Now that we have Daddy's pet and no one is poisoned or anything, we can finally cross the ocean by flight. Our next destination of important urgency is Walse, where the Water Crystal is being amplified and in danger of shattering just like the Wind Crystal did. So, we're going to go pretty much everywhere possible that isn't there first, because that's the RPG way.

While the purpose of getting Hiryu was so we could fly over the ocean, we're also able to go back to where the game very first started and fly over the meteor crash site to get to the other side! On the other side is Castle Tycoon, which we saw briefly in the opening cutscene. This is our first time actually being able to visit, though, since the place was blocked off when the meteor crashed right at the beginning.

When we arrive at the castle, most of the people inside are thrilled to see that Lenna has arrived home safely. The chancelor also appears to want to speak to her, so we go visit him. Basically, he just talks about how there have been lots of monster raids and the defenses are weakening. Having Lenna back should be a great boost to the troops' morale, but Lenna explains the situation about saving the crystals. Protecting the castle will do little good if the crystals are to shatter.

The chancellor is shocked to hear she'll be leaving so soon, but he comes around quickly and supports her decision to journey to save the crystals. He insists that we at least stay the night since we're already here.

Lenna agrees, and we all get to have a rest at the castle. We see Lenna in bed, though, a bit restless. She's unable to sleep, so she starts to take a walk around the castle.

She goes out to the balcony above the main entrance, where she finds Faris. Faris tells Lenna that it's late and she should be asleep.

... And Lenna responds that Faris should be asleep, too, and addresses him as "Sister."

Faris is surprised, and then laughs at the idea of the idea of someone like him being a prince -- er, a princess. Yeah, he refers to himself as "prince" first and then uncomfortably corrects himself.

He laughs and storms off, and Lenna just mutters, "But your pendant..." after he has gone.

We get a little comedy scene with Bartz being really out of it when he wakes up, and then we're free to roam the castle. Someone tells us that the chancellor has a gift for us, but we're going to go talk to all these random people first. One of the servants mentions that they looked after both princesses, Lenna and Sarisa. Bartz asks who Sarisa is, and the lady explains that Lenna had an older sister, but she was lost at sea when a storm hit a ship she and her father were on.

By the way, Sarisa was "Salsa" in the PS1 localization of this game, hahaha.

There are all kinds of goodies lying around the castle, free for the taking. I mean, we're pretty much the first-in-command here now anyway, so it's not like we're stealing. This is Lenna's stuff!

In all, we made off with quite a haul:

• 1 Hi-Potion
• 1 Cottage
• 2 Phoenix Downs
• 2 Ethers
• 2 Elixirs

And that's just from random pots and barrels!

We can get into the storehouse now, where the chancellor is waiting. He gives us a treasure of the Tycoon family, the Healing Staff. This is a very amazing item and will help out our journey immensely -- it's a Staff weapon, but instead of dealing damage, it heals the target. You can target your own party members with your attacks, so you can use this to heal them without having to consume MP or use items or anything! Free healing! The only downside is that it is your weapon, so you lose your ability to use normal weapon attacks (unless you want to heal the enemy for some reason....)

And in the treasure chests in the storehouse, we found Ashura (a katana weapon), a Diamond Bell (an instrument weapon), and a Shuriken (a throwing item for ninjas). Nothing we can really use right now, and probably will never really use, but at least it can probably be sold for a good chunk of Gil.

I tried to go into the king's room, but it wouldn't let me. I want to sleep in Daddy Tycoon's bed T_T

Our next point of interest is the cave where we ended up finding Faris's crew. We asked Boko to wait here for us, so he should still be here, right? Well, it seems like that's not the case, as all we find upon arrival are his footprints. Bartz thinks that Boko must have ended up trying to follow us in the cave even though we told him to wait. I mean, we were probably gone for a really long time, though, like... many days lol. Maybe he just got hungry...

But a quick trip through the short cave and we arrive at the pirates' cove again, and find that Boko was indeed inside and hurt, but the pirates are taking care of him now. The pirate doctor is looking out for him and says he's confident Boko will be fine and just needs to rest now. They even put him in a human bed lol.

