They follow in the direction of the two guys and PUGGY!!. Zidane finds several strange items along the way, such as a wooden box shaped like a coffin. That can’t be good. He also finds a Strategically Placed Moogle. A couple of rooms later, Zidane and Garnoa see a big machine and a set of doors. There is a pile of wooden boxes nearby, and Garnoa hears crying from one of them. It’s poor PUGGY!!, who was indeed stuffed into a box. Zidane breaks him out. Then, PUGGY!! reiterates what we already knew — some guys kidnapped him and told him to stay where he was. “They asked me, ‘Why were you outside?’ and then they said, ‘The cargo ship isn’t even here yet,'” PUGGY!! explains. “I didn’t know what they were talking about, so I didn’t say anything, and then they said, ‘Let’s put it in today’s shipment.'” Then they stuck him in the box. Could they drag this on any more? Wait, forget I said that. I hope there are no game designers who would read this and take it as a challenge.
Zidane teaches PUGGY!! how to fight back, or at least scream, the next time someone tries to abduct him or whatever. Zidane’s suggested line is, “‘Get off me, you scumbag!'”, something that sounds a little closer to what an unwilling sexual partner might say. Interesting that Zidane has happened across that line at some point. Wait, it’s not interesting; it’s disturbing. “It surprises your attacker and empowers you!” Zidane says. Okay, he’s been taking women’s self-defense classes (probably to find out what he’s up against).
Then, Zidane has the brilliant idea to put PUGGY!! back in the box, in order to see what’s going on. Um, couldn’t they just stand by and watch or something? PUGGY!! agrees to it, because he wants to know more about what’s happening, too. “Look…what is that thing?” PUGGY!! wonders, and the camera pans over to show us a large machine with some sort of conveyer belt spitting out what looks like sewn-together eggs. Zidane says they’ll all go together. Well, if that’s not a harebrained idea, I don’t know what is.
But first, Zidane checks out the door at the end of the room. There’s something smoky coming from under the door. It’s Mist. I make Zidane open it, only to be confronted with a battle. Crap. The asshole monsters keep stealing PUGGY!!’s MP. Thanks. Garnoa also has a bad habit of dying in battle. Damn it. Afterward, Zidane finds a machine in the other room and says, “Looks like it’s sending Mist to the machine outside…What are those eggs made of…?”.
Back in the first room, Zidane walks over to the first machine and wonders, “Is that…an egg? Is this machine making eggs? This isn’t a Mist engine, but there’s Mist coming out of it…” I’m noticing a very bad trend here — the game designers planned for things to be done in a certain order. Namely, Zidane is supposed to examine the egg machine first and the Mist-sucking machine second. In that order, the dialogue makes sense. However, it’s good programming practice to plan for all possibilities, and the game designers clearly did not do that. Yet more proof that the game designers were lazy.
A little further along the conveyer belt, Zidane finds a hamster wheel with a chocobo inside. Well, it would be a chocobo wheel, then, but you get the idea. There are gysahl greens hanging in front of the chocobo, causing it to run incessantly. Now we know how the conveyer belt is powered and why there are mystery chocobos underground. Zidane wonders why they don’t just use a machine to power the belt. Of all the things to wonder at this point, that would have to be one of the stupidest.
The eggs pass under another Mist machine at the end of the room. “It looks kinda like the Mist engine on the theater ship,” Zidane notes, dragging this whole process out even longer. He peers into the machine, narrating what’s going on. Of course, he can’t see anything, so he’s not very helpful. He hears something and wonders if the eggs are hatching.
In the next room, Zidane, Garnoa, and PUGGY!! find out what was inside the eggs. Hanging from a moving track on the ceiling are a bunch of black mages. They resemble PUGGY!!, if PUGGY!! were an adult and wore purple instead of blue. But they’ve got the whole pointy-hat, glowing eyes thing going on, which kind of freaks PUGGY!! out. “Are they…dolls?” he wonders, shaking. Just as Garnoa says, “Why…? Is my mother behind this…?” Zidane hears someone approaching. Since no one will pay attention to his warnings, he does something to them. We don’t know what, because the screen goes black. We just hear (or see) the indignant exclamations. I’m noticing that the game designers do this quite a bit — instead of making the effort to animate things, they just black out the screen and only show us the scene after the change.
GAH!
Sure enough, as soon as the “lights” come back up, Zidane is carrying Garnoa over his shoulder and dragging PUGGY!!, as he looks around for a hiding spot. He disappears into something that looks kind of like a stone furnace, and does something disturbing to Garnoa that results in a lot of muffled yelling. I shudder. A random worker dude enters the room and asks the other workers already in the room if they said anything. This is kind of stupid because I’m assuming that the workers in that particular room often say stuff to each other. Does the random guy ask them about it each time? I’d think that would get annoying. He tells them to hurry up because it’s almost time. Almost time for me to throw my controller at the TV screen.
