FF1 gives you the choice of a party of four characters picked from six classes: Warrior, Thief, Monk, Red Mage, White Mage, and Black Mage. The 'standard' party is Warrior, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage, and that works perfectly well, but you can use any combination up to and including "all White Mages" if you want. In this case, Red Mage (a hybrid mage that can wield both black and white magic) is the only one of these classes that I've actually played in FF14, so it has to go in, but I also loathe the idea of not getting access to the highest spells in the game, so the other two Mages have to go in, redundancy be damned. The last slot would likely be better filled by a Warrior, capable of both physical offense and significant defense, but with RDM/WHM doubling down on the healing, I've decided to go with the pure offense power of the Monk, the only class to never get any magic, trading it in for more punches.
I have no clue how well this applies across versions, but I played the shit out of the Dawn of Souls version and in that, I ultimately concluded there was an objective perfect party; Thief/Monk/Red Mage/White Mage.
On the second try, because on the first try he killed one of my PCs, and I realized that when a character dies, they don't get XP from the fight. Now that doesn't really matter because it balances out over enough battles, probably? I will never know. The very idea bothered me so much I decided this would be a no death run and I have been reloading every time one of my PCs died, like a psychopath.
As a Red Mage, Alisaie has both a broader and narrower selection of spells available. She can, and does, learn Haste and Blizarra, and as for white magic she learns Cura, an upgraded healing spell - but she can't learn Diara, a "damage undead" spell, or Heal, a "heal everybody a slight amount" spell, which are only accessible to Alphinaud.
I assume he also has other moves. I did not get to see them. 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.
In Dawn of Souls at least, Temper stacks, making the objective best way to make anything dead be haste your monk, cast as many tempers per turn as you can, and if you have the item for it, have them self-saber, and then just go ham on killing everything.
We've entered a new paradigm under which Yda and Alisaie hit with physical attacks much harder than Papalymo's spells individually, but Papalymo has spells that hit the entire enemy screen, which can easily add up to five or six times as much damage overall than any given attack. Alisaie also has those spells, unfortunately she has decided she didn't feel like leveling up Intellect, so her spell damage doesn't scale for shit and there's nothing I can do about it. Fortunately, she does hit quite hard with that sword of hers.
This time there is no need for multiple expeditions. Thanks to plentiful healing spells from both Alisaie and Alphinaud and having finally remembered that Ether exists and can replenish your spell slots, we manage to power through and reach the bottom of the Cavern of Earth.
This is basically the paradigm for the rest of the game in my experience. Magic stops being good for direct damage on bosses compared to a Monk/Master or even just like, a Red Mage with stacked boosts, but can sweep through some random encounters easily due to the area damage component.
I think that XV is the only Final Fantasy I've actually finished, and I keep intending to do what you're doing here, but man, the fact you have to choose and are locked into exactly four classes right at the beginning of FFI really sets off my choice paralysis something awful, and then I end up replaying the first hour like a hundred times over with different teams because I'm sure I've got something wrong.
It's also, as you've encountered, got the atrocious status effect mechanics of early dungeon-crawlers, which are literally just money sinks to force you to grind more.
Honestly any four classes will do good enough, and experimentation shows four monks is funny and better than you'd think, but yeah it's a bit awkward having to hard commit when you don't know what's good.
Especially since the class changes hugely impact it.
Somehow it feels weird that this Grim Leaper-looking motherfucker is only the first of the big element-destroying fiends you fight in the game, he feels more endgame than that, but that's just me.
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.
Dragon people? Citadel of trials? Recognition of the Dragon King?
Fuck me baby, you know there's no way I don't go for it.
The Citadel of Trials can only be one of the two overworld locations left: the spooky desert tower or the mean-looking castle, and my money's on the castle.
Bahamut, the Dragon King, receives the rat's tail and proceeds to use his awesome power to transform my entire party into upgraded versions of their base classes.
Yda is now a Master. Alisaie is a Red Wizard. Alphinaud is a White Wizard. Papalymo is a Black Wizard.
Whether these new upgrades translate to raw stat boosts is unclear. Yda is definitely hitting harder, and Alisaie can now equip better stuff, but a lot of the underlying mechanics are obscured if you don't use a wiki, and even if you do it's hard to parse what applies to Pixel Remaster as opposed to Dawn of Souls or NES classic. More importantly, however, I can finally buy every spell in the game. Alisaie, Alphinaud and Papalymo's range of spells have expanded to cover the entire library between the three of them, and I use the airship to go on a shopping spree and fill out their spellbooks, including with the Exit spell so I never have to deal with a dungeon run-back ever again.
my recollection is that in Dawn of Souls at least (but of course remakes change things) Red Wizard is statistically identical to Red Mage, only benefitting from better equipment and spell access. (including better access to low level, mostly white magic, as I mentioned earlier)
I believe that the formula the game uses to calculate the Monk's unarmed damage and unarmored defense changes to a better one as Master; at the very least Yda's damage numbers have gotten bigger.
From my own experience obsessively playing Dawn of Souls, they definitely do. Monk is only moderately more lethal than fighter in my experience, but Master is a glass cannon that kills the hardest by a wide margin, and monk unarmored bonuses are bad enough I found it was often better to armor them anyways, whereas even superior end-game armors are just blatantly worse than the Master's naked body.
Can any FF1 veteran tell me if those are actually useful at all before I spend my hard-earned gil on them?
The game going "this is the highest level of spell so it's all instadeath and screen-wide paralysis" is like… conceptually it's neat, but… Those are never going to work on bosses, yeah? And so far I have yet to meet a mob encounter that doesn't get wiped by a Flare cast. Do I really have any use for those spells?
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?
Alas.
(now I'm not sure if that applies to any given non-dawn of souls version given where my experience lies)
In any case, the place turns out to be full of loot. Most of which looks pretty valuable… and is useless. There is a full set of Diamond defensive gear, which can only be equipped by a Warrior (maybe a Ninja? I don't have one of those), and is thus as useful to me as a pile of bricks. Still, there's another magic item, and the Giant's Gloves make up for many shortcomings.
Ninja can equip nearly every piece of equipment Knights can, which leads to a massive power spike because Thiefs are vastly worse than Fighters at equipping things and then Ninja are better than fighters and roughly identical to Knights. There's like, maybe one or two end game armors that are knight only? But not much.
