Garnet has a bad feeling about Zidane going off with with that other girl, so she sends Eiko after him. Picking up Vivi and Amarant on the way, she finds the first Genome girl (who I'll call Pinky for now, after her shirt) on a dead end path. Pinky says that Zidane went to see Garland, saying that he was an enemy of Gaia as he went. Of course, she's leaving out that he said that as a rhetorical question, and went on to say that he wasn't going to join the Genomes' side.
Switching back to Zidane, he enters Pandemonion and meets with Garland, who reveals that he sent Zidane to Gaia twelve years ago to disrupt the cycle of souls, and that another specialized Genome was the one responsible for Zidane's transformation from Kakkarot into Goku. Naturally, he's talking about Kuja, who he created twenty-four years ago for the same purpose, making him Zidane's spiritual big brother. Kuja was meant to disrupt the cycle of souls by starting wars, which would allow the souls of Terra to take the Gaian souls' places in their world's cycle. The Iifa Tree was also part of this plan, it's purpose being to turn Gaian souls into mist, thereby stopping the cycle and allowing Terran souls to fill the void. Although we stopped the creation of mist, the rest of the tree's function is still going on undisturbed.
However, Kuja was threatened by Zidane's birth because Zidane was meant to replace him once his soul wore out, and abandoned him on Gaia. Garland theorizes that Kuja left Zidane alive so he could prove himself superior to Zidane, but soon Zidane will surpass Kuja, at which point he will continue Kuja's work for Garland. Wait, didn't Garland think Kuja was dead after Alexandria?
Zidane calls bullshit on that last part, though. He's not here to work for Garland, he's here to kick his ass. One better, he'll destroy Terra.
Er, wait, doesn't that just make Zidane Gaia's Kuja, though? I mean, granted, if Terra really makes a habit of destroying other planets like this to perpetuate itself, that's pretty awful, but isn't destroying the planet kind of overkill? Is it even the whole planet that's responsible for this plan, or is it just what Garland came up with after everyone else designated him the planet's maintenance man and took the big stasis nap? Speaking of which, if the entire planet is in stasis mode, what do Garland and the Genomes eat? Was the destruction of Madain Sari actually a pizza run gone tragically wrong?
Anyway, Zidane tries to call Garland out for a one-on-one throwdown, but Garland apparently installs magic restraining bolts in his Genomes, and Zidane drops unconscious on the floor.
Having talked this much about Kuja, it's probably about time we saw him again, and he makes his appearance on Terra with the proclamation that soon he will rule over both Terra and Gaia.
The magic restraining bolt has caused Zidane to slip into an Angst Coma Vision Quest where his friends take turns criticizing or complimenting him, both of which he shrugs off without a second thought due to angst over the sudden existential quandary of learning his origins and purpose as a soulless genocider. On the whole, one of the more appropriate things to be angst-ridden about.
He comes to in a room that looks like it was decorated in the ribcage of a pipe organ monster, where Eiko and Vivi are worrying over him. He gets to his feet and sort of stumbles past them, telling them not to get involved. When they try to press the issue, he shouts at them and leaves, shutting the gate behind him. In the next room he's attacked by a thestral, but Freya and Amarant join him when it looks like it's more than he can handle. Afterward, he just says he can take care of himself and goes on alone again to find Steiner and Quina fighting a giant bug. Zidane helps them destroy it, but once again tells them to leave him alone afterward.
Alone in the next room he calls everyone a bastard, with himself as the worst, and is attacked by a giant tortoise with an even more giant chin. After a couple rounds, the tortoise knocks Zidane down to critical health, setting Garnet up to make her entrance, who calls him out for trying to do everything himself. He says he doesn't want to cause trouble for anyone (coulda fooled Steiner), especially because he can't accept everyone else as his friends anymore now that he knows he was meant to be another Kuja. Garnet says that just as he's always looked out for everyone else, they've all been looking out for him, too, and they're not about to stop now. This wins Zidane over, and we regroup to confront Garland as a team.
This is probably as good a time as any to point out that while most of Terra has been this beautiful, crystalline place, Garland's fortress of Pandemonium is more like H.R. Giger without the sex. The inclusion of a room full of rows of little pedestals vaguely reminiscent of the xenomorph egg chambers in the Alien series doesn't really help, especially when they spew more giant bugs at us if we pass them while they're lit up.
It also has flying Malboros, because why not.
