<\/div>The task now is to cross the Sandsea. They aren’t just being poetic with the name, either; the sand here is special, and flows like water in a vast, sprawling mass stretching beyond the horizon. Basch describes it as larger still than all of Dalmasca and booooy he ain’t even kidding. This is the first time the game drops you off at the beginning of an immense stretch of wasteland or ruins and says, \u201chave at it, we’ll start up the plot again on the other side.\u201d From here on out, this is more or less how the game functions, and I’ll be perfectly honest: I think the game gains something from this. There’s just something about peering out over the trackless wastes, with nothing on the other side but some magic-charged ruin lost to the mists of history, and fighting my way to the very bottom of it in search of some relic or other that just whips me into the adventuring mindset.<\/p>\n
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<\/div>Unless I miss my guess, this design is another relic of the early, early era when the game was conceived as an MMO. This is, of course, par for such games; in an MMO, the boundless wilderness packed with roaming monsters and the bottomless dungeons crawling with nameless horrors and forgotten superweapons are<\/i> the game. Yet I think they do a service to the game as it became. The game’s skill at creating atmosphere certainly helps this along, and yet simply having areas like this is a large part of that; as big as the game world can be, they still go out of their way to make it feel like there really is no horizon, that you could walk in any direction and eventually run into the remains of a civilization that rose, prospered, and fell eons before the Dynast-King came to power.<\/p>\n
Since there isn’t much to remark upon until I actually get to the tomb across the Sandsea, I’ll explain the Dynast-King. 1100 years before the kingdoms of today were even dreamed up, a man called Raithwall appeared bearing artifacts of unbelievable power, claiming to be chosen by the gods to usher the world into a new era of prosperity under his rule. Thanks to the aforementioned artifacts, he did exactly that, and he came to conquer every part of Ivalice worth putting on a postcard. By all rights, his rule was pretty fucking sweet, and once things were consolidated under him, he ran his empire like a champ. Times were good, and he set things up so smoothly that the Galtean Alliance\u2014 so named because he ran it from the Galtean Peninsula, where the three continents of Ordalia, Valendia, and Kerwon come together\u2014 held up for four hundred years afterward. All his direct descendants have passed on, but even today every nation in the land can trace its roots back to the Dynast-King’s era, to include the royalty of Rabanastre, to include Ashelia B’nargin Dalmasca. (*snicker*<\/i> \u201cB’nargin\u201d)<\/p>\n
<\/div>Speaking of Ashe, it would seem someone found her sorely missed at the Marquis’ crib… Basch takes a moment to explain the odd machines that compose a lot of the area: oil rigs! Yes, oil and electricity are actually old, pass\u00e9 technologies and have been ever since magitech became the standard. Electricity is still the way to go for rare devices which require a huge amount of energy at once, but for most powered devices, magicite has all but supplanted all other energy sources. The linked oil rigs make a handy way of crossing the sandsea, and they’ll be present in both of the large areas we’ll have to cross, the Ogir-Yensa Sandsea and the Nam-Yensa Sandsea, though mainly the former. The circular catwalks make for some interesting maps, though they aren’t always the most efficient for getting from one place to another.<\/p>\n
The rigs were built by Rozarria, the great nation to the southwest in Ordalia, and longtime enemy of Archades to the northeast in Valendia.I sometimes wonder if Archadia, Rozarria, and Dalmasca might have functioned as MMO player nations in an online concept, similar to the FFXI player nations of Bastok, Windurst, and San d’Oria.<\/span> Basch is dismayed that the nations in between\u2014 including both<\/i> of his countries\u2014 keep getting caught up in their warmongering, but a voice comes from behind dismissing his opinion, conceding that’s simply the fate of small nations. It’s Vossler!<\/p>\n I’m surprised by how much I’ve come to like Vossler in this playthrough, given that I could barely remember him upon restarting. Vossler gives a token WHAT THE FUCK BASCH I TOLD YOU TO STOP THIS SHIT after he returned to the Marquis to find Ashe abducted. He also says the Marquis can only keep Ashe’s \u201cabduction\u201d under wraps for so long. Uh, Vossler? Under wraps from whom? The people that even know Ashe are alive at all can be counted on your hands, and our party is most of them. The only people who would be suspicious are Ghis and Vayne, and if they know that she absconded to Ondore’s care after busting out of the Leviathan,<\/i> then the Marquis is already pretty well fucked, \u201cabduction\u201d or no. Beyond that, there’s only the Marquis himself and Vossler and his Resistance buddies. Ondore knows, Vossler’s joined up with us again, and the Resistance peons can go trip on a staircase of dicks and hit every step on the way down; they’ve never accomplished anything, and they never will. So who are we keeping the “abduction” secret from, again?<\/p>\n Oh, well. Fran uses her bunny-girl danger-sense to tell us we’re all fucked, and on that note the Urutan-Yensa reveal themselves. See, the Sandsea is so much like a sea that it has its own fish, too, as well as its own crab-people that ride those fish. And these crab people are the Urutan-Yensa, foul-tempered, angry little bastards that really, really hate it when tall, squishy sorts intrude on their territory. Balthier, in his unfailing brilliance, yells, \u201cLet’s quit this place while we can!