Many of the newly-available destinations turn out to be pointless, at least for now, so let's start with one that isn't. A small village comprised of several grass huts sits on a large turtle-shaped island found south and slightly west of Kakkara, or west and slightly south of Matango. "Color of the Summer Sky" plays.

Curiously, however, we have our weapons out, even though there's never anything to fight here.

One hut has a pair of young children.

But the real reason to come here is in the larger central hut.

Wasn't someone looking for one of those? Also note that it won't appear in your inventory, which seems to be the reason for that final line.

There's also an unreachable event here, activated by a specific value of an event variable that nothing ever sets. If the event variable were set to the proper value, the following messages would display upon entering the hut where the fugitive royalty live:

魔者 is a particularly interesting term. It appears nowhere else in the game text, and is quite uncommon in Japanese in general, so it's particularly difficult to pin down the meaning and connotations. 魔 is a ubiquitous difficult-to-translate kanji with a meaning of roughly "supernatural, and probably not in a friendly way" that comes up in terms like 魔法 (magic) and 悪魔 (demon/devil). 者 is basically "person", and tends to be both more literary and either a bit more humble or not quite as respectful (depending on who it's applied to) than 人, a near-synonym. And 魔人 (majin) is a standard term for human-like entities with superhuman (and generally dangerous) powers, which has been applied to everything from genies to Dracula. Other related terms include 魔物 (魔 + thing = monster), 魔女 (魔 + woman = witch), 魔獣 (魔 + beast = monstrous beast), and 魔神 (魔 + god = baleful god).

On the other hand, maybe it's just a typo. 者 and 物 are both commonly read もの (mono), and mixing up sound-alike kanji is possibly the most common kind of typographical error in Japanese. So perhaps it was just supposed to be 魔物 (monster) all along. Still, the text remains unused either way.

Good question, kid. Compounding the mystery, higher values of the same never-modified event variable deactivate the NPCs here and change the music to "The Boy Heads for the Wilds", typically used in wilderness areas. Were there plans for the village to be abandoned after some unknown occurrence?

Optionally speaking to the king's attendant first adds this extra line to the beginning of the scene.

He'll hand the tail to the king, at which point the scene continues the same way as speaking to the king directly.

The screen brightens, and when the light fades, the once-dry pool is filled with gleaming water! "Sprite Child" replaces the music in Kakkara from now on.

The Moogle Belt is a reusable item that toggles Moogle status, similar to the Munchkin Hammer, if perhaps less useful given that Moogle wears off on its own. Still, the kingdom is saved, at least for now. The king still has misgivings, though.

Some distance north of Kakkara is what appears to be a large volcanic island, but we can't land there for now. Let's file that away for later investigation.

Shortly east of Kakkara is an odd feature. It looks sort of like a large tar pit with what appears to be another mana temple in the middle? We can't land at the temple itself, but landing nearby brings us to the shores of what, on closer inspection, doesn't resemble a tar pit so much as a viewport into space, with what seem to be planets and galaxies shimmering in a black field! There's a boat on the lake, if it can be called that, but trying to board gets us nowhere.

Okay, then. We'll try again later.

One last note while we're in the area. If we land in or near the C-shaped formation in the desert to the southeast, this will briefly take us where we first entered the desert before encountering the Sandship. The game divides the world map up with a grid to decide where you end up when you land, and cannon travel evidently uses the same data as Flammie, so there has to be a cell with the Sandship area as its destination for the cannon misfire to take you there, and this is that cell. However, now that the Sandship events are over, we're sent to the screen south of Kakkara immediately after landing, and can't re-explore that area.

Directly east of the starry sea, and between Matango and the Ice Country (you may have passed by it before when traveling by cannon), is an island dominated by a gaudy city. The plot doesn't send us here until later, so we'll skip the dialog and other details for the time being. However, the item shop sells the best armor money can buy until close to the end of the game, for those with enough cash. Getting it now will make things go more smoothly for a while.

