Final Fantasy Flight, Part 9

The trip to Leifin was short and sweet. But something felt off. Here was a technological advanced race living in a town that looked like paradise on earth. They wander to and fro in flashy white robes, the kind that only advanced 4D entities would dare wear (See: Star Ocean 3). But the live in a little town.

Now I understand that two of the fiends teamed up to destroy civilization prior to the start of the game. But you'd think these Leifin people would try to expand their town and tame the land rather than carve elaborate fountains.

The chime that they gave me helped me access the Mirage Tower. And since I had previously acquired the cube from the robot underneath the waterfall near Onrac, access to the Sky Fortress was a cinch.

There's a really tough super-boss called WarMech that resides on the upper level of the Sky Fortress. In all my years of playing this game on the NES, Wonderswan Color, and PlayStation, I have never once encountered him. But if the message board ramblings are to be believed, he hits for insane damage and is more frustrating than legendary. Plus, you don't really get any special items for defeating the WarMech, which means all of the subsequent boasting to friends requires their extreme faith in your honesty.

Either that or you'd have to invite them over and convince them to stay 6 hours in front of the TV as your party wanders aimlessly on the sky bridge.

In any case, I didn't expect to encounter WarMech this time. So when he failed to rear his ugly command console, it wasn't much of a surprise.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the adamantite (which used to be called adamant) is pretty much in the same location but bigger. I'll have to return to the dwarves later and have them make the second-best sword in the game: Excalibur.

One of the random things about the Sky Fortress in the original NES version was the sky window. It was a 3x3 sky tile segment that looked like a spriting error. Upon closer inspection, a message would pop up saying that the fiends were gathering at the Temple of Chaos. A little subtle hint about what to do after defeating Tiamat, perhaps.

Not so in the subsequent remakes. The window is now a giant orb a la Zordon's viewing globe that shows a short scene of four colored ribbons of light converging on a center point.

In any case, the path to Tiamat was pretty simple. The GBA version's decision to remove magic charges in favor of MP means I can let my party die hundreds of times and never worry about resurrection. That's not to say my party ever died. Since the GBA version decreased the amount of EXP required to level up, the heroes were already ridiculously overpowered.

Tiamat went down in three rounds without ever posing a challenge. There was no need to buff any characters. I had the white wizard heal the entire part with Healara. Weasly the black wizard would either heal with a staff or attack with the cat claws I bought from Gaia. And both the knight and ninja just focused on fighting.

With the final crystal restored, we've reached the final dungeon in the game: the Temple of Chaos.