Last time, we journeyed into the scary parts of Walse Castle to get an Elven Mantle and prove our worth to the Ice Goddess, Shiva. Now we can actually do what we came here for -- saving the Water Crystal!

Our first order of business is to find the king and tell him to stop amplifying the crystal's power.

And lucky for us, he happens to be a beardly guy with long hair. Hooray for hot kings in this game! Well, not that he really has much appearance since he's just a little sprite, but a king with a beard and long hair is always good, honestly.

Lenna and King Walse seem to be on good terms, greeting each other pleasantly. Then Lenna asks him to stop amplifying the Crystal's power with the machines.

But Walse is pretty reluctant, as the Crystal's power allows his people to live peacefully. Lenna urges him more, telling him that the Crystal will shatter and be completely unusable if he doesn't stop the amplification. But he still won't give in, as there's no proof that what happened with the Wind Crystal will also happen with the Water Crystal. Plus, he knows that the people of Walse will object if he tries to stop using the Crystal. As a king, he has to think of his people, too.

Bartz interrupts and says there's no time for bickering about the situation, we just have to save the Crystal. But as soon as he says that, the entire Castle starts shaking.

Some guards rush in and exclaim that a meteor has fallen near Walse Tower, where the Water Crystal is. The king vows to continue our discussion later and rushes off with his army to the tower to try to protect the Crystal.

And since we're the heroes of this game, you know what we have to do.

Slowly walk around the castle pushing against walls to see if there are any weird hidden paths to treasures we can steal!

Though we didn't end up finding anything...

If you have a Thief, they can get a Job skill that lets them see the hidden pathways, so you don't have to do that. But the Thief Job is unavailable to us in this playthrough, so we'll have to push against every wall like this :)

But we were able to go to the King's bedroom since no one was around! And we could get into his bed!

It reminds me of that thing in Ys II where you can have Adol go in some girls' beds and then he'll like... rustle around under the covers by himself and hearts pop out LOLLL

THAT'S DEFINITELY WHAT I'M DOING HERE THOUGH

But enough playing around.

We go to check out the meteor crash site. It's a lot like the crash site by Tycoon, but smaller. And there's no treasures or anything. So we can't really do anything here. So we'll just head to the tower...

Inside, we find the guards that wouldn't let us in before, now knocked to the ground. They tell us that the king and some unknown knight ran up the tower chasing after Garula. Ohhhh, so THIS is when we fight Garula. Oops. I wonder if you can defeat it before this though? I mean, I'm sure you can... but I wonder what happens. I can't remember. I feel like I probably would have done it before? I've played through this game a couple times before.

The tower is a pretty simple place at first. We find King Walse not too far up and he tells us to go save the Crystal, as he seems to be incapable now.

The rooms kind of just continue in this fashion: small rooms with downward stairs on one end and upward stairs on the other...

We do get into some fights, but it's nothing particularly interesting...

A couple floors up, we find a consecrated circle, and there are treasures on either side of the room. There's a pathway to walk to the one on the right easily, but the left one doesn't have a path from where we are now. There's just a weird hole in the ground. Maybe this is one of those puzzles where you have to fall down holes from higher up...

We go ahead and snag the loot from the left chest, which is just a Maiden's Kiss, the item that turns a party member back into human form if they were turned into a toad. Then we continue up the tower.

The tower continues well past the consecrated circle room; I thought that was going to be one of the last rooms. On floor 8, we end up in a room that's empty except for a suspicious pillar in the center of the room. Approaching it, we get the little "!" above our head to show that we're able to interact with it. This is something that didn't happen in the original version of the game -- you just had to go up to stuff and try pressing the A button to see if it did anything.

Interacting with the pillar, we're able to climb up it!

The pillar takes us to the ninth floor, but we're completely surrounded by water and can't continue on. Looking in the back of the room, though, we can see two more holes in the ground like the one we came up through. Heading back down to the eighth floor again, we can notice there are vines on the back wall similar to the vines that were hanging on the pillar. So the vines allow us to climb up into holes in the above floor...

Which means we probably should go back and check if there's vines on the floor under the consecrated circle floor. Which is... several floors back now.

Our hard (?) work pays off, though, as the chest contains a Silk Robe, which is a big upgrade from our Cotton Robes we're wearing, granting an additional 2 points to Defense and Resistance.

