FFVI – Part 57: The Falcon Flies Again

Summary: We find Setzer in Kohlingen, and convince him to join us. All together, we head to the tomb of Darril, his engineer friend, and get her airship. The Falcon. We’ve got wings.

Kohlingen

-Narshe is overrun with monsters.

-A woman feels nostalgia for the past, and we get a brief happy flashback of her memory of peaceful Kohlingen.

-Hi Setzer! That’s… random.

-He, too, feels no drive. His will to fight was crushed when he lost his ship. Celes encourages him to find new dreams to pursue. (This is especially wonderful coming from Celes.)

It helps to not be alone in chasing your dreams.

-YES! Setzer thinks on this, and then his musical theme rips in. He has a new dream: “pay a visit to Darill’s Tomb.” Huh? “She’s waiting for us… with a new pair of wings!” A tomb has an airship. Ok…

-The camera pans to a small town-looking thing to the west. I see where we’re off to next.

-Townie: “There’s a real tough fellow fighting in the coliseum. Seems he’s trying to get a weapon called an ‘Itchy Gecky.’” What and what? I guess that the coliseum from the Dragon’s Neck guy is now a thing. Good for him, constructing his creepy-ass monument to war.

Not sure about “Itchy Gecky.” I’m sure there’s some epic weapon called Echeyakee (a random World of Warcraft reference) or something like that, but not sure what the guy’s interest in the weapon has to do with the coliseum.

-Sounds like Cyan’s been here.

The tell-tale ‘thou.’

He went to Maranda.

-Jeez. Even the plans in the world despair.

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Darill’s Tomb

-Setzer misses Darill.

-Noooo!! Malboros.

-Actually, they’re surprisingly not as bad here as they were in FFIV, specifically because Relics let me play against them.

-We have an option to carve something on a blank tomb. Not sure what. I’ll come back to this room.

-Whee! Turtle transport is the best transport.

-Monster-in-a-Box with boss music: “Angler-Whelk.”

It looks AWESOME. Standard shell boss, where I kill it when it’s out of the shell. It rewards me with Dragon Claws for Sabin.

-We arrive at Darril’s grave, and a boss attacks us.

Dullahan.

Really cool spectral charioteer model. Not a bad fight.

-I backtrack before going on to a room I missed. The room has four graves with nonsense on them: “ERAU,” “QSSI,” “DLRO,” “WEHT.”

-AHA!! It’s “The world is square” backwards. Or maybe “The world is Square,” given the publisher. We head back to the room with the empty tombstone, and carve this combo of words in.

Success. A voice tells us how to get “The Growth Egg.” We go where it says and get it, and it doubles the xp earned. HOLY SHIT YES PLZ.

-We descend further into the tomb. The music becomes… more peaceful. Beautiful, really.

-The game gives us this really cool style of flashback. It’s not sepia. We walk down a stairway in the present while above us on the screen we see Setzer’s memories with Darril, his former friend/possibly girlfriend.

Setzer the… cautious?

-And Darril’s awesome. She’s an ass-kicking test pilot who designed a ship better than the Blackjack, and died a while back.

I’m sorry we just see her in Setzer’s memory.

-New airship. Interestingly, it’s not actually buried in the tomb. It’s under the water, and emerges, Lunar Whale style. EMERGES TO AWESOME MUSIC BTW. It has this techno backbeat to it that I really like. I think that Setzer somehow uses something in the tomb to remotely activate the ship.

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The Falcon

-Celes sees a bird fly by, and some instinct inside her speaks up:

CELES: “Setzer! Follow that pigeon!”
SETZER: “…why?” LOLOLOL

We follow it to Maranda.

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Next time: Hopefully meeting a new party member in Maranda. Locke is my guess, given the pigeon, but maybe Cyan.