8-Bit Theater - Plot

Plot

For a plot summary of the game the comic parodies, see Final Fantasy (video game)#Plot.

8-Bit Theater opens with an introductory sequence that explains how the Light Warriors initially meet and decide to form an adventuring party in the kingdom of Corneria, where King Steve's daughter, Princess Sara, is being held captive by the knight Garland in the nearby Temple of Fiends. After her rescue, during which both the Light Warriors and Garland himself are shown as so incompetent that Sara has to orchestrate her kidnapping and rescue herself, the king has a bridge built that connects Corneria to the main continent.

Here the Light Warriors meet the witch Matoya, who blackmails them into recovering her stolen crystal. In the port town of Pravoka the party defeats the pirate Bikke (accompanied by Garland) and uses his ship to travel on to Elfland. There, they discover the King has been poisoned, apparently by the same person who stole Matoya's crystal, and Thief is the prince of Elfland. The Light Warriors retrieve the antidote and Matoya's crystal from the dark elf Drizz'l, who is shortly thereafter recruited by Garland and Bikke. Upon his recovery, the Elf King sends the Light Warriors to save Elfland by retrieving the Earth Orb from two undead beings, Vilbert von Vampire and his father Lich, the Fiend of Earth. Vilbert survives the battle and is later recruited into Garland's Dark Warriors, while Lich goes to hell. White Mage then sends the Light Warriors to meet Sarda the Sage, an omnipotent wizard who takes the Earth orb and proceeds to draft the group into quests for the other three elemental orbs.

The Fire Orb is held by Kary, the Fiend of Fire in Gurgu Volcano, who kills Black Belt before the group can defeat her and retrieve the orb. A subsequent side quest to the Ice Cave on Sarda's behalf, during which the Light Warriors encounter squid-like Doom Cultists, is ultimately fruitless. A second side quest, however, involves the Light Warriors meeting the dragon god-king Bahamut, who sends them to the Castle of Ordeals to obtain a rat tail. There, the Light Warriors each face their own internal demons: Sloth (Fighter), Pride (Red Mage), Greed (Thief) and a doppelgänger of Black Mage, who is the only thing that can represent his evil. The Light Warriors present the rat tail to Bahamut, only to find that it is an ingredient in a virility soup his girlfriend Matoya makes for him. The party is rewarded with class upgrades: Red Mage becomes a Mime, Fighter becomes a Knight, Thief becomes a Ninja, and Black Mage becomes a Blue Mage with some help from a Dark God.

Returning to the task of retrieving the elemental orbs, the Light Warriors travel to the cities of Gaia and Onrac and use a submarine provided by Sarda to reach the Sea Shrine, where they meet the Doom Cultists a second time. After defeating them, they accidentally summon the third Fiend, Ur (known in the game as Kraken). The Light Warriors kill Ur, retrieve the Water Orb and travel on to Lefein in search of the Air Orb, where they meet Dragoon, the last Dragon Knight, and the evil dragon Muffin, the fourth Fiend, who guards the Orb of Air. During a battle in Muffin's Sky Castle she is killed by Dragoon. The Sky Castle itself explodes after Fighter and Black Mage take the Air Orb.

Upon presenting the final orb to Sarda, he dismissively orders the Light Warriors to return to the Temple of Fiends, where they find that the Dark Warriors have made the temple their base of operations. During the night, Drizz'l summons the Four Fiends from Hell and has them confront the Light Warriors. Black Mage, using evil energy he absorbed from his doppelgänger, kills the fiends, absorbs their evil energies as well and turns on the other Light Warriors. Sarda interrupts the fight and reveals his intent to destroy the Light Warriors himself.

Sarda explains himself to be the grown-up version of a child that suffered great harm as a result of the Light Warrior's actions around the world. Young Sarda became so focused on revenge that he studied to be a great wizard and travelled back in time to the beginning of the universe to remake it without the Light Warriors; after discovering that changing the past was impossible even for him, he decides to settle for making the Light Warriors into the warriors of legend, for no other reason than to further humiliate them in defeat. Sarda absorbs the orbs' magic energy as well as Black Mage's evil energy and easily unmakes not only the Light Warriors' class changes, but also removes their original abilities. Sarda's power quickly becomes erratic and unstable, and Chaos, the King of Demons, takes the opportunity to possess Sarda's body and announce his plans to annihilate the universe.

However, before a final battle between the Light Warriors and Chaos can begin, he is destroyed off-panel by a group of four White Mages, a party combination that was dismissed in one of the earliest episodes as ineffectual for the game, and all credit for saving the world goes to a group of bystanders, the Dark Warriors. The Epilogue picks up three years later. White Mage visits Red Mage and Dragoon at a restaurant, where they have started up an extremely unsuccessful support group for sole survivors of ancient sects. Afterward, White Mage visits King Thief in Elfland, who has been trying to locate Black Mage and Fighter, in an effort to obtain more riches from their adventure. Black Mage and Fighter find themselves poor and out of work in a remote town, trying to make money by taking job postings in the town square. The epilogue ends with Fighter suggesting that they resume their search for the "Armor of Invincibility" that Fighter has been searching for since the beginning of the comic.