Welcome back to my ongoing playthrough of Opera Omnia, that one Final Fantasy gacha game building off of Dissidia. The last time I played this for the blog, it was… more than half a year ago. I actually missed the game’s anniversary during that period, which kinda sucks because you know, that’s a lot of juicy free rolls lost. I kept putting this off for one reason or another, including getting into Granblue Fantasy, which is also due for an update… Whatever, let’s get into it.

Before doing so though, I want to plug something I discovered in the interim. There’s this podcast called Gacha Journalism, which has the hosts playing a random gacha game for a few weeks and reporting on their time with it and saying whether it’s worth getting into or not. If you’re a gacha game head, I recommend checking it out.

Despite missing out on big anniversary rolls, there were some banners with free rolls on them. In the first banner, I unlocked a character, Lyse, by getting her weapon. Don’t know who she is. On the second banner, I got a nice new weapon for Zidane. Speaking of FF IX characters, I got Steiner from the third banner, along with a duplicate weapon for Vivi. On the fourth, I unlocked the Paladin version of Cecil, so I guess there’s more than one Final Fantasy gacha where there’s multiple Cecils, along with a guy named Vayne, who I don’t know but looks like an FF XII guy. On the last banner, I got ya boys Sephiroth and Vincent Valentine, happy FFVII Remake day to me.

Anyway, let’s get to the main story. It’s Chapter 4 and our intrepid gang has to go on an adventure on some snowy mountains to close a Torsion there. While traveling around, they’re attacked by Magitek mechs, which also apparently exist in Type-0 since those characters recognize them. But then they come across a miniboss battle against a Magitek machine they don’t recognize, and guess what, it’s Terra’s mecha from FF VI. She stumbles out, though she’s unfortunately unconscious.

But then, Mog senses the presence of somebody else attuned to light. For some reason he inexplicably has the ability to imagine who they’re following and he pictures a blonde girl with braids. Vaan is excited since it might be Penelo and it turns out to be right on the money. Much like the original game, she just decides to tag along.

After murdering the shit out of a turtle, the gang checks on Terra. Whoops, she’s still out of it. The gang realizes that she was probably being mind controlled into attacking them and Warrior of Light, who was previously “leave her for dead,” decides “yeah let’s keep her around.” She takes a while to wake up, though.

After a whole bunch of arbitrary fights, Terra wakes up while a chill remix of the FF VI‘s map theme plays. Apparently she was wandering around Opera Omnia’s world alone, ran into Kefka, and ended up getting mind controlled by him for a second time. Everyone decides that the clown man is on sight, since he’s basically the Joker and would probably want to harness the Torsions to destroy shit.

Speaking of which, Kefka is here. He gloats that Terra did some cool war crimes while she was under his control, sics some monsters on the gang, and ditches the scene.

Shortly afterward, Yang of Fabul shows up, but he is clearly not in the right mind because he wants to beat up the party immediately with a Cecil and Edge manikin. After defeating the Yang Gang, Yang comes to his senses, revealing that the evil side offered him a cabinet position in their administration to drop out of the good side.

Fellow monk Yda is like, “sick, punching stuff rules right?” Edge also compliments Yang and Yang in turn goes, “wow, ninjas are cool, but you’re cool for being a person in royalty that actually fights for his people.” Everybody then takes the time to gush about their friends that happen to be royalty and how they’re the good monarchists.

Everybody catches up to the Joker and he escapes through a Torsion and our heroes give chase. Vaan and Terra brings up the reasonable question of, “hey, why can’t we make our own Torsions?” Mog doesn’t know, he just knows that the Warriors of Light have the opposite power of closing them. Zidane goes all centrist brain and suggests recruiting the villains to their side to get them to stop; I mean, given that you can use villain characters in your party, he’s probably onto something, but also, the gang couldn’t even get the moderate evil threat of Seifer and his polycule to back them up, so what does he know?

After fighting a bunch of manikins, the gang emerges on the other side, where they have to arbitrarily beat up enemies. I really mean it here. So there’s these roadblocks on the world map and they only clear up after clearing certain conditions. I got stuck on a roadblock demanding that I kill a certain amount of enemies and the problem was that I cleared every level up until this point? Please don’t make me replay levels for no good reason, Opera Omnia.

Our reward is that we meet up with the Onion Knight, who is just kinda chilling. He says that he’s too busy to join the crew though, as wants to find an understanding of his own role in the world even though his goal and the whole gang’s aren’t mutually exclusive. He ends up coming around to the gang, though he questions the justice of the whole group. Bartz tells him to not worry about it. Besides, as Zidane puts it, even if they don’t fully understand the end goal of closing the Torsions, it’ll help everyone achieve their own individual heroic goals.

But alas, Onion Knight is still worrying about it. He pulls Terra aside and voices his suspicions of Mog. And he honestly has a point: why is everyone taking the word of this weird Moogle at face value? Anyway, Terra gets it, but the journey will probably lead to them beating the shit out of Kefka, which is an objectively good goal.

Speaking of whomst, our heroes have caught up to Kefka. He sics a huge mech on them that acts as the chapter’s final boss. Surprisingly, Kefka is thrilled to see the gang trash his robot and close the Torsion. As it happens, his goal isn’t to rip apart reality with the Torsions like what was initially thought. His actual stated goal is to just fuck around and see what happens. Truly, the Joker of gamers.

Anyway, that’s another chapter done. To be honest, besides the arbitrary roadblocks, I forgot how much I kinda dug Opera Omnia. I will say though: the auto battle in this game really sucks. The AI seems to have trouble differentiating when it should use a normal or brave attack, which often leads to them doing normal attacks in spite of having low brave and being nowhere close to killing an enemy.

See you in the next chapter, where our intrepid heroes go to the Palace of Malitia, which will hopefully not take me months to get around to.