Last time, our plans to go talk to the calling Ghido were thwarted with one big mwa-ha from Exdeath. And we were left with little clue as to where we were supposed to go. I can't even tell you how much I ran around hoping to trigger an event somewhere. And of course, since we went to Castle Surgate last time and there was nothing to do there, I figured it wasn't even worth stopping in again.

So here we are at our destination, Castle Surgate! Last time, they wouldn't let us in, but this time, for some reason, they actually recognize Galuf and let us inside. It seems that the King of Surgate, Xezat, who was also one of the Hot Dad Brigade Dawn Warriors, is currently leading a fleet of ships toward Exdeath's castle. The soldiers allow Galuf and his friends free roam of the castle.

There's not too much to see here, though. I think the real purpose to coming here is to learn that we need to go find Xezat's fleet. But we do find a few treasures, do chores for some old lady that tests our ABC's, learn the Time Magic spell Float, and talk to some librarians who have a book that is missing half its pages. Curious, in our world, we also had a book that was missing half its pages and was super old and in some famous imperial library thing. Hmmmmm. Probably just a coincidence!

Oh, another little cute thing is that in Xezat's room (which we're also allowed to just go in with no guards or anything) we find a diary with a song inside, and Galuf (I guess?) remembers it as a song that Xezat used to always sing. We learn the Swift Song, which is cool, but what's cooler is knowing that Xezat used to serenade the rest of the Dawn Warriors~~ I wonder if he used the Bard Job? That would be adorable, honestly, since Xezat is the biggest and most gruff-looking of the four. Also, I'm curious how the "Swift Song" actually sounds. What kind of song makes you go fast? Maybe something like this XD

Anyway, other than the few little goodies scattered around, we mostly just run into soldiers constantly reiterating that Xezat's fleet is headed toward Exdeath's castle. Since there's a barrier around the castle, there's no way to get in by land, so it seems that Xezat has some other kind of plan.

We fly over to the fleet and almost get shot down by Xezat's men, but he calls for a cease fire because we're friends. We land and Xezat, happy to see his boyfriend, calls Galuf a "sight for sore eyes." His eyes might be really sore because he constantly keeps them closed. Just kidding, I know it's an idiomatic expression to express that he is happy to see Galuf. But saying you're happy to see a sexy mustache grandpa is like saying water is wet, so I really don't know what the point was. Well, maybe he was so overjoyed, he couldn't contain himself, and felt he had to comment on it. It's weird the kinds of details they choose to put in the game when they can't even explain major plot events. But, in the end, stache dad love is the most important element in any work of art, so...

We ask Daddy Xez what his plan is, but he just tells us to go rest up in the cabin and wait for the fireworks. Talking to some of the ship's crew on the way, though, we learn that the main objective of this mission is apparently to destroy one of the four towers surrounding Exdeath's castle, as it is those towers that maintain the barrier. Even with just gone, we should be able to get inside. And apparently the fleet of ships is nothing more than a decoy. But we didn't really learn what they are a decoy for, so we're still not really sure what the plan is.

We head downstairs as we're told, and a soldier tells us to use the room on the right. Naturally, we head straight to the room on the left. It's just more cabin space for the soldiers though, and there's some guy puking in here. Maybe we should have just went to the cabin on the right from the beginning like we were told.

We head into the cabin and are given the option to rest up. After choosing to, despite their being perfectly good beds (and coincidentally exactly four) in the room, we decide to have a 'who is the most badass' challenge by seeing who can sleep on the floor on their face for the longest without having to get up. Just kidding again! I'm a real comedian tonight. Haaa...

Anyway, we were actually shaken out of bed by "monsters," which somehow Bartz knew immediately upon waking, despite the fact that there are no monsters anywhere near where we are. All of that detail writing power went into the old man slash.

We run up to the deck, where there are indeed monsters.

We seem to be surrounded, and the guards are helping fight. A monster with a much more colorful and noticeable sprite appears, and Xezat decides to fight it himself. He uses Growl, which lowers the foe's attack by one stage. And then they like hop around onto another ship, and it's actually pretty cool and cinematic compared to most of the little sprite scenes in this game.

We can run around the ship and fight monsters but it doesn't seem to really do anything. They're just some little goblins called Gobbledygooks, and we easily take them out with Gaia yet again, this time summoning tidal waves to destroy them in one splash.

I ran around for a long time here trying to figure out what to do next. We actually were supposed to walk out onto the... uh...

Bowsprit. It's called a bowsprit. Do you realize how long it took me to figure this out? Well, it probably would have taken me a couple of seconds if I had just used image search, which I finally did after looking through a huge list of nautical terms just hoping I'd come across it because I'm a big stupid idiot.

So we walk out onto the BOWSPRIT where Gilgamesh is standing on the BOWSPRIT and talks to us on the BOWSPRIT.

Anyway, Gilgamesh says some nonsense stuff and then we start fighting him. He's as easy as he always is, and with Gaia bringing the big waves, we're able to damage him very quickly.

After enough damage, Gilgamesh's buddy Enkidu appears to help out. Even though he's a completely different color than the map sprite, from their little exchange, we realize that this was the baddie that was fighting with Xezat, and apparently Enkidu was the winner of that duel. Xezat probably should have tried at least opening his eyes. During their banter, Gilgamesh makes a weird Team Rocket allusion, too.

Now we have to fight the two of them, which isn't terribly bad. The biggest threat is that Enkidu can use White Wind. I think I whined about this in another entry, but White Wind restores HP to the entire party equal to the caster's current HP. So this usually means restoring tons of damage since they are bosses. But using Haste and Comet and focusing all our attacks on Enkidu, we're able to take him out, and then can just go back to spamming Gaia and waiting for the tide to wash away Gilgamesh.

