Of course, I’m kidding. No matter how unrealistic the Diving Helmet of Certain Asphyxiation seems, it is apparently real enough to get the job done, because the next thing you know, we’re underwater. This part of the game actually rather reminds me of F-Zero, because it involves racing over a 2-D terrain and making decisions as to when to turn. But instead of cruising down the streets of Mute City, we’re doing all of our racing across the bottom of the ocean. And there are random battles against all sorts of aquatic fauna, like jellyfish and anemones and eels. (Oh my!) Insert your own joke about killer Australian stingrays here, and then follow it with your own chorus of, “Too Soon!”s. Thanks.

Jacques Cousteau, eat your heart out.

So anyway, all the party has to do at this point is watch the 16-bit scenery fly by and kill any monsters that appear. Even their invisible controller seems to have put on the autopilot, because he keeps choosing to turn left at every intersection. Eventually though, the camera creates an illusion of being sucked into a cave, and then we suddenly see the world map again. The view shifts over the ocean and lands on the port town of Nikeah.

We fade up on an unconscious Guile, lying on the docks, where the water unceremoniously dumped him after having its way with his beefy body (that makes the third time in three hours–twice in this recap alone!–this has happened to him, for those of you playing along at home). Guile wakes up, blinks a few times, and then sets to exploring. The docks house a ship whose captain offers to ferry the party to South Figayro, but before Guile can accept, he has to head northward into town to do some shopping. How terrible would it be if he rolled into Narshe wearing last season’s fashions while everybody else had upgraded their wardrobes during his months-long absence?

Nikeah’s market is interesting, in that it’s modeled after an open-air market, with all the shops and dealers sitting out in the open, heckling customers as they walk by. As Guile visits the shops, he realizes that nobody really sells anything superior to what was being sold back in Mobliz, but he does pay special attention to which armaments might be better for people like Twiggy and Edgar, who aren’t currently in the party, but might need some armor sometime in the near future. He’s just a planner like that.

After Guile has blown most of his money, he leaves town to explore the countryside, but is disappointed to find that Nikeah is surrounded by water and mountains on all sides, meaning that the South Figayro-bound ferry is the only out. Before he does that, though, Guile wants to make sure he’s gotten all the info he’s supposed to out of Nikeah, so he heads to the Pub. Inside, there are only two patrons, but fear not, they’re both very chatty. The first, an old woman, totally fills in Gau’s back-story for the players that are too dumb to figure it out already: “Ya met that odd man, lives near the Lete River? His wife bore ’em a son 13 years ago. It was a problem birth, and the woman passed away. The man totally lost it. He thought the newborn was a monster. Wonder what happened to the poor little baby?” Gau doesn’t have the heart to tell the lady that he grew up to become the token twink for two older studmuffins, so he just keeps his mouth shut. Next!

BEST. INSULT. EVER.

The other bar patron is a hooker. Like, really. She’s called a “Dancer,” but as soon as she sees the party, she starts flirting it up with Kyan: “Yoo hoo! You handsome thing. How ’bout joining me? Tee hee!” Kyan is suitably freaked out–can’t this bimbo see that he’s here on a romantic outing with his two boyfriends?–and starts to tell Dancer off: “H…how dare you… you licentious howler!” Holy crap, that’s a big word for this game. Who says videogames can’t teach?

Dancer just shrugs off Kyan’s insult and, suggesting that he try not to “blow an artery,” pulls him close to her. Kyan jerks away forcefully, and ends up throwing himself backwards against the wall and falls to the floor with a crash. Guile, hating to see his lover put in such an awkward position, comes to the rescue. “Don’t let [her] get to you, [baby],” he croons, while sliding his arm around Kyan’s waist. Dancer, clearly unable to take a hint, instructs the two boys to stop whispering, and screeches, “My ears are burnin’, baby!” You mean, like, with syphilis? This, apparently, is the final straw for Kyan, and he tells Dancer off in a series of “I’ll have you know”s and “etc etc”s. Then the party morphs back into Guile and they leave the hooker, vapidly staring at the spot where Kyan was standing. I guess he fried her brain with the power of love. Or something.

Okay, now we can get on the South Figayro Fairy Ferry. Guile heads back to the docks and talks to the captain, and the next thing you know, the ship is pulling out of the docks. On the world map, we watch a tiiiiiiiny little ship sail away from Nikeah for a little while, and then fade up in the ship’s deck. Guile, Gau, and Kyan are each looking out at the water as they sail. Kyan announces, “Narshe is just a stone’s throw away!” Guile responds that he hopes the others made it home safely, too. But we all know he’s really only concerned with his fabulous brother. Won’t he be surprised when he sees who Guile’s bringing home to dinner?

And, scene. I guess the game designers assumed that Guile is intelligent enough to make it to Narshe from South Figayro, since they are on the same continent. This is not an assumption I would have been comfortable making, seeing the route it took Guile to get home in THIS recap, but I digress.

Okay, so we’re back at the Black Screen of Meta-Game Commentary, and our Moogle narrator prompts us to choose another scenario. We just finished Guile’s magnum-sized story arch, so he’s not on the BSOMGC anymore, but we still have Winona (remember him?) and Twiggy/Edgar/The Sunflowardly Lion to choose from. Well, I know from personal experience that Winona’s scenario is a tad on the long side, and I’m not really feeling that, so let’s go with T/E/TSL. We haven’t really seen much of these characters in a while, so the Moogle gives us some contextualizing remarks: “Fleeing the Empire’s troops, [The Sunflowardly Lion], EDGAR, and TWIGGY ride the rapids toward Narshe. But the going won’t be easy…”

And just like that, we’re back on the raft, moments after Guile jumped ship. Twiggy, now leading the party, maneuvers the raft around the twists and turns of the Lete River, continuing on towards Narshe. Nothing has really changed since we last did this, other than the party is now (obviously) missing Guile. But other than that, everything is the same, right down to Twiggy and Edgar’s levels and weapons. Sigh. We’re weak again.