Some narrow coffin-shaped boxes, like the ones that we saw earlier, drop from the ceiling and into a hole in the top of the furnace-like thingy where Zidane and the others are hiding. Through some sort of magic that, once again, the game designers don’t let us see, Zidane, Garnoa, and PUGGY!! end up trapped in the boxes. Apparently, this is how they package the Super Duper Big PUGGY!! Dollsâ„¢ as well. However, the boxes look way too small for Zidane and the others to hide in, let alone the rather plump Big PUGGY!!s. Maybe that’s why they didn’t want to take the time to animate it. The boxes are placed into a barrel like the one we saw earlier.
Meanwhile, back in Adelbert’s random plotline, our “favorite” armored guy is standing on an overlook above the clouds, where a random guy, possibly the aforementioned Morrid, is staring at a weird contraption that juts out from the cliff. It looks like a combination of a weather vane and pulley system. Adelbert tries to talk to Morrid, asking him when the cargo ship will arrive and telling him that he, Adelbert, needs to escort someone to the castle. Morrid ignores him, the best course of action. When Adelbert persists, Morrid simply tells him that he’s busy, and then rather rudely pushes past him, walking down the stairs. Adelbert doesn’t give up.
He follows Morrid to a small cottage at the base of the stairs. Morrid offers Adelbert some coffee, and Adelbert drinks some before remembering that he’s on a mission. “I am not here to drink coffee! Tell me when the cargo ship will arrive, or else the Alexandrian royal family will appropriate this property!” he threatens. Unsurprisingly, Adelbert is from the brute force school of interrogation. Morrid is not fazed. He calls Adelbert’s bluff, to the point where Adelbert finally whines, “Tell meeeeeee!” “You’re not a very creative interrogator,” Morrid says. They go back and forth about some philosophical shit relating to what is right and what is wrong, and finally Morrid tells Adelbert that the cargo ship has already arrived. Oops.
Adelbert runs down the path, ending up in the field with the strange patterns. There’s a big-ass airship across the field from him, and he feels the need to state the obvious once again. “It is indeed the cargo ship! Now I can take the princess back to the castle!” I take a break from recapping in order to write a letter to Square, informing them that while I can understand why they think all gamers are drooling idiots — there are so many shining examples — not all of us fit that description. Then, I return to the recap.
Adelbert continues his monologue, wondering how to get the princess on the ship. “Wha!? There is something coming out of the ground!” Adelbert narrates. Of course the field and cargo ship are part of the static background and we see no animation in that area. Just when I think the game designers can’t get any lazier, they surprise me. Adelbert runs over to the cargo ship. Fade out.
We return to the screen with the vegetable patch, and this time the lower part of the cargo ship is in the background. A couple of random workers lead a chocobo cart over to it, and provide us with some exposition. One of them wonders what the Big PUGGY!!s will be used for. “We’ve been making lots of ’em since they set up the factory six months ago,” he needlessly explains to his co-worker. The other one doesn’t care because he’s just interested in the money and the fact that it’s easier than farming. Suddenly Random Exposition Guy #1 shrieks, “H-Hey! Is that scary guy in armor running toward US!?” No, he’s running toward the damn pumpkin patch to wait for the Great Pumpkin. The two of them run away like a couple of pussies.
Poke it.
The next scene shows Steiner reaching the cargo ship. He spots one of the barrels nearby. “This barrel…What could be inside!?” he wonders. It coincidentally happens that this is the barrel containing Zidane, Garnoa, and PUGGY!!. I make Adelbert poke it with his sword, just because the phrase “Poke it with a sword” makes me giggle. Of course he doesn’t just poke it, he rams the sucker in — but from behind, so we can’t see it. Wait, that sounds wrong. Zidane leaps out of the barrel, so I guess he magically found a way to get out of the coffin box, even with the entire barrel jammed full of them. He screams at Adelbert, “You almost stabbed Garnoa!” That would have been quite a plot twist. Adelbert isn’t too happy to see Zidane either, go fig. “The princess!?” Adelbert exclaims. No, the other Garnoa they’ve been carting around. Zidane jumps down, landing on Adelbert’s head. Adelbert falls over. The scene ends. Boy, that was pointless.
Oh wait — it was just another We Don’t Wanna Do Any Animation Black-out. We fade back in with Zidane, Garnoa, and PUGGY!! all out of the barrel. Adelbert demands to know what is going on. And then he…..and then he……I can’t say it. Just think of something that is really in character for Adelbert that he’s said a HUNDRED FREAKING BILLION TIMES ALREADY and you get the idea. PUGGY!! is still upset, and Garnoa feels shitty for not knowing what has been going on at the castle. She and Zidane agree to stay close to PUGGY!!. I’m sure that makes PUGGY!! feel a lot better. Meanwhile, Steiner is having an internal monologue about finding a way to get Garnoa on the cargo ship and returning to the castle. Gah!
Our friends are now happily reunited or whatever, so it’s time to end the recap. Maybe we’ll find out more about what’s going on with Alexandria in the next installment. Maybe there will be less obnoxious repetition. But probably not.