Bahamut... and beyond

Actually, there is no beyond; Penelo's denoument is all too short. All you get is a movie and several screenfuls of memorable names (Final Fantasy XII fans will memorize these, of course), followed by a plain old English-language owari.

Some of the cheat sheets to the contrary, it is not foreordained that Ktjn will become, wants to become, or must become "a warrior like her sister." Far from it. In my version, she becomes a shopkeeper apprentice at Migelo's and seems happy about it. The Japanese have a name (or is it a verb?) for this nascent, "just watching" stage, but it eludes me at the moment.

Also, I never got the whoop-de-do "Zodiac Spear" or "Zodiac Escutcheon", nor did I need that stuff. In fact, I never even found a shop that sells Ether, for that matter. Apparently, I got the Syphon spell instead, and that plus walking around and Save crystals seems to be all you need.

Oh, well. I missed about half the beasties list, the whole Bangaa hunter killer subquest, the Archades Hunt Club payoffs, the entire (but beckoning) Barheim Passage sidequest, a good chunk of the Zertinan Caverns, and roughly all the optional junk in Giruvegan and Pharos. Maybe I'll go back and have a little fun before essaying Bahamut again. Later.

Vayne is a cupcake at level 65 with six (mostly) useless espers plus a levelled-up B Team. A couple of points on that:

• Gambits are a programming language roughly as sophisticated as some of the table-driven industrial process controllers I've seen (or written).
  
• Also, as Nebraska well knew in its Big Red glory days, it pays to have a little thunder in your second string.

Yarr, maties, the wise, they be lavish with they lucre.