I have a lot to say about Week 3
One thing I found amusing about ăźă«ăăŒăis that he automatically hightails it out of the battle once his health gets low enough, but then immediately pops back in when itâs time to celebrate the victory.
âI helpeeed!â
At least itâs useful for passively getting exp.
I have a vague memory of getting stunlocked during a fight this way when I played the game for the first time, because he was the only member still technically alive but since he was hiding I couldnât give any commands⊠(Or I probably made him get out of hiding and he immediately got wrecked understandably)
But reading through the wiki says the command canât be used if everyone else is KOâs so I wonder if I remember wrong.
However, if he automatically hid away by being in critical status and THEN the last alive party member gets KOâs, would he automatically pop out of hiding? I remember something weird happening with him but itâs been decades and I canât find anything online, just challenge runs of completing the game only with him.
Also, amusingly, I discovered a bug that afflicts him in the GBA port thatâs been dubbed the âPsycho Edward bugâ
âThe GBA ports include a bug in which Edward can be both hiding and afflicted with Berserk, allowing him to continue attacking while near invincible until everyone else in the party is knocked out, which removes Edwardâs Hide status.â
Playing the games in order side by side really emphasizes the little upgrades game by games.
We went from mute characters getting spoon-fed the next spot where plot happens on the map by NPC to having scenes with characters interacting and clashing. Our party is not a uniform group where everybody has the same opinions.
Little things like Rydia casting Fire to help the group even despite her trauma to ăźă«ăăŒă kinda pulling out the " I am nobility and obviously would know the king of a neighbouring country" card to vouch for the party and get the king of Fabul to trust Cecil⊠Itâs fun!
(Also, incidentally, ăźă«ăăŒăcalled himself çć, shouldnât he be the king now? Granted, I can totally understand the implications that is whole family is dead wouldnât have sunk in yet⊠Poor guy, I feel bad for him. His songs still didnât hit once for me playing through this part though)
Did you see the dancer in Fabul this week? Great moves, my favourite is still Week 2âs dancer for now.
The return to Mysidia is great as is the reaction of the people, you wake up alone, wander into this town and you have this little moment of recognition going âaw shit, of all places to happen uponâ.
I too got really close of having to do Cecilâs big character moment as a pig, luckily I had a couple of items that cure the status on hand, especially because the item shop doesnât even sell them. (The little character portrait in the menu changing to a full on pig was absolutely hilarious)
The barman poisoning you is also great. Was honestly surprised when I managed to sleep at the inn without getting cursed or robbed, but I guess that the white mage handling the inn still respects some Final Fantasy version of the Hippocratic oath.
Cecil basically spends the first part of the game adopting random kids. Between Rydia and now the twins, FF4 probably has the lowest average age of the main cast. Surely between the games we have played until now.
Got jumpscared good by ăăă âs portrait.
Now, the big part of this week. Cecilâs change into a Paladin.
Everybody when Cecil removes his helmet for the first time:
For some reason, when I first played the game at⊠What? 15? it left a BIG impression on me.
Maybe for me it was the first time of seeing one of those âface yourselfâ scenes in videogames, even if by the time of the GBA port it surely wasnât anything new.
I would be curious to know what other games had already done something similar when the game had first come out. I doubt itâs the very first one, but who knowsâŠ?
I however also wish it had come a tiny bit later to let you have more time to feel Cecilâs internal conflict, but I can understand why they didnât want to do it from a technical standpoint. But at the start, having a character that actively uses âthe dark artsâ yet is still a good guy and is worried about getting corrupted by it is conceptually really cool. Always a big fan of those character archetypes. They could have absolutely thrown Cecil in Kingdom Hearts with the whole light and darkness theme and he would have been perfect as a cooler mentor figure instead of only cameoing characters from the usual suspects and pretending anything before FF7 doesnât exist. (Kingdom Hearts 2 had a Setzer from FF6 cameo, of all things, but itâs so minor I sometimes forget it is a thing)
(If also you, like me, thought it would have been much cooler for him to keep both his Dark Knight and Paladin aspects, donât worry, the developers of the Dissidia spinoff must have thought the same thing because in that game he does exactly that! But I will say more on that at the end of the game)
However, one thing I realized replaying it now is the little âgameplay as storytellingâ part embedded into the random encounters on Mount Ordeals itself. When you arrive, with Cecil still as a Dark Knight, against some group of enemies like the various zombies types all his attacks will be basically useless doing 1 damage with the sword.
So basically, for most players, in these encounters heâs practically forced to sit back, acting as a meat shield tanking attacks while his companions do all the damage, maybe throwing potions and other items around here and there.
And what does a Paladin do? Protects the weak and healsâŠ
The mountain itself forces the player (and Cecil) to already âactâ as a Paladin in a way, and I personally love it.
And then thereâs the âtrialâ itself. Facing your old self by literally letting it damage itself and bracing its attacks instead of retaliating and âkillingâ it.
Itâs a great spin on the usual âface yourselfâ mirror matches in videogames.
To win, he literally has to not fight his old self.
What he did as a Dark Knight cannot be remedied by simply âdefeatingâ that part of him. You do it by becoming a better person. Not answering to violence with other violence, but by sheating your swordâŠ
I just really love this small part of the game.
Pretty sure that itâs just because his default equipped sword after the change does more damage to undead in particular. (The game description calls it âholy swordâ specifically, so the opposite of his dark elemental swords as æé»éšćŁ«)
Cannot be a true Paladin if you canât cast Divine Smite after allâŠ
