The Pulse L'Cie find themselves in a rut of lose-lose options on Pulse. Their only chance being the dim hope brought to them by watching Cid Raines defy his focus, and yet still gain release as a crystal. Besides that dim light of hope, their options seem to be to follow their focus, destroy Cocoon, and kill millions, or to ignore their focus and be damned as mindless Cieth.
At this point, the characters seem somewhere between two ideas. Snow, ever optimistic, believes the L'Cie can defy their focus and still win, while Fang lies at the other spectrum, seeming to be motivated by not watching her friends, especially Vanille, become Cieth. The game implies that some time passes as the L'Cie set up a base camp on Pulse and mull over their choices. Eventually, Hope concedes to despair, and is attacked by his Eidolon. Seeing the inherent risk in doing nothing, the group decides to head to Fang and Vanille's hometown, Oerba. The "open-world" portion of Pulse (open only in comparison to the rest of this game, of course) is at this point optional. It is up to the player whether to fully explore Pulse and it's Cieth Stone missions, or to instead advance the plot. The first dungeon is a bit of a throw-away, feeling like a rehash of one of the Cocoon dungeons. After that, it gets a little more interesting though, as the party makes it to Taejin's Tower.
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| Sazh approaches the broken tower. |
The tower is unique in that it incorporates the Cieth Stone missions as a way to open paths up the tower. Also, the players chase an adversary up the tower, a flying Fal'Cie. Unlike Titan and Bismarck, the player is rewarded for their efforts by getting the satisfaction of defeating this Fal'Cie in combat.
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| Pulse Fal'Cie Dahaka Mighty-Morphs, I kick HIS ass though. Source. |
Dahaka takes his name from Azi Dahaka, a three headed dragon from ancient Iranian mythology. Dahaka is one of a few names that Final Fantasy has pulled from a religion that originates in the area, Zoroastrianism. The religion is monotheistic, sharing parallels with modern religions, yet was essentially the pre-Islamic state religion of what is now Iran. The practitioners mostly survive as the Parsis, or Parsees, in India. I'd read up a bit about Zoroastrianism specifically because FF peaked my interest, but just now made the connection between the Parsees and the religion. Nice. Learning is fun, tell your kids.
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| Here is a picture of Azi Dahaka from a neat little game called Destiny of Spirits I hadn't heard of. It's a free-to-play online strategy game for the Playstation Vita. I just thought it was neat how the stats list the "lore" that the spirit is from. Calling it Babylonian is probably accurate enough, as Dahaka seems to have originated before Zoroastrianism, but was incorporated into the religion. Source. |
It was a learning day, and since learning the name origins is part of what this blog is about, there's a few other things I'd like to mention. Like I said, Final Fantasy has pulled a few names from the religion. The most used one is Ahriman, which is another name for Angra Mainu, the adversary (analogous to Satan) of Zoroastrianism. By the way, Zoroastrianism is hard to type a bunch of times. You may remember Angra Mainu from Final Fantasy 10-2. 10-2 also had an appearance from Azi Dahaka, who was the guardian of the final gate, showing up to mete out punishment if the party failed at the musical puzzle.
In opposition to Angra Mainu is Ahura Mazda, the god of Zoroastrianism. Of course, this immediately made me think of the Mazda car company. I wondered about its origins, and upon seeing it was Japanese, surmised that the name was really "Matsuda" and had been changed to something a little more Western sounding. Looking it up on Wikipedia, my thoughts were confirmed, the companies founder is named Matsuda. I was all ready to reveal this, until looking under the "Name" tab, and seeing something to the effect of "The Mazda company is named after Ahura Mazda, the god of wisdom in Zoroastrianism. It also takes it's name from the company founder, Matsuda." I did not see that coming, both theories are correct.
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| Mazda... official automobile of the god of wisdom. |
What was I talking about? A game you say? Final Fantasy 13? Right. Following the climb up Taejin's Tower and the defeat of Dahaka, the L'Cie find themselves finally in Oerba. The village is desolate, uninhabited, and surrounded by a desert like layer of fine crystal dust. In the dialogue, very little attention is given to Fang and Vanille's reaction as they come back to their village and find it full of Cieth instead of humans. (Perhaps they expected as much after 1,000 years?) The Datalog expands on this a little bit, but that leads me to another annoyance with this game. The dialogue is very vague, often times consisting of generic statements like "We can do this if we just keep at it!", "Yeah, where there is a will there is a way!", "Yeah, go team!" If you want to understand what is going on, and in most cases, the motivation of the characters, you need to read the Datalog. This is a wall of text that is updated as the game goes along. It's better than nothing, but is it too much to expect to understand the game, characters, and story from the game itself, without having to read an e-book? Huh FF13, is it?
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| The remains of a road leading into Oerba. |
There is a certain thing about the history of Gran Pulse that bothers me. The village of Oerba consists of patchwork buildings, the remains of roads and a large bridge. In other areas of Pulse, the player can see the remains of skyscrapers that look a lot like those you would find on Earth today. As far as I know, it's never explained whether Fang and Vanille were contemporary with this apparently massive civilization, or instead Oerba was ruined before their time, and they lived in the aftermath. I would be content with this remaining a mystery if it weren't for the fact that Fang and Vanille are right there... and just never seem to bring it up. Opinions may differ, but I found this jarring. The writers went through all this trouble to create a massive story and history, yet if the player can't find out about it, what's the point? It could be a marketing ploy now that I think about it. The Final Fantasy games are followed by massive "Ultimania" books in Japan, which contain concept artwork, and expanded information about the history and characters of the game world. As far as I know, they aren't released outside Japan. So, that is one theory for how Squenix constructed this game.
So the characters explore Oerba, finding little of note (unless Sazh and Vanille are in the active party and you find the robot bhakti... more on that when I discuss mini-games) until they make it to the end of the aforementioned ruined bridge. There they find a cryptic inscription about... I think it was about Etro, Lindzei, and Pulse (These are three gods that are part of an interesting mythology, that again one has to read the Datalog to understand in any way.) A quick summary is that Lindzei created Cocoon and its Fal'Cie, while Pulse is the creator of Gran Pulse and its Fal'Cie. Etro is responsible for turning Fang and Vanille to crystal, even though they did not complete their focus originally, that of destroying Cocoon.
Following reading the inscription, they are approached by an apparition of Serah, Lightning's sister and Snow's fiance. She acts a bit oddly though, and the ruse is revealed to be a machination of Barthandelus. The party fights him once again. He also reveals that he has resurrected Cid Raines, and placed him in the role of Primarch, in order to incite his previous command, the rebel Cavalry, to attack Eden and eventually destroy Orphan. It appears here that Barthandelus is, at least in part, able to actually directly control his L'Cie's actions. It isn't explored whether other Fal'Cie can do this. It may be an ability reserved for Cocoon Fal'Cie, or the most powerful of them.
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| Bart is kind enough to once again supply a ship for the L'Cie. It will be soon be a... ship of fools! Hehehe, sorry. |
for This Bard's Tales!
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