Apparently instead of Exdeath getting smart and just walling himself in, it turns out it's actually an illusion, and Cara calls upon the powers that be to dispel it.

Like, say, Kelgar, the last remaining Warrior of Dawn.

Who apparently isn't doing too well.

Hey, don't go dying on me just yet!

Galuf's ghost shows up to make sure Kelgar sacrifices himself for something instead of just dying for the sake of dying. I mean, how anticlimactic would it be for him to just be like "agck I'm dead" and that's it?


Everyone's power reveals the true nature of Exdeath's castle, and oh fuck it's gross! Aw man! The walls are stomachs, man! Fuck!
(not shown: staircase)


I walk through the place, picking up treasures and getting into easy random encounters. I make sure to catch four of these Magic Dragons. You'll see

I also find this loser

Carbunkle, or whatever. Summon monster, reflects magic, is lame. Strategy? I just hit him with X-Fight four times and he was dead. LAME


However I have no beef with multi-target Reflect.

Hey, a treasure chest in the middle of a big empty room.

Huh. It's empty. That's odd. Okay, I'll just keep g


Gilgamesh! I guess we have to fight. Again. Fine

We kind of halfheartedly exchange blows over idle conversation.

Aw, how cute, we're rivals.


Oh... well, uhm... that sucks.


Gilgamesh powers up!!! Normally I'd roll my eyes at him, but holy crap, he has eight arms. And each one of those arms has a different weapon in it.


And one of those weapons is the legendary Excalibur?! Shit, even a scrub like Gilgamesh could fuck somebody up with the Excalibur!


And its mighty power does all of 25 damage to me. Keep in mind Gilgamesh was doing about 500 damage before wielding its awesome power. He continues to ineffectually hit me for a while, until the big man shows up.

No, not Clarence Clemmons, Exdeath.



Gilgamesh is banished, and he leaves behind the mighty Excailbur!

Yes, I typed that correctly. This legneardy sorwd apparently boasts a weapon power of 100, but whenever you hit someone with it, it does exactly 1 damage. There's a reason for this, and it's that all weapons actually have two power stats. The first one is hidden and used for regular attacks, and the second one is the one shown on the equipment screen and used only for Throw and Goblin Punch. In most cases, the two are the same, but the Excailbur is an exception. As such, it's worthless for physical attacking, but it does have two rather odd uses: the first and most popular option is to Throw it for really high damage, but the second and sneakier option is to equip it and use Goblin Punch. The Excailbur's 100 Throw/Goblin Punch attack power is the highest you have access to at this point, and paired with the Drain Sword (with 84 attack power) you can do around 3132 damage with one Goblin Punch. Slightly less than a typical X-Fight, but there's the huge boost to damage if your level is equal to your opponent's, and it lets me use all the other Blue Magic spells.

So I go through a few rooms and find the big man again.

Fuck if I care, I'm interfering anyway. So I guess this means THROW DOWN


Exdeath is a rather nasty fellow. He's got a bunch of really powerful attacks and a lot of hit points, and he's immune to all status effects and all forms of instant death. So basically the fight boils down to hammering him with my most powerful attacks while being sure to keep everyone healed, correct?

Ah, not really.

See, these Magic Dragon fellows, when caught and released, use a little attack called Flame. Flame, as well as Thunder and Breath Wing (and Surge Beam, but that's enemy only), takes off 25% of the target's maximum HP, up to a maximum of 9999 damage. Which basically means that four of these will kill anybody with less than 39997 HP. Exdeath, as it turns out, has 32768 HP.




So Exdeath is dead, mission accomplished!

So I defeat the evil warlord to rescue the crystals and the first thing they do is explode? Way to go, crystals.

Everyone gets knocked out, fade to black.

The party wakes up, presumably out of Galuf's world and back to their own. Except the landscape has changed and I can't really go anywhere but Tycoon Castle. Fine.


Apparently we were gone for a while. I go to talk to the Chancellor.


They talk about how the king is dead but they're back so let's party whooo!


It turns out Faris is really really hot, which is too bad because it seems like most of the time she's dressed like a guy. Anyway, the party starts, there's dancing and whatnot.


And these asshole dancers stop me from getting to Lenna or Faris. What the hell, man!

Cara steps outside for a premonition.

So they decide to ditch the party. I mean, come on, they don't even have punch and cake.


They also decide to ditch Lenna and Faris, because Butz just can't get by those slow dancers fast enough!!


As they're about to leave, they receive word that a bridge has been completed, which would allow them to get back to the pirate's cove and check up on Boco.


So they find Boco and apparently Cara can speak with chocobos and he has a wife and they have a baby and fuck it I'm not uploading like ten screenshots of this stupid bullshit!

I head out with Boco who can cross rivers and shit until I reach a canyon.

Butz is so manly.


I'm attacked by this guy, Antlion, who's fucking lame. It turns out he can be put to sleep, so I have Butz cast Sleep Sword and use X-Fight until he dies. Waste of my time.


So they're stuck in this hole, but some mysterious stranger offers them a rope, except whoever it is keeps pulling it back before they can grab it.


No! Never! Being a hero means never having to say you're sorry! Whatever I did I was only doing it to save the world!


So it was Faris and everything is happy yay


Eh? What the... why do you find this worth wasting my valuable time?

So I find a cave, and in the cave I find

Oh, Guido! Hahahaha!

Okay, seriously though, the world is in PERIL

So the two worlds were one, eh? How... interesting.


Lenna communicates with us beyond time and space through the Cleft of Dimensions. Whoops! Looks like somebody forgot she wasn't supposed to be here! Just goes to show how interchangeable the characters are in conversations like these.


So it turns out Cara's splinter was an evil demonic entity bent on destroying the world, so it dislodged from her foot and grew to five times its ordinary size and took the form of a douchebag.


Exdeath shows off the power of the Void by transforming Tycoon Castle into a giant black octagon! :ultramon:


Yadda yadda yadda

TURTLE POWER

So Guido and Exdeath get into an awesome super saiyan power duel!!


Until Exdeath gets fucking cheap and blasts everybody to another continent. Foul! Foul!!


Guido recognizes the Ancient Library and decides to head there because they have a book we need. So we're going to defeat Exdeath with a book? Yeah, sure, guy.


When we get there, apparently the two crazy books that nobody could read (which I kind of glossed over because fuck it nobody cares) were combined into one really crazy book that's gonna kill Exdeath with its bare hands!

Meeting!

Legendary weapons?


So this book tells us about weapons and seals and tablets, and also about crap like Flare, Holy, Meteo, Leviathan, and Bahamut. Great.


We start off by heading to the pyramid in the middle of the Quicksand Desert (which I think was there before but I never really saw it) to get the first tablet.