Setzer Gabbiani never beat Daryl in a race. Not once, in his whole life. Then she won the last one by not coming back from it — she took an airship higher than anyone had flown, reaching for the stars, and the sky kept her. That is the race Final Fantasy VI never lets him run again, and it is the reason the easy charmer dealing cards on the Blackjack is a much quieter man than he looks.
The game hands you almost nothing about her. One flashback, a tomb full of monsters, a ship that erupts from the sea — and if you played in English, a joke sitting where her epitaph should be. So here is the whole shape of it: who Daryl was, what Darill's Tomb and the Falcon actually mean, why a man who lives by dice refuses to steer a single outcome, and the line the localization quietly cut. Setzer's grief turns out to be the most legible thing about him, once you know where to look.
Setzer Gabbiani, the Gambler with an Airship
He owns the only casino that flies. The Blackjack is Setzer's airship and his gambling hall at the same time, an elegant thing that carries dice tables and slot wheels up into the clouds. He fights the way he lives, hurling cards and darts and rolling for results; his signature command is Slot, a row of reels that can heal the whole party or wreck it depending on what lands. When the Returners need an airship of their own, Setzer is the answer, because in the entire world there are only two — the Blackjack and the Falcon — plus whatever the Gestahlian Empire keeps in its hangars.
Getting him aboard is a con stacked on a con. Setzer announces, by letter, that he means to kidnap the opera starlet Maria. Celes happens to resemble her closely enough to pass, so she takes the stage in Maria's place, and Setzer snatches the wrong woman straight up to the Blackjack while the party stows away on a rope she drops for them.
He works out that he has been played almost at once — and decides he likes Celes better than the singer he came for. He will help, he says, if she marries him. Celes offers a coin toss instead: heads, he helps regardless; tails, she is his. The coin comes up heads. It always would have. It is Edgar's two-headed coin — the king's face on one side, his brother Sabin's on the other, both of them counting as heads — and when Setzer turns it over and sees the cheat, he laughs and throws in with the party anyway. Hold onto that coin. It comes back.
Daryl, the Woman Who Made Him One
Daryl flew faster than anyone alive. She was Setzer's friend and his rival, the pilot of the Falcon, and the world called her the fastest woman in it. In every speed contest the two of them ever ran, Setzer lost. Not most of them — all of them. He spent a lifetime chasing someone he could never catch, and by every sign he loved the chase.
What Daryl wanted was height. She meant to break through the cloud ceiling and be the one who flew closest to the stars, and one day she took the Falcon up to do exactly that, a record attempt she knew was dangerous and made anyway. She did not come back.
Because the world held only two airships, Setzer was the single person who could search far enough to find her, and even then it took him a year. He turned up the Falcon wrecked in a distant land, and learned that Daryl had died in it.
Here is the part the game trusts you to assemble on your own. Before Daryl died, Setzer was not a gambler at all — he was a racer, a man trying to be the fastest thing in the sky. When the one race that mattered ended for good, he stopped chasing "fastest" completely. He turned the Blackjack into a casino and began handing his outcomes to dice. The two ships carry the whole story between them: the Falcon rugged and built for nothing but speed, the Blackjack elegant and made to be watched. Japanese fans have a shorter name for what happened on that last flight — Icarus. She reached for the sky, flew too close, and fell.
You can hear Setzer name her ship long before the tomb. In the World of Balance, right after the Imperial banquet and before the party crosses to the southern continent, step back onto the Blackjack and you can catch Setzer telling Terra about the fastest ship ever built. Most players never trigger it, which is a shame — it is the only time the Falcon surfaces before Darill's Tomb.
Darill's Tomb and the Falcon — Grief You Can Walk Through
Setzer built Daryl a labyrinth. Darill's Tomb sits southwest of Kohlingen, and you can only reach it in the World of Ruin, the broken half of the game that opens after the world has already ended once. Calling it a tomb undersells the thing. It is a flooded underground labyrinth, with switches that raise and lower the water and tombstones that slide open to reveal new passages, and undead drifting its halls even though only one person was ever laid here. Setzer did not dig Daryl a grave. He built her an entire world and sealed her ship at the bottom of it.
Because the Falcon is down there too. He recovered the wreck, rebuilt it, and set it to rest in a dock beneath the tomb — not scrapped, not mounted like a trophy, but whole, with a working launch mechanism, a ship kept ready to fly by a man who could not yet say why he was keeping it ready.
