Let's visit Final Fantasy IV once more. A lot has happened between that moment and this one. This one takes place near the end of the game. Cecil and crew have traveled from town to town, city to city, been all around the world, the underworld, and even been to the home of a sleeping race of moon-folk named Lunarians. Many characters have joined his party, and many have left for various reasons, injury being the most common. All the while during their travels, they were chasing after 8 crystals that were rapidly being taken by a dark knight named Golbez, the man who replaced Cecil after he left Baron, and the man who was responsible for all of the events of the game so far. It wasn't until Cecil and company got to the moon that the Lunarian FuSoYa told them what the 8 crystals were going to be used for: To open a road from Cecil's planet to the moon, in order to transport a Robotic Giant to the surface of the world and destroy everything.
Think he saw us?
The scary thing? At the point you find out the plan, you have a bit of an Ozymandias moment. "I did it 35 minutes ago." By the time you get back to your planet from the moon, The Giant of Babil has arrived, and is beginning his monstrous rampage. The bad guy actually accomplished his goal, the angry death machine is loose and all appears to be going their way. As your group is flying in front of the Giant of Babil, they begin to remark on how hopeless the situation is.
Oh don't, worry. Sit tight, it's about to become awesome!
That is, until the entire world stands up and collectively screams "Hell No!"
"Goin' somewhere?"
The friends who you had to leave behind apparently saw this shit coming from miles away. The collective airship fleet of the overworld is seen flying in from the east, ready to bomb the fuck out of the giant. The fleet is led by a Prince of a demolished castle, and your aging airship mechanic, Cid. On top of that, You've got tanks coming in from the south side. King Giott, overseer of the Dwarves of the underworld has brought his entire military force to the upper layer of the world, and is accompanied by Sylphs who until this point were xenophobic and distrustful of non-magical sentient life. The Sylphs are joined by Kung-Fu master Yang, another party member who was presumed dead, but has returned to give the forces of the world a fighting chance. I don't know HOW they managed to drive Tanks out of the underworld, over mountains, and across the freaking ocean but you know what? I don't care. The combined assault force unleashes absolute hell upon this intruder upon their peace, with the exception of Cid's airship, who sidles up next to yours. He tells you to hop in, he'll drop you off at a spot close enough to get inside the Giant. Once within the Giant, one of the best dungeon bgm's begins to play, and Cecil and friends charge inside and find the CPU of the robot and summarily smash it. After some expository banter, the Giant crumbles, the world is saved, and the group decides they're not gonna stop there. They get back on the ship, return to the moon, and look for the asshole who started all of this. This is how "turning the tides" is done.
#4 - Final Fantasy VIII - The War of the Gardens
Now let's come back to Final Fantasy VIII. This is the last cool event before the game's plot takes a horrendous nose dive. When we last left our heroes, they had just succeeded their Practical Final Exam, and had been accepted as soldier mercenaries. Their first mission took them to Timber, a city under martial law where they were to assist a resistance faction known as the Timber Owls. From there, they get word that the President of Galbadia has appointed a new advisor, a Sorceress named Edea. This is apparently very bad news, as you are promptly recalled from your mission and given a new one: Assassinate the Sorceress.
At the end of the first disc, the plan to bump off the mage-lady is put into action and subsequently fails. The sniper's presence was noticed and the Sorceress blocked his bullet, so Squall charges in swinging his sword, and discovers his rival Seifer, who has turned on Garden and now serves by the Sorceress' side as her Knight. After a short combat, Edea gets pissed off, stabs Squall through the chest with an unfinished ice sculpture, and throws the group in jail. When he awakes in prison, he learns of plans by the Galbadian army to wipe out the Gardens of the world.
"Dibs on the girl's changing rooms!"
