Honestly, job level really doesn't mean a lot in FFIII (at least, this version). The game straight up has multiple classes that are just upgrades of previous ones (warrior -> knight, mages -> eventual obvious upgrades, etc.), and has several areas that expect you to swap your entire party to a specific class (like the sea shrine). It's also not something like FFV or FFT where job experience is important because it can carry over to other jobs.
God, though. FFII was going for an epic scope, but it had nothing on this. The sheer power of the first map being a decoy map and revealing an entire second map of nothing but water and three small landmarks and then returning the entire world from the apocalypse to reveal the true world map? Absolutely outstanding move.
Funny thing is, FFIII as a whole is yet another case like FFI of "let's just take what Dragon Quest did and do it bigger and better". DQI is the early console RPG where you run around with a single character doing 1v1 fights? Hell naw, our game has FOUR characters and MORE enemies per fight. DQIII has a class system where different characters can be created in different starting classes, and has a continent fakeout where your starting area is actually barely 10% of the entire world? Screw that, we have freeform class changing and a whole floating continent.
Though granted the "bigger world" bit was also done in some way in DQII, because partway through the game you can wander to a section of the world which is actually the entire continent from the original game. Can even hit up the big bad's now decreipt castle and talk to his descendant.
The flooded world looks very different in the 3d remake, with an intro that will set the hairs on the back of an XIV player's neck on end.
While the airship can still dip into it and navigate, the 'water' that covers the surface world looks distinctly different from the placid blue of the floating continent. It roils and churns constantly. This is no mere flood, even one of biblical proportions.
Meet the Flood of Darkness itself.
(You can watch it here. The into to the surface world is covered in the first few minutes of the video.)
The flooded world looks very different in the 3d remake, with an intro that will set the hairs on the back of an XIV player's neck on end.
While the airship can still dip into it and navigate, the 'water' that covers the surface world looks distinctly different from the placid blue of the floating continent. It roils and churns constantly. This is no mere flood, even one of biblical proportions.
Meet the Flood of Darkness itself.
(You can watch it here. The into to the surface world is covered in the first few minutes of the video.)
It also has that as having happened ten years ago, not a few days. The airship crash Cid and the four youths were in that orphaned them? Fleeing the flood.
Knights have a support skill, Cover. That skill makes it so, if any character's HP is in the red, whenever they face a physical attack, Mimi steps in and takes that attack instead of them - her sprite literally flashes in front of theirs. Because she's a heavily armored Knight with high defense stats, Mimi takes less damage than they would, too. This means that Mimi can help the group through a tough spot, with Tsugumi providing healing either to the injured character while Mimi weathers assaults, or to Mimi herself to keep her shielding everyone.
Or.
I can just equip Mimi with the Bloodsword.
And she heals more health per turn than she loses to enemy attacks, even though she is taking every attack by any enemy at all. At the point where I stop bothering to heal the rest of the party, Mimi is attacked three, four times a turn, heals it back on her next attack, and everyone else is just relentlessly offensive. Using this tactic, my group has essentially become invincible. Using these reckless tactics, we reach the end of the dungeon.
This means that Knight is the first time the Final Fantasy games have what we, today, would conceptualize as 'tanking.' FFI and FFII gave each character varying mixes of damage, survivability, and support efficiency - but survivability couldn't cover for anyone else. Your Knight being strong and tough meant they were better at surviving than the others and could clutch a victory after other characters had died, that's it. The ordering system did help this for some extent - you put your toughest guy up first because enemy preferentially target them. But FF3 and the Knight's Cover is the first time we see a tough character proactively take damage in place of other, more vulnerable characters. It's the shaky start of what would years later become the Trinity.
Then we trip over the invisible cutscene-triggering threshold.
yeah my consistent experience was that in ff1 White Wizards were your true tank class because, uh, they could heal and buff people and had the best overall defenses. A Knight was less frail than a Master, sure, but he didn't really do anything to keep your Black Wizard or Master or whatever alive.
You know, it's often been said that the FF3 protagonists are a step back in characterization from FFII, but I don't think they are. Now, they don't have individuality - they're effectively a blob, with dialogue most of the time being spoken by the front character but interchangeable with anyone - but weirdly, as a collective, they have more personality than any FFII character. They're oddly charming, really - they sincerely care about the people they encounter, they're easily spooked but overcome it with genuine courage anyway, but when it really comes together is in this line, right here: moments after waking up from a three-day coma during which the whole world turned upside down, their first act is to earnestly thank a literal child for her hospitality and watching over them while they were asleep.
The Warriors of Light have enough maturity to brave death and endure loss, but enough innocence to speak to a child on an equal footing and treat her with respect. This line, more than any other, endears me to them.
I do agree that they seem to have much stronger overall characterization. Firion was mostly a generic do-gooder, Maria barely had any character beyond 'worries about her brother', and Guy basically had 'talks to animals and has improper grammar' and not many defining moments otherwise.
There we have our true map of the world, with the Floating Continent hovering in the South-West, likely covering most of that stretch of ocean in truth.
A mountainous world, full of high, wide mountain ranges, creating what look like a bunch of tight, maze-like corridors through the land, with what living land remains almost entirely taken over by forests or the one desert - notably, no snow biome like in FFII. I wonder how heavily settled this world is. I wonder about a lot of things, tbh.
