Final Fantasy VI Character Tribute: Gau

A genial nod to my first teacher's final lesson

So. Among certain types of gamers (JRPG fans), one question is oft-used to suss someone out entirely; you might call it the “Myers-Briggs Typology” of a certain generation of gamer:

“Who’s your favorite Final Fantasy VI character?”

It’s such a loaded question. Puts a body on the spot, it does. This game single-handedly raised the bar for all JRPG storytelling from that day forward, and is considered to be simply foundational in the genre because of what a dedicated following the game still has today, largely due to the rich and complex plot, the deep characterization, and the music, gods, the music. Then there was the place where the two intersect and this game really shines, because each character has their own theme music. The ending of the game is very long, owing mostly to its arrangement as a medley covering all of the characters in one theme with corresponding scenes from the endgame venue.

Anyway, seeing as how the pen name I use for World of Ruin is based on the name “Gogo,” who appears in this game as a secret character, one might say they are my favorite character. I just chuckle. Nah, Gogo is just fun. Kind of cheap. Gogo can do anything any other character can do…just….never quite as well, owing to their stats.

I can tell you the favorite character of Matt, my teacher and Initiator (best covered in The Wind Rose). His was Gau (how is it pronounced, by the way? I think it looks like “Gao” or “Gow,” but Matt always pronounced it more like “GuyU” (“guy, YOU!”). Anyway. It was him. According to Matt, Gau kicked ass. And for most of my gaming career, he was always my last pick for any given team.

Such a rookie mistake. Properly trained, Gau is…pretty badass. Properly trained and played, he’ll take a spot on the frontlines against Kefka and the Goddesses any day of the week.

Plus, I just have a soft spot for his backstory. And his theme music. That cello…sigh…

Backstory

We meet Gau running around in a particular zone of the map in the first part of the game, the World of Balance…the place even has separate theme music: The Veldt. However, we are more likely to have met his father first in the story.

Gau has a certain resonance with Mowgli from The Jungle Book. Or Nell. He’s a wild kid who was raised by the beasts on The Veldt because his father was crazy and threw him out. He managed to make it work, which means the kid has seen some shit and knows how to throw down when he needs to. When our party meets him, we’re more likely to attack him and scare him off by accident.

His father, by the way, goes on to fulfill his insane vision in a post-apocalyptic future called The World of Ruin (yeah, that’s right), a map that has been ruined and rearranged by Kefka’s Light of Judgement: That vision is to build a Colosseum as a monument to war.

In-Game Overview

“Mr. Thou! You angry… me? Mr. Thou! You angry… me?”
Gau to Cyan Garamonde

Anyway, the key to getting Gau to join the party is to buy some Dried Meat in town and, when he appears after a random battle out on the Veldt, to feed it to him (it functions as a curative item restoring 150HP in-game).

He’s unwieldy from the get-go; in his opening cut scene, he gets in a fight with Sabin, a professional martial artist who can potentially fling Aurabolts by the time they meet, and he laughs and tells Sabin he’s a good dancer. In combat, Gau doesn’t even have a proper Fight command and can’t equip weapons if I recall correctly (unless under the effects of Imp and equipped with Imp gear). Instead, he has a command called “Rage,” and at first, though there are actually some good attacks right away, it’s slim pickings.

Gau’s Rage command brings up a menu of monster names representing all of the Rages he has learned. He gets a few for free, but it’s best to start training him right away. The downside is that when you select a Rage, you lose control of Gau for the rest of that battle unless he falls. He will behave randomly within the specific skill set of the monster you select. Sometimes that’s just a limitation and sometimes, depending on the Rage, it can be an active problem (he might drop Quake or WWind with some Rages, which might do collateral damage to party members or even cause a wipeout unless equipped against).

Now, if you choose well, it won’t matter much that you lose control over him, because he will likely just tear shit up and the fight will end quickly.

Nerds train him up incessantly, but that takes work because of the way the Veldt works.

Everywhere else on the Overworld map, battles are basically random, but the monsters you face will depend on where you’re walking around and will vary in difficulty. On the Veldt, you will cycle through a list of enemy sets every time you visit there, and it might take a few visits to train up all of the Rages that are even available to a brand new Gau. The system works a bit like an abstract set of “gears;” each time you fight a random battle outside the Veldt, you advance to the next set of monster formations in a rotating list in the background. While on the Veldt, you will cycle through the specific formations in your current formation set. On any given visit to the Veldt, you will only encounter monster formations from that specific set, so once you’ve seen all the formations in the set you’re on, the list will cycle back to the beginning. Once you have all the Rages you want from a given set, the only way to see a different set of monsters is to leave the Veldt, fight one or more battles outside the Veldt, and then come back to collect the new Rages.

It gets tedious. It’s a grind.

Real devoted Gau fans will go very far out of our way to revisit the Veldt an extra time or two before the “trigger event” crossing the game over into the World of Ruin…and, of course, there will be more Rages to collect from new monsters in the World of Ruin, too.

By the end of it, if you are diligent about getting a shopping list of Rages, you will have a Gau who can probably destroy almost anything by himself provided he is properly equipped and leveled going into the fight. And he’s not too shabby a magic-user once Magicite enters the picture, which only sweetens the pot due to how many of his Rages are basically just free versions of some of the best offensive magic spells in the game.

It takes dedication to learn Gau’s ins and outs, learn how to train up and finesse that killer out of the wild beast-kid, but in the proper hands, Gau is a tour de force.

It took me years to figure it out for myself in practice. Who or what convinced me to put in the work (and broke down the finer points, including lists of recommended Rages)?

Djibriel’s Final Fantasy III FAQ. Pure genius.