Talking to the pirates, we're given a gift of a bunch of potions, and most of them just say that they're holding down the fort. One of the pirates starts to confess his love for his captain Faris, but ends up getting too embarrassed to come out and say it. Hooray for gay pirates. Actually, apparently, historically, (commas!) pirates were very commonly gay or something? I don't know, I read about it on the internet. But I'm sticking to gay pirates being historically accurate for now haha.

We're also able to push a button on a wall to open up a little secret treasure room behind where a sleeping pirate was when we were first here. Inside, we find a few chests containing 300 Gil, an Ether, and a Tent.

There's nothing new at the Wind Shrine, and I couldn't really find any other new places to visit, so we finally do head to Walse. We do stop by the like... Water ... Shrine? Tower? Whatever thing, and are told we need King Walse's permission to enter, and the people there are kinda rude honestly.

But before heading to the castle to ask for permission, we head into town, and ... I guess there really are child sprites in this game, so that really was an adult running around the flowers and saying "spinny spinny whee" before...

This little girl tells us that Garula lives in the "forest near the tower," and that it's shy.

Other than this frog that speaks English, we didn't really find much here. There was a pot in someone's house that held Silver Specs, an accessory that prevents the Darkness status effect. Which is nice for Flailin' Faris.

The residents of the town almost all just talk about how great it is that the Water Crystal is amplified and makes their water pure...

And the shops had nothing useful for White Mages, so... guess it's time to head out.

I went to this forest, which is the closest one to the tower, but ... it's kind of far from the tower? But I wanted to try hunting out Garula. While a lot of my detailed memory of this game is gone, I'm pretty sure you can fight these things...

I wandered around for a long time in like... pretty much every forest on this continent and didn't run into any Garula...

... So I just went near the tower and walked around in the very-definitely-not-a-forest area surrounding it, and Garula came out for every random encounter..

It didn't attack at all, but it had a ton of HP. Using Libra to see its stats, and comparing how much damage we do per "round" of combat (everyone getting to attack once), it seems like it would take 5 or 6 rounds of combat total to defeat it, but it always runs away after about two.

It is vulnerable to almost every elemental type, though, so maybe we'll be able to come back and fight it when we have access to some offensive magic. We do get 1ABP each time it runs away, so I guess you could theoretically farm ABP here without any danger at all, but... 1ABP at a time, especially while having to wait for it to run away each time is... really, really slow.

We finally head to Castle Walse, and we learn that there are some "fabulous" treasures hidden beneath the castle, but if we steal them we'll go to jail or something. (We really won't.) But the guy who tells us is kind of funny I guess.

We also learn by talking around that the ice goddess Shiva is sealed somewhere within the castle...

And so it sounds like we have some more random unimportant objectives that we must finish before going and saving the world from impending doom.

In the castle dungeon, we find the pickpocket Lone Wolf who asks to be set free. We can do it, but I think it's actually a bad idea. I used to always do it, but I think the only thing that happens is that later in the game, some of the treasures you can find will have already been swiped by him... I don't think anything good comes of letting him free.

We find a room below the castle where we encounter this strange enemy called Jackanapes. It always gets a back attack on the party, and its attacks can deal way more damage than any party member's max HP... Someone in the castle had actually warned us about these, saying if we ever happened across one, we'd be "up a creek."

The only real choice here was to try to run away before he could kill the whole party. I did manage to escape, and learned that staying at the inn will revive fallen allies.

This little area is not very big, but you're very likely to get into multiple battles with Jackanapes as you go through. Using the small amount of Phoenix Downs I had, reviving everyone after running away from each encounter, we were able to to make it to the back of the room and find a treasure chest containing the indeed-fabulous Elven Mantle.

This is an accessory that allows the wearer to random completely avoid attacks.

So we quickly give it to Lenna, who now has the Healing Stick to whap her friends, and a cape that makes enemies miss her a lot. So she's a pretty dedicated and extremely useful healer at this point.