With the Rosetta Stone in hand, my next step is to find a sage who can use it to teach me Lufenian.
Not this one…
That's the guy!
Hilariously, this guy rewards me by teaching me Lufenian. Right there, on the spot, in a few minutes. Duolingo should hire him.
With the knowledge of the Lufenian language well in hand, I head back to Lufenia, where a bunch of new dialogue opens up.
I was excited to find the first reference to a guy named Cid in the series this early, but I am told that this is actually a retcon that wasn't in the original game. Sad!
A first for Tiamat, though - interestingly the game pulled Bahamut and Tiamat from D&D and made them both important dragons, but they don't have any connection to each other that I can see.
Okay, that's just kind of funny.
So!
Centuries ago, a civilization known as the "Sky People" mastered the wind, and used their prowess to build a flying castle. These Sky People notably had advanced technology - in a setting full of golems and raised undead and whatnot, they built actual robots. Robots that appear still functional today, centuries later, as I found one capable of talking to me even after falling from the sky.
Then Tiamat, the oldest of the Four Fiends, somehow appeared, and invaded the flying castle. For all their technology, the Sky People could not hold her back, and had to flee their fortress down to the earth. With Tiamat now feeding on the power of wind, the Sky People's magic and technology was presumably no longer functional, and they became merely the Lufenian people, a small, isolationist on the largely-deserted northern continent. Using mystical rituals, they pass down their memories from generation to generation, but these memories have begun to fade.
The Sky People were the most advanced civilization in history; with the arrival of Tiamat and their downfall, the wind itself started go wrong, and mankind never again reached such heights. It's unclear exactly quite how that worked, but the intro suggests dead wind, which might have severely impacted the viability of sea travel, cutting the way between the northern and southern continents. Then with Kraken appearing two hundred years ago, and more recently the Lich, the world reached its current fragmented state, in which only a handful of fortified but small towns survive in the middle of monster-plagued wastes.
The reason the northern continents has so little grassland areas is because grasslands are typically artificially created by sedentary agrarian societies, and it was the first area to suffer from the elemental calamities - human civilization has been shrinking for longer, allowing nature to take back the land in the form of vast forests and marshes - but also deserts, where the loss of elemental energy meant that nature could no longer thrive at all - there's a stretch in between a calamity where nature (and monsters) thrive as humanity is no longer shaping the landscape, which eventually ends when the benefits of human withdrawal can no longer outpace the drawbacks of elemental energy being lost. Thus, the Mirage Tower, once a cornerstone of Sky People civilization, is now in the middle of a giant desert.
Interestingly, some of the monster encounters are, at least by implication, civilized or semi-civilized races with hierarchical society; ogres, their chiefs, and mages are a fixture of several overworld areas in the southern continent, dark elves show up as powerful wizards dwelling in dungeons, the sahagin have "princes", the "gigas" appear to be some kind of giants and are at least wearing clothes… None of these are explored beyond their existence as combat sprites, but they're out there, living through the apocalypse.
Hm. They exist in the hostile overworld and don't appear to have settlements. So they're probably some kind of nomadic, yeah? Maybe following the population of other monsters they hunt.
…
IT'S THE PASTORALIST-AGRARIAN CONFLICT
A SHIFT IN ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITION HAS MADE LARGE-SCALE STATE ENTITIES NON-VIABLE, FORCING SEDENTARY AGRARIAN POPULATIONS TO WITHDRAW INTO SMALL, DEFENSIBLE SETTLEMENTS IN THE FEW REMAINING FERTILE "GRASSLANDS"
ALLOWING THE PASTORALIST, NOMADIC "MONSTER RACES" TO EXPAND BACK FROM THE UNSETTLED "FRINGES" THEY HAD BEEN PUSHED BACK TO
EVEN THOUGH THE LAND IS GROWING BARREN AND HOSTILE, THE MASSIVELY EXPANDED RANGE OF ROAMING THEY ENJOY ALLOWS THEM TO THRIVE ANYWAY IN COMPARISON TO THE PRIOR STATE OF THINGS
WHAT HUMANITY IS EXPERIENCING AS MONSTER INVASIONS IS THEIR INABILITY TO SUSTAIN THE LOGISTICAL WEIGHT OF A MILITARY CLASS MEANING THEY CAN NO LONGER POLICE THEIR BORDERS AND THE PASTORALISTS CAN NOW FREELY FORAGE OFF LANDS ONCE RESERVED FOR AGRICULTURAL USE
I AM ACTUALLY A STATE AGENT ATTEMPTING TO SUPPRESS NOMADIC OGRE/GIGAS/SAHAGIN EXPANSION AND A RETURN TO THE SUPREMACY OF MILITARIZED, AGRARIAN STATE ENTITIES
Am I suggesting that the seeds of FF14's long-term "Beast Tribes" story arc are already incipient in Final Fantasy I? Yes, yes I am saying exactly that. It's all already in there.
Anyway, one of the Lufenians kindly gives me the Chime, which is the item needed to actually enter the Mirage Tower.
I cross the desert to get there and catch a nap before what is no doubt going to prove a whole ordeal (but at that point I have no idea how much).
There's this cute animation that plays when you tuck in for the night.
Then I enter the tower.
A look at the interior of the tower, with its 'antique' vibe.
I wonder about this 'Black Knight'. The tower has been sealed for centuries, so it must be some kind of immortal. I wonder how it fits into my agrarian-pastoralist conflict model.
Weirdly enough, one of the pieces of loot I find in the tower is called the "vorpal sword," which is the name of an iconic kind of D&D magical sword taken from Alice in Wonderland, but it's just kind of mediocre (weaker than Defender, which Alisaie is currently using) and does not appear to have a random beheading chance. Onto the trash pile it goes.
Notably, there are robots in the tower, and they come in both hostile and non-hostile varieties - these take me for their 'master' and are glad for my coming. The guardian robots, not so much. Keep that in mind for, uh, later.
Giant loot circle. Note the glowing stones around there, which aren't interactive but are clearly some kind of still-active technology.
Another piece of loot is "Thor's Hammer," which is a decent weapon but whose primary purpose is to be used to cast Thundara, a screen-wide lightning damage spell, infinitely for free. I mistakenly assume that I won't need it much, but in fact it will soon prove extremely important.