After taking out more of Gilgy's HP, he turns around to talk to Enkidu, realizes he's gone, and decides to flee. For our trouble, we get a whopping 0 Gil, 0 EXP, and 0 ABP! One of them at least dropped a Golden Shield, though. Not that we can actually use it, but it's something...

As Gilgamesh is running, though, he decides to try to pull us into the ocean with him. We start to topple, but catch onto the bowsprit, and Gilgamesh falls in alone. He complains about it a bit and then disappears into "the drink." Xezat appears on another ship and says he'll come for us, telling us to "hang in there." Galuf decides suicide by drowning is the appropriate response to what I didn't even recognize as a pun until he pointed it out.

And he indeed does let go, but the Wind Drake swoops in and saves us.

Xezat decides that "now is the time" and takes us to the cabin where the dude was upchucking earlier. We help him move a large chest, revealing a passage underneath. We go in and are in some kind of weird mechanical room. Our bearded friend finally explains the situation to us: they've been digging out a tunnel under the water to get into one of the towers from underneath, and it's finally been completed. While the ship acts as a decoy, the real mission is to enter the tower by means of submarine, which we're riding now, and take out the tower from the inside.

The ride to the barrier tower goes smoothly without any trouble. Once inside, Xezat gives us a Whisperweed, which is like a walkie-talkie, but it's a plant. Just go with it.

He tells us he is going to go down and cut the power to the antenna, and when that happens, we have to destroy the antenna while it's inactive. Maybe it would be dangerous or something if we tried to destroy it while the power was on. I don't know. Those kinds of details were left out in favor of the dad boyfriends deets.

If we try to follow Xezat into the basement, he is just standing on the stairs and gripes that we don't have a lot of time. Why are you just standing there, then?

The tower is a long climb, and there are lots of monsters inside. None of them are terribly difficult, but the Yellow Dragons (that are inside of treasure boxes lol) pose a bit of danger if we're not careful.

There are some other obnoxious enemies, but mostly it's just a matter of taking forever to fight them. There are these little magnet goblin things that can change the rows of the party members, and these reflect knights that reflect most magic (but not Comet, so we're good).

When we reach a certain height in the tower, Xezat calls us on the Whisperweed. For some reason it "hisses" like the electronic radio static from real-life radio communication devices, and he uses words like "Roger" and stuff. Galuf doesn't respond in that fashion, though, and what's even more curious, is there's never any "hiss" sounds when Galuf or anyone else is talking, so I assume that Xezat is just making those noises on his own.

At first I thought maybe it just seemed like that, but then I thought maybe we only hear the hiss from Xezat because he's the one that's communicating from a distance. It wouldn't make any sense from where we are to hear hissing from our own voice, since that would only be audible on Xezat's Whisperweed.

But then the scene actually cuts to the basement where Xezat is, and his speech is still speckled with hisses, so it is proven that, indeed, Xezat is just hissing into the plant for some reason.

Some monsters start to fight Xezat in the bottom of the tower, but he makes it to the power source and manages to shut it off. He commands us to quickly destroy the antenna while the power is cut, but of course, it won't be that easy. The scene begins to get dark, and we hear a voice telling us we'll have to "pay with our blood." Is Exdeath coming for us?

And Atomos appears. This was actually one of the more interesting fights in the challenge, because it was, well, actually challenging. If more than two party members are alive, Atomos will use massive damage comets to take two of them out. Once two members are knocked out, he'll do a bunch of obnoxious stuff, causing status effects to the remaining party members and draining their life more slowly.

The biggest problem here, though, is that as long as a party member is knocked out, Atomos will slowly suck them in across the field. If they reach his giant mouth, they will be "dragged into another dimension," permanenly removed from the fight. And when this happens, Atomos will start focusing on directly taking out more party members.

I died a couple times before really working out a decent strategy for this. My first attempt was just relearning the fight since this was my first time playing the game since it was released on the PlayStation in the US, and then after that I decided to just try taking out Atomos quickly before he could swallow up whichever two party members he decided to destroy.

Eventually, I realized that this wasn't going to happen. It just took too long for our weak little party to defeat Atomos. So I had to work on buying more time. Even doubling max HP with Drinks did not help avoid being one-shotted by Atomos's Comets. So wasting times on buffs and stuff was not an option, since all the buffs would be lost when a character got KO'd anyway. The best solution seemed to be to constantly try to revive fallen characters to keep Atomos locked in a pattern of dropping comets. I'd always make sure one character was ready to go with raise, actually making use of the Active Time Battle system here, letting their turn "sit" until Atomos used Comet, then immediately cast Raise on the target of the attack.

Whenever there was more than one character with their ATB guage full, I would have the "extras" use Comet back on Atomos. It took a while, and I got scary close to having Atomos swallow up Faris or Galuf, but in the end, nobody was sucked into the void, and Atomos became little squares.

Afterward, we successfully destroyed the antenna (it just kind of blew up?) and did a little victory dance on the tower. The whole place started to blow, and Xezat got trapped in the basement. Galuf wanted to go after him, but Bartz held him back, and Xezat made Galuf promise that he'd go straight to the sub and wait for him there. Xezat reveals that he knew this was going to happen all along, and that it was important that the four new warriors chosen by the Crystals stayed alive to fight Exdeath.

The Wind Drake came to save us so we could successfully escape the tower, but Galuf was still not wanting to leave. Bartz punched Galuf in the head so he passed out and tossed him onto the Wind Drake. Galuf started to wake up on the Drake and demanded to be taken to the sub. Bartz tried to break it to him that Xezat wasn't coming back from the tower, but Galuf insisted that they made a promise and he must go.

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