There's also a little room with three pots in it, and looking inside we find 2,000 Gil and learn the magic spell Speed, though it's not White Magic, so we can't use it. I don't know how looking in a pot makes you learn a spell, either. Maybe there was a book in there. And we just like... sat on the pot and read the whole thing. And Jackanapes saw it and didn't want to disturb us while we were reading so we didn't get into any battles. Of course, none of this was shown in the game, as that would be as boring as making an entire game system that revolves around the act of waiting for loading bars.

Oh, wait.

Walking around the castle some more, and purposely avoiding the throne room because I don't want to get permission to go to the tower just yet, we're able to find some waterfalls and stuff because all of Walse is obsessed with water to the point where they surround their castle with an elevated wading pool with waterfalls.

Most the waterfalls in the game will push you away if you try to walk on them, but we can actually walk into the center of this one and find a secret area hidden behind it.

There's a little tower area back here that's extremely simple to navigate, but we get in a lot of battles with these frogs and soldiers a lot...

When Lenna smacks someone with the healing stick, it heals them for even more HP than their max! So she's kind of like the Jackanapes of healing. But it's really devastating when I accidentally have her target an enemy that we've been beating up on for a while...

Also at this point I noticed that Staves are actually starting to outclass punching in offensive might, so I gave Galuf Lenna's old Staff, so now the entire party has a weapon equipped.

The frog enemies in here have an ability called "Pond's Chorus" where they sing, and the target that hears the song is turned into a toad...

I was trying to get a screencap of Lenna's Elven Mantle, because it has its own special animation, but it's only on the screen for a tiny moment and Lenna isn't targeted that often because she's in the back row... so I sat and fought the frogs forever, having Lenna heal as needed. Also, when she uses the Healing Staff in toad form, she licks the party member she is healing...

I FINALLY GOT A SCREENSHOT AND THIS TOOK ME LIKE AN HOUR SO YOU CRETINS BETTER BE APPRECIATIVE FOR ALL THE WORK I'VE DONE FOR YOU.

Also, even in toad form, Lenna still uses the mantle and it's so weird looking.

But yeah, it's always exciting when it triggers, and it always makes the attack miss Lenna completely :D

When we get to the top of the tower, we run into this... weird green bubble with a fireball in it? That is apparently Shiva. She says that if we would command her, we have to prove our worth. But... no one said anything about commanding anybody, so we don't really have to bother with that, right...?

TOO BAD, GOTTA FIGHT

Not only do we have to fight Shiva, but she has these guardians protecting her, too. The guardians only do physical attacks, but they can deal a ton of damage at once, and there's three of them...

Shiva herself doesn't seem to do anything but Blizzara, which can also deal a ton of damage to an entire row at once...

It didn't go so well...

And you have to save outside the castle, so you have to wander all the way to the stupid waterfall thing and then climb the whole tower every time you retry this fight...

By the way, I love how everyone like... changes their clothes when they die. Like I think once they heard someone say "I wouldn't be caught dead in a White Mage robe" and took it as a warning thinking the robes are cursed if you die in one or something, so they rip it off if they start to die and they're always wearing their regular clothes underneath.

But, like... doesn't it get hot?

I had moved Bartz to the front row once Lenna got the healysmacker, so I decided to try changing the formation to have Bartz and Lenna in the back again to solely focus on healing, with Faris and Galuf in the front row focusing on attacks. I also made sure to immediately cast Protect on everyone as soon as the battle started.

This didn't go so well, either, and we eventually died again. Then the next time, I just ran back up but forgot that I changed my party formation after saving, so Bartz was in the front again. So I had him use the "row" command, but I ended up wasting a bunch of time doing this and forgot to use Protect and ended up dying before I could do much of anything.

But this time, I noticed something about the damage numbers... Shiva's Blizzara seems to do different amounts of damage depending not on which row she targets, but how many targets are hit at the same time. This makes sense, as it's a pretty common Final Fantasy game mechanic for abilities that target groups to have their effectiveness spread among the targets, so the more targets, the lesser the amplitude of effect per target.

In short, I had a hunch if everyone was in the same row, Blizzara would do less damage than if the rows were split up between members...

So the next time, I decided to put everyone in the back row. And actually save the game after changing formation, too.

