Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Chapter 25: The Place I’ll Return to Someday, Disc 3 Finale

You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: Terra

We have arrived on Terra at last and we are immediately faced with something totally weird. When we get the chance to change our party, swap out the three characters you grinded for before you entered the Shimmering Isle. There is blue magic here, but we’ve got it already, so leave Quina out. My party for this is Vivi, Eiko and Freya. After, run down and to the right to exit the screen.

WARNING:  If you run into Movers, little red dots that always come in threes, kill them QUICKLY! They have an instant death attack called Delta. When they stiffen up into an upside-down triangle, they are about to cast it. Beware!

Go ahead and do a your grinding for these characters. Especially have Eiko work on the Hamelin flute which has her next best magic. Also, if you’re ever going to teach your characters Auto-Reflect, do it in this span of time because it will soon come in handy.

When you’re ready, proceed down the stairs at the bottom left of the screen. Hop the stepping stones and go to the right a bit to get the Coronet. Hop back and hop up now. Follow the path now to get a Dragon Wrist.

Return to where we first saw the girl and exit up the screen. Get the Elixir here and watch the girl run off again. Run across the bridge, following the girl, until we reach some cliffs and some odd netting that looks a lot like shiny spider webs. Climb down the first two webs to grab a Remedy. Climb back up one web than run to the left. Jump across and grab the Mythril Racket. Choose next to climb down the web in between the small crevice to continue the chase. There is a chest at the bottom of the web here with a Demon’s Vest. Run over to the girl. Running after her, up a flight of stairs, if you continue to a hidden corner of the first landing and fiddle around you’ll eventually find a path going down to a Minerva’s Plate.

Return to the first landing and go up the next flight of stairs. Continue up and up. The game takes over and after a few moments we get this foreboding scene.




Dagger passes out and we have to find her a place to rest. First, for some reason, they think we should change our party around. The only reason you should do this is if you didn’t have each character arranged as mentioned in the last chapter. Refer back there if you need to but it really is not absolutely crucial.

Go to the left. The stairs in this next screen conceal another hidden path. Follow it to a Flash Hat. Back at the stairs, head up from them and into the house with a bunch of people who look just like Zidane. Take the stairs down here and in the lab you can find an Elixir. Back upstairs head down and out to the street. Enter the only nearby door. Grab the Wing Edge and help a moogle out of a basket. Mognet, Tent, Save. Moorock also has a shop for us. If you exit and go back inside, Stiltskin should be waiting. He has more for us to buy and this is the only chance we have to get it. Trust me, take it!

When you are ready, return back to the first screen. There is an inn here, enter it to initiate another auto-sequence. When you have control of Zidane again, re-enter the inn to grab an Elixir. Outside the inn, on a path just in front of a path, closest to the water, there is a pair of Angel Earrings. Go back to the lab where we found the Elixir and talk to the girl to continue. Eventually, Eiko will be in control. Watch the ATEs if you want, and even collect the characters in the ATEs, or just go back to the fork in the road where we began this trek and head north into a green light. If you go all the way around, past the Moogle Room, you’ll also loop back to this intersection. The girl waits at the far end of this bridge and she tells us that Zidane has gone to...Pandemonium. The POV switches back to Zidane and we get his emo moment for this game. FFIV reference coming up in this section. Kudos if you can pick it out. Also turn up your music after Kuja goes away because the BEST song in the game is about to play.

When Zidane wakes up, we see his emo moment is continuing a little while longer. He brushes Vivi and Eiko off and leaves them trapped in the room he woke up in. In the next room, he is ambushed by an Amdusias. This Amdusias cannot be petrified unlike the one at the weapon shop. However, use thievery, and when Amarant and Freya get there the fight should be easy enough. In the next room, Abadon attacks. Steiner and Quistis start off this fight but Zidane jumps in to help out. Twister, Darkside, Attack, Lv3-Def-Less, Thievery will all make this fight a breeze.

The last fight in this gauntlet is a Shell Dragon. Zidane starts off alone and this thing SUCKS! It has an attack that will reduce you to 1 HP. So keep Zidane on the defense and healing. If you’re using an emulator, Save State before the fight starts just to be safe. Just when all seems lost, Dagger arrives and heals us up. Hopefully, you should get Zidane into Trance. Grand Lethal all the way baby.

After the battle; Dagger, Steiner and Quina all gather with Zidane to have an intervention, snapping Zidane out of his funk. After the discussion, Zidane realize he’d left the others behind and so we must backtrack to retrieve them. Here, everyone has a good yell at Zidane and they decide it’s time to find a way out of this strange place. We must form our party again. I suggest taking the lower levels of course, but bring Freya along. She will be terribly useful coming up.

In the room we began in, is a Holy Miter, in the chair.  Moorock followed us from Bran Bal so you can tent and save up. You’ve already got his letter. Here with the moogle is another great place to grind. Take it. Of course, the only characters you should need to grind for are really Steiner, Freya and Amarant who always seem to be behind on abilities. Eiko also needs to finish off her Hamelin Flute. You want a white mage in this area. Curaga will be a must.

Every Final Fantasy game, starting with the original II, has had their own version of... the MALBORO! These horrible creatures are back in this game but praise the Lord they’re not so hard to beat. However, they still have that terrible Bad Breath attack. If you didn’t have Quina eat an Anemone back on Lanar Isle earlier, you can let her eat a Malboro here. However, make sure you have all the status preventions on. The only one you can’t protect against is Mini.

When you’re ready, let’s find our way out of this chicken shit outfit. Head past the room where we fought the Shell Dragon. The first room of importance that we come to is a room with strange pillars sticking up from the ground and a switch. When you flip the switch, the pillars will light up and a 30 second timer will appear. Your goal is to make it to the bottom left exit of this room in 30 seconds without touching the lights. There is no wrong way to do this but the easiest way for me is to go down the right side than just cut across to the exit. Cross the bridge quickly to find another mechanism which we find out works a lift in the room to the left. The mechanism lets us customize up to six positions which allows us to get some treasure. If you’re shooting to get all the ATEs, mess up over and over to trigger “The Elevator.” If you just want to get it done. Switch to 3, go up twice for a chest with 20007 gil. Switch for 4 and take the elevator up twice more.

We are in the middle of three teleporters. Take the northeastern teleporter. It takes us to the next floor. The left blue teleporter leads to the Carabini Mail. The right-hand blue teleporter takes us to an Elixir. Return to the previous teleporter room. Take the southwest path to take another teleporter back to the previous maze. When you reach the fork, take the southeast branch to reach some Battle Boots. The opposite path takes us to Mozme. Give her the letter, tent, save. Now, I’m going to forewarn you. Once you leave this room, the game takes over and we are hurtled into a major boss gauntlet. 3 hard bosses one right after the other. Worse, you won’t be able to heal in between battles. So, here’s the set up you want. Equipment that absorbs or nullifies wind and thunder and Locomotion. The Coronet is good for this and of course the Rubber Suit too and the Coral Rings. There are other combos too, so figure out which equipment gives all four characters this necessary protection. Quina isn’t a bad idea but there are other ways of inflicting the damage we want without her. One last note: Make sure that you do not have Auto-Reflect on. Reflect in the last of the upcoming battles is simply asking to be killed.






There are very few instances where you actually have to do anything from here on out and even then the path is pretty straight forward (It would take a very concerted effort to get lost). Once everyone is evacuated from Terra and we hop on the commandeered Invincible, we get...

This is the end of disc 3. Thank you for playing and we’ll see you on Disc 4 next time for the last round of Side Questing.

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