Considering the armor quality, it seems likely that you weren't orginally meant to be able to do business in this city until later on.

West of Gaia's Navel and south of the giant turtle, we find a castle along the shoreline of an island ringed with cliffs on all sides. We can land on what seems to be a pier, but soldiers block the entrance. Like on the Sandship, "Seaside King" plays.

This is where Gemma's from, but it doesn't seem we can do anything here for now. Maybe later, then.

A small island south of Pandora holds a tall lighthouse. "Always Together" plays here, a track we haven't heard since the very beginning of the game, before encountering any monsters. Up several flights of stairs, we find a peculiar man spinning around on the roof.

He may be named for Jacques Piccard, an undersea explorer from a family of adventurers. There's less likely to be any direct connection to Jean-Luc Picard, whose name is normally rendered as ピカード rather than ピカール.

Regardless, his dialog never changes at any point in the game, even when you might expect it to, and there's nothing else here or anything else to do here. The lighthouse might have been more important if sea travel existed in the game, but as it is, the only reason to visit is this minor nugget of information.

We might as well take a look here, too. The coral reef shows up on the map in two tones of violet, and certainly seems large enough to be hiding a sunken continent. There's also a structure in the middle that looks like a more elaborate Mana temple. Flammie can only land on the flanks of the building; neither the central tile nor the surrounding coral allow for landing. On closer inspection once on the ground, the structure definitely has the look of a Mana temple, and "Holy Intrusion" plays as well. However, there's nothing else here, and if we try to enter...

Another place to come back to later, then.

A lot of that was mildly interesting, but so far useless. For a change of pace, here's something potentially interesting that won't ever be useful. There are two places on the world map that have hidden faces in the terrain if you look closely enough. One is in the mountains southwest of Southtown. The other is in the middle of nowhere in the ocean near the northeast corner of the map, due north of the cannon by Southtown. We can't interact with either face in any way.

Well, King Truffaut did point us toward the mountains southeast of Matango, so it would make sense to investigate the area. There's a single tree roughly at the center that might indicate the peak, but we can't land there. Northwest of that is what looks like another Mana temple, with a small clearing in front of it, and north of northwest from there is a village right next to what looks like yet another Mana temple. We'll start with the village. Although it looks much like the villages in the Gaia Lowlands region, "Distant Thunder" plays here instead of the usual town music, giving it a different feel.

Jach is another name that ends in the same sound as "Mach", and it has no obvious significance. The disciple's name may not mean anything specifically, but it does at least match that of a famous Brazilian football (soccer) player.

The item shop has some new armor, but although it's better than what Northtown offers, it simply doesn't compare to what we can buy in the Gold City. However, the Ochu Ring remains notable due to protecting against Asleep and Poisoned. Watts is in town, too, inside the southwestern house.

Let's have a look at that temple, then. Up close, it looks more like the ruins near Pandora and Northtown than like a Mana temple.

There are seven orbs inside the temple. Not all of them still work properly, and even some of those that do are entirely inconsequential.

Others seem more important.

These names may look famliar from other games in the series.

This appears to be a reference to a flying fortess in the 1970s post-apocalyptic sci-fi anime Future Boy Conan. It's unclear whether that's supposed to be another name for the Mana Fortress. And, given the reference to a sci-fi anime and how hammed-up this feels, it's similarly unclear whether it's meant to be an actual in-universe news broadcast or just a recording of a thematic fictional work. We've got pop music and a game show, so why not a science fiction drama?

Outside the village and up the mountain, track 21 風の焉わるところ plays.

It seems that the track's English name is "The Wind Never Ceases", but the original track name isn't so straightforward. 焉わる looks like a verb, and 風の[verb]ところ would normally translate to "where the wind [verbs]". The problem is that 焉わる isn't a verb any Japanese speaker seems to be familiar with. It's believed to be a Kikuta-ism (Kikuta being the composer), and even its pronunciation isn't known with any certainty. Most discussion agrees on いずくわる (izukuwaru), based on 焉んぞ (izukunzo), which apparently is used to indicate rhetorical questions when reading Chinese text in Japanese.