Obviously our intrepid heroes escape from the prison, and return to the Garden, which in a pinch just before getting blown apart by angry shark-missiles, turns mobile and uproots itself, dodging the majority of the blast. From there on, Balamb Garden becomes the token "boat" of the game, traveling around the world, reuniting with your friends. Eventually, you learn that the Galbadian Garden has learned how to go mobile as well, and you see their garden hanging around once in a while. Events lead the group to a small abandoned orphanage off the coast of a distant continent, where they all feel familiar memories emanating from. When they get there, they discover that they were all in the orphanage together at a young age, with the exception of Squall's love interest, and none of them were able to remember it. After some warm nostalgia, they're reminded that the Sorceress Edea was actually their matron at this orphanage. Oh noes!
Think it's a bit ridiculous? Well sit tight, it's about to become awesome!
The Galbadian Army doesn't give a shit about your past. When you exit the orphanage and re-enter your Garden, you see the Galbadian Garden sitting in the middle of a forest, staring at you like "bring it, bitch." Squall takes charge of the situation, however reluctantly, and prepares the soldiers and students of Balamb for a final confrontation with Galbadia Garden. Who do you imagine is going to be leading the opposing Garden force? You guess it, it's Seifer, Squall's old buddy.
"I love the smell of Firaga in the morning."
The battle begins like a sumo match, with the two gardens crashing into each other. Unlike a sumo match, these Gardens have the added perk of shaving off entire sections of the opponent. It's very clear from the onset that Galbadia has the upper hand. You've got legions of well-trained soldiers, paratroopers, hell you've even got troops coming in on rocket-propelled motorcycles. Whereas Balamb garden has a few Mercenaries, a handful of somewhat-competent students, and a mess of junior classmen. For the majority of the battle, Balamb is boarded by the enemy, and it becomes a hectic warzone that drags everyone into it. Your party splits up and runs to help with different tasks, such as shoring up defenses, defending the junior classmen, and providing general support. At one point, Squall's love interest Rinoa gets knocked off the edge of the Garden's quad area, and hangs on to a rock for dear life while everyone runs around frantically trying to find a way to save her. Squall leaves charge of the battle in the hands of his friends, and as he runs through the Garden, looking at the state of things, he realizes that this fight isn't going well in the slightest, and a change of strategy is needed.
The music cuts out and changes to something somewhat inspiring, and Squall jumps on the PA, giving an inspiring speech about how not all is lost, and though his soldiers may be tired, they're made of tougher stuff than that, and they can find the will within them to drive the enemy out of the Garden and win this fight. With this, Squall directs the forces of Balamb into a final desparate charge to fully combat the enemy.
I feel bad for that guy's motorcycle.
After that, Squall gets singled out by a soldier in a suit that acts as a glorified jetpack. He gets into a fistfight with the jerk, and eventually knocks him out of his own armor. He then uses the hover-armor to float over to Rinoa, who by this point has arms bigger than Hulk Hogan, and grabs her, flying to a safe location on the enemy's base, where they will now sneak in, and finish the job they were assigned to do by defeating the Sorceress. Not a bad sequence to end disc 2, eh?
#3 - Final Fantasy V - Apparently "Chuck Norris" is a Job Class
In Final Fantasy V, you play from the perspective of a young adventurer named Bartz (or Butz, if you play a certain localization), who travels the world with his faithful steed Boco the Chocobo. Bartz is adventuring along one day and spots a Meteor screaming towards the earth below. As it collides, he is filled with wonder and confusion, and promptly charges forth to investigate the fallen rock. When he gets there, he finds an old man who appears to have lost his memory, except to say that he warns Bartz about the danger that the 4 elemental crystals are in. Over time, you learn that these four crystals are the seal that binds the evil sorcerer Exdeath. Stupid name aside, this sorcerer is bad news, so Bartz teams up with Galuf, as well as a Princess and a Pirate in order to venture forth and protect the four crystals from destructions. The group is met with numerous failures as the crystals shatter before their very eyes on more than one occasion.