God, though. FFII was going for an epic scope, but it had nothing on this. The sheer power of the first map being a decoy map and revealing an entire second map of nothing but water and three small landmarks and then returning the entire world from the apocalypse to reveal the true world map? Absolutely outstanding move.
Evoker: Now we're talking. Another FF first, and this time a huge, mechanics-defining one: summons. The ability, either for specific characters/jobs or for everyone, to summon powerful spirits with devastating effects, is iconic of the Final Fantasy franchise. Evoker looks to be Babby's First Summoner even in the context of its game, with a weird coin toss mechanic, later upgrading into a stronger version of itself? Unfortunately, summons are something you actually have to find and learn, and at this time Evoker is useless.
Specifically classes in ff3 that can cast summon spells either do the coin flip thing (and aren't very good in my opinion, partly for the unreliability but also cause they're kinda weak?) or always get the High or whatever it was called result. Bit of an interface spoiler on the spells but eh.
On a different topic, it's arguably optimal to level as much as possible with everyone Vikings, though hardly needed; as came up with the scholar, HP growth is permanent, and the Viking has considerably better than any other class you have access to. I forgot if it's just plain the best or if any late game class edges it out.
Maybe, but some of the jobs seem to be straight upgrades over previous ones even accounting for the 'lost' job levels, and others at worst side-grades even with that loss. Knight seems like a flat improvement over Warrior in every way, even 'losing' 25 job levels in the transition, and going Scholar for one boss fights costs you nothing. Rushanaq had over 30 levels of Black Mage and that's great, but she was still 'only' wielding spells of the 3rd level at time of job switch, and I have to switch if I want to use the summoning system at all - and, in turn, I am pretty sure Summoner is a flat upgrade over Evoker once you unlock it.
Beyond that, while Knight is probably equivalent to Dragoon if doing different things, or maybe stronger (Cover is really insane), I'm only 'losing' 9 levels in the switch, which frankly isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. I think it's fine - a bit of a pain in the ass, but mostly fine.
The one I'm most curious with is Tsugumi, who is still a White Mage after this whole time and getting on her 40s (in job levels. I mean job levels.) I wonder if she's going to turn out to be my first case of "character's job level is so high transitioning to a 'better' class is temporarily a downgrade."
Pixel Remaster's total lack of a job-switch penalty does make it much easier to adapt your whole party to a given encounter, though. I really don't think any switch penalty is needed - the job level disparity is its own drawback to a flexible party composition while still leaving it a strong option.
Frankly you can basically divide FF3's classes into primary, non gimmick classes, like the White Mage, Black Mage, and Fighter, and secondary gimmick classes. The latter tend to be good for one or two places tops, the former tend to have 2-3 clear flat upgrades (especially outside the DS version).
And yeah, there's a bunch of dungeon stuff like the mini dungeons that strongly desires you actually change classes. The existence of actual penalties basically incentivizes a little more grinding, rather than causing you to want to not do class changing.
I'll talk about the clear upgrades when you're closer to the end of the game in more detail, for now laying it out feels like spoilers so I'd rather wait to see you experience it more naturalistically.
I genuinely adore the reveal of the flooded world, especially having played the previous two games. You fly off the edge of the Floating Continent maybe expecting just to loop back around like every other world map... and you're met with this intense atmosphere of loneliness and melancholy courtesy of the completely barren ocean map and the stellar Boundless Ocean track. It was so good I was determined not to spoil it for Omi in my Discord reactions, and probably the point where I decided that FF3 is Based, Actually.
Anyway, about job level - switching matters a little bit, but not as much as you think. What all actually scales with job level tends to vary a lot but it's usually more of a ribbon than a core functionality thing. Your accuracy goes up with job level, so a new martial class will do less multihits, but the Knight's still gonna block attacks and the Dragoon's still gonna whip ass with their Jump and the Archer can still Barrage the enemy team and the Geomancer can still repeatedly spam Terrain for free spell-likes that do respectable damage. For the most part the game is trying to drill into you that party composition and your tactics matter more than raw stats and job level, and even if it does that in a rather brute-force way it still leads to far more engaging fights than either of its predecessors.
EDIT: Oh right this is what I was forgetting - the major exceptions are Viking, because the success rate of their taunt is based on job level and the taunt also seems to lower defence so it's a fucking godsend for some fights, and Bard, which needs to hit level 30 or so to have all four songs available. Job levels on casters seem to give bonus spell slots but primarily for the lower levels, so when one of my guys hit job level 99 on White Mage he had over forty fucking slots for 1st-level spells and like 17 for 2nd-level, but his character level was low enough he couldn't even cast some of the higher tiers.
The village of Gysahl is a cozy little place that serves two main gameplay purposes: it's where you find a locksmith who sells Magic Keys that can open certain doors found across the game world, and where you can buy the Gysahl Greens that cause the Fat Chocobo to appear.
I'm more interested in it, though, for the flavor it has. If you'll forgive an ancient classic or nerdery, it's a bit of What Do They Eat? There's been a huge evolution in the depiction of Final Fantasy townships. FF1 didn't really have any space or resources to dedicated to anything plot- or gameplay critical, so you had the minimum number of ambient NPC needed to convey information for one town, and every building was either a shop, a shrine, or plot-critical. FF2 expanded on this a little by having more ambient NPCs, a couple of inns with free dialogue, and a handful of houses for important purposes like Paul's home or the Mysidian Library.
