Upon starting, you get the same exact scene that you got in the prologue. Thank you very much, Square. I was hoping for a glimpse of the mysterious man on the ziggurat in the screenshot, but instead, you can enjoy a view of the Orange Barf Glow.

Instead of the credits, you get this scene inside the colliery of Narshe. Those of you who watched this on YouTube should know that Unregistered HyperCam 2 is not a feature on this or any other game and anyone who says that it is is lying to cover up his mistakes.

Wedge is talking about something called an esper, derived from ESP for a short story called Oddy and Id, and not Blade Runner like I thought.

Here, you can enjoy the character portraits. Wedge and Vicks are equipped with Mithril Blades, bucklers, leather hats, and leather armor. None of this matters, since you're in the magitek armors.

Meet your stats!
Vigor determines the physical damage, but Bat.Pwr does a lot more to determine physical attacks. Don't concern yourself with it too much.
Speed affects how fast your ATB gauge will recharge. The difference between a speed of 33 and 34 is minimal. For example, the ATB gauge at a speed of 25 takes 8.1 seconds to fill up, at 40, it takes 6 seconds to fill up, and at 128, it takes 2.5 seconds to fill up.
Stamina determines the HP you'll gain back with regen, the HP lost by poison and seizure, and evading instant death attacks. More stamina means more HP lost. I'm not sure if that's a bug or the programmers being assholes (keep in mind II and XII), but stamina isn't exactly the most beneficial stat.
Magic Power, or Mag.Pwr for short, determines the damage you do with magic and various other things.
Battle Power, or Bat.Pwr for short, is the most significant factor in determining fight damage.
Defense determines the damage physical attacks will do on you. Mag.Def is the same thing, except with magic.
Evade does nothing. It was supposed to do something, but due to lazy programmers, it does nothing.
M.Block determines the percentage (1% meaning 1/128, I'll stick with percent because otherwise just means deriving a new word that's really awkward) that you'll block a magic attack. Due to lazy programmers, it does what evade is supposed to do as well, making it far more useful than it should be. At 128%, as 100 is not a power of 2, you are untouchable, assuming the attack is not unavoidable.

That's enough stat explaining. Here, we have a battle, and it looks much better than Final Fantasy IV. This is your first enemy, Lobo (Spanish and Portuguese for wolf, along with a show that never should have been canceled). He does very little. In the Japanese version, he's a Silver Lobo. Those of you looking for references to earlier Final Fantasies in Final Fantasy XII would do well to ignore this, as monsters in this series have been recycled since Final Fantasy II.

It doesn't matter what attack we use. Anything leads to a very dead Lobo. Here, I demo the bolt beam. It's electricity based. There are eight elements in this game.

I don't think Narshe was very safe. The fact that these are the weakest enemies in the game doesn't help them very much.

Guards aren't very tough at all.

Let's use Fire Beam.

And on these Lobos, Ice Beam.

Looks like X-Fer, the insta-kill attack. That is, instakill no matter what, provided it isn't immune, as opposed to the regular attacks which are powerful enough to be instakill. I certainly wouldn't show off confuser here.

Meet Vomammoth. They have the highest battle power of any monster and a higher battle power than you'll see on anything for a long time, but they're at level 1, which completely negates any benefits for having an obscenely high battle power. They cast Blizzard if Mystery Girl reaches level 7, or anyone else is at level 7 if she isn't around for some reason.

We're going to show off the confuser here. You know why?

Vomammoth will use Blizzard on his own team if you do! NOTE: Only use Confuser to show off Blizzard. You can't use it as blue magic, there are better ways to kill monsters (read: any of your own attacks except for heal force, duh). Everything here can be one-hit killed. He's a Megalodoth in the GBA version, a minor cosmetic change and a portmanteau of mammoth and megalodon, I suppose. So minor, in fact, that I won't be pointing out any more name changes unless they're noteworthy.

Enjoy this, as this is your only chance to do this for a long, long time. BioBlaster looks really freaking cool. It also poisons the enemies.

Now that we've forced our way into the mines and orphaned many Narshian children, we'll fight Were-Rats. Don't use BioBlaster on them, they'll just absorb it, being used to hanging around in toxic waste dumps, I suppose.

Repo Men (Bandits in the GBA version, which makes a hell of a lot more sense) hang out in caves. If you somehow hurt him without killing him, he'll use the Wrench on himself. If you deal enough damage to kill him, he won't be able to attack himself and throw the wrench at you instead. How odd.

Meet Whelk (Murex scolopax), a murex in the service of Narshe's army. That's weird, huh? He can slime, which inflicts slow and reduces the speed of your ATB gauge by one half.

Well, what he does is absorb lightning.

When he says Gruuu, he retreats into his shell. If you atttack the shell with a lightning-based attack, it does nothing. Absolutely nothing. If you attack it with anything else, it counters with Mega Volt. It only has the MP for six of them. Mega Volt is not strong enough to kill you.

Fun Fact: If you whittle the shell's 50,000 HP away, you get a tincture. This might take over an hour, and it's not worth it.

Doubly Fun Fact: If you kill the shell and the whelk inside it, you get a tincture and a potion! You'll need luck or a calculator to pull that off. Hooray! You have no life.

Vaporite absorbs Lightning. Nobody wanted to transcribe the bestiary and there aren't any vaporites in games that do have bestiaries transcribed or easily accessible (read: FFXII), so I can't explain what the hell they are. I'm stuck with relying on what Djibriel says in his FAQ.

Note: Final Fantasy IV for the DS has a bestiary, but it lacks descriptions of any sort. It just has HP, EXP, items, weaknesses and strengths, and where they can be found.

After that, you get another boss battle with the esper frozen in ice. Except it's not really a boss battle.

Biggs and Wedge are either vaporized or whisked away to Final Fantasy VII, or even timewarped to Final Fantasy IV, where they were probably retroactively added for the remake, it doesn't really matter, because you never see them or even hear of them again.

While the esper and the mysterious girl resonate with each other and smell like a very actinic variety of blue.