I also find a dragon hide armor, which is totally sick, except nobody in the party can wear it.
This is alluding to the fallen robot who gave me the warp cube.
The Mirage Tower has a minor boss in the form of a Blue Dragon, who doesn't really do much.
Behind that dragon,at the top of the tower, I find a glowing red circle, and a robot who tells me to use the warp cube to use that circle to reach the Flying Fortress, which I do, and…
Studio Ghibli time, baby!
The Flying Fortress has very large floors, notable for their symmetrical patterns:
Lots of rooms with chest contents, and since I now have as much ether as I want, I take my time exploring them thoroughly.
There are an odd number of earth-themed enemies here, such as stone golems, earth medusas and black flans (which are a kind of ooze). There are also dark fighters, which use the Astos sprite and are thus presumably dark elves, and "black knights" and "death knights" whose nature is unclear, as well as air elementals, fire hydras, spirit nagas, and so on… Mechanically this means the Flying Fortress has a wide variety of threats to present the player with, and you can't hammer through everything with lightning spells the way you could the Sunken Shrine. Lore-wise though it's kind of inexplicable, but that's old JRPGs for you.
While exploring, I find this strange thing:
It turns out to be the legendary metal known as adamantite! It's supposed to be turned into Excalibur according to the wiki but, reader, I'll be straight with you:
I totally forgot I had it after the dungeon so I never did that.
I also find the "white robe" and "black robe," which I imagine are intended to be a kind of ultimate item for black and white mages, sort of like the arcane robes of D&D? But they're also items you can use to cast spells infinitely, so in the inventory they stay.
On one of the higher levels, I find this very interesting observation point:
The power of every shrine is converging into one single point, at the tip of a southern peninsula - the Chaos Shrine, where we first fought Garland. This, then, is clearly our next destination once Tiamat is dealt with.
Further exploration reveals that the machines of the Sky People, still running, are trying to find some weakness in Tiamat:
There's also another piece of loot whose name intrigues me:
A "ninja blade" belonging to someone called Sasuke???
Incidentally check out this floorplan:
This is the penultimate floor of the flying fortress, and it's a maze of sorts. There is nothing to it but these endlessly repeating crossways: if you reach the edge of the room it just loops back around itself, and if you don't have the map you don't know that it just did that. There's a stairway tile in one spot, and until you find it, you're just wandering about these crossways aimlessly, presumably completely disoriented.
But of course this is Pixel Remaster, so we do have a map and that floor is dealt with quickly.
Now comes the last part.
The last floor of the Flying Fortress is a bridge:
This bridge leads directly to the green orb that will unleash Tiamat when interacted with.
But.
First.
@Tempera, a fiend who delights in my suffering, tells me: "When you're on the bridge that leads up to Tiamat, hold off and grind for a while. There's a special encounter."
So what do I do? Well, I listen to her, of course! Would she ever mislead me into my own doom for her entertainment? Surely not.
This take over half an hour and several dozens of random encounters. Not that I mind too much - I was likely going to have to grind anyway for the final boss - but the whole thing has me go from lv 45 to lv 50, it's wild. I watch a bunch of YouTube videos. Attrition is a thing of the past: I have this set up where with the Black Robe one party member can cast Blizzara for free, with Thor's Hammer another can cast Thundara, and with the Mage's Staff another can cast Fira, so every encounter is Monk Attack/Fira/Blizzara/Thunder and then it's over.
Some encounters can still be painful. These Mindflayers have a "Psychic Blast" of unknown effect (it whiffed every time they used it), but more concerningly their basic attacks have a chance to instakill, likely to represent the brain extraction.
In all of this, I get a bit lax in making sure my characters are always at full health and spell slot. Falling asleep at the wheel before this is taking too long.
And then.
It happens.
Hrm.
I'm sorry, can you repeat that?
Oh.
OH!
Goddamn.
They made a superboss. They made a superboss and they hid it behind a super-rare random encounter.
I'm so mad.
Because the thing is, I can't just take this lying down, can I?
I can't just beat the game "except the Warmech that kicked my ass." I have to fight back. I have to take revenge.
And that means pacing around the bridge leading up to Tiamat for another entire hour, and not just that but every time doing it making sure that my characters remain at full health and spells after every encounter. Of which there will be at least two dozen.
But the alternative is letting it go. And I am very bad at letting go.
So I spend an hour grinding encounters while staying vigilant - until it happens again.
Round two, motherfucker.
The Warmech is a problem as simple as it is difficult to solve. Elegant in its simplicity. It works in a very simple way:
It always goes first in the turn.
It has 2,000 HP, and regens 100 HP at the end of each round.
It either attacks one character for over half of their total HP, or uses Nuke, which hits everyone for 300-400 damage.
It resists all magic.
You can't do anything that relies on attacking first (at least with my party; I imagine a Ninja would do better). Any turn in which you're not hurting it makes the situation worse thanks to regeneration. His attacks cannot be tanked or ignored.
Case in point, the Warmech opens up the fight by firing two Nukes in sequence. This wipes out my entire party but for Alphinaud, whose gigantic HP pool ensures he's left (barely) standing. This makes things look pretty fucking hopeless.
Somehow, though, I manage a comeback. Alphinaud self-heals back above the point where he won't die from a single hit, then starts using his max level Life spell to revive PCs with full health. The Warmech temporarily shifts to individual attacks, which spreads the hurt and allows Alphinaud's spells to heal more total damage than the mech is dishing out. As the party starts rising from the dead, I resume the Buff Dance in careful order - first Yda, then Alisaie, then Papalymo. My entire strategy has only one goal: to make sure that Yda stacks enough buffs, and survives long enough, to actually hit the Warmech.
She does.
Each attack totals up to 1,100 hits. The Warmech dies in two blows.
Alphinaud sadly didn't make it, but none of this could have happened without him.
But actually delivering these blows was the hardest challenge in the game so far. My entire party turned into some kind of crew-served weapon whose purpose is to secure a tactical Yda strike.
And it worked. And it was awesome.
Compared to that, Tiamat is kind of a pushover, and we'll cover her next time.
But before we leave off for today, I want to talk about something that's been pointed out to me. Likely old news to all the FF veterans here, but hopefully as interesting to my lay audience as it was to me.