And it worked! Blizzara would always target all four party members when they were in the same row, doing 80-90 damage to each, rather than sometimes doing more damage than their max HP like before...

And what's nice about being in the back row is that the guardians' attacks are severely dampened, doing only about 20 damage per hit, compared to the like 60-80 they were doing before.

So now we have a chance to survive!

Shiva seemed to only do Blizzara one per every two rounds of actions the party got to use. Slightly more often than that, though, so I couldn't rely on being able to get two rounds off between every healing session. Immediately after being hit with Blizzara, I'd have both Lenna and Bartz cast Cure on the entire party (which restored about 30-40 HP per character, making up for most of the damage that Blizzara dealt, but not all of it), and Galuf and Faris would attack. They were just using their regular weapon attacks, of course, because that's all that was available, so damage output was very low. Thankfully the Flail's damage had such a wide range of damage that we still ended up being able to deal about 40 HP damage with it on average.

The second set of actions after Blizzara, I'd have everyone attack except Lenna, of course, who would use the Healing Staff to heal up the party member with the lowest HP at the time.

This... ended up not going so well, either, as we were still taking more damage than we could heal...

But I finally found a method that seemed to work! Only Faris would attack most of the time, and after Blizzara, Galuf and Bartz would use Cure on the party, while Lenna would healstick the member who needed it the most. Then the second round, Lenna would use her stick again, and Galuf and Bartz would attack only if the party looked healthy enough. If not, they'd toss potions or cast Cure again. Usually one of them got to attack at least, though.

We even managed to take out one of the guardians eventually! But... Galuf and Bartz were pretty much out of MP by the time this happened, so we wouldn't be able to keep the healing up much longer...

We had a total of four Ethers from all the looting we did, so we were able to restore a bit of MP to Bartz and Galuf twice each. Once all four guardians were defeated, I had everyone use the Row command to jump to the front row in order to maximize the miniscule damage from the Staves. Faris's damage output seemed about the same from either row, and Lenna didn't do any attacking, but it was important to keep everyone in the same row so that Blizzara would still do the most divided damage possible. And since it's a magic attack, it doesn't do more or less damage based on which row you're in.

During the row transition, though, Shiva cast Blizzara (even though I was specifically trying to avoid that scenario lol) on Faris, who was still in the back row alone. Since he was the only target, it did tons of damage and he died immediately. So I had to use a Phoenix Down and get him in the front row quickly, but I managed to do it without anyone else dying.

Eventually, though, we were out of Ethers and MP... I started having Lenna and Faris cast Cure, and Faris only attacking every other turn between Cures and stuff, with Lenna just spamming it every turn to try to keep the whole party's HP in a healthy range. Bartz and Galuf could do nothing but smack at Shiva with their Staves, but sometimes didn't even do that so they could throw a potion, so damage output was getting smaller and smaller...

Eventually it got to the point where only Faris had HP and using Potions and the Healing Staff weren't going to be enough to keep the party alive. So I realized I was done for, and even after all of this effort, it seems like this is just not a battle we'll be able to win with the party how they are now. I don't remember the game well enough to know if we'll be able to come back here after getting our next set of jobs (which is very soon) when the party is a bit stronger and versatile. So I really wanted to do it now.

Which means we might even have to sacrifice the whole Shiva battle completely, leaving it permanently unfinished, if we're not able to come back...

The only thing really left to do is just have everyone attack until we're finally wiped out by the incoming Blizzaras.

SKDGJLKSDGJLSKDJ OR I GUESS NOT BECAUSE I ONLY HAD TO DO A COUPLE MORE DAMAGE TO HER I GUESS??????????

And so with cotton robes and basic wooden staves (er, and a flail, I guess), our once-leather harem was able to take down a goddess by poking at her with sticks until she died.

I was kind of freaking out at this point, hahaha. And sorry if it was spoiled for you since I already posted the victory screencap on twitter and facebook :P But I was really excited, hahaha...

And with that, we get no EXP and Shiva believes we've proven ourselves, so we gain the ability to command her.

Which is effectively useless for this party.

BUT WE DID IT...!

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