Lol, the title is a bit of a lie, or at least it's hyperbole.  I am walking through a guide when I feel like I'm getting stuck, or I just want to plow on through parts, but I'm not trying to look ahead too much for spoilers.  After my previous post, I was at the part in the game where I was going to open the Esper Gate.  I was aware that the main world seemed to be about half the game and then there's some realm that is the second half, or at least a large part of it.  I assumed I was about to enter that second-realm and start the second half of the game.

Oh, the naivety!  Opening the Esper Realm sent a bunch of Espers flying, they destroyed Vector and now the story had to progress a bit more in the main over world.  I'm fine with that as a game mechanic but let's just say when I opened the Esper Realm and I wasn't given a new area to explore... Yeah, I walked away for a time and needed to take a break.  I wasn't mad.  I was just expecting something completely new and I was a tad disappointed and lost a little motivation.

This of course meant that as the days ticked by, I got busy and found myself wanting to do other things and play other games. The week I'm posting this is also the first week of the NES Weekly Challenges and although I always suck at those, I really have fun participating in those.  Am I going to remain loyal to this goal, or jump into the NES Challenge full steam ahead?

Heck no, I'm not giving up!  This is the year of Final Fantasy VI, baby!  Unless something really, really life changing happens, I plan on fully finishing this game!  In fact, I'm using that desire to play the NES Challenge or to participate in the N64 Completion thread to motivate me to make goals for each week before I participate.  For the past two nights (Saturday and Sunday) my goal has been to try and get to the Ascended World (or whatever it's called.)  I know I said I'm not looking ahead in the guide for spoilers, and I'm not really, but the wonderful Caves of Narshe site guide is what I've followed and when I paid attention to the headings of the guide chapters, I could see that I was more than a few away of finishing the main overworld because their guide is divided up into 3 sections and I think the third section is bonus material.  Section two, I think, is into the Ascended World of Kefka... maybe.

So this weekend I plowed through the story, picked up a couple of key items and Lores that I needed went back to the airship to go to the realm above the ground.  Being that at this point I was still a few guide chapters away from Part II, I knew this wasn't yet the end and it was good to have that expectation.  Man, these enemies up here are toooooough.   On cheat-mode in the Pixel Remaster  version (I have all battle rewards set to 4x so leveling and GP is easy to get now), that's not entirely true.  My party is around levels 42-50 at this point and taking on most of this literal, and figurative, behemoths isn't that difficult.  However, if my level was anything normal, I'd be toast up here!

So far I've put about 20 hours into this game and I assume at least 10 more are left.  I'm amazed that some people can complete this game in around 10 hours, even if they are speed runners!  That's impressive as I feel like I really have tried to lightening-play my way through this game, which does require some grinding to become OP so you can breeze through bosses.

The good news is the past two nights have really invigorated me to keep going!  I'm about to enter the  final battle with Kefka before Part II of this game begins.  That has been my goal for this week so I can move onto some SMB3 playing for the weekly competition.  Hopefully today I'll complete this goal and then it's time to go collect some coins in worlds 1-1 thought 1-4 of SMB3!  Here-ah we gooooo!