Last time on Batman’s Dying Dream, Batman made us all know that he’s one of the shittiest protagonists in all of Final Fantasy because he
can’t get shit done. Even when he’s beaten the final boss, he still fails to protect the crystal because he’s afraid of hands.
Today, we’re going to see if we can climb a tower.
Giott, the Great King
Yeah, don’t tell Giott
why Golbez got the last crystal or anything.
I need to find a way to prove that I’m a hero in the most batshit way. Clair coming to save the day isn’t it, and my way of bringing her back was to atone for killing her mom and making Leviatan eat her whole. And hands are my biggest fear, so I’ll put that in my dream too! And I’ll make Giott super-drunk so he doesn’t ask questions!
Golbez could steal the key if he truly wanted to, or he could break into the sealed cave because magic. If he could turn into a freaking
hand, well, you know.
Can I switch protagonists? Giott seems like the ideal protagonist next to Golbez. Dude knows how to get shit done.
I also think Donnie forgot a “that” in his sentence.
Batman sucks so much. So indecisive as a leader. Fucking
lead, dude. That’s your job. And people want you to be the
King of Baron? No thanks.
We agree to do it anyway, and Giott tells us that there’s a path under the castle.
Great. Let’s just Warp outta here to get some XP.
Uh…
Golbez didn’t take the crystal at all, dude. Let’s show King Giott at once and
end this game!
Nah. Let’s not. This is one of the ways you can break the game if you’re speedrunning. The Warp spell takes you to the room that you were previously in. Cast it right after you talk to Giott and you’ll be back in the crystal room. This map is basically the one for the Crystal Room in the Sealed Cave. Later on in the game, you’ll be able to take one of the Darkness crystals and it’ll be in your inventory. This allows you to skip the Sealed Cave dungeon altogether (and just get the scene to progress).
But we’re not going to do that. I’ll suffer through the entire game.
Back to the main game now.
So, my Clair is pretty strong (typically, she’ll be in her mid-20s in terms of levels). But we encounter a problem immediately after she comes back: she is equipped with a Whip. A whip weapon of any type in this game will render your ability to score critical hits obsolete. You will never ever be able to score a critical again. This is true for a few other weapons in this game.
Because Clair isn’t primarily a physical fighter, this isn’t much of a problem… unless you don’t like to cast magic a lot. Speaking of magic, Clair comes back stacked with Tier-2 spells and Virus (she learned Psych after the boss battle). But you’ll soon see that Tier-2 spells aren’t really going to cut it anymore. They’re effective, but we can do better in terms of damage output. We’ll need Tier-3 spells soon. Clair can no longer use White Magic for a completely bullshit reason, but to be fair, Batman already has the shitty White Mage role covered.
Clair now has a lot of Call spells. She’s gained the Mist Dragon (the thing Batman and Tommy killed at the beginning of the game), regained Titan (you know, the thing that killed Batman and Tommy at the beginning of the game), and gained Shiva, Indra, and Jinn.
Without getting too in-depth…
Indra is the god of war and thunderstorms in Hindu mythology whose weapon is the
vajra.
Shiva is the destroyer or transformer among the Hindu Trinity of the divine—he destroys the world and recreates it in a cyclical manner. Shiva’s representation in Final Fantasy is completely different from that in the Hindu religion. Shiva is generally thought as both male and female (but is generally denoted as male), and has blue skin due to consuming poison to save the world. No, Shiva does not consist of twin sisters who turn into a motorcycle.
Titan comes from Greek mythology; they were overthrown by the Olympians and symbolized many things.
Ifrit is the name given to a class of Djinn/Jinn, and they are the ones that symbolize fire.
Anyway, no one cares about this stuff, so let’s go exploring!!
I would if I could, brah.
They don’t know how to use the word “our”! That is adorable.
I don’t like their weapon selection. And dwarf weapons and armours are expensive! Rune Rings are helpful, so grab those. I never really equip Beer with a bow and arrows, so we’re going to leave her alone. We could pick up the Fire weapon for Tommy in terms of a completion thing, though. He doesn’t need the Fire Armour.
Anyway, what’s that space between the shops?
This café has a kickass name and no one’s here? What the? And there’s a space in the corner that looks like it can lead down to somewhere but there’s nothing there. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Oh son, you wouldn’t believe it. We got shipwrecked, we had to fight some Dark Elf from the first Final Fantasy game, even we’re bad guys because we steal crystals from people… it’s a tough world up there, man.
We don’t even need to ask fucking
permission here. These dwarves are on the
Cool List.
Do not equip this in the SNES version. Don’t. Do not do it. It will take your criticals away forever. Axes are a class of weapon which removes your critical forever. It is currently your most powerful weapon in your inventory, so people are likely to equip it without realizing how dumb some of the programming is in this game.
Hey guys, remember how we always made fun of Final Fantasy XIII’s dialogue?
FF’s dialogue has always been insane; it’s just more noticeable now with all the voice acting, and how seriously the narratives take themselves now.