FF3, by contrast, has inns and town halls and independent houses galore, full of NPCs who don't just exist, but are lying in bed, dancing to a piano tune , hanging around having a drink, tending to chocobo stables… The difference in making the world lived-in is massive, and it's compounded by a town like Gysahl, which has: 1) flocks of sheep, 2) chocobo stables, and 3) a vegetable farm. It's a place that very clearly produces staple resources, not just for itself, but presumably for the world that surrounds it. What do they eat? Well, this guy has a farm, and these look like turnips. What do they wear? Well, this girl's raising sheep they talk about half a continent over. How do they go places? Well, this guy raises and presumably sells chocobos.
None of these questions need answering, especially in a game with such condensed aesthetics. But it's nice that we're given visual evidence of how people's lives work. It makes the Floating Continent feel more alive.
I know this is a Final Fantasy thread, but I've seen that Shandification video before, in the context of the Legend of Heroes series. I've played the three games of the Trails in the Sky trilogy, and if you're into worlds that really feel like they're alive, it's worth a look. I could probably have shaved a dozen hours off my playthrough if I didn't insist on talking to everyone, because almost every NPC has unique dialogue, and that dialogue updates for almost all of them each time you move the plot along. It's a ridiculous amount of text.
I genuinely adore the reveal of the flooded world, especially having played the previous two games. You fly off the edge of the Floating Continent maybe expecting just to loop back around like every other world map... and you're met with this intense atmosphere of loneliness and melancholy courtesy of the completely barren ocean map and the stellar Boundless Ocean track. It was so good I was determined not to spoil it for Omi in my Discord reactions, and probably the point where I decided that FF3 is Based, Actually.
Anyway, about job level - switching matters a little bit, but not as much as you think. What all actually scales with job level tends to vary a lot but it's usually more of a ribbon than a core functionality thing. Your accuracy goes up with job level, so a new martial class will do less multihits, but the Knight's still gonna block attacks and the Dragoon's still gonna whip ass with their Jump and the Archer can still Barrage the enemy team and the Geomancer can still repeatedly spam Terrain for free spell-likes that do respectable damage. For the most part the game is trying to drill into you that party composition and your tactics matter more than raw stats and job level, and even if it does that in a rather brute-force way it still leads to far more engaging fights than either of its predecessors.
EDIT: Oh right this is what I was forgetting - the major exceptions are Viking, because the success rate of their taunt is based on job level and the taunt also seems to lower defence so it's a fucking godsend for some fights, and Bard, which needs to hit level 30 or so to have all four songs available. Job levels on casters seem to give bonus spell slots but primarily for the lower levels, so when one of my guys hit job level 99 on White Mage he had over forty fucking slots for 1st-level spells and like 17 for 2nd-level, but his character level was low enough he couldn't even cast some of the higher tiers.
A lot of the damage commands like the Ranger's, Dragoon's, Dark Knight's, maybe the new Black Belt's scaled strongly with job level. Or did with the 3D remake, meaning it took a few levels(like Ranger to 70 to max out Barrage) to really let them pump damage vs just sticking with Black Mage forever.
I'm fascinated by how Cid not only instantly recognizes the Ancient Perpetual Motion Artifact by name, he also immediately knows he can use it to make a new airship.
I have the strong suspicion Cid already knew about the Wheel Of Time (the artifact, not the Robert Jordan series of fantasy books), and was fantasizing about using it to make an airship one day, but since it was owned by Argus, Cid could only make speculative blueprints. And then the Warriors of Light turn up with it, and Cid goes "I've been waiting for this all my life" and turns his dream into reality.
So we're talking 'Biblical Flood' proportions here. There was a world, mere days or weeks ago, but then an earthquake somehow caused it to be engulfed in the water - perhaps long buried water surging through the cracks, 2012-style. Which means everybody is dead. The Floating Continent's population, without even knowing it, are the last people alive. Protected by their position in the sky, they might even go on living, oblivious to the world that died below.
It's kind of weird that apparently nobody mentioned that the world below the Floating Continent appeared to have been consumed by a flood, instead of the landmasses they could presumably have seen if they peeked over the edge. Especially since, as established, airships are a known technology (if rare), so it's not like there's an impenetrable barrier around the Floating Continent preventing people from exploring further.
Conversely, I also wonder what the people on the ground thought about the Floating Continent. Like, there's this big landmass floating in the skies. Is it just a fact of life? For example, in FFXIV, there are lots of landmasses just floating in the skies due to natural wind magic, so people are used to the idea of floating landmasses, even if they might be surprised by specific floating landmasses being important in ways they didn't know before.
It's kind of weird that apparently nobody mentioned that the world below the Floating Continent appeared to have been consumed by a flood, instead of the landmasses they could presumably have seen if they peeked over the edge. Especially since, as established, airships are a known technology (if rare), so it's not like there's an impenetrable barrier around the Floating Continent preventing people from exploring further.
This assumes they could see past the cloud layer to below, which is not actually a safe assumption.
This also assumes anyone particularly lived at the edges, when most of the towns are far from the edges and there's no sign most people even know the 'world' has edges.
