Our FF4 sequel was better. (part three)

Part Three: The Story

Don’t worry, I’m not going to provide a step-by-step account of the entire game’s story, start to finish. (Although we kept such good notes that I could, if I wanted to.) Instead, I’ll just summarize the important conflict, describe how the heroes get caught up in it, and finally get around to explaining what happened with Rydia.

In short, she was the villain. In slightly-less-short, she would have made Golbez look like a pussycat.

Before the Lunarians came to the world with their magic and their airships, there were only humans and eidolons. I remember there being a very long, somewhat heated discussion about the exact terminology for eidolons; this was before the GBA or DS remakes cemented that term in the FF4 lexicon. FF10 was still new at the time and I recall someone fighting to use “aeons”, and I think someone else wanted “espers”. Most of our oldest design notes just say “monsters”. In fact, I’m only using “eidolons” now because I’ve recently replayed FF4DS and finished FF4:TAY and that’s the term the games eventually settle on. Who knows what it might have really ended up as.

Anywho, the Lunarians cooked up this scheme to help the human race evolve to the point where their society and the Lunarian society could co-exist, so the Lunarians could move in and colonize the planet peacefully. To further that end they gave mankind the eight crystals and taught them magic, which mankind promptly turned around and used on the eidolons. The eidolons, with no such Lunarian advantage, quickly factioned off into two groups: one that bent to man’s will rather than fight, led by Bahamut, and one that wanted to wage war eternally to escape slavery, led by a terrifyingly powerful eidolon named Arcus.

One thing led to another and Bahamut defeated Arcus. He sealed Arcus away on the moon where he could stand vigil over him. Unfortunately the moon turned out to not be a completely safe place to seal the consciousness of an unimaginably evil being; you may recall the Lunarians having similar trouble with one of their own: Zemus.

Zemus and Arcus plotted together to escape their respective prisons. Their goals almost aligned: Zemus wanted to destroy humanity and claim their world for his race, and Arcus wanted to destroy humanity to return it to the eidolons. They found that, with combined effort, they could take control over specific humans who already had evil festering in their hearts. Arcus therefore lent Zemus his power in snaring Golbez and gave him command over four of his most powerful eidolon lieutenants: the elemental archfiends Cecil would meet during his adventure.

The plan wasn’t perfect. Arcus knew that Zemus would escape first and then obliterate him while he was still captive, for the wicked do not share power. So while Zemus was so busy monitoring Golbez and building a bridge to the moon or whatever, Arcus began shaping his backup plan. He installed one of his archfiends as King of Baron and had him order the village of Mist razed, ensuring the eradication of the summoners — all except one, a young child in which the seed of hatred had been planted. Later he convinced Leviathan to “rescue” the girl from her human captors, ensuring she would grow up rapidly in eidolon care rather than with her own kind.

Arcus had the advantage in the pawn department, now. Where Zemus only had weeks or months with Golbez and Kain, Arcus had years with Rydia, thanks to the difference in the flow of time in the eidolon’s homeworld (which I’m sure we would have tried to over-explain). During her training Rydia came to sympathize more with eidolons than humans, and in learning how Arcus had been wronged so long ago became involved in the plot to return him to glory.

Then came Arcus’s masterstroke. Arcus had been monitoring Zemus’s movements, and knew Golbez and Cecil would be squaring off in the Underworld, and he sent Rydia to aid him. Rydia had no love of Cecil (he only murdered her mother) and even less for Golbez, so she was perfect for the task. Even better, she eventually went on to command Bahamut himself. Whenr Zemus broke free and was waging an epic, climactic battle against Cecil, Golbez and the rest of humanity Rydia summoned Bahamut to aid in combat. During that brief, unguarded window of time Arcus silently escaped and returned to the world.

(Yes, this means part of our plot revolved around a game mechanic. And yes, we are fully aware that everyone always just lets Rydia lay there dead during the Zeromus fight because she can’t even survive one friggin’ Big Bang. Work with me here.)

So now Arcus was free, but too weak to do much of anything, and meanwhile the rest of the world was focused on rebuilding and whatever else. Rydia’s next task was to pass the art of summoning to some trusted lieutenants of her own and see these people well-positioned in world government. This included Cedric, the man who eventually overthrew Eblan, as well as a Troian priestess and a Fabulian (Fabulean?) vizier.

There was one hitch in Arcus’s plan: Rydia did, over time, manage to create a strong, loving relationship with the one human who had only ever shown her respect and kindness: Rosa. She just couldn’t bring herself to destroy Baron in a violent uprising or shatter it economically, as was happening elsewhere in the world. She tried to bring Baron down gently by sending her agent, Jet, to corrupt Rosa’s daughter. The plan was to play on the princess’s ambitions so she would create strife with other nations, eventually leading to open war.

And it almost worked! That’s precisely what Crystal spends the first half of the game doing!

The game plays out pretty predictably: Arcus regains enough strength to return to the world, the team eventually defeats Rydia and her eidolons, Rydia has a tearful deathbed reunion with Rosa, then gives her power to the team’s summoner (Jet) in order to bring Arcus down once and for all. So, fitting with the pattern of making sure all the roles of FF4’s story are seen after, Rydia was our Golbez character.

One interesting side effect of the plot was that, because all of Rydia’s eidolons were “bad guys” it didn’t make logical sense for the heroes to be able to summon them. This means there’s no overlap in the list of summons from FF4 and the list from FF4:CS. This sounds crazy at first, considering Rydia’s list contains FF staples like Shiva, Ifrit, Ramuh, Bahamut, etc. We got around it by populating the summon list with eidolons that don’t appear in FF4 (like Moogle, Carbuncle and Quezacoatl) and including the former elemental archfiends. So instead of summoning Ifrit to dish out your fire damage, you’d summon Rubicante. My favorite summon on the new list was Red XIII, who would caste Haste on the entire party with Lunatic High. That would have been so sweet.

So yeah, that concludes the WALL OF TEXT portion of all this FF4 sequel madness. I do have one more update under my belt, where I show off the few meager resources we had compiled for the project before our egos clashed so hard the whole thing crumbled under its own weight. I’ll get to that later in the week.