Heading back up to floor eight, we take the left set of vines first, which leads only to a treasure chest containing a Silver Armlet, and then the right set, which leads to the other chest with an Ether in it, and the door to the staircase leading to the next floor.

The tenth floor is the one with the Water Crystal, and inside the room we see a knight in orange armor standing between Garula and the Crystal. He says "they're controlling" Garula, and that he won't let the Crystal be destroyed, but Garula just knocks him over easily.

Instead of busting up the Crystal, though, Garula turns to us instead, and now we have to fight it.

And I'm pretty sure it's not going to be "shy" and run away this time, either...

The fight is... really easy. There's really not a lot to say about it. Garula just uses some regular physical attacks that do small amounts of damage, especially with Protect cast on the party. It can also do an attack that causes a party member to get the Drain ailment, which makes their HP constantly drop like a few points every second. But when your whole team has Cure and you can smack people with the Healstick, this isn't really much of a concern.

As Garula's HP gets lower, it seems to get angrier or something, as it starts attacking more frequently. It eventually gets to the point where it's attacking about three times for everyone one time the party gets to attack. But since it's still not much of a threat, this is mostly just tedium.

We can't do much damage to Garula, either. It's just a really drawn out episode of bopping the thing with sticks until it finally falls.

The battle with Garula took too much time, and now we're too late to save the Crystal. We watch it shatter just like the Wind Crystal did. The orange knight who tried to stop Garula before seems to be struggling to get to the exit, but he falls in front of the door and notices us standing by the shattered Crystal. And he calls out to Galuf.

Galuf is surprised that the knight knows who he is, and tries to get him to help, but all he manages to do is beg Galuf to protect the Fire Crystal with his dying breath. Galuf hangs his head.

Before we have time to really be sad about it, though, Faris notices that the Crystal fragments are glowing. And like before, it seems like the Crystal is trying to lend to us its power.

Instead of floating to us this time, they just continue to lie on the floor, and we have to actually go around and pick each one up. From the fragments, we find five more spirits of past warriors, giving us the Jobs Time Mage, Mystic Knight, Berserker, Red Mage, and Summoner. But of course, only one of these are going to be for us...

So it's time to Tweet to Gilgy and see what our next job is going to be...!

... And it looks like we've gotten Time Mage. I was kind of hoping for Summoner since that would be fun and I never used Summoners much before in this game.

But Time Mage is one of my favorite Final Fantasy classes, with the ability to manipulate time, doing things like stopping enemies and speeding up allies.

But before we can really think much about our new powers, the entire peninsula where the tower was sinks into the ocean! I guess it's more of those aftershock tremor things from the meteors...

And now we're drowning!

Maybe we're going to wash up in some weird place again like we did with the ship graveyard...

But then Syldra appears! She swims up to the party and starts... inhaling everyone. Bartz, Galuf, and Lenna all fall unconscious before Syldra vores them up, but Faris is so badass he can breathe under water or something, and even talks. Lenna, who was further away from Syldra's mouth, starts to float away, but Faris swims over and catches her and they go into Syldra's tummy together.

She carries us to shore where we all just... casually walk out of her mouth like nothing happened... but then suddenly EVERYONE FALLS OVER.

Except Faris who is barely fazed by this whole thing. He turns around from the party, happy to see Syldra alive.

But Lenna, who is now suddenly conscious for some reason, walks over and says that Syldra used the last of her strength to save us. Faris denies that such a thing can be happening, and tells Syldra he won't let her die.

At first I didn't understand why spitting some people up would make her die, but later I realized I think this was supposed to mean that Syldra was near-death ever since before when she got sucked up into the wormhole with the giant enemy lobster, and she managed to hang on this long searching for us, but saving us from drowning did her in.

Poor Faris, though, essentially having to watch his sister die like twice. Except she didn't really die the first time. Syldra starts to float back out to sea and Faris runs after her, but Lenna grabs onto him and stops him, very similar to what happened on the ship when Syldra was in the whirlpool.

And thanks to Syldra, we didn't get scattered or anything. We're right next to where we were, at the meteor crash site just outside what was formerly Walse Tower. And while we may have lost one of our dragon friends, we still have Hiryu to fly us around at least...

And now from here on out, we won't just be all White Mages anymore!

---