The Flying Fortress is a pretty place. A castle, floating above the clouds. With… robots? Bit of an aesthetic mismatch, isn't it? Or not, necessarily. It does have a kind of Ghibli vibe. It's a castle in the sky.
But here's the thing.
This observatory spot that lets you see the entire world at once? The mentions by the Lufenians of the flying fortress looking like it's among the stars? The fact that the robot that fell to earth was seen as a shooting star? The way these glowing glyphs back in Mirage Tower looked, in the NES version, like straight up data servers?
This is what the "flying fortress" looks like in the original NES game:
Steel-grey walls. Sharp angles everywhere. A background of darkness strewn with tiny lights.
This isn't a castle in the sky.
This is a space station.
The Lufenians weren't just a fantasy civilization. They were a science-fantasy civilization. Their technology was so advanced that it was advanced. In a world that would everywhere else stick to the fantasy aesthetic, there was, for one moment in time, pure sci-fi, not even diluted into the ethereal blends of magitech of a Laputa castle or a Breath of the Wild robot, but cold, hard metal, electronic computers, and atomic power.
They built a satellite in orbit around the planet, staffed by robots, with an observing deck that could study energy currents over the world below, and even long gone, the last of their death machines, an incredibly advanced weapon platform with nuclear weapons, still stalks its dark and empty corridors, more powerful (but perhaps less controllable, for it did not save them in the end) than even Tiamat herself.
And now four hundred years hence, in a decaying world of agrarian civilization, small fortified settlement, rare magic, and swords and shields, the language they have to speak of it has been adjusted in ways comprehensible to its people. The Sky People, their Mirage Tower launchpad/teleportation system, and their Flying Fortress space station.
Even the treasure chests have a different model, looking like modern metal crates.
It's very hard to make out on this picture, but the room at the bottom is straight up a bunch of office chairs around a row of computers.
I like to think the nonsense jumble of random encounters in the Flying Fortress is non-diegetic, existing only for reasons of gameplay. The Flying Fortress sits nigh-empty against the backdrop of the stars: Tiamat, the Fiend of Wind, coiled serpent-like around its crystal core in the reactor room, the oldest of fiends, who cannot leave this room even if she wanted to, for the dark, silent corridors of her new kingdom are home to nothing but the prowling Warmech, forever on patrol, the last, spiteful relic of her old foes.
Until you came along, and it had something else to hunt for once.
Hm.
The "Warmech."
What would you need to wage war against, when you have advanced so far and wield such power? What enemy is there left to cow?
Why would the Wind Crystal be in space?
The game will never tell us this, so it is my own wild theory, but perhaps Tiamat was not the first Fiend, not the first being to seize the power of the very elements for themselves and deny them from the world. Maybe the reason she came to be - the original sin that introduced the unbalance of elements which threw the world out of order, the act of hubris that would invite such a being as Tiamat, a monster of immense power associated with the very same element she means to claim control over - was when some very clever, very wise, very powerful people saw one of the four crystals upholding the fundaments of reality sitting there, uselessly doing nothing but ensuring the world continued to function instead of being skillfully harvested to serve human industry, and thought:
"This is the unlimited energy source that will serve to power my space station."
Maybe the reason they built a war machine more powerful than any Fiend would ever be was because, on some level, they realized the theft they had committed, and that the enemy they might need to defend against would be the world itself.
I love how half of this is "here's the game" and the other half is "here's rambly thoughts about what this assortment of gameplay elements actually means(in an artistic sense not a gameplay sense)".
I do find it absolutely hilarious that Tiamat, the Mesopotamian goddess of the primordial ocean, is the Wind Fiend. Big 'I flipped through the DMG and did No Other Research' energy.
I do like the idea of an advanced science-fantasy civilization looking at the crystals that kept the world in balance and the climate functional and going 'yes, we will burn all of these for power steal one of these to power our orbital base'. I can't think of any modern parallels at all. Nope. Coming up dry.
(I also definitely can't think of any reasons a Japanese company might, even subconsciously, make references to the genocide of indiginous peoples to allow a more centralised group take over their land. Nosiree. Don't look at the history of Japan at all, by the way. Especially not from the 1800s onwards. There's nothing relevant there at all, and there's definitely not a bunch of works that deliberately grapple with this very issue. Fullmetal Alchemist doesn't exist and is definitely not about the genocide of the Ainu people.)
The power of every shrine is converging into one single point, at the tip of a southern peninsula - the Chaos Shrine, where we first fought Garland. This, then, is clearly our next destination once Tiamat is dealt with.
Fun fact, the room in the Chaos Shrine that Garland sits contains exactly and precisely five bats, like the five warriors turned to bats referred to by the Lufenians.
Case in point, the Warmech opens up the fight by firing two Nukes in sequence. This wipes out my entire party but for Alphinaud, whose gigantic HP pool ensures he's left (barely) standing. This makes things look pretty fucking hopeless.
One reason why White Mage/Wizard is borderline mandatory is because it's just plain the toughest class, on top of being the best healer. Knights and Ninjas are a little more resistant to physical damage, but in my experience their spell library is just the icing on the cake to being by far the toughest to magic (which is most of the strongest enemy attacks, no punch monks for your foes) and only somewhat behind on physical.
Another thing worth pointing out more generally is that certain tiles have fixed spawn encounters triggered when you enter them. By far the most memorable example of this is back in the Earth dungeon where there's one random corridor that's something like two tiles wide and 20-30 tiles tall, and every single one of those tiles is a forced encounter with a group of giants.
Which would seem to imply a literal army of giants just hanging out in there.
Re:Cid, the first true Cid to my knowledge is in FF2, where he's to probably nobody's surprise heavily associated with Airships.
But you should be getting there soon enough at this pace, with the Four Fiends down there's... not that much left of the game, kinda by definition.
Fun fact, the room in the Chaos Shrine that Garland sits contains exactly and precisely five bats, like the five warriors turned to bats referred to by the Lufenians.
One reason why White Mage/Wizard is borderline mandatory is because it's just plain the toughest class, on top of being the best healer. Knights and Ninjas are a little more resistant to physical damage, but in my experience their spell library is just the icing on the cake to being by far the toughest to magic (which is most of the strongest enemy attacks, no punch monks for your foes) and only somewhat behind on physical.