An elevator puzzle eventually forces us to split the party so that half of us can ride it to the next level while the other half work the controls. I was going to question why Garland would put an elevator in his fortress that can only be operated remotely, but then I remembered he can teleport, so now I'm going to ask why he has an elevator at all instead.
You know what, I take back what the "no sex" part of my Giger comparison, because the elevator takes us to a room covered in wall vaginas.
We catch up with Garland, who rambles some fauxlosophic nonsense about life and death being one and the Terrans transcending it in another dimension, and I'm just totally beyond caring at this point. The party tells him to stuff it anyway, because they believe in the Power of Friendship and growing from past experiences, and then Garland summons Kuja's silver dragon. I'd been wondering where that thing disappeared to after Bahamut wiped out the navy, but why does Garland have it?
The Silver Dragon is fast and likes to use fairly powerful attacks that hit the whole party, but Auto-Regen continues to make every encounter in the game its bitch, and we only resorted to having Garnet actually cast Cura a couple times "just in case." Once again, the boss is mostly a matter of everyone sitting around waiting for Zidane to finish stealing everything, and then beating it into paste with standard attacks. Am I just overleveled, or something?
After slaying the dragon, Zidane asks Garland what he wants. Garland ways the restoration of Terra, but Zidane says that's what the Terrans want. What does Garland want (other than for the [[8BitTheater forest imps to go away and Princess Sara to return his calls]])? Garland reveals that he, too, is a creation of the Terrans, and attacks.
Garland is the Silver Dragon's opposite: slower, and focused on single-target attacks. They can hit hard, but once again are nothing that Auto-Regan doesn't overcome. The most dangerous thing he does is cast Stop, which, since none of our party members are equipped with the Locomotion ability, could potentially cause a TPK if not healed. Fortunately, Remedies turn out to cure the effect, so there goes the danger, and Garland goes down shortly after Zidane finally steals the last item.
Also, I just realized that what I thought was a white ascot is actually a beard. The game's art design may be really nice, but the grainy graphics can totally hamstring it at time.
Suddenly, we notice that the Invincible is flying overhead, because apparently Garland left the keys on the dashboard, and now Kuja's in control. Being the preening narcissist that he is, though, Kuja can't resist beaming down to gloat face to face with us and Garland about how we all played directly into his hands.
And then he attacks us directly, instead of using his giant interplanetary battleship to just blast us into oblivion. Yeah, fine, three boss fights back to back, why not.
Kuja only has two attacks: Thundaga, and Demi. Once again, Auto-Regen renders both moot save for the occasional need to patch up multiple hits on the same target, and the fight consists almost entirely of Zidane spamming Steal.
...until Kuja Trances and blows us all away with Ultima. By stealing the souls from the Invincible that it harvested from Madain Sari, the Iifa Tree, and Alexanria, and then letting us beat on him until the souls' survival instincts kicked him into Trance, Kuja has become unbelievably powerful. And the most powerful soul of all those powering him is Queen Brahne's.
Kuja coup de graces Garland by punting him off a ledge Sparta-style, and starts contemplating how to kill us, when Garland's voice starts talking to him. Garland reveals that he intentionally built Kuja only to last long enough for Zidane to reach his full power, and that Kuja, like the black mages he took such joy in deceiving, has a finite lifespan that's fast approaching its close.
Kuja comes to the only rational conclusion, of course: take it all down with him.
As Kuja lashes out at everything in sight with his magic tentacles of destruction, Zidane orders the rest of the team to capture the Invincible while he rescues the Genomes. Garnet is coming too, because she's not letting him out of her sight after what happened the last time he went off alone with Pinky.
Speaking of which, it turns out that Pinky also has a soul of her own, as Garland intended her to be the replacement for Zidane, and she has no interest in escaping Terra now that Garland is dead and she has no purpose. She also reveals that her name is Mikoto, which is awfully out of place with all the other names in this game. Zidane tells her that he felt the same thing after he found out what he was, but they have to make their own purposes for existing, and she comes along. With the Genomes aboard, the Invincible makes its escape back to Gaia as Terra crumbles in flame.
Freya and Amarant are catching on to how things work around here, though, and point out that Kuja is sure still alive. Zidane figures his next move will be to try and destroy Gaia, too, and that the Iifa Tree will have something to do with it. Steiner interrupts the conversation at this point to bring us to the bridge so we can see for ourselves that the mist is back with a vengeance to cover the entire world. No points for guessing who's behind it.
End Disc 3.