Like you're expecting a bunch of dudes who are busy with their own problems to look over the edge of the world, a dangerous sounding prospect and something even the likes of Cid don't seem to habitually go near. That's just silly.
If there was watch towers or something maybe, or towns dangerously on the edge, but it's wholly irrelevant to most of these people who are living their lives in positions that make it difficult to impossible to check. That's part of how the floating continent reveal is kept from the player; you initially flat out do not have access to the edge of the world.
Yeah, there's a good reason that Final Fantasy 3 is considered one of the best in the series, and a criminal shame that it took forever to come over the pond.
Okay, how about this: Dragoon is one of my two favorite jobs in the series (the other is Dark Knight, which is currently unavailable), and Mimi spent Final Fantasy XIV's base game and the Heavensward expansion as a Dragoon, so she gets DRG.
Ah, my Athyros (my FFXIV character) was also a DRG until HW, and from SB onwards switching between DRG and RDM (and if I ever get back to tanking, DRK is the one I'll continue leveling)
Look he's a max-height Au Ra, the edge is mandatory, especially when Little Sun is giving us a bad name
Ah, Dragoon. The class with just, so so much style, and some of the best characters across FF games are Dragoons, even if they tend to be just kind of...fine mechanically. It's always so disappointing.
The flooded world looks very different in the 3d remake, with an intro that will set the hairs on the back of an XIV player's neck on end.
While the airship can still dip into it and navigate, the 'water' that covers the surface world looks distinctly different from the placid blue of the floating continent. It roils and churns constantly. This is no mere flood, even one of biblical proportions.
Meet the Flood of Darkness itself.
(You can watch it here. The into to the surface world is covered in the first few minutes of the video.)
That's very interesting. There's a very real difference in aesthetic and presentation - this is much more otherworldly, unreal. A world that's clearly been taken over by a terrible supernatural presence. And it makes a lot more of immediate sense - the crystals failed, the darkness was unleashed, and it's flooding everything. It's a much clearer causality than the weirdness of the Earth/Water Crystal relationship causing an earthquake that causes a flood of literal water to emerge from the earth while also everyone is turned to stone, which is weird.
But I... think I prefer the Pixel Remaster presentation, honestly?
I don't know, I just like the mythological simplicity of a world drowned in a flood with only its highest peaks reaching above the water. Especially in a game that starts in a town called 'Ur,' lmao. There's a kind of... ominous mystery to an endless sea - not even necessarily wracked by storms, just lying flat and endless - and nothing else, that isn't quite what you get from emerging in a roiling tide of chaos.
I'm fascinated by how Cid not only instantly recognizes the Ancient Perpetual Motion Artifact by name, he also immediately knows he can use it to make a new airship.
I have the strong suspicion Cid already knew about the Wheel Of Time (the artifact, not the Robert Jordan series of fantasy books), and was fantasizing about using it to make an airship one day, but since it was owned by Argus, Cid could only make speculative blueprints. And then the Warriors of Light turn up with it, and Cid goes "I've been waiting for this all my life" and turns his dream into reality.
This is the first line with which Cid greets you when you talk to him after acquiring the Wheel of Time, immediately before "omg is that the wheel." Now, I've attempted to reload prior saves to see if any unique dialogue triggers in which he muses about what the Wheel of Time is prior to you having it, but if that window exists, I didn't find it. But clearly, Cid knows about the Wheel of Time - even if he never explains to you any context for it, its origin, or his knowledge of it. Fitting of a scatter-brained mind like Cid's.
It's kind of weird that apparently nobody mentioned that the world below the Floating Continent appeared to have been consumed by a flood, instead of the landmasses they could presumably have seen if they peeked over the edge. Especially since, as established, airships are a known technology (if rare), so it's not like there's an impenetrable barrier around the Floating Continent preventing people from exploring further.
I've remarked before that the inhabitants of the Village of the Ancients talk about the Floating Continent being, well, floating, as if it were hidden knowledge, and that there are no settlements on the rim. This isn't quite correct - Gysahl is located on the rim, but it is blocked off from actually reaching the edge by a huge mountain range. Civilization on the continent is clustered around the inner sea, with a few outliers like the dwarven islands, whose inhabitants seem to have little interest in exploration. Notably, the Vikings appear to be inner sea raiders, not outer sea explorer. The actual edge of the world is uninhabited despite containing fertile land.
Without a doubt over a long enough length of time someone would reach the edge of the continent and report, but as far as I can tell, this hasn't happened yet. People aren't aware of the boundaries of their world, or if they are, it's in the old mythological way in which it's told the world is flat and ends in a sea of clouds past a certain distance, without any question of there being a 'world below.'
This doesn't quite jibe with the existence of airships, that's for sure. But keep in mind airships in this game are more limited in function - Cid's ships cannot raise above mountain height, and so must actually navigate landmass as they travel, and the need for the Wheel of Time to power our own airship suggests maybe 'normal' airship don't have the fuel capacity to range far enough from the rim to actually explore the cloud sea and study the world below.