The Bird of Sacred, you say? You’re telling me that a GF from Final Fantasy VIII owns the Big Chocobo? That’s pretty kick-ass. But we all know the real reason is that all the trees melted in the presence of all that magma so they had to shove the Big Chocobo in here somewhere…
When are they going to upgrade to the
Nintendo Cannon 64?
Learn some damn manners, man. >:|
This is the most horrifying sight I have seen in this game.
Who in their right mind would open all of these?!
Hey, we’re underground surrounded by fire and brimstone and magma, no wonder the Fiend of Fire lives here!
And this is the reason why you don’t sleep at the Dwarf Castle Inn. Well, besides their beds being super-tiny and we wouldn’t be able to fit in them.
Land of Dwarves
This is one of the better BGMs on the soundtracks. Lots of bass, and a nice arrangement of the Main Theme of Final Fantasy IV. It’s more subdued, and it feels mellower than the original overworld theme. The arrangement of the tune is indicative that you’ve moved onto a completely new segment of the game and left the previous one behind.
I cannot stand the DS version at all, omg. The synth in the DS version so
bad. It’s terrible. It completely butchers the original version of the theme. I don’t like most of the DS arranged soundtrack, and this BGM is one of the worst offenders.
Digital Devil Saga 2 – Battle for Survival
This is what the Dancing Dagger does when used as an item. It deals magic damage to an enemy and you can easily use it from the back row. This is going to be Clair’s physical attack for a while.
Just showing off what the new summons do. We’re not going to use them much. I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t like using summons anymore in Final Fantasy.
A special note about Mist Dragon, which I didn’t show off here… it is non-elemental, but it’ll do more damage if Clair has more HP.
There’s a bunch of new enemies down here, but they’re pretty easy to straighten out. The BlackLiz is something we encountered on the surface, and we already know we can spam Ice2 at it. Mighty the Armadilo decided to come here after Sega ditched him, and he’s incredibly unremarkable. No wonder Sega don’t care about him. And we have Dark Imps. They are also unremarkable. Clair can kill them with her Dancing Dagger.
Man Clair is so much better than Abe. Abe sucks.
The dwarves are there to distract the Super Nintendo Cannon. For some reason I am able to use a Tent right in front of the Tower of Bab-il and stand on the tanks perfectly fine. The dwarves don’t care. They let me do whatever I want.
Tower of Bab-il
Welcome to the Tower of Bab-il. No, not the Tower of Babel, like in Mystic Quest and the Bible/Torah. For some reason they were afraid of calling it by name here. Oh, and they added such a neat little hyphen in the middle of the name because they thought it would look all cool and futuristic. And Golbez spent a crapload of money to make this place look futuristic and awesome.
I hate this dungeon. There’s a lot of walking around, and I don’t have a run button in this version. This is Golbez’s house. Or his Cottage of Love from the Future. I don’t know what Zot was, tbh. It was in space. The Tower of Bab-il extends from the Underworld, through a mountain range near Eblan, and into the sky. It’s pretty big. And we have to climb most of it. It’s annoying. But Golbez needs to live in style, surrounded by stuff from the future. He deserves it because he knows how to outwit every single one of his opponents.
Well, outwitting Batman is
clearly the easiest thing in the world. Even in his dying dream he’s an idiot who can’t do anything right.
Anyway, I’m not going to spend most of the update going, “this floor is annoying, because…” as that’ll make the update really really long. So let’s talk about the enemies.
Star Ocean 4 – The Incarnation of Devil
There are a lot of new enemy types in this dungeon. The Marion can summon EvilDolls once you’ve cleared most of them from the battlefield. You can use this to your advantage to grind EXP, actually. Hit the dolls with fire-elemental weapons or with a Fire spell (but that would be a waste, imo, since they don’t have that much HP to begin with).
We also encounter FlameMans and Flame Dogs. Hit them with Donnie’s Ice Claw, Clair’s Ice spells, or the two Ice-elemental weapons for Tommy and Batman that you can find in the Tower. You also find Ice Arrows in here, but they aren’t worth using. Tofus are also weak against Ice. Stonemans / Stoneman #s are weak against Ice as well. Mystery Eggs in here hatch into a BlackLiz, so hit them with an Ice-Elemental attack.
Medusas will do what you think they’ll do: try to cast stone on you. Just, uh, hit them with anything, I guess. Chimeras absorb Lit, Fire, and Ice attacks. They’ll try to quickly take you out with a Blaze attack (which is Ice elemental). You can either petrify them with Medusa Arrows, or take them out with my favourite spell Virus. Nagas are unremarkable.
Alerts are assholes that are basically Golbez’s car alarms. If you touch them, they’ll summon a monster security guard. And Golbez has Stoneman #s, Nagas, Chimeras, and Hot Dogs as security guards. If you kill the summoned monster before killing it, it’ll just summon another one. It should be your first target because it will not shut up.
Did I mention this dungeon is long? Because it’s long. Oh, this room seems important. We’ll probably be able to get to the Important Room after the special boss.
