Duke Revier's Grand Game Emporium

 Alright, let's go through the rest of the sidequests. To begin, you need to read this conversation from a bar in and around Zeltennia. This opens up an island off its coast...where, oddly, nothing happens. To progress this further, you need to go back to Goug after clearing Bethla, where Mustadio's father has excavated yet another machine from the depths. This one requires an entirely different stone, and given that Nelveska Temple had mysteriously opened up earlier through a rumor without being actually visitable, the stone could only be placed there. Sure enough, there's a fight there now. It's pretty rude, featuring lots of fast fighters that can easily attack any member of your team within their first turn, and an extremely powerful robot that spams exceptionally powerful lasers! That being said, my samurai was powerful enough to singlehandedly kill half of them, and Revier handled the other half. This fight is also notable for being one of the few places where the...

Revier's entourage headed for his former family castle, Igros. Meanwhile, Olan tried breaking into Ovelia's chambers to convey her the truth about his father-in-law, Orlandu, but he was injured by the castle's security, and by the time he got to her, Delita got wind of his antics and stormed in! He outright boasted about how he'd done a "good thing" by framing Orlandu as Goltana's killer, and how killing Goltana was completely justified. Ovelia and Olan are aghast to hear of such blatant skullduggery, but Delita, running high on arrogance, goes a step further, and tries to persuade Olan to work for him while outright stating he wants the Church's High Priest dead! This goes too far for the church's agent, who prepares to stab him, but Delita catches her in the act and stabs her! Cutting away from all of that, we see Zalbag pay a visit to their father Barbaneth's grave, with a chemist in tow. The chemist confirms that he had indeed been poisoned...

The averting of the Bethla clash naturally involved shops opening up more of their stock, including this crazily powerful rod! It certainly tempted me to switch someone over to Oracle-ing. Too bad every character is more or less set on achieving their final forms now. I redistributed Orlandu's gear, but the Excalibur remained a frustratingly hard item to utilize, as it could only be equipped by Knights, and the sword equipping passive did not permit equipping it! I didn't want to switch anybody to that class, it was an exceptionally unattractive class, being completely superseded by the Lancer and the Samurai, and being tied down with a rather uninteresting command, at least, with its weapons of choice. In the end I decided to forego using it and just keep it in reserve, pulling it out only if need for it arose. Revier's team passed by a dilapidated trading city, where a woman resembling Aeris sold him a flower, and sighed at her miserable life, hoping to escape it someday....

  Revier hurries towards the border fortress, Bethla, but his journey is interrupted by one of the cabal leaders, who unleashes a poison bomb on his party! He laughs, and boasts about how he's unleashed this poison on Dycedarg's faction's army, meaning they too will be put out of commission! Thankfully, despite his boasting, this was generic poison that wore itself out. Despite this, the fight was quite hard. The enemy was well entrenched, but that wasn't really a problem by itself. You see, this leader was a speed devil, often getting their turns in very inopportune times. Not only that, he was equipped with a magical ice gun, and had no qualms about shooting the party with it! I could've cheesed this fight by making everyone wear ice shields, but I decided to be a sport and bear the pain. Eventually the team got past him, albeit after a prolonged and tense battle that involved many a revive! The upside of this was that the team earned lots of xp and skillpoints, l...

This addendum shall take a look at the sidequests, or rather the first of them, as I am curious in them. I looked up how to initiate them with a guide, and it was pretty simple - head to Goug, hometown of the archeologist Mustadio, then to Goland, where the bar gives news of monsters capturing the local mine. This then leads to a scene in Lesalia's bar, where Revier eagerly volunteers to free the mine, and a mysterious knight offers to accompany him. This leads to a series of bizarre fights against chemists, thieves and behemoths. The experience and skill points from random encounters had added up enough to let Revier unlock full horizontal jumps; you can see how glorious the end results look! 😆 The monk had also finished training himself up, and was qualified to become a samurai, but given how pricey its katanas were, I chose to instead make him travel down the defensive mage path and become an oracle instead. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a rather gimmicky class that casts s...

  The fourth and final act of this game begins with Revier and Malak discussing the church's potential motivations for acquiring the stones. They reason that the church could perhaps have its interests in seeing the two factions grind themselves down, making the existing nobility lose their power and legitimacy, and opening up a space for them to step in and seize power. Yet, the stones having demonic power, or potentially demonic power, at any rate, cast some serious wrinkles into their plan. It was far more likely that the church itself was being played by the cabal, who had motivations more sinister, as most of them were demons in disguise. Revier finally decides to try and speak with Delita, as he's in the cabal's employ, and thus would be better informed of their true motives - assuming, of course, that he himself wasn't being used by them and being intentionally kept in the dark. We then cut to Orlandu and his son-in-law Olan. True to his word, they have been tryi...

 For this addendum, I should be honest and note that the PSP version doesn't really add much. That's not really surprising, because this act is really short. Observe: The entirety of Act 3 is traveling to that imperial capital, then travelling back down past Dorter to Orbonne, and then travelling alll the way up top and left to Riovanes. There's just not much that happens here, either narratively or gameplay wise. Barinten does get some development as a foe, but sadly we barely deal with him, and it'd be hard to expand on him without significantly rewriting the story. So let's cover what we do have. The main addition here is a cameo by Luso, the protagonist of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2! I don't know much about that game, I do know that it, and its predecessor, are set in roughly the same universe, but eons in the past, back when the land was still prosperous and ancient civilizations with advanced technologies still existed. I also know that both games use...

The next fight was in a haunted forest, haunted by the spirits of the victims of the earlier war. It's actually a little funny how this was very similar to a scenario in Ogre Battle, Matsuno's very first game. Anyway, it wasn't very hard, though the undead respawning at times did get a bit annoying. At Barinten's castle, the game cut to a meeting inside. It was revealed that Duke Barinten had already figured out what the cabal was up to, and was threatening them by showing them the stones he had obtained by capturing one of their leaders. The cabal is none too pleased, and uses the stones they still have to transform into monsters and fight his garrison! Well, alright then. Lol. The battle at the castle's gates was fairly straightforward and easy, with the only real threat being the archer posse at the top. By now my white mage had learnt every spell I had wanted them to, so I transitioned them into a time mage, as, despite my grievances with the class and the class...