The upside to shattered crystals is that the crystal fragments are able to imbue a person with power, and each fragment is unique. This is how they explain the Job Class system that was seen in Final Fantasy III and later, Final Fantasy Tactics. Soon enough, Bartz and crew fail to save the 4th and final crystal from being destroyed, and the seal on Exdeath is released. Simultaneously, old man Galuf recalls his purpose and regains his memories. As it so turns out, he was actually one of the members of the party who had originally sealed Exdeath away to begin with, The Dawn Warriors. He also explains that there is an alternate parallel universe that he is originally from, and that he must return there now, as Exdeath is his problem and he'll deal with it in his own world. Galuf then leaves the party on their planet, jumps back in his meteor, and winds up warping back to his own world.
Of course the group isn't going to let the geriatric handle the world's problems by himself. There are other meteors in the world, so the group attempts to power one of them up and warp themselves to Galuf's world in order to give him a helping hand and finish off Exdeath once and for all! That's the plan, however it doesn't work out quite so romantically. The group succeeds in powering one of the meteors, but it doesn't transport them directly to Galuf's location like they would have hoped. Instead, it warps them smack in the middle of an isolated, and biologically devoid island with no way to contact anybody in the world.
Somebody get this man a volleyball.
The group wanders around the island for a while, fighting off hostile monsters, and are eventually knocked out by agents of Exdeath who knows of their exploits and almost-successes, and has them dragged to his castle and thrown into jail. Meanwhile, Galuf is getting ready to lead an assault on Exdeath's castle when his scouts tell him of a group of unconscious adventurers who were taken into Exdeath's castle. Upon getting their description, he immediately understands the danger his friends are in.
It's number 3! You know it's about to get awesome!
So what's an old soul to do? Send in a task force to retreive them? Nah. Bargain with Exdeath for their lives? Not a chance. What does Galuf do, you ask? He tells his army to sit the fuck down, he'll be right back. He jumps on top of his dragon, flies across a massive bridge, over enemy lines, and into the top layers of Exdeath's castle. The music changes to one of the best "Fuck Yeah" themes ever played, as Galuf jumps into the prison block area of Exdeath's castle, fighting his old ass way through dozens of Exdeath's minions, breaking down doors and kicking all kinds of ass. As he goes along, he grabs up all of his friends' gear. He eventually comes across Exdeath's general Gilgamesh.
"Walker, Texas RedMage."
Galuf pulls no punches, as he summarily embarasses Gilgamesh, takes the prison keys, and gets his friends out of there and drops their weapons in front of em, sayin "time to go to work." The four of them then make a daring escape from the castle, and begin the infamous Clash on the Big Bridge sequence, in which Galuf's army sees him returning from Exdeath's castle, so they launch an offensive at the same time in order to give Galuf and crew a safe place to return to. That's what I call a rescue.
#2 - Final Fantasy VII - Evil Corporation Finally Gets Judgement
Final Fantasy VII is the story of an Ex-SOLDIER named Cloud, who now takes jobs as a mercenary, as long as the pay is good. At the start of the game, he is working with an activist/terrorist group known as Avalanche, whose purpose is to overthrow the Technology/Energy company known as Shinra Inc., whose influence is far reaching, and who runs the majority of the world, as a monopoly that has grown too large to subdue anymore. Avalanche operates out of Midgar, the main city of the corporation, and their main targets are machines known as Mako Reactors, which draw upon the very life force of the planet and convert that force into energy that provides heat, power, electricity, etc.
Cloud and his friends eventually get way in over their heads, as the sector their are from gets crushed underfoot, essentially wiping out 1/8th of the city, all in the name of stopping Avalanche. The party isn't too happy with this, so they climb their way all the way to the top of Shinra Tower, and eventually they find that the president has been killed off by a figure from Cloud's past, the greatest SOLDIER of all time, Sephiroth. From that point on, the game is spent largely following Sephiroth around, but Shinra gets in your way time and time and time again. They Coerce locals, they wipe clean and rebuild Cloud's hometown and fill it with their own employees in order to hide what happened there, they take advantage of the hopes and dreams of industrious folk like Cid Highwind, and they contribute in unleashing terrible monsters known as WEAPON, which only awaken when the world is in absolute, imminent peril.