Another thing worth pointing out more generally is that certain tiles have fixed spawn encounters triggered when you enter them. By far the most memorable example of this is back in the Earth dungeon where there's one random corridor that's something like two tiles wide and 20-30 tiles tall, and every single one of those tiles is a forced encounter with a group of giants.
Which would seem to imply a literal army of giants just hanging out in there.
Re:Cid, the first true Cid to my knowledge is in FF2, where he's to probably nobody's surprise heavily associated with Airships.
But you should be getting there soon enough at this pace, with the Four Fiends down there's... not that much left of the game, kinda by definition.
This was originally going to be the final post covering everything up to the ending, but then I got lost in tangents about pastoralism and space station and decided to cut it off.
[BACK IN MY DAY]
Man the wind temple was such a pain in the ass back in the day. That endless floor was, indeed a nightmare if you weren't a sophisticated and handsome Nintendo Power reader, as I myself was. And the war mech was an entity to be feared. Fleeing was your best response.
Also, the high level spells outside of Nuke at least saw some use because we didn't have no fancy Ethers - spells were a carefully guarded resource, to be meted out begrudgingly and only when absolutely necessary. You bought 99 of status cures and potions and by god you made do. Thankfully, the spellcasting equipment that you get in the later temples made things a lot more manageable.
[/BACK IN MY DAY]
Steel-grey walls. Sharp angles everywhere. A background of darkness strewn with tiny lights.
This isn't a castle in the sky.
This is a space station.
The Lufenians weren't just a fantasy civilization. They were a science-fantasy civilization. Their technology was so advanced that it was advanced. In a world that would everywhere else stick to the fantasy aesthetic, there was, for one moment in time, pure sci-fi, not even diluted into the ethereal blends of magitech of a Laputa castle or a Breath of the Wild robot, but cold, hard metal, electronic computers, and atomic power.
They built a satellite in orbit around the planet, staffed by robots, with an observing deck that could study energy currents over the world below, and even long gone, the last of their death machines, an incredibly advanced weapon platform with nuclear weapons, still stalks its dark and empty corridors, more powerful (but perhaps less controllable, for it did not save them in the end) than even Tiamat herself.
And now four hundred years hence, in a decaying world of agrarian civilization, small fortified settlement, rare magic, and swords and shields, the language they have to speak of it has been adjusted in ways comprehensible to its people. The Sky People, their Mirage Tower launchpad/teleportation system, and their Flying Fortress space station.
Even the treasure chests have a different model, looking like modern metal crates.
It's very hard to make out on this picture, but the room at the bottom is straight up a bunch of office chairs around a row of computers.
I like to think the nonsense jumble of random encounters in the Flying Fortress is non-diegetic, existing only for reasons of gameplay. The Flying Fortress sits nigh-empty against the backdrop of the stars: Tiamat, the Fiend of Wind, coiled serpent-like around its crystal core in the reactor room, the oldest of fiends, who cannot leave this room even if she wanted to, for the dark, silent corridors of her new kingdom are home to nothing but the prowling Warmech, forever on patrol, the last, spiteful relic of her old foes.
Until you came along, and it had something else to hunt for once.
Hm.
The "Warmech."
What would you need to wage war against, when you have advanced so far and wield such power? What enemy is there left to cow?
Why would the Wind Crystal be in space?
The game will never tell us this, so it is my own wild theory, but perhaps Tiamat was not the first Fiend, not the first being to seize the power of the very elements for themselves and deny them from the world. Maybe the reason she came to be - the original sin that introduced the unbalance of elements which threw the world out of order, the act of hubris that would invite such a being as Tiamat, a monster of immense power associated with the very same element she means to claim control over - was when some very clever, very wise, very powerful people saw one of the four crystals upholding the fundaments of reality sitting there, uselessly doing nothing but ensuring the world continued to function instead of being skillfully harvested to serve human industry, and thought:
"This is the unlimited energy source that will serve to power my space station."
Maybe the reason they built a war machine more powerful than any Fiend would ever be was because, on some level, they realized the theft they had committed, and that the enemy they might need to defend against would be the world itself.
Okay so there are no hints that I can find in-game. The guy who was looking for the levistone has no new dialogue, the twelve sages don't either, and I'm not spending half an hour just visiting every town in the game to talk to random NPCs until someone gives me a hint.
I AM ACTUALLY A STATE AGENT ATTEMPTING TO SUPPRESS NOMADIC OGRE/GIGAS/SAHAGIN EXPANSION AND A RETURN TO THE SUPREMACY OF MILITARIZED, AGRARIAN STATE ENTITIES
I touched on this a bit in my FF1-inspired D&D campaign. My players didn't want to get too deep into it, but they did end up negotiating a peace between the dwarves who blasted open the path to the ocean and the Sahaugin druids who attacked in retaliation.
Maybe the reason they built a war machine more powerful than any Fiend would ever be was because, on some level, they realized the theft they had committed, and that the enemy they might need to defend against would be the world itself.
the high level spells outside of Nuke at least saw some use because we didn't have no fancy Ethers - spells were a carefully guarded resource, to meted out begrudgingly and only when absolutely necessary.
This is the part where I'd grumble under my breath about how the more strictly defined barrier between science fiction and fantasy we have these days makes stuff like this a lot less interesting, but I just managed to sum up my thoughts in a single sentence so I won't.
I wonder about this 'Black Knight'. The tower has been sealed for centuries, so it must be some kind of immortal. I wonder how it fits into my agrarian-pastoralist conflict model.
Unrelated to your musings here, in the NES version the Black Knight is called a BADMAN. Yes, the ALLCAPS are in the game. And yes, it is exactly as silly as that makes it sound.
Character limits in older games, man. They're a thing.
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.
[BACK IN MY DAY]
Man the wind temple was such a pain in the ass back in the day. That endless floor was, indeed a nightmare if you weren't a sophisticated and handsome Nintendo Power reader, as I myself was. And the war mech was an entity to be feared. Fleeing was your best response.
Also, the high level spells outside of Nuke at least saw some use because we didn't have no fancy Ethers - spells were a carefully guarded resource, to meted out begrudgingly and only when absolutely necessary. You bought 99 of status cures and potions and by god you made do. Thankfully, the spellcasting equipment that you get in the later temples made things a lot more manageable.