The tomb plays like any other dungeon, which is its own quiet cruelty — you fight your way through it. A monster-in-a-box called the Angler Whelk waits near the save point, and the boss Dullahan stands guard over Daryl's casket. And then there is the tombstone puzzle: four scrambled fragments you arrange on a blank stone to spell out an answer. What you end up spelling depends on which version of the game you own.
Arrange the tombstone in the original Japanese and it reads "Rest in peace, my friend." You are carving Daryl's epitaph with your own hands. The English release swapped the line for an in-joke about the developer: the fragments spell "The World Is Square." The meaning was cut, and it was never restored — the modern Pixel Remaster that most people play today still spells out the joke. So the tomb gets finished, outside Japan, without once writing the line it was built to hold.
That tomb is where the game finally lets the grief off its leash. When the world tears apart, Setzer loses the Blackjack in the cataclysm — his wings, gone in a moment — and he simply stops living. You find him in Kohlingen, drinking, finished. Celes is the one who reaches him, and what she tells him is that a time like this, when everything is lost, is exactly when a person has to hold onto a dream. It lands. He says he knows where to find another wing, and he leads the way to the tomb. As his memories of Daryl play out around him, he walks down the long staircase — and the Falcon tears up out of the sea and takes the sky. For the rest of the game, Setzer flies Daryl's ship. Not his own. Hers.
The Gambler Who Lost the Only Bet That Mattered
Now the coin means something. Setzer lives by handing his outcomes to chance — dice, darts, slot reels, a coin turning in the air. Read it as a bit of flair and you miss the whole man. The one outcome he ever truly wanted was to beat Daryl, to be the fastest, and he never could; when she took that race for good by dying in it, he stopped trying to steer anything at all. A person who cedes every result has already lost the only result he cared about. The gambling is not recklessness. It is a man who refuses to bet on what he can control, because the last time control mattered, it was never his to have.
He handed his whole life over to dice the year he lost the one race he would have given anything to win. — Pierre
And now the coin toss reads differently too. The one professional gambler in the world gets recruited by a rigged bet — beaten not by luck but by a cheat, and he respects it enough to laugh and sign on. It is the same two-headed coin that once decided the Figaro throne, the trick Edgar used so his brother Sabin could walk away from the crown without guilt. A cheat used as a kindness, twice: once to free a man from a life he did not want, once to pull a grieving one back into the world. The coin that catches Setzer is a coin that has already saved someone.
The game even seeds the reveal early, though nothing flags it as worth remembering. That missable moment on the Blackjack, Setzer describing the fastest ship ever built, is the one time Daryl surfaces before the tomb. Catch it, and the reveal stops feeling like a bolt from nowhere; the story was pointing at her the entire time.
The airship ends up being grave and vehicle at once. Setzer buries Daryl inside the Falcon's tomb, then spends the whole back half of the game flying that exact ship — grief he does not visit but sits inside of, all the way to the final battle. And the game makes sure you cannot opt out of it. In the World of Ruin, every other lost ally is optional; you can storm the last dungeon with a skeleton crew. Setzer is the one exception. You cannot finish Final Fantasy VI without him, because you cannot finish it without the airship — which means you cannot finish it without Daryl's ship carrying you there.
Common Questions
Who is Daryl in Final Fantasy VI?
Daryl was Setzer's friend and rival, and the pilot of the airship Falcon, known as the fastest woman in the world. Setzer never beat her in a single race. She died before the game begins, on a record-breaking flight to reach the stars, and you only ever see her inside Setzer's memory. The game tells you very little about her directly, and that scarcity is the point: she is the absence the whole character is built around.
Is Setzer optional in the World of Ruin?
No. Setzer is the one ally you are required to recruit in the World of Ruin. Every other character is optional, and you can reach the final dungeon without them. Setzer is mandatory because getting to the end means flying there, and he is the one who raises the airship you need.
What does the Darill's Tomb tombstone puzzle say?
It depends on your version. In the original Japanese, arranging the fragments spells "Rest in peace, my friend" — Daryl's epitaph. The English localization replaced it with "The World Is Square," an in-joke about the developer. The modern Pixel Remaster kept the English joke, so most players outside Japan have never spelled the original line.
Why does Setzer gamble?
Because the one outcome he ever wanted, he could not win. Setzer spent his life racing Daryl and never beat her; when she died chasing the sky, he gave up trying to control anything and handed his life to chance instead. The dice and coins are not a hobby — they are what is left of a racer who stopped believing the result was ever his to decide.