So, eventually, a random battle occurs, as they so often do in this game. The Sunflowardly Lion, being good for nothing else, immediately starts spamming his Health ability. If this was Final Fantasy XI, that mob would be so aggro’d right now, it wouldn’t even be funny. But this isn’t FFXI, it’s FFVI, so TSL only suffers the occasional scratch from a monster, which he is able to heal away. Edgar, on the other hand, falls into a pattern of confusing, poisoning, and attacking the enemy hoards with his Noiseblaster, Bioblaster, and Autocrossbow tools. Twiggy… pretty much just stands there uselessly. Since she’s trying to conserve her MP for emergency healing, she tries to attack a couple of times, but doesn’t really do much damage. What actually ends up happening is that a confused Pterodon casts “Fire Ball” on the enemy party, wiping them out but good. That turns out well for the party, but it also serves to scare them shitless, because that attack would obliterate them if used by a non-confused enemy.

Luckily enough, the rest of the trip is pretty much uneventful, because all the battles go the same general way, and presently, Twiggy finds herself standing on the world map mere inches south of Narshe. Compared to all the hoops and whirlpools Guile had to jump through to get so far, this is simply too easy. What’s the catch?

When Twiggy enters Narshe, three guards immediately get all up in her grill and accuse her of recently tearing though town in Magi-tek armor. Which she did, in like the first two minutes of the game. But apparently, the guards aren’t convinced enough of her guilt to, oh, I don’t know, arrest her or something like that. They’re only mad enough to bar her entrance to the town. The party splinters out of Twiggy, and The Sunflowardly Lion attempts to reason with the guards. It earns him a slap in the face that sends him flying back, like, forty feet. Then Edgar tries his luck, even pulling the “I’m the King” shtick, but all it gets him is a swift kick in the pants.

Edgar/TSL: Their love is so… frail.

Twiggy walks over to her male companions to help them to their feet and make sure that TSL didn’t break a hip or anything. “It’s all my fault…” she mopes. As the guards meander back into the town, Edgar and TSL merge back into Twiggy without a word of consolation. Clearly, they think it’s all her fault, too.

So, with the main entrance to Narshe blocked, the only other way in is through that secret path that Winona told us to remember waaaay back at the beginning of the game. Twiggy heads over that way, and when she gets to the stone wall, Edgar and TSL come out to play. Twiggy tells Edgar that when Winona first helped her, he “fiddled with something right around here”–dirty!–and Edgar deduces that there must be a secret passage hidden in the wall. He touches a few of the rocks on the wall, and the cave appears. Twiggy and the boys head in.

So, back in the caves from the beginning of the game, Twiggy, Edgar, and TSL are suddenly quite strong, compared to the weak enemies that populate the area. Following the path deeper into the caves, Twiggy and company stumble upon a room filled with boulders. Before Twiggy can start to navigate her way through them, a glittering point of light appears and takes a complicated path through the room. After it has reached the door at the north end of the room, the light disappears, and Twiggy wonders what it was. Edgar announces that he thinks it’s some sort of security device. He bullshits that “if [they] follow the light exactly, [the party will] probably be okay.” But Edgar also somehow knows that if the group makes a mistake in following the light’s path, the light will surround them. “To proceed safely we must ‘tag’ the glimmering light,” he intones. Um, okay. Twiggy follows the path the light took to the best of her ability, and when she accidentally steps off of the pre-determined path, a ring of light surrounds her, just as Edgar predicted. There is one dark spot in the ring, but Twiggy doesn’t choose it, favoring instead one of the bright lights, and then the lights disperse again. No harm, no foul, I guess. Twiggy follows the rest of the path to the door at the end of the room, and continues through the caves without any further trouble.

The Rapture is upon us!

Eventually, Twiggy rediscovers the catwalk leading to Baron Liverspots’s house. Inside, TSL and Edgar splinter out of her, and TSL calls for the Baron’s attention. The Baron comes running to greet them, and TSL asks him what is happening in Narshe. He responds that the town has remained neutral, unable to side with either the Empire or the Returners Rebels. Then, Baron Liverspots asks why TSL has come to Narshe, but before TSL can launch into a diatribe about how Twiggy is the Rebels’ Ray of Light and Hope and AWESOME!!, Edgar jumps forward to ask how “his people” are doing, whatever that means. The Baron responds that the people of Narshe “all went slightly berserk when the Esper was discovered,” and TSL excitedly replies that he believes Twiggy is the key to communicating with the frozen Esper. The Baron non-sequiturs that “his people” are dying to know what the Esper looks like. This may be literally true, because we already know that the Esper fries anybody who gets too close. (RIP, Biggs and Wedge)

Edgar, noting the gravity of the situation, comments that the Esper is “either going to save [them]…or dig [them] an early grave…”

And, on that happy note, scene! Man, that episode was a breeze compared to Guile’s! It took all of, like, fifteen minutes to complete. Which is all the better, really, because I don’t think Twiggy, Edgar, and The Sunflowardly Lion would have been as successful at traipsing all over the world as Guile was. Just a hunch.

So without further ado, we get dumped back at the Black Screen of Meta-Game Commentary, and our Moogle narrator prompts us to pick the third and final scenario, the one in which Winona infiltrates South Figayro and then escapes back to Narshe. That sounds like a job for Sam, if I ever heard one, so we’ll leave Winona in her capable hands, for now. But I can assure you that it’s bound to be a pants-stealing good time, just you wait!

See you in Part 6!