焉んぞ itself is more commonly written as 安んぞ. An example I've found is that the classical Chinese proverb 燕雀安知鴻鵠志 is conventionally written in Japanese as 燕雀安んぞ鴻鵠の志を知らんや. Roughly, that's "How can a small bird (metaphorically, a nobody) understand the aspirations of a large bird (metaphorically, a great person)? (It can't.)" And although I haven't been able to find the Japanese rendition of Kirk's line from Star Trek V, I could imagine something similar being used for "What does God need with a starship?". It's a question that seeks not to receive an answer but to make a point: An almighty being, like what the entity Kirk faces claims to be, wouldn't need a starship. And that makes these claims highly suspicious.

In any case, the only other place where 焉 is at all common is in the word 終焉 (shuuen, demise), leading to speculation that 焉わる might be meant as a something of a synonym for 終わる (owaru, to be over), especially given that the verb ends the same way. 風の終わるところ would basically mean "where the wind dies". But that doesn't quite seem to fit, and 焉 by itself doesn't have that sort of meaning associated with it. Perhaps, though, the track name was meant to evoke it, while also including the rhetorical effect of 焉んぞ. "Where does the wind go to die?" It doesn't. So maybe the English name had the right idea all along.

As the villagers said, the mountain path is crawling with monsters, specifically the Blood Pansy (Trap Flower), Bomb Bee, and Cockatrice (Eggatrice). Although Bomb Bees can sometimes set someone on fire, Blood Pansies remain easily the most annoying of these, as they'll often immediately fire off a spell that can knock a character unconscious. Fortunately, the Ochu Rings sold in Mandara prevent that stauts effect, reducing the tedium of climbing the winding trail up to the summit. Nikita may appear along the way if there aren't too many monsters on screen, but just duplicates the village's inventory at a higher price.

At the top is a cave, and inside, track 24 伝説 (Legend) plays. A strange energetic creature reminiscent of a large prehistoric bird is here, but where's the sage?

Well, we did need to visit all the temples regardless. Now is as good a time as any!

Also note that it's not necessary to visit here yet. For now, it's just a place to get some guidance if you're not sure where to go next.

It seems likely that you were orginally meant to escape the Empire by sea, possibly even with other escapees on the giant sea turtle that in the final game is an unmoving island. Or perhaps you were meant to shipwreck there, then find another way to travel? It might help explain the unused events.

As previously noted, the presence of beaches on the world map that could have served as landing spots for sea travel further support the theory of having some way to sail. Even the final version's world map has visible beaches in the Ice Country, on the northwest shore of the Golden Isle, along the mountains northeast of Matango (which might be related to what look like unreachable cave passages but don't go anywhere), on a small island just off the shore of Tasmanica, at the foot of the mountains south of Mandara, ringing the volcanic island in the northwest corner of the map, and arguably all allong the Kakkara Desert. The most developed version of the pre-release map has an additional beach on a protrusion of land toward the eastern side of the northern coast of the Empire, as well as islands with beaches on the lake between Northtown and Southtown and off the coast west of Southtown (the protruding bit of land and both islands are all removed in the final game). Perhaps you would have been stranded on one of these islands until finding a way off?

I also doubt that you were orginally meant to reach Mandara by air, at least the first time there. Most likely you would have come ashore at the base of the mountains and made your way up on foot, possibly going through a cave system that no longer exists, if it was ever designed in the first place. Looking at the pre-final maps again, Mandara isn't visible from above and so may have been a cave town, assuming it existed at all. The clearing in front of the Darkness Temple hadn't been added yet, either. However, there does appear to be a larger open space around the summit, implying that you might have been able to land there after finally securing a means of air travel, and even the final game still has an unused landing zone defined for that sector that drops you off just a short distance from the sage's cave. It would have felt especially rewarding after having had to climb up all the way from the foot of the mountain on every visit until then.