In my next essay, I will elaborate on how the cosmology of the inner sea sedentary peoples is a mythologized distortion of the geographical information relayed to them by the rim-nomad peoples who have seen across the edge but lack the historical context to understand what it is they saw-
Honestly, I think the DS redesign lost a lot of the focus on exploration that FFIII has, and this is just another example - finding yourself in a flooded world makes you go "What happened here?" and inspires you to investigate, whereas the more spooky presentation in the DS makes it clearer that this is something unnatural that you have to fix, which makes the following events less about "let's explore the waterworld" and more about "let's solve the new problem the plot dropped on us", in my opinion. Same with the dungeon designs, which I feel don't have the same appeal and don't transmit the same sense of "something could be hiding anywhere" that most of FFIII dungeons do.
I did say that FFIII is where the series found its identity, and a big part of that is how it's the first Final Fantasy that's really about exploration, which makes the world really feel like a large, expansive place full of hidden things for the player to look for and discover. Although that's just my take on it.
That's very interesting. There's a very real difference in aesthetic and presentation - this is much more otherworldly, unreal. A world that's clearly been taken over by a terrible supernatural presence. And it makes a lot more of immediate sense - the crystals failed, the darkness was unleashed, and it's flooding everything. It's a much clearer causality than the weirdness of the Earth/Water Crystal relationship causing an earthquake that causes a flood of literal water to emerge from the earth while also everyone is turned to stone, which is weird.
But I... think I prefer the Pixel Remaster presentation, honestly?
I don't know, I just like the mythological simplicity of a world drowned in a flood with only its highest peaks reaching above the water. Especially in a game that starts in a town called 'Ur,' lmao. There's a kind of... ominous mystery to an endless sea - not even necessarily wracked by storms, just lying flat and endless - and nothing else, that isn't quite what you get from emerging in a roiling tide of chaos.
A subjective judgement, I'll freely admit.
You are in fact correct!
This is the first line with which Cid greets you when you talk to him after acquiring the Wheel of Time, immediately before "omg is that the wheel." Now, I've attempted to reload prior saves to see if any unique dialogue triggers in which he muses about what the Wheel of Time is prior to you having it, but if that window exists, I didn't find it. But clearly, Cid knows about the Wheel of Time - even if he never explains to you any context for it, its origin, or his knowledge of it. Fitting of a scatter-brained mind like Cid's.
I've remarked before that the inhabitants of the Village of the Ancients talk about the Floating Continent being, well, floating, as if it were hidden knowledge, and that there are no settlements on the rim. This isn't quite correct - Gysahl is located on the rim, but it is blocked off from actually reaching the edge by a huge mountain range. Civilization on the continent is clustered around the inner sea, with a few outliers like the dwarven islands, whose inhabitants seem to have little interest in exploration. Notably, the Vikings appear to be inner sea raiders, not outer sea explorer. The actual edge of the world is uninhabited despite containing fertile land.
Without a doubt over a long enough length of time someone would reach the edge of the continent and report, but as far as I can tell, this hasn't happened yet. People aren't aware of the boundaries of their world, or if they are, it's in the old mythological way in which it's told the world is flat and ends in a sea of clouds past a certain distance, without any question of there being a 'world below.'
This doesn't quite jibe with the existence of airships, that's for sure. But keep in mind airships in this game are more limited in function - Cid's ships cannot raise above mountain height, and so must actually navigate landmass as they travel, and the need for the Wheel of Time to power our own airship suggests maybe 'normal' airship don't have the fuel capacity to range far enough from the rim to actually explore the cloud sea and study the world below.
In my next essay, I will elaborate on how the cosmology of the inner sea sedentary peoples is a mythologized distortion of the geographical information relayed to them by the rim-nomad peoples who have seen across the edge but lack the historical context to understand what it is they saw-
Hmm, perhaps the thinner air up on the floating continent makes airship travel harder than it would be closer to the ground? So you need a legendary magical artifact to do something that would work fine where your baseline is sea level and not "halfway to fucking orbit"?
This also brings up the idea that floating continent dwellers are adapted to the thinner atmosphere....
I have mixed feelings about Minwu, because on the one hand the set-up makes some level of sense (he's not sure he can survive breaking the door so he needs the heroes to be there), but also dude literally dies to a door, which, like... C'mon.
It's been a long, long time since I played FF3, and I believe it was the DS version, so I may be mistaken about this.
However, I remember there being a lot of reasons necessary to switch between jobs in FFIII, and in such a way that combines for my least favorite part of the game. Basically, a lot of bosses have jobs that seem designed to beat them...and then combined with the horrendous penalty for switching jobs, that leads to...problems later in the game.
It's been a long, long time since I played FF3, and I believe it was the DS version, so I may be mistaken about this.
However, I remember there being a lot of reasons necessary to switch between jobs in FFIII, and in such a way that combines for my least favorite part of the game. Basically, a lot of bosses have jobs that seem designed to beat them...and then combined with the horrendous penalty for switching jobs, that leads to...problems later in the game.
Most of the "forced" switching is front loaded in the PR versions with the mini/toad sections. Overall the bosses that are easier with certain jobs aren't as hard in PR. They also got rid of the switching penalty, so it really is the best version to just play.
Most of the "forced" switching is front loaded in the PR versions with the mini/toad sections. Overall the bosses that are easier with certain jobs aren't as hard in PR. They also got rid of the switching penalty, so it really is the best version to just play.
It also added healing points to the final dungeon and has a quicksave feature, so you no longer need to run The Gauntlet that even the developers are on the record as thinking sucked to play*. That alone would be enough to justify calling III PR the best version by a country mile.
