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Episode 3: Yaschas Massif 010 AF
-Hope’s experience with the fal’Cie spurred him towards the Academy. I can’t imagine anyone wanting humanity to develop independence from the fal’Cie more than him.
-Sazh continued to fly airships after XIII, “but one day he simply disappeared along with his son.”
-Alyssa has been doing great in the Academy these past 5 years, spurred by her experience with us back in Bresha Ruins 005 AF.
-I’m gonna try boosting my Early Peaker Pulse Pulse Knight (SEN). Probably not a long-term monster ally, but once I outgrow him I can infuse him into another more late-game monster.
-A fal’Cie was discovered in the ruins, one with a deep connection to the people of “Paddra.” The name sounds vaguely familiar but I can’t pin it down.
ALYSSA: “Ruins are places where memories gather like dust… probably the easiest places for paradoxes to occur.” I like that explanation of why we’re spending time in ruins so much.
-Hope has discovered that the paradoxes are “temporal overlaps.” He thinks they have something to do with the disappearance of our old crew. Sazh, Snow, Lightning.
-I don’t like how the game makes me talk to people over and over, watching for when the convo starts to loop. Would rather they just gave me the full dialogue initially.
-Hope hasn’t heard from Snow yet. Seems likely he’s somewhere lost in time.
-These are the ruins of the city of Paddra, built by the Farseers. They were a nation led by a seeress.
I’d bet a dollar that we’ll go back in time and see the Farseers in their heyday at some point soon.
-Hearing Hope talk about the Farseers makes Noel all misty or introspective or something.
HOPE: “The seeress would read the fates and guide the country.”
NOEL: “Yeul…”
AHA! So that’s who Yeul is. Is Caius also a Farseer?
-But apparently Yeul wasn’t (exactly) a single person. The power of the seeress was passed down, and that seeress was always called Yeul.
Getting a strong whiff of FFVIII, where the matrilineal power of the sorceress.
ALYSSA: “They were destroyed because they could see the future.” Yeul foresaw the city’s destruction, and this very prophecy caused division and civil war.
Self-fulfilling prophecies are fucked up.
-The buildings here strongly resemble some I saw in Valhalla. I wonder if Valhalla is at least partially composed of the memories of Paddra.
-Paddra fell apart. The survivors fled into the wilderness.
-At the heart of the paradox is a device the Academy discovered called the Oracle Device. Noel recognizes it instantly.
NOEL: “Oh… uh, yeah… I’ve, uh, heard of them… in books and stuff!”
Suuuuure. He’s giving off vibes that he had a major hand in either creating or discovering them.
-Hope thinks it’s a recording apparatus, but it depicts “things that cannot be possible.” Perhaps it shows alternate timelines, like the true timeline Serah remembers where everyone is happily reunited.
-It’s like an image projector – and NOW I understand why the Eclipse Artefact is shaped like a projector!
Noel activates it. It shows Ragnarok stopping the fall of Cocoon at the end of XIII. The forming of the pillar. Lightning fighting.
-What’s weird is that the device is centuries old.
Ah! Hope thinks this is a prophecy from the past.
-The next image on the Oracle Device is XIII-2’s opening battle in Valhalla.
-Something interferes with this device, making it only show broken images. If we could manage to clear up the paradoxes in the area, we’d be able to get a clearer view of the images of Valhalla.
-Hope gives us an artefact he found, one in the shape of a Cie’th stone. A “Hollow Artefact.”
-Researchers found images of battle in the ruins. Not against monsters only, but people.
-Paddra was likely founded before the War of Transgression. Hundreds of years ago.
So this wasn’t just a self-fulfilling prophecy by the seeress that destroyed Paddra. It would be destroyed in the then-future War of Transgression.
-The people of old Paddra are said to still roam the wilderness on Gran Pulse.
Fragment Quest, “Amur’s Sphere” - A retro electronics collector wants me to find a particular old battery from 10 years ago.
I think the fragment quest images are a hint about where to find them. The picture shown for “Amur’s Sphere” is a daytime scene. I doubt I’ll find it in this time.
(I know it’s from 10 years ago, but I still thought before seeing the picture that maybe Mog would find one of those lost-in-time treasure spheres with the battery in it.)
Fragment Quest, “Innocence’s Sacred Sphere” – A woman lost her watch nearly falling off a cliff. When the eclipse clears, I’m supposed to find her “sporty wristwatch.”
-With that, we head through the ruins to the next Time Gate.
-Noel’s acting weird. Something’s bothering him, and I get a live trigger. I’ll ask about the Oracle Drive. He clearly acted weird around that.
-Maybe. Hm. He doesn’t really answer. Maybe I should’ve asked about the seeress instead.
-ARGH! Closed the game and it restarts me in Oerba 200 AF. I really hope I didn’t miss anything in the Historia Crux, dialogue or whatever.
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Oerba 200 AF
-The Academy has restricted access to Oerba, “because it is the homeland of the two heroines who turned to crystal and held Cocoon safe in the sky.” FHDKLSFHDSJFDHSFKLDS
-It’s been swallowed into a rift 200 years after. Spacetime is all tangled up and crushing itself here.
-This is the time when Fenrir was supposed to arrive. Maybe the answer lies there somehow.
-This is SURREAL.
NOEL: “The ones who are left behind crave nothingness… oh, just an old fairy tale.” I have a feeling this will relate back to Caius and Yeul.
-The music here is chill and voiced.
-I recognize this as the bridge to Oerba, but everything else is starry void. It’s awe-inspiring, like seeing the wild-reclaimed ruins of New York City in hundreds of years from now.
-Mog’s pom blazes. He uncovers another of those mazes.
-This is a new type of Temporal Rift puzzle. I have to restore the bonds between crystals of the same shape and color. It’s… like a very strange Cait Sith-shaped “Connect the Dots.”
-Resolved the anomaly, which opened up more of the world.
-The lore fragment tells me that moogles fly with an anti-gravity field in their magic bobble (the pom). The wings are just for show.
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Next time: into Oerba Village proper.