Near the start of disc 2, after WEAPON is awakened, the party is captured by Shinra Inc, and taken back to the town of Junon, where they will be given a public execution and blamed for literally all of the world's problems, all in an effort to make themselves look better.
"How DARE they put a Meteor the size of 50 moons in the sky?!"
The group obviously doesn't care for this, so they break out of the jail, steal an airship, and get the hell out. As the crew regroups and tries to decide what to do next about Sephiroth and the Meteor, the move all around the world, finding clues to help them, they even try to smash a rocketship loaded with magical explosives into the meteor. When they return from space however, all hell breaks loose.
"Man, I sure hope Midgar has funnel cake!"
WEAPON is pissed off, and the Diamond variety has decided to take a nice little vacation to Midgar. The problem here is that a WEAPON's vacation involves destruction, murder, and chaos. Essentially, he's gonna run and clear Midgar right off of the map. Thankfully, Shinra Inc. Has a solution to this problem. They've got a weapon of their own, though not a mobile, sentient one. Actually, Midgar has relocated their marvelous symbol of compensation, a colossal cannon, from their port town to their capital city. They then hooked it up to every major power generator in the city, and aimed it directly north, coincidentally, exactly where Diamond WEAPON is coming from. As they fire the cannon, it shears right through Weapon, sending him flying thousands of feet backwards and slumping to the ground, defeated (of course, not before he gets a few shots off and blows up the top of shinra tower.)
The group rests easy and takes a deep breath. That is, until they get word from their inside man that the Mako Cannon is about to fire again. This wouldn't be so big a problem, if the draw on the city's power supply wasn't so heavy, and the cannon's cooldown time wasn't a few hours. Turns out, the mad scientist who oversaw Sephiroth's genetic engineering has decided to once and for all end the problem he created by firing the cannon directly at the northern crater where Sephiroth sleeps. The shock from this blast would destroy the grand majority of Midgar and kill just about everyone inside city limits. Yet, as we go to the board room of Shinra Inc, only one of the executives wants to do anything to stop the cannon. The rest of them just don't care.
Sit tight and grab your parachutes, because it's about to get awesome!
The group decides collectively, "Alright Shinra, you know what? No. Fucking NO. Enough of your shit!" Midgar is presently under martial law, so nobody can get in or out of the city by foot. Solution? The group brings their airship about and flies right over the top of Midgar city and parachute their way in.
"Whoo, Bitches!"
The entire sequence of trying to get up to the Mako Cannon is my favorite part of the entire game. The music that plays is the music that played at the beginning of the game, during the mission to bomb one of the reactors. I find it cool that they bring the music back for when you're running up to screw with Shinra on a much bigger scale.
The group lands in sector 8 and immediately enters the sewer system, which leads them through to the train system which they follow all the way back to a familiar location from the beginning of the game. Along the way, everyone from Shinra Inc. you've ever encountered is there to try and stop you. The elite shadow agents The Turks, Weapons and Development Executives Heidegger and Scarlett, as well as all of the soldiers and machines that shinra has at its disposal. The most satisfying thing about this segment is being able to personally get revenge on the assholes responsible for all of your troubles throughout the game. At the end of the sequence, the group climbs up a long staircase and comes upon the mad scientist Hojo, who reveals that he could be considered Sephiroth's father, and claims its his job to finish him off. Hojo doesn't want you to foil his plan, so he takes advantage of all the weird experiments he's done to himself over the years and engages you in a long climactic battle to finish off the second disc. By the end, the people of midgar are saved, Shinra is finished, and only Sephiroth remains.
