At The End

Well, here we are finally.  I've taken my first steps into the final world of Kingdom Hearts Final Mix, the aptly named End of The World.  It's an appropriately dark, unsetting place, full of impossible physics and eldritch creatures.  It has the potential to be the best final level I've encountered in an RPG for a good while. 


The ones I've played over the last few years have never quite gotten there.  The three Tales games I've played were alright (and even downright brilliants in spots). Legendia's final level suffered from both ending fatigue and a much too high OMGWTFBBQ factor.  Abyss has the wondrous Luke vs. Asch fight (and managed to trigger a bit of vicarious acrophobia) but was just too damn bright. Vesperia's final dungeon felt out of place, until the very last section, which came across as alien and disturbing somehow, and was evocative enough of Lovecraft to feel built and inhabited by Deep Ones or something; it actually scared me some. 


But this one is different somehow.  It's something of a pleasant surprise, since RPGs (even good ones) have a bad habit of screwing them up somehow.  Most of them have length issues, being too much of a slog compared to the rest of the game (at least to me), or feel anticlimactic somehow.  It's good to know that Square still knew what it was doing in the PS2 era.


Anyhow, things are going along pretty well, though some of that can be explained by some incidental grinding.  I decided to go ahead and hunt down the last of the 101 Dalamations and get the final Aero upgrade.  Things devolved fairly quickly, and the final set of puppies eluded me.  I wound up tearing through Hollow Bastion for three hours, stopping and looking it up on GameFAQs, then futilely beating on it another hour.  I thought I had managed to find a nasty glitch, and Googled it.


I didn't find a glitch.  It had been moved the final set into a semi-secret area I had ignored (the hidden Lift Stop in the Library) thinking I has already thoroughly looted the place.  Check Everywhere is the first rule of RPGs, and I forgot it!  This was all compounded by the fact that the FAQs I consulted were copied and pasted from the original version to the Remix/Final Mix versions database without any corrections or new data.  Frickin'.  Lazy.


Anyway, I'm probably over-leveled now, but the monsters are still not pushovers at least.  That's good, because we're down to the wire, and where the game needs to bring out the badasses.  The Harvest Never Rests!