Speaking of which…
Boy oh boy this doesn’t look good. Golbez isn’t at home, but he has his two roommates hanging out in the middle of nowhere.
Eblan probably fell at the beginning of the game, probably? It’s probably been days or weeks since we’ve raided Eblan’s treasure chests. Welp, at least one of them is gone so we only have one to deal with. And I think this is the easier one.
Dancing Calcobrena
And he dances around a little bit after this. He’s kinda weird.
Hey guys, I think this is Proto-Hojo. He is a mad scientist working for Golbez (Golbez has the bloody
world working for him, obviously). He’s pretty insane, but he shares Hojo’s love for fucking things up with Science with a capital S. <3 Science.
I wonder which scientist he admires the most? Probably one that didn’t care about ethical boards, just like Hojo.
…wait a minute, since when did this game give a crap about science outside of airships? I thought we were supposed to explain everything by saying, “because… magic”? I don’t get it.
Haha. It’s funny because they must be around the same age in terms of appearance but Beer needs to calm the overstimulated Clair down. Oh, and the best part of this entire dialogue point is that Lugae is alerted to our presence by Clair’s exclamation. Even though we’re, like, 10 feet away or something. And sometimes when he’s dancing about like a madman, he’s looking straight at the party.
Everyone except Golbez and King Giott in this game must be an idiot.
Tommy must’ve been all buddy-buddy with Hojo before this when he was on the winning team. Either way, Tommy’s being way more manly and heroic than Batman could ever aspire to be. Tommy deserves the Beer more than Batman does.
Uh. Let me take that back.
What makes you laugh, Tommy?
Shit, he
must be a mad scientist. Only a mad scientist would name his kid Balnab!
I like these guys. They’re adorable, and Balnab just punched his father in the nose. I miss the times when Final Fantasy made me laugh-out-loud laugh in a genuine fashion. Oh, btw, Dancing Calcobrena is still playing during this battle.
Okay, so there are a few ways you can finish this fight off. The first is killing them quickly so that you don’t get to Part 2 of that fight. That way you don’t see Balnab-Z and you don’t have Balnab exploding on you.
The second is to take Dr. Lugae out first. This is not recommended in the slightest because you’ll miss Balnab-Z and you might not be fast enough to take him out before he explodes. So this is what happens:
The third is to take Balnab out first. This is the best course of action in any of the games with an in-game bestiary. We’re going to do that.
Balnab isn’t hard to take out, by the way. He relies on physical attacks so cast Blink on your squishies, Slow on the boss, Tommy should jump, and Clair should use whatever spells or summons you want.
Lugae’s Heal command will heal Balnab for 500 HP and will take off any status effects he’s inflicted with.
If you take Balnab out first, you’ll get a brand new boss.
You get Balnab-Z. Just attack it and make sure you take as much HP as possible.
This button is a self-destruct button! When it explodes it will cause as much damage as how much HP it has left.
This is anime, so a self-destruct sequence will not kill Lugae.
Mother 3 – Natural Killer Cyborg
Dr. Lugae transforms into something… uh… well, I don’t know what the heck that is. It says it’s a Mech type. He probably stole the plans from Robotnik or something and ended up roboticizing himself. Lugae will counter with Gas (which will put a character to sleep) and will use Poison Gas at the beginning against the entire party. He’ll use Emission (fire spell), Beam (10% of player character’s total HP), and Laser. Laser’s the one you should watch out for, as it is affected by how much HP Lugae has (so lower HP means lower damage). Lugae will, for some reason, use Heal on the entire party after a while.
Yes, this fight is pretty fucked up in the DS version. He’ll cast Reverse in that version and it sucks.
After the fight we win a…
Uh… Well, we win a Tower key, but… uh…
You see, I had attempted to force this message by making my bag full before I’d left the Dwarf Castle. I filled it with a bunch of Cure 1s without sorting them. Whenever you have a full bag, and need to get an item, you are prompted to exchange or discard an item. It’s different when you need to get a key item, though. You cannot leave the Item Get screen without it. If you attempt to Exit the screen, you will be told that you need to take something out of your inventory to make space for the key item.
Well, in Final Fantasy IV SNES, it’s hard to ever get this message if you aren’t taking advantage of a Big Chocobo and are hoarding everything you get. You have to force yourself to get this message. This message is untranslated from the original Japanese. It is the only text in the entire game that is not translated. Based on what I’d said before, it’s completely easy to see why it slipped past the translators’ gazes, but this is the type of thing QA is for? I think?
Rubicant is a genius. So if the crystals have been taken to the upper portion of the Tower, we should probably go get them, right? The dwarves are in their tanks outside and they could drive away if the Cannon’s about to hit them (I thought they were holding off the Super Cannon before?).
So what do we do: do we go upstairs and go after the crystals to end this game, or do we rescue the dwarves?
Well, we have the worst leader in the world, so what do you think we’re going to do?
Good lord. The dwarves will be fine, you guys.
Next Time: Sometimes you’ve gotta make the hard decisions.