#1 - Final Fantasy IX - Assault of the Silver Dragons
Final Fantasy IX is one of the more overlooked games in the series, but I find it to be one of the most rewarding. Throughout the events of the story, you will find a plethora of reference and homage to earlier games from the same series. It follows the story of a thief named Zidane, a bit of a ladykiller with a real lackadaisy attitude and a penchant for pushing peoples' buttons whenever he can find them. Throughout the game, it's hinted at that Zidane is trying to find out where he is originally from, as he does not know who his parents are, or where his homeland is. Eventually, he finds it in an alternate world known as Terra. Once there, he receives some long exposition that he was not born, but he was created. As well as the villain Kuja, who had been pulling all of the strings in all of the bad events up to this point in the game. He orchestrated a war on the Mist Continent, the murder of the Alexandrian Queen and her armies, the stealing of magical essence from one of the characters, as well as the near-complete Genocide of an entire race.
It is told to Zidane that he and Kuja were created for the same purpose, which is to incite war and destruction on the world of Gaia, in order to remove the souls of the people from their bodies, and circulate them over to Terra so that the genomes, Zidane's kind, can have souls of their own and be allowed to have a real life once more. Zidane had a bit of a Goku treatment from DBZ, in that his memory was lost at a very early age, and he instead grew attached to the people of the world. After a moment of desperation and loss, Zidane returns to his senses and bands together with his friends in an effort to defeat Garland, the mastermind behind the soul operation, and Kuja who had been gaining power in order to defeat Garland himself.
At the end of the third disc, we're treated to three consecutive boss fights against a silver dragon, Garland, and Kuja himself who returns to Terra and kicks Garland off of a cliff, killing him. After Kuja is defeated at last, he begins to question how this could have happened, typical bad guy speeches, so on and so forth. Suddenly, Garland's voice can be heard. Garland tells Kuja that even if he weren't defeated, he isn't long for this world. See, Kuja wasn't ever meant to have a long life. After accomplishing his mission, he would have fallen over dead, no longer of use. Confused and enraged by this, Kuja enters a sort of limit-break mode and completely destroys the Pandemonium dungeon, and sends Terra into a state of flux. The group narrowly escapes in Kuja's airship, and finds a way to return to Gaia. When they get back however, things are not looking so great. The world is covered in a thicker, more potent version of the same tension-raising Mist that the group had eradicated earlier in the game. Above the source of this mist is where the final area can be reached. All that can be seen is a swirling red, pink, and white sphere of energy that must be flown into.
Sit tight and put your tray table in its locked and upright position, it's about to get awesome!
However, as the group approaches, this happens:
Wait....is that....?
Shit.
If you thought fighting one silver dragon was bad, well here's an entire flock of them. Enjoy. Nevermind that your airship's only weapon is on the bottom of the ship, facing down. This is Final Fantasy, not Mario. You're not going to be able to get above every single enemy. The situation appears to be hopeless, and dire is too light a word. One of the dragons rears up to fire a blast of energy directly into the bridge of the airship when...
"So, we heard you had a dragon problem."
Hell yeah, the cavalry has arrived! In an homage to Final Fantasy IV, all of the allies you've made over the course of the game come in the save your ass and clear a path!
"Six vs. Six thousand? I like those odds."
The airforce of the industrial city of Lindblum, who you've helped out time and time again throughout the game, arrives just in time, blowing away hundreds of these silver dragons that seek to stop you from entering the final area, Memoria. The scene cuts to the pilots of the ships, all of them close friends to Zidane and crew, or important figures who they've helped in the past. As the fight rages on, a path gets cleared for Zidane's ship, but a flight of dragons catches wind of them and starts to follow behind them. It looks like they're about to catch up with the ship, until the Alexandrian airship blocks the way, t-boning all of the dragons against the hull of the ship, giving Zidane and crew a clear passage into Memoria. I mentioned the music in earlier entries, and this will be no exception. The theme that plays here is one of the best Uematsu has ever written, and I almost think he wrote this theme first, before the scene was finished. That's how perfect the entire scene is. You've just flown a ship past thousands of angry dragons, while your dozen good buddies had your back and blasted most of them into dust. That is a hell of a way to enter a final dungeon.That is awesome.
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