*No, really, in an interview, Sakaguchi described the final dungeon in the original version without healing or saving as "horrible".
As fate would have it, this uptick in activity thanks to the Pick of the Month (thank you, truly, I am honoured) happens just as I have just now completed my Escape From Warsaw, having fought my way through the Royal Palace of Stanislaus Augustus and the National Museum with nothing but my wits, a mullet, an eyepatch and the guidance of my trusted if hapless sidekick @Gargulec. I expect The Work to resume tomorrow.
Most of the "forced" switching is front loaded in the PR versions with the mini/toad sections. Overall the bosses that are easier with certain jobs aren't as hard in PR. They also got rid of the switching penalty, so it really is the best version to just play.
Having just played through FF3 thanks to this series, there isn't that much mandatory switches. Sure, the mandatory toad/mini sections, 2 bosses(one of which is optional), and then 2 dungeons. And technically you don't even have to switch in those depending on your party compositions. There is a class that's good for it, but in some ways they're more similar to the mini sections.
Viking: Its special command is Draw Attacks, which appears to be a variant on the Knight's Protect - it's not passive, it's the Viking actively making itself the target of all physical attacks.
Also appears later in Octopath Traveler: the Warrior job's Incite skill. Rather niche, considering most bosses have access to at least one elemental attack, although it's very, VERY strong against one boss in particular (if you know, you know).
The Dark Knight has the 'Bladeblitz' ability, which appears to be a move that hits every enemy on the battlefield - I'm not clear if there's reduced damage and how much, but it kinda seems like a melee version of the Ranger?
Once again, reappears as the Warrior's Thousand Spears skill.
All this talk about the Gauntlet at the end of the game also reminds me of Octopath's similar slog right at the end, where you have to
rematch 8 bosses in a row with no healing or restoration besides what you came in with. At least you can heal up between fights… and then after all that you have to fight two forms of the final boss! And if you die during any of that, you have to go all the way back to the rematches!
At least you can't trap yourself inside Octopath's final dungeon like you can with Pandemonium.
Also appears later in Octopath Traveler: the Warrior job's Incite skill. Rather niche, considering most bosses have access to at least one elemental attack, although it's very, VERY strong against one boss in particular (if you know, you know).
Once again, reappears as the Warrior's Thousand Spears skill.
All this talk about the Gauntlet at the end of the game also reminds me of Octopath's similar slog right at the end, where you have to
rematch 8 bosses in a row with no healing or restoration besides what you came in with. At least you can heal up between fights… and then after all that you have to fight two forms of the final boss! And if you die during any of that, you have to go all the way back to the rematches!
At least you can't trap yourself inside Octopath's final dungeon like you can with Pandemonium.
Oh, I wonder why I didn't see this thread sooner, I had just given the Dawn of Souls pack a whirl for remembrance sake during a break from Ff14 (I could have played the original NES ones for Ultimate Rule & Bug Mess Fidelity Hardcorism but fuck that, I already did it in my teens so I already got those pitiful bragging rights and ain't nobody got time to go with the interface screw inconveniences anymore) and this comes quite on point.
Respectable. I just went with a standard Fighter/Thief/White/Mage, thinking that, hey, people said Thief doesn't suck anymore!
Well, yes, but also no. The ninja promotion can be as strong as a fighter in different ways. But before that any other class have more (not necessarily better!) use, and as a ninja he's just a weeb flavored knight and a mana saver for the black mage when using multitarget spells on thrash. Unless you decide to use him your main fighter's dedicated attack buffer, and your black mage can do that himself because magic attacks lag behind a buffed melee attack anyway. I don't want to say he's a waste of a party slot, ninjas are strong, but I'd pick him only for flavor.
It's actually funny seeing the very first implementation of concepts that will be re-utilized much later; the Matoya I'm familiar with is from FF14, where she is also a cranky old witch living alone in a cave with her singing brooms, although she is a much more significant character with ties to the main plot of the game as well as a desperate attempt to give Y'shtola depth.
Using a spell is also a fraught proposal. FF1 calls its magic points 'MP', but they actually work like D&D spell slots: you have a number of slots for each level of spells you know, and they don't cross over. This means that even after burning through all your high level spells, you can still cast low-level spells; it also means these spells become increasingly weak as time goes on, and you can't upcast. If your White Mage has run out of lv 1 and lv 3 slots, which contain Cure and Cura, the healing spells, no amount of lv 2 slots will allow them to heal, because there are no healing spells at lv 2 - only buffs and debuffs. It can get annoying to deal with.
Yup, this is where Sakaguchi having an intern pull out the D&D rule book rears its ugly head. The slot system works so-so in this context where random battles pop up all the heckin' time. But at least has you try to be tactical about it. There's also the matter that a lot of spells in the original NES release straight up didn't work or worked wonky. And they didn't use the characters' spell stats.
And yet, the game still miraculously worked. Funny thing is, when they tried to fix it for DoS, well, things would have been good enough balance wise like that. But they also changed the slot system for the MP we do know. Sure, this allowed you a much more flexible spell selection and use, nobody likes having their mages being limited to shanking and bonking dragons with their sticks because a boss MIGHT BE behind that door. But the threat of running out of magic if you misused it was gone, and after the class change, the MP growth turns it into a non issue. Buffing your main meleer's attack during 10 turns so that a single hit can send a boss to Saturn and then start raining Flares that actually did damage? Sure. Spam Curagas and Healagas for an entire boss? And still have enough fuel to last you a couple of dungeons more? Whatever you want, my dude.
