An adventure that we never get to see.
Vyse and Pippi drain the water out of the bottom level, and walk through the door to see the giant Moon Stone. “We finally made it. That wasn’t too bad!” Obviously Pippi has a different opinion of the last half hour than I do. Vyse wonders how they’ll get the Moon Stone out of there, because, in case you missed the five times they mentioned it, it’s really big. As Vyse goes forward to try to pick it up or whatever, Pippi screams. “Vyse…Those rocks…They’re…they’re moving!” The camera pans over to the “rocks” in question, which are clearly not your average rocks at all, but instead, remnants of a giant golem monster thing.
Phallic object #2
As Vyse and Pippi look on in horror (I’m trying to make this dramatic – they don’t actually show their expressions during this part), the monster parts reassemble themselves into the whole, well, monster. And it’s pissed. Boss battle time! The moonstone can be seen embedded in the floor through this entire battle. It’s glowing, almost as if to mock me.
The battle takes a lot longer than it should. I take full responsibility because of several idiotic things I did. I will share them with you so you won’t make the same mistake when you play this game. Actually, you’ve probably already played this game ten million times through and now you’re just laughing at me. Let me just tell you, I’m laughing at you for playing the game that many times through. Loser.
Anyway, even after the wonderful exposition we received earlier from Briggs the Vice Captain, I forgot to teach Pippi her special attacks. So she can’t really do much. Would the attacks do that much anyway? I don’t know. But it wouldn’t have hurt. The second thing I messed up is the same thing I mentioned earlier: I didn’t go and stock up on healing items. To be fair, I’ve had a rather Tidusy week, full of such fun occurrences as getting my coat caught in the car door and John starting to drive off, forgetting what the hell the “Task Manager” was in Win2K when someone at work asked me to open it, and something else that I forgot, but it’s probably better that way. Hey, at least I realized I was being stupid. Most people don’t have that luxury.
I manage to get through the battle somehow (let’s chalk it up to my excellent gaming skills), and after the battle, Pippi wonders what the hell they just fought. Vyse thinks it was some kind of ancient guardian. It doesn’t really matter – it’s supposedly dead now.
Pippi walks over to the Moon Stone and says, “Wow, it’s huge!” Thank goodness she said that because here I thought it was just a dinky little pebble. “Yeah, it was definitely worth going through all that trouble. We won’t have to worry about fuel for a while!” Vyse agrees. Pippi surprises us all by saying, “It’s beautiful…Treasure hunting is definitely my favorite part of being an [Ass] Pirate!” Since when did character development become synonymous with repeating a single opinion over and over and over and over? And over? Or has it always been that way and I’m just getting jaded and bitter in my old age? Don’t answer that.
Vyse and Pippi do their Ass Pirate handshake salute thingamabobber, and the screen goes black. After all those comments about the difficulty of transporting the gigantic Moon Stone, we never actually find out how they managed it.
Fade in on Pirate Isle. Ben the Lookout is standing around talking to himself. He’s going on and on about what a nice, perfect, wonderful, gorgeous, happy day it is, which means something bad is going to happen. Yup. Suddenly the happy music stops, and we cut to a fleet of ships headed toward Pirate Isle. Is that the proper term? “Fleet”? I know diddly-squat about ships. Ben the Lookout starts screaming, “It’s the Imperial Armada!!! They’ve got a full battle squadron! They’re in attack formation!!!” I bet he’d feel really stupid if it turned out just to be, like, a bunch of merchant ships or something. But it’s not.
I thought ‘Pirate Isle’ was the perfect name to throw them off the scent!
As menacing music plays, the Imperial Armada attacks the village. People are running around and screaming. Well, we can’t actually hear the screaming because there isn’t any voice acting, but I’m assuming there would be quite a bit of carrying on. And swearing. We see Dyne, and he’s pissed. He dramatically orders everyone underground, only pausing to hit the ground when something explodes next to him. “Damn…I never thought they’d find us…” he says. This is the part where, if I were in the game, I would say, “Hey, Dyne. This might not be such a good time to mention this, seeing as how everything is getting blown up and stuff, but might I suggest that the next time you are trying to hide the fact that you are pirates, you try to name your village something other than ‘Pirate Isle’?” I might also inform him that the 80’s are over, but probably not. I mean, the man’s lost enough in one day.
We see a close-up on a flag. “…!” Dyne exclaims, “That flag…It’s Galcian’s flagship!” The information is nice, but I don’t know who the hell Galcian is. My question is soon answered. Cut to inside the biggest, baddest Armada ship. A large, evil-looking guy in a robe looks out the window (or whatever the hell the front windshield thingamabobber is called) as a young man in similarly colored attire speaks. The big evil guy is Galcian, and the young man, Ramirez, is clearly his boy toy. Ramirez looks like what would happen if Squall and Seifer got together and had a love child. This means Ramirez’s new name is “Squeifer”.
But deep down, you just know he’s a big cuddly teddy bear.
“Lord Galcian. We’ve blasted the island with cannon fire and our troops have begun the invasion,” Squeifer tells all of us. Galcian thinks that Fruity may have been in over his head earlier, because the Ass Pirates seem well-organized when under attack. Or something. Galcian commands Squeifer to capture the girl (I’m making a wild guess that “the girl” is Fina) and the Ass Pirates as well. And to destroy their ship. The Ass Pirates’ ship, that is. It wouldn’t make much sense if Galcian was talking about his own ship now, would it? And then, just to show how utterly bad and evil Galcian is, he tells Squeifer that if the Ass Pirates resist, he should burn the village and execute everyone. That sucks. Fade out.