Summary: Costlemark Tower. A giant fish. Thoughts on the Kingsglaive movie. Terra Wars crossover.
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Side Stuff (Chapter 8)
-Back in the XIV instance, my Miqo’te friend sells weapons at the cost of – lol – “Allagan Tomestones” (an XIV raid currency). Not sure how I get those yet.
-I can fight either a level 45 or 120 version of Garuda again. The 120 version must be superboss material.
-Tried refighting her in “Howling Eye (Hard).” Tons of experience but only one Allagan Tomestone. The weapon rewards cost anywhere from 10-99 tomestones. Not gonna farm that now.
-For giggles, I tried my hand at a level 99 quest in Vesperpool, to kill a snake woman named Melusine.
It didn’t go well.
-Dino requested a gem from Costlemark Tower, a new dungeon I’d missed before.
-AND WHAT A DUNGEON! A maze, but one that somehow feels less confusing than Crestholm Channels. The enemies are mostly in the 30s and 40s, with Yojimbos being the toughest.
The toughest part is a puzzle with a bunch of blocks to push and tunnels to uncover. It loops back on itself a lot, but it seems at least a bit on rails, which I appreciate.
-The floor bosses are pretty tough. Red giants and snake people. I love that they brought Red Giants back to the series! I last remember them as tough enemies in FFIV’s brutal moon final dungeon.
-Final boss: Jabberwock. A giant dragon.
-What kind of place is this? Super high tech beneath here. A giant royal tomb, with a 2-hander royal arm.
-Got another (final?) fishing quest for the Devil of the Cygillan. Took a bit, but eventually got it to bite on my tonberry lure.
The thing is HUGE! The fight to reel it in took a hell of a lot of patience, and probably about 10 minutes from the first hook to victory.
-Did my first timed quest, taking down nine bandersnatches. The music is one of my favorite tracks in the game. It awarded me 100 QP. I really want the sword that costs 1,000 QP, but not enough to farm right now.
-I really dislike the hunts we’re given to basically just redo old dungeons. Like, I have a hunt for a Jormungand, the boss of Crestholm Channels. WHY. Just give me credit for having beaten it!
[Later edit: I retract this at least a little bit. Most of the dungeon’s enemies were still cleared, and the various gates remained unlocked. Reaching the bosses again was much faster than I feared it’d be.]
-Whelp. I found out why the Mt. Ravatough volcano had giant eggs. A level 67 hunt had me return there to take out a titanic Zu.
-The summons in this game feel weirdly balanced. They’re both incredibly strong and incredibly random, leading to the enemy just sometimes dying like a quarter of the way into a fight, even bosses and big hunt marks. It’s a cool feeling so I’m not complaining exactly, but still feels like a weird design choice.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the badass Garuda summon in action btw, here she is:
I didn’t get summons much until the XIV Garuda. Now I get them more frequently, and pretty much always Garuda.
[Later edit: This was my impression at the time around summon randomness, but it’s mitigated by what my friend Hatstand said in the comments to last post, that you can control the randomness a bit if you know the conditions that cause each summon.]
-Whelp. The time has come. I’ve done all the side quests and hunts I can/want to for now, despite leftovers like a quest to find a griffon for that awesome professor.
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Kingsglaive (movie)
[Note: PS4 wouldn’t let me take screenshots as the movie went on, so this is just text.]
-As I write this on Sunday, April 5, I just saw the “Kingsglaive” movie with friends. A quarantine, FaceTime thing, and it was a ton of fun! I didn’t take notes as we went or anything, and want to share some brief thoughts.
-First impressions: I really liked it! A strong story in its own right, amazing visuals, character development, intriguing plotting, good voice acting, the works.
-My favorite voice actors here was probably Emperor Aldercapt. Something about his tone and presence during the treaty signing scene. I found out afterwards that Sean Bean, Lena Headey, and Aaron Paul were even voice actors!
-Really happy that the movie gave such an active role to Lunafreya. I had assumed she was just chilling across the ocean, hiding out this whole time. But no! She was incredibly proactive in heading over to Insomnia, fighting for the Ring of the Lucii, and fighting the Empire.
Sucks that Crowe, the only other prominent female character in the movie, died early and off-screen. As my friends said, a continuing problem for XV.
-The monster design was fantastic. Both the Old Kings of Lucis fighting back (who gave me major Knights of the Round vibes) and the various daemons. Cerberus, the Ruby Weapon-looking thing that stomped over Insomnia…
And mother. Fucking. Ultros. THAT KILLED ME XD XD XD
-A part of me – albeit a small part – was wondering whether there really was something subversive in how much Ardyn was “helping” Noctis. No more. My distrust of him bumped up from 99% to 99.9%.
-The Kinsglaive themselves were interesting enough, if feeling a bit like paint-by-numbers action heroes. Libertus was my favorite among them. His arc in losing faith in the king and then losing faith in the Empire-colluding revolution was interesting, and I hope we get to see him in game.
-One last thing: I loved how the movie portrayed Regis. It centered just how trapped he was in a way we didn’t necessarily see from Noctis’ perspective. He was intelligent, noble, making the best of a terrible situation with no really good options.
Got some chills when I heard him as one of the now-former Kings of Lucis, talking to Nyx.
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Chosen Girl, Eroded World (Terra Wars)
-I’d started this quest before, a crossover event with the Terra Wars mobile game. [Later edit: Google tells me it shut down at the end of 2019. RIP.] I’ll knock it out before sailing to Altissia.
-A teleport took Noctis alone to a new world along with Sarah, a character I assume is also from Terra Wars. They have to figure out what’s up. (I adore Sarah’s voice actor.)
-We come across those weird alien things. “Hiso hiso!” Sarah understands its language. It wants us to rescue them from the Eroder.
Hiso Alien kids love Noctis.
-This is an unfinished world created by “the Great Tree.” We see those blue blocks floating about randomly, like we saw in XIV’s world-in-progress Vauthry was making. The Eroder is some mysterious being that is trying to destroy it. The Hiso Aliens could only seal it away temporarily.
-The world/combat music which I assume is at least adapted from that game) is fantastic.
-The quest is clearly trying to build some sort of chemistry arc between Noctis and Sarah where they’re out of sync at first and become a team, but it’s hard to buy over the span of like three conversations.
-I like the anime art style they use for Sarah’s special attacks!
Noctis got this treatment too. It just happened so fast I couldn’t get a screenshot.
-Time to fight the Eroder. She appears at first as a little Hiso Alien with a mean look before barreling into Serah and copying a decaying version of her form. Again, A+ design!
-I also kind of dig the red glitchy effects as she “erodes” this world.
-It’s a two-phase fight, neither too tough. She has a habit of creating shadow forms that attack us and she dodges well, but we keep at it until she goes down.
Some warm banter later, Sarah and Noctis depart back to their respective worlds.
It’s a neat quest, even with no knowledge of “Terra Quest,” and they did have decent chemistry for as little time as they had together. I’m sure I’d appreciate it more if I were familiar with Sarah’s story.
-Hey, I get a souvenir back in the main game! Sarah’s Shortsword, a decent lower-end weapon.
[Non-rhetorical question: Completing the quest returned me to the title screen. I loaded my last save (couldn’t save mid-event), but the event quest is still in my log. How do I dump/abandon it?]
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Next time: Sailing to Altissia and watching the “Final Fantasy XV: Brotherhood” anime.