I don't know how it feels in the Pixel Remasters, but hopefully it's a decent middle ground.
A little more exploring leads me to what I initially assume is a dungeon, but is actually the ruined castle of another king cursed by Astos, who laments that if he had his crown, he could end his curse, and tells me it is in the Marsh Caves.
This is a Heckin' Huge Red Flag. A ruined castle? Ok. Lotta cutie bats doing their thing? Ambience! No monsters? Even the Chaos Shrine had some mofos around. So, why exactly is this "king" sitting in the middle and only asking for his crown as if nothing else around mattered a bit?
Even worse. Those encounters were tied to the floor tiles, like many others guarding chests. Screw your movement, and you're going to repeat that fight. If you're lucky, you'll only have to kill a couple. If the gods laugh at you, you'll get SIX. I had a conniption when I saw the mind flayer boss in FF14, fearing that he'd destroying my ass only because of my experience with these jerks.
One of the best design decisions that the Pixel Remaster did was sticking with the 'easy mode'. The increased speed of levelling and getting gold is definitely for the better; the game's combat system isn't quite interesting enough to make grinding a potentially fun experience in and of itself, so making the grinding process progress quickly and letting you push forwards to something new every fifteen minutes or so is definitely a point in its favour.
Shhh. The easy mode changes was a welcome thing given the scarce deep of the game, but don't let the hardcorists hear you. There are some who really hate with a passion that attacks switch to a different target if the first one dies. :_D
It gets specially funny in a lv11 run. You see, in a lv11 you explicitly avoid all combat as possible, except for absolutely unavoidable fights like Garland, with the goal of getting your class change as soon as possible, so, that the improved stat growth turns your characters into engines of mass destruction.
Of course, that means that your income is severely limited. Obviously most of it will go to pay for gear upgrades so that you have a chance against bosses. But depending on your character selection you might choose to pass on Poisona, and depending on your luck getting poisoned in the cave, you might not be able to buy enough antidotes before you're forced to run back to town. And the monsters have no problem hitting you while you're trying to flee...
What happened was, Yda first hit him in the face to the tune of 150 damage, then Alisaie and Papalymo cast Haste (double attack rates) and Temper (increased damage), and shit hit Astos for 350+ damage, killing him on Turn 2.
This is pretty much the optimal boss strategy for FF1 and why black mages were great to have even when the int stat was broken. Hastebotting a warrior/blackbelt or two in conjunction with the steel spell ends most fights pretty quickly. Good thing in this case too, as one of the Astos mechanics you didn't get to see is a Death spell that usually goes after your front-line fighter. (It's got a cute little animation of a grim reaper that whacks your party member with a scythe.)
Oh boye, wait until he learns that Temper can stack!
At least it did in the older versions. Dunno about the PR. But in DoS seeing a knight hit 25-30 times in a turn for about thousands of damage is HMMMMM. Tasty boss gibblets.
I keep going through whole stretches of map bumping into groups of goblins worth 4xp total that still require actually killing or fleeing from, which is literally just a waste of time. There is no mechanical challenge and no meaningful reward, it's just busywork.
My first time decades ago had me find the hard way about the worst parts of this place. The giant corridor, for one: a path that starts from the entrance and circles west-south-east-north back to the entrance, and where each tile of the floor starts a fight with at least one giant. Sure, you might kill them, and it's a great money maker... but what do you do if during your exploring endeavors you're halfway the corridor and notice that your hp, mp and resources are starting to get worryingly low? I pushed forwards, and I was destroyed when I found out it just led me back to the entrance.
"Bobby, do you think that maybe we only ganked a dude who was just vibing in that cave, instead of solving anything?"
"I mean, perhaps."
"And do you think that maybe, just maybe, we only explored half the place and the real monster capo is a mofo ten times harder than this chump?"
"... stop thinking please."
He reveals the vampire was but a decoy, and in order to find the true enemy, I must go past the stone seal. He hands me a "nature rod" with the power to do so.
In a lv11 run, Lich is the big test. The point where a run is made or broken. When you defeat him, you can go straight to get the boat, the Levinstone, the airship, the rat tail, and to Bahamut to get the class changes. And both the trash that you have to flee and the bosses you can't flee are surprisingly quite manageable compared to what cam previously. But of course, there's a trick. For an easy win, what people do is to start the 15 puzzle; when you're on the ship and do a Konami code depending on the version of the game, you start it and you win prizes when you do it quick. One of those items is the Red Fang, a Fire in a bottle. Get a bunch, go to Lich, get him a date with FIRE FIRE IN EVERYTHING OF ME and the rest is smooth sailing.
Or you could be like me, decide that wasting hours on that puzzle is stupid, and just try to kill him with a lv9 or so party. This requires the starts to line up, global peace to be achieved, and a soul made of steel. I get the feel the PR changed him a bit, but in older versions most of his attack are manageable. You just need to focus your white mage on healing even when there's nothing to heal, and keep the others buffing your main hitter so that he can burn down those 1200~ hp asap.
Because Lich likes using his Blizzara randomly. Rock falls, everyone dies.
One thing I find interesting about this is that it answers a question I had in the back of my mind since the start. In the intro, it is said "The world lies shrouded in darkness. The winds die. The seas rage. The earth decays." No mention is made of fire, and I was wondering if we were only going with three elements, or what was up with that. The answer is that there is actually no fire-related disaster yet - the Fiend of Fire has only just now awakened and started feeding on the Fire Crystal, and I have the opportunity to stop them before things escalate to more natural disasters, which would likely involve wildfires.
You see, at this stage of the game, you have enough HP that 1 damage a step isn't that debilitating if you packed potions. And while you're walking on the lava, there are no random encounters. This means that, at times, walking on the lava might actually be preferable to fighting enemies, because the enemies hit harder and take more time to defeat.
"Billy, those motherfuckers. See them crossing the lava? We're made of fire and we don't do that. They do that. We're outta here, let Tom die for Marilith if he likes her so much."
Funnily, that's quite the hair to mommy ratio in that sprite, even if it's the same pose as in the original from NES. In the other versions there was a lot more mommy than hair tho.
... And considering how horny FF14 can be, I'm now dreadfully curious about how they'd represent her.
Okay I have to go into the desert south of Crescent Lake. I did find it odd that there was this patch of desert fully sealed in a circle of mountains with one entrance, but I went to explore it earlier and it was just normal desert; I would have no reason to go back there. Is it possible I missed an environmental hint or an NPC talking about some ancient legend related to that desert? Can't think of any. Maybe I was supposed to just wander around the map until I accidentally stumbled onto it, as some of the busywork stuff games like this ask you to do sometimes.
I think someone mentions the airship, some dialogue in later versions even mention Cid as the creator. But IIRC finding it was a matter of finding information about the desert and the levistone as well, and then you had to put the pieces together.
But this means we can now access the norther hemisphere - those two continents up north don't have any docks, which means our ship couldn't get us there before. Kind of a lame ship if you ask me.
That's the kicker. If you think about what the many NPCs tell you, the northern countries have been ravaged continuously by the Fiends for centuries. The Lufenians got kicked out of their space crib by Tiamat, and Onrac has Kraken chilling below them and probably has turned any old ports nearby into an Innsmouth styled horror. Lich had only started in his area relatively recently, and you only find a half dead village. Crescent Lake is just above Marilith's napping hole, and that leaves Cornelia and Elfheim (which doesn't exactly look too shabby lately. The world has been going to crap in a hand basket and nobody has been able to stop it. No wonder the pirate crew gifted you their ship, they had nowhere safe to land!
In older versions there was no figure, it was yet another tile encounter that could be started again and again. It was yet another excellent grinding spot, I guess the figure banishes forever because they wanted it to stop that for some reason?
Also, it's interesting to me that - when so many other franchise-defining aspects have yet to show up - Bahamut is already there, in the first game, but… isn't a boss (or a summon, as those don't exist yet). In fact, he's an ally providing you with the biggest boon you can receive in the game. So he's still a huge deal! I find that interesting.
You know, shameless ripping from D&D aside, it makes me wonder if this was in part where YoshiP's team got the idea for the nation of dragon and men living together before Ishgard, and Bahamut being an actual authority figure.
I know there's plenty of people who think of JRPG overworlds as some sort of obsolete nonsense to be eliminated, but I gotta say there's not a whole lot that's as satisfying as getting your airship and suddenly being able to go anywhere. That's something you just can't replicate with the modern "just make it a menu" style.
At least for DoS, absolutely. As I said, I recently did a run to change classes asap and the stat growth went out of hand fast. The killing power I gained was leagues above what I got in more conventional runs.
Until, that is, I realize the place obeys non-Euclidian geometry. You see that little straight corridor at the top corner of the image? There is another similar corridor at the top left, on the other side of the room… And going through one causes you to arrive through the other, without screen transition, as if the entire room was spherical and I'd just done the Risk play of crossing from Alaska into Kamchatka.
They're just not useful. Ultimately I concluded that Black Wizards are basically worthless because Red Wizards do the random encounter cleaning essentially as well and can stab harder, and the few spells exclusive to the Black Wizard are just. bad?
It's a freakin' space station with lazers! Which is why you find robots around, and why in Stranger of Paradise you visit a freakin' space station, where robocs have lazers! In their heads!
This change in the remakes was a tragedy, I tell you. A bit of a spoiler, but it also makes the lufenians in SoP to come very out of left field for someone who played only the remakes.
I was today years old when I learned they changed this guy's name back to Warmech. In the GBA version it's "Death Machine" which certainly works but doesn't quite have the same charm to it.
Huh. I coulda sworn from Dawn of Souls that the Four Fiends gave gloating speeches about what trivial gnats you were and how mighty their lord Chaos was, but it's been ages and I might be misremembering, or of course this might be a case of Dawn of Souls being different.
Funnily, that's quite the hair to mommy ratio in that sprite, even if it's the same pose as in the original from NES. In the other versions there was a lot more mommy than hair tho.
... And considering how horny FF14 can be, I'm now dreadfully curious about how they'd represent her.
(and if I ever get back to tanking, DRK is the one I'll continue leveling)