\u201d as though we weren’t crossing the fucking sandsea,<\/i> which Basch just got finished pointing out is wider than the rest of the country.<\/i><\/p>\n Allow me a tangent. Again.<\/p>\n It is worth noting that Urutan-Yensa\u2014 a common enemy in the Yensan Sandseas\u2014 have not one but five bonus pages in the bestiary (as do all of the humanoid enemies), documenting the creation of the mimic-type enemies, and, from them, Omega Mark XII, this game’s rendition of the perennial superboss. What’s more, it seems that the mimics were created to do battle with Yiazmat, the game’s signature superboss named after original director and producer Yas<\/b>umi Mat<\/b>suno, who created not only this game but the entire Ivalice setting as it was in Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics; the hunt for the wyrm, appropriately entitled \u201cFarewell to a Legend,\u201d is a scantily-disguised metaphor for Matsuno’s departure from the project due to poor health: Montblanc, the clan leader, explains that he and his siblings were all taught their respective trades by a single magnificent master. But one day, a terrible dragon appeared and, though their master did battle with it for several weeks, it ultimately took him from them all.<\/p>\n Yes, the final challenge of the game is to avenge Matsuno by slaying the disease, and in a real sense, to avenge the game itself; the director’s departure proved to be a poor omen for the title. Matsuno was apparently most of the brains behind the operation, and the game appears to have suffered from the lack of his vision and oversight.In fairness to Hiroyuki Ito and Hiroshi Minagawa, the game had always been troubled by frequent aggressive corporate interference, and Matsuno left the project in 2005, a year before release, after working on the title since its beginning in 2000.<\/span> Hironubu Sakaguchi (the man that the Final Fantasy series calls \u201cpapa\u201d) was so disappointed at the loss of his vaunted talents that he declined even to play more than the start of the finished title, a first for the series. Yeah, this game’s creation had some problems.<\/p>\n After going all Anikin on the sandpeople, the party eventually arrives at the Valley of the Dead, a long, man-made canyon carved into the living rock of the cliffs that lie beyond the sandsea. At the end of a long tunnel, an open-air colonnade stands before a large, grotesque structure. Vayne makes an off-hand comment about \u201cGaltean architecture\u201d at the beginning of the game, and I’ll hand it to him (and the developers!), the structures from the old era\u2014 the cathedral in Rabanastre, the tomb, and a shrine later in the game\u2014 all share a distinct style that I find really cool.<\/p>\n Upon entering the colonnade, a glowing, toothy bird attacks, and is promptly blinded, silenced, and barraged into nonexistence by four graverobbers. Upon its death, a strange lantern-like device within the structure lights up. The party climbs the steps while Ashe ruminates a bit on the Dynast-King, and about his relics: the Midlight Shard, left to the predecessors of House Nabradia; the Dusk Shard, left to House Dalmasca’s founders; and the Dawn Shard, interred with Raithwall in his tomb. Now, if one bearing either of the other shards wants to go creeping around in the tomb, they’ll be totally safe, but of course our party is shit out of luck, and will have to fight our way all the way to the bottom. Bring it!<\/p>\n There is no door into the structure; at the top of the steps, one must use the magic device to teleport within. You’d think Raithwall could have just skipped the giant bird and warped everyone who came to the tomb without the right stone to a room with no exit, deep underground. But of course, Raithwall seems to have anticipated someone might need the Dawn Shard someday. Once within, it’s only a few steps onto a narrow passage before a time-honored tradition of the series commences: a Demon Wall. Behind the party, a horrific statue comes to life, waving two massive swords in front of it. A dozen insectoid legs begin pulling the whole structure slowly but surely forward. The party must defeat the wall, retreat into the passage behind them, or be crushed. Demon Walls are generally a massive pain to fight, and this one’s no different; let’s just run away!The Wall is intended to trap the party on a narrow catwalk above an abyss, but it activates as soon as the party leader hits the trigger; the ensuing cutscene showed the Wall move right past bemused straggler Penelo still standing free, off to the side.<\/span><\/p>\n Once through the door leading deeper into the tomb, the light is too dim to see much of anything… except two eyes gleaming in the darkness. It’s a second Demon Wall! And this time, there’s no escape. However, this catwalk is about three times longer than the previous one, and the Demon Wall isn’t quite as strong as the first. The fight isn’t much to write home about, except that the Demon Walls are the only enemies which can inflict the X-Zone status, temporarily removing a party member from play, which can only be lifted by moving to a different screen.You really are supposed to run from the first Demon Wall your first time in the tomb, but 100% of Rocketeers polled gave no fucks, and it was ground into dust with the second. Defeating it gives access to some optional areas with later-game treasure.<\/span><\/p>\n The tomb is neat to look at, but I won’t bore you with the details of the epic switch-flipping errand that took place within. Fran stops par-way to infodump Penelo about Mist, the glowing yellow-orange phenomenon that amounts to raw magic floating through the air. It’s a recurring element throughout the game, and occasionally serves whatever purpose the writers need it to.<\/p>\n
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