After teleporting out of the Sunken Shrine, I talked to the people in Onrac. Specifically, I talked to Dr. Unne’s brother, who exhorted me to take the Rosetta Stone to Dr. Unne.

I did so. Dr. Unne was very excited to see it. After studying it for at least 20 seconds, he mastered the Lufenian language. Even better, he offered to teach me. Apparently learning a foreign language involves thrusting your arms out repeatedly while your teacher hops several times. I’m not kidding.

Why didn't they use this amazing technique in my college French classes? This is all I remember from 2 semesters of French: "Zut alors!" That's it. Oh, and "Va te faire enculer chez les grecs!" Side note: this is a perfectly appropriate and valid response to any attempt my anyone to engage you in socratic dialogue against your will. But forget I said any of this, as this is a family blog.

Now that I was a master of Lufenian, I headed for the last city I hadn’t been to. Presumably Lufenia. I presumed right. It totally was Lufenia. And since I had thrust my arms multiple times over the course of 5 seconds, I could speak to its denizens.

They lived in the clouds… and they were called the "Sky People". I don't know, I just don't understand the connection.

The Lufenians were full of interesting information. Most confusing was a comment about 5 warriors who had been sent out to track down the big bad guy. There was also a comment that I think referred to them being turned into bats, though I might be confusing some things. Anyway, this got me wondering whether there might be a subplot involving all the “Kee-Kee!” bats I’d been running into.

Anyway, the Lufenians had tried to fight off Tiamat, the fourth of the fiends, 400 years ago, but were not successful. One of them gave me a chime that would grant me entrance to the Mirage Tower.

I headed there. There’s not much to say — I fought through a lot of enemies, eventually finding a warp to the Flying Fortress. I guess the warp cube I got from the robot earlier helped with that.

Anyway, I eventually found 3 interesting things. First was some Adamantite.

I wasn’t sure what it was for, but the game made a big deal out of it. Played some music and everything.

Second was a window showing the geographical center of all of the crystals. It was very close to where the game started, in Cornelia.

Third was Tiamat. Tiamat was actually a little tougher than the other fiends, but that’s not saying much. She went down in short order.

That's not how things played out.

Anyway, it was the usual deal. Lit the crystal, teleported out, all that.

I had lit all the crystals, but it appeared that there was still a big baddie to deal with. Before heading to the spot indicated in the window above, I went to the various towns, swapping spells around and seeing if there were loose ends to wrap up. It turns out that the adamantite could be used by that dwarf blacksmith in Dwarfopolis to forge Excalibur. That is super-confusing, considering the whole legend around that sword, but cool. It is a bad-ass sword.

Spells in order,¹ Excalibur in hand, I was ready to go after the head douchebag. In a hilarious repeat of an earlier confusing mistake, I went on a fairly long detour that left me a little frustrated with this game’s self-awareness as a remake.

But I’ll explain that in my next post.

Until then, I’ll leave you with two things. First, if you look at my list of games, you may see something exciting, though not entirely surprising. Second, here’s Square trying to shoe-horn Cid into the plot. This was definitely not in the original:

Yeah? And was Cid a chocobo? With a pet moogle? And will anyone who is actually likely to read this have any idea what I'm talking about?

I get why they did it — a character named Cid is in most of the Final Fantasy games. Usually it’s someone associated with airships somehow. Still, it seemed a little silly to throw this in. Unless I’m completely mistaken, of course. But this feels like some Grade-A Lucasian retconning.