[/BACK IN MY DAY]
This is all, again, my theorizing, relying on both treating the "space station" thing as a given, and assuming non-diegetic monster encounters, which is a bit of a stretch.
But.
All of the Fiends are static, just sucking on their elemental crystal letting the world go to shit, but you can imagine the Lich (most recently awakened of the Fiends, whose domain is least settled) commanding the undead, thwarting attacks by earth elementals who want some of that crystal juice, negotiating (or "negotiating") with the ogre tribes dwelling in the Cavern of Earth, either recruiting goblins as mooks or sending forces to wipe them out as pests, and having ominous anime villain conversations with his Vampire second-in-command. You can imagine Kraken holding court beneath the waves, ruling over the Sahagin people whose princes he has long suborned to his will, gloating at the mermaid people he holds captive, and generally playing at being king under the sea. Marilith woke up literally five minutes ago, so she has none of that going, but she's (literally) hot-blooded and excited to set out on her work.
But Tiamat?
The first and oldest of Fiends, who brought about the end of the most advanced civilization in history, who stopped the winds and is even now supping on the very source of one of the four most fundamental energies of the world?
She sits alone in a locked room at the heart of a dark and empty space station, afraid of the mindless thing that stalks its corridors, following ancient commands to hunt and slay the enemy of its people, even after that people is long gone and has forgotten even the weapon's existence. Sipping of the Wind Crystal's power to sustain herself, for though she is the mightiest of the Four Fiends, she is the only one who does not dwell within her own element, not buried under the earth, not at the heart of the volcano, not deep beneath the seas:
But in the void, where there is no wind at all, where all is silent and still.
Welp, all the reading of this FF LP thread made get off my butt and start playing FFII. And I am now very much looking forward to Omicron playing it. Particularly for one character.
I also especially liked the original version of FF3, but not really the Dawn of Soul version (they streamlined things too much, was my take on it), and the original was infamous in its time for having three final dungeons back to back with no save points inside of them, so that one would have plenty of run-killer potential, if you were to play a version where that particular "feature" was preserved.
I've seen a few FF Marathon runs, and the common point between all of them is they all stalled out (or at least slowed down considerably) at FFIII. Specifically, the 3D remake of FFIII that was originally for the DS.
Which matches with my own impressions of FFIII 3D: it's been a long time since I last tried it, and I can't recall why I disliked it so much, but my vague recollection was that it was "tedious". I think there was no auto-battle or fast-forwarding of battles, so the encounter rate just meant I had to mindlessly and manually grind through enemies.
dang it now i wanna try out ffiii to form my own opinion on it based on, well, playing it
but the impression i'm getting from this, and what others have said in the thread, that even if i do find it fun (as there's a chance i might seeing as i'm actually having fun--for the most part--with the version of ffii i'm playing), it'll take a long while so it makes me less wanting to play it
well at least any time soon, if at all
I'm more inclined to believe the latter considering Jiraiya is a folk tale protagonist who has a character named after him in Naruto, not to mention Masamune and Muramasa often being used as names for swords, including Final Fantasy.
-looks it up-
Yeah, Sarutobi Sasuke is folk hero who has monkey-based abilities and is said to be the leader of a ninja group, the Sanada Ten Braves. I also looked up that Sarutobi Sasuke is a character in Naruto and who the more well-known Sasuke is named after.
Yeah, ninjas named Sasuke were everywhere in Japanese stuff even before Naruto, for the Sarutobi Sasuke homage. One from Ranma 1/2 comes immediately to mind
This is all, again, my theorizing, relying on both treating the "space station" thing as a given, and assuming non-diegetic monster encounters, which is a bit of a stretch.
But.
All of the Fiends are static, just sucking on their elemental crystal letting the world go to shit, but you can imagine the Lich (most recently awakened of the Fiends, whose domain is least settled) commanding the undead, thwarting attacks by earth elementals who want some of that crystal juice, negotiating (or "negotiating") with the ogre tribes dwelling in the Cavern of Earth, either recruiting goblins as mooks or sending forces to wipe them out as pests, and having ominous anime villain conversations with his Vampire second-in-command. You can imagine Kraken holding court beneath the waves, ruling over the Sahagin people whose princes he has long suborned to his will, gloating at the mermaid people he holds captive, and generally playing at being king under the sea. Marilith woke up literally five minutes ago, so she has none of that going, but she's (literally) hot-blooded and excited to set out on her work.
But Tiamat?
The first and oldest of Fiends, who brought about the end of the most advanced civilization in history, who stopped the winds and is even now supping on the very source of one of the four most fundamental energies of the world?
She sits alone in a locked room at the heart of a dark and empty space station, afraid of the mindless thing that stalks its corridors, following ancient commands to hunt and slay the enemy of its people, even after that people is long gone and has forgotten even the weapon's existence. Sipping of the Wind Crystal's power to sustain herself, for though she is the mightiest of the Four Fiends, she is the only one who does not dwell within her own element, not buried under the earth, not at the heart of the volcano, not deep beneath the seas:
But in the void, where there is no wind at all, where all is silent and still.
While I doubt the probability the writers intended such, it's a pretty fascinating pitch.
Nevertheless, I do feel like pointing out the obvious other things Warmech may have been built to fight.
The obvious possibilities are either that the ancient Lufenians were not so peacefully unified, and thus it was a Warmech meant to fight other Lufenians/their robots, or else it could be that the nation that took one of the four very important elemental crystals and used it to make some kinda wacky space station figured another nation might use one against them- the Water Crystal is conspicuously found in a structure, no two ways about it, and the Earth Crystal I'd also argue appears to be in a man-made kinda locale, with only maybe the Fire Crystal chilling out in the wilderness. It's possible Warmech was originally built out of fears of Perfidious Mermaid Aggression or some such.
On a different topic, I find it amusing to consider the possibility that the Wind Crystal might not so much be a power source for the space station- Warmech shows they have some mastery of nuclear technology, after all- as a way to cheat at an oxygen supply. The idea of one of these four fundamental pillars of reality being abused as an infinite value oxygen tank, nothing more, so as to support a space station certainly has a folly of man kinda vibe.
(this thought brought about by your point about the flying fortress being in the void, away from air)
Indeed, one could make an argument that while Kraken and Lich despoil their elements, Tiamat may have had her job done for her by the ancient Lufenians apparently taking the Wind Crystal out of the atmosphere and that doing bad things to the world.
When I did my run of this game a few months ago, I never spoke to Unne when I got to Melmond. So when I suddenly had to find this guy, I ended up searching every town for a half hour before finally admitting defeat and turning to a walkthrough. >.<
It turns out to be the legendary metal known as adamantite! It's supposed to be turned into Excalibur according to the wiki but, reader, I'll be straight with you:
I totally forgot I had it after the dungeon so I never did that.
I always felt that one of the most fitting pseudo-histirical settings for the classic DnD/fantasy "small communities with untamed wilderness and ruins" is a sort of post Bronze Age Collapse one, which fits really well with your agrarian vs pastoral take (as well as FF1 being such a direct DnD campaign)
This is the thing I meant, yeah. For some reason I had the name wrong.
I personally think FF3 is the best of the three NES Final Fantasy, and it has the other two handily beaten in terms of originating stuff that became recurring in the series after that. While, as shown in the latest post, a lot of things, like the mix of science-fiction and fantasy, were an hallmark of the series from the beginning, FF3 is where the Final Fantasy series truly found its identity. It's also the closest thing to a direct improved sequel FF1 ever got - even FF4 and FF9, who come the closest, don't really have the "same idea, much better implementation" approach to it FF3 does.
I haven't reached the Flying Fortress myself, but reading through your playthrough, and considering that you are about to face Tiamat, I kept imagining the Azys Lla theme playing throughout.
The Warmech is dead. The Flying Fortress has been almost cleared. Only one thing is left standing in our way: Tiamat herself.
Tiamat continues the trend of pilfering freely through D&D material, being a five-headed dragon and in no way a Sumerian personification of the primordial chaos and the saltwater before the world was made.
Whatever abilities she has, she elects not to show them, instead doing simple attacks on Yda and Alisaie that can't outpace Alphinaud's healing spells. The result is that by the time she falls, the group is still at full HP:
An anticlimactic end for the Fiend of Wind.
And with this, the last of the Four Fiends has perished. The world is free. The elements will return to balance. Mankind (and elfkind and dwarfkind) will thrive again.
Or will they?
The energy of the four shrines was converging in one point, and that is worth at least investigating.
But first, let's see what the twelve sages are up to - their dialogue changes lightly after each Fiend defeated, and while the changes were never a huge deal before, I'm curious to see if they have any important wisdom before tackling the endgame.
It turns out they do, in the form of a massive expository dump that explains the entire actual plot at the eleventh hour, and it's mildly baffling. They tell me that they will now reveal the true purpose of the four crystals the Warriors of Light carry, which have each been lighting up with the appropriate elemental being cleansed, and…
What?
I'm sorry?
Bruh?
What the fuck
Wait.
Who am I?
I mean not who am I me, I know that, I'm a late 00s Sonic the Hedgehog OC with an obsession for cool fight scenes, I mean who are the Warriors of Light?
They show up in every town like they've never been there before. They manifest on Cornelia's doorstep one day, holding four crystals whose origins are unknown and whose purpose they themselves don't know. Nobody knows them, and they don't know anybody. Now the sages are telling them their own memories are unreliable. Yes, I realize that in a Doylist sense, that is because they're blank slates analogous to simple TTRPG characters, more tactical units than actual characters. But in a Watsonian sense it's kind of inexplicable.
At this point I start theorizing that perhaps the Warriors of Light and the warriors sent by the Sky People four hundred years ago are one and the same, displaced in time, but this turns out to not be the case when I finally travel to the Chaos Shrine and discover…
The Sky People's warriors (Sky Warriors?) were indeed sent to fight the Fiends and transformed into bats, and have been waiting this whole time here, in the Chaos Shrine, for true Warriors of Light who could hear their human voices.
Which is an interesting idea - that there was another group of heroes before the Warriors of Light, who attempted to save the world from doom at the very beginning of it all, when the first calamity struck, but who just couldn't pull it off. Four hundred years of unraveling, because these first heroes failed, before new ones showed up.
Hmmm.
What if the Sky Warriors failed because they were only human? Merely people, with their own names and history and frailties, up against primal entities of elemental evil? What if the Warriors of Light were shaped for a purpose, blank canvas with human thoughts and feelings but no past, no distractions from their goal, manifested one day to save the world? Not foretold by the prophecy, but created by it.
Well, that's completely unprovable. They're probably just orphans from a village too small to be displayed in the overworld who found the crystals in a cave one day.
Either way, it's now time for the final confrontation with the evil created 2,000 years ago.
Focusing the power of the crystals onto the Dark Crystal, the Warriors of Light create a portal to the past and step forward, landing in a chaos shrine that is no longer (not yet) a disused, bat-riddled ruin, but a mighty dungeon.
I imagine the Chaos Shrine would be a fitting endgame challenge in the original game, when Ether didn't exist, grinding was difficult and time-consuming, and you couldn't save during dungeons. As it stands, it's more of a victory parade. I have three spellcasters, infinite spell slots, and Yda and Alisaie kill anything they hit in one attack.
I assume this many of these guys would be concerning if I couldn't just wipe them all out in one Flare.
"Upgraded version of earlier boss showing up as a mook' is one of the classic ways of showing we're in the seriousface endgame now, but, just like everything else, this dude dies in one hit.
I actually take this as an opportunity to try some of the less-optimal spells, for funsies, and let me tell you Warp has one of the best-looking animations in the game. I straight up spaced these dudes.
However, when I reach the stairs to the second level down…
…they're blocked by an orange-brown orb.
What gives?
The Lich is back again, and more powerful than ever!
It doesn't have any dialogue lines unfortunately, so we don't really know why or how, and also "more powerful than ever" is from a baseline of thirty levels ago. It gets dealt with quickly.
From there the follow-up is predictable. Each floor is home to enemies of a specific element, and ends in a stairway blocked by an upgraded version of one of the Four Fiends. All of them, without fail, are at this point little more than speedbumps.
That's two thirds of her entire health gone right there.
You know, random thought.
Why are there both four and three elements in Final Fantasy games?
By which I mean, the plot of the game revolves around four elements, which are the foundations of the world, the loss of their energy is causing the apocalypse, there are four monsters tied each to one element, and all that: these are Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. But the mechanics of the game, the magic that is actually available to the player characters, are divided into three elements: Lightning, Ice, and Fire. This actually has gameplay consequences! For instance, I know that if a water-aspected enemy shows up, they're likely vulnerable to lightning spells. But what is an earth-aspected enemy vulnerable to? Are fire-aspected enemies weak to ice, or resistant to it? One could decide either way depending on justification! And while you can kinda squint and associate lightning to wind and ice to water, it's not a clean fit, and it leaves Earth without a representative.
It's such a staple of the genre that I never really questioned it until I played this game and realized that it's not legacy code in this one, since it's the first, it originated the split.
In later games, this would be approached differently. Final Fantasy XIV has a full circle of six elements (Earth, Wind, Fire, Water, Lightning) and two "polarities," Light and Dark, which serve to divide them into class-appropriate selections: Fire/Lightning/Ice belongs to thaumaturgy (black magic), Air, Earth and Water to conjury (white magic), and most magic appears to use the elements themselves as your basic, foundational spellwork, with spells of the associated "raw" polarity being the most powerful, capstone spells. (I had this whole spiel about Red Mage that ran into the problem that I can't prove that Verflare is actually a Dark-type spell within the narrative even if mechanically it deals fire damage).
But this is working off an awkwardness that's built into FF1 at a base level. So why this?
I asked around, and the best guess we've been able to work out is that it's because the game draws on D&D - at that time, the main damage spells in AD&D were Fireball, Cone of Ice, and Chain Lightning. So, while the four classical elements are a cornerstone of the story, the combat system, which like everything else is ripping off D&D, instead has the three elements associated with these spells.
I'm just posting this one because the idea of just bumping into three D&D purple worms in the middle of a dungeon is vaguely hilarious; purple worms are 80 feet long and move by burrowing through stone at incredible speed.
And, on the second to last floor, I do a brief detour and find…
This will make a suitable replacement for missing Excalibur (that I can't use anyway). It's a significant step up in damage for Alisaie, and she's gonna be one of my two primary damage dealers in the final fight.
Another classic showing up for the first time!
Alright.
It's time.
We reach the deepest level of the Chaos Shrine, and find…
…Garland.
Oh, dear merciful God.
It's a time loop.
I kill Garland. The Four Fiends send him back in time just as he dies. Here in the past, Garland sends the Four Fiends into the future, where they save him by sending him back in time, where he sends the Four Fiends into the future, where they…
Where is the starting point??? How did he first get saved to start the loop??? The answer is he doesn't because it's a time loop so it already has its endpoint as part of its starting point and aaaaaah
I have no idea how many iterations of the loop have already occurred, if any; Garland seems to imply that he's killed the Warriors of Light before, that doing so is part of the loop and why he's now achieved "eternal life" through recursive existence. Neither am I clear on how the Fiends themselves were born - he sends them to the future from the past, sure, but what are they, and how were they born? How does this interact with the Warriors of Light's weird undefined background?
Perhaps the reason they are such blank slates is because they don't really have a past - like the Fiends, their existence is presumed by the existence of the time loop - defeating Garland is the premise of an already-established loop, just like the Fiends being there to send him back, even though they wouldn't be there if he hadn't sent them from the past, and the Warriors of Light wouldn't be there if he hadn't sent the Fiends. Without an origin point - existing outside of causality, within a complete chain of events that by its very nature cannot have a beginning - the Warriors of Light are unmoored from continuity. They exist because they exist.
What a strange twist to add to what is otherwise a completely straightforward "the Fiends answered to a greater evil, go and kill it to end the threat" plot.
Either way, for Garland, it's morphin' time.
"Random faces on random joints of your body" is an underrated aesthetic, although Chaos is otherwise a pretty standard Lizard Devil Dude.
This proves to be the toughest fight in the game, tougher even than the Warmech. The Warmech was very difficult, but very simple; Chaos is vast and protean. He has a wide arrays of spells, which plays in my favor for the most part, since it means he's not attacking for massive damage every round, and he has 20,000 HP, ten times as much as our friend the death machine. That doesn't make him ten times harder - Chaos leaves me a lot more opportunities to attack him. But it does make him pretty fucking hard.
Attacks like Blaze or Tsunami are party-wide damage spells that I can tank pretty well by using Healara to regenerate more damage to the whole party than they inflict, effectively nullifying Chaos's turn. This leaves me time to set up my multiple layers of buffs on Yda and Alisaie, which I need because of Chaos's huge magical resistance. There's only one problem: Chaos can buff himself. With Haste applied, his physical attack is an instakill on any one of my characters. A KO'd character loses all their buffs, meaning even after a Full Life, I waste one or more turns bringing their damage up to speed.
To top it all off, Chaos can cast Curaja on himself, instantly healing 9,999 HP, undoing several rounds of progress. It's a long, protracted battle, in which my characters die repeatedly, I exhaust a bunch of high-level spells, and in which I have to make some really harsh calls - calls like "Papalymo is KO, but he finished buffing the fighters, his Flare does too little damage, and I can't afford to risk losing a fully-buffed fighter by spending a turn rezzing him, so Alphinaud will cast Curaga instead."
It's also the most fun I've had with the gameplay this entire playthrough.
And in the end…
RIP, Papalymo.
Chaos goes down.
And just like that, the game is over.
There is no cutscene as such following Chaos's demise - the epilogue takes place in the form of a text scroll over a peaceful picture of the healed land.
I never enjoy "and then everyone forgot the adventure happened" resolutions, but here I don't really mind, owing to how sparse the plot and characterization are to begin with. The time loop has been severed, and the Warriors of Light may return to a world that is open to a new age of greatness. A world where even, perhaps, Garland is still the gallant knight once so beloved, and no foul-hearted blackguard.
How long did the time loop go on? What is it that this time, granted the heroes the strength to undo it? What will become of the Lufenians, and their hopes of reaching across the vast expanse of the sky, and the sins they may or may not have committed in so doing? Where did the Warriors of Light come from?
Maybe the time loop is the game itself. Maybe every failed loop, every failed effort to defeat Chaos, every doomed timeline, is a run ending in that simple and grim sentence, "The party was defeated."
But that's probably too meta.
o7
Conclusion
That was Final Fantasy.
Not the original in its