Final Fantasy: Lost in Japanese

We head back inside the meteorite near Carwen. Once inside, we step into the white light, which teleports us to the third meteorite, which lies on a plain well to the west of Carwen. From here, we’ll search for the town of Karnak, where I believe we can defend a third crystal.

The journey is actually a bit challenging. It takes a bit of exploration to find the route, and we explore a few dead ends that force us to backtrack. The random enemies we run into pack a decent punch and take a good bit of hits before we can polish them off. Bartz, our knight, is for the most part our only effective fighter with melee weapons. Lenna, our white mage, is next to useless. Galuf’s weapon does little damage, except for the occasional strong blast. And Faris’ dagger does only minor damage as well. For the most part, Bartz takes out the majority of the enemies we fight. I use ample magic in support of our fights, but it doesn’t take long before our casters are low on magic points.

With Lenna and Galuf nearly out of magic points, we finally stumble onto both the town and the castle of Karnak. We enter the town, and immediately notice that there are fires all over the place. Many of these fires block our access to certain locations, but we still are able to explore quite a bit. We first head for the inn, where we spend a night and replenish our strength. We then make our way about the town talking to the locals.

We learn all sorts of bizarre things. Apparently, evil people and werewolves came out of the meteorite and started attacking the town. People seem to believe they are after the fire crystal, which I assume is somewhere around here. And somehow coming into play is an old library, which lies to the south of here. Connected to this is the Queen of Karnak, who apparently has sealed off access to the library by building a wall around it. I forget why at the moment. Lastly, we learn of yet another Cid. This one apparently is taking the blame for the general mess that the town is in. According to the townsfolk, he tried to harness the power of the fire crystal by making some sort of machine. Everyone seems to think this was a bad idea, and apparently Cid is now rotting in prison in the castle somewhere.

Not quite sure of where to go, we decide to head to the local merchants. Once there, we decide to upgrade our equipment, but just as we try to buy something, a local comes up to us, identifies us as the enemy, and gets us thrown in prision. Apparently someone spotted us leaving the meteorite, and this was enough to connect us to the werewolves and convict us. We end this play session wandering around our cell. Have I somehow gotten my party in some sort of irreversible mess?

Status: In Jail.

I ended my last session looking around the Pirates’ Cove for some sort of clue to how to find Karnak, and I started tonight in the same way. One of the pirate’s mentions a strange cave that opened up after the earthquake, but the two caves I found were dead-ends.

I was convinced that I was missing something obvious here, but decided to return to the Castle in Carwen to talk to the king and the hurt soldier from Karnak once again. Maybe I had missed something in their conversations the first time through.

On the way back, I remembered that when I first got stuck, I had assumed that the second meteor had fallen into the ocean with the tower, but that I had never confirmed it. On a whim, I made a quick detour to the peninsula where the tower had been. Aha! There it was! The second meteor! Could this be the way?

I landed the dragon, approached the meteorite…

…the door was open! Found it! Inside, there is a bright area that must be the transport zone to get me near Karnak! Yes, we are unstuck!

We quickly exit the meteor, save our game, and head back inside. We’ll head for Karnak tomorrow.

Status: Unstuck!

Not sure of what to do next, we head back to Carwen. We wander around the town and castle and speak with as many people as we can find. From this, we learn that a third meteor has fallen near Karnak (a city, perhaps?), which lies to the west. Apparently this is the next place we need to get to.

We immediately board our flying dragon and head west, but things don’t go that well. We can only go so far west before we hit a wall of mountains. Matter of fact, this wall of mountains is actually a large ring of mountains that surround our section of the world. We can’t get beyond the ring, and Karnak doesn’t appear to be anywhere inside it.

Along the way we spend a night in Lenna’s castle in Tycoon, where we learn that Lenna and Faris are possibly sisters, since they have identical pendants. Apparently Lenna lost a sister at sea many years ago.

But Karnak continues to stump us. We return to the pirate’s cove, but other than finding our Chocobo, we learn little of the way to Karnak. We wander back to Carwen, where we get an apparent clue. There is a solidier from Karnak that is hospitalized in the castle there. When we speak with him, he tells us that he arrived by going inside the meteor near Karnak, which warped him to the meteor near Carwen (before it sank into the sea).

Inspired, we fly back to the first meteor, near Tycoon. We can see the faint outline of a door on the meteor, but no matter what we try, we can’t seem to open it.

Humm. I’m baffled. I can’t seem to fly to Karnak. I don’t have a boat. I can’t walk there. Which leaves the meteor, which I can’t open. I have a hunch the key lies in opening the meteor, but how?

I spend another half hour retracing my previous route, but I get no new clues.

Status: Pretty Stuck.

A couple of days ago, I was scanning a Final Fantasy V walkthrough for the correct spelling of a couple of place names, and my eyes inadvertently caught sight of a reference to a world map that you can get in that section of the game where walk around on all the ship debris.

I wish I hadn’t seen the tip, as I try to not use any cheats or outside resources, but I figured that it would be a good idea to have a world map, so we all boarded our flying dragon and headed back to the river of the undead.

Not remembering exactly where in this place the map was, it ended up taking me a heck of a long time to actually find the thing, and when I finally did get back out and took a look at the map, I couldn’t have been more disappointed. This is the second lamest world map I’ve ever seen. I can’t believe I just spent 45 minutes of my life fighting for this digital drabbiness.

Oh, well, I suppose it will come in somewhat handy. I can kind of identify mountains, and water is clear enough. If I squint and hold the map at a certain angle, I can kind of see sparkly thingies that might be cities.

Which brings us to our next problem: What do I do next?

Status: Holding Crappy Map

(This next section is a bit vague. I played it right before I went to Japan, but forgot to take any notes on it. I remember the general gist of the experience, but I’ve forgotten some of the details.)

As we head out of town, we notice a large castle to the west of Carwen! We decide to check this out before heading to the tower with the water crystal.

We head inside the castle and promptly gain an audience with the King. (That was easy!) We tell the king to stop using the water crystal’s power, but as this conversation goes on, a huge meteorite lands near the tower that holds the water crystal. This ends the conversation abruptly, as the king grabs his troops and heads off to see what’s going on.

We follow along after a bit of exploring in the castle, and hack our way up the tower. Apparently the king is somewhere above us. And here is where my memory gets a bit vague. I’m pretty sure we fought something big, and we met the king, who was hurt. We also ran into the water crystal, which busted into lots of little pieces. By gathering up the pieces, we can learn all sorts of new jobs. After this, the tower fell apart and we ended up floating around in the middle of the ocean. Doomed to a certain death, we are given a reprieve on life when Faris’ dragon rises up from the depths to rescue us. It carries us safely to shore, where it subsequently dies from the effort.

Again, I’m not sure if I’ve gotten even half of this correct, as it was about a month ago that I played this section. I’ve now pretty much caught up with the previous playing time, so I’m going to be playing and posting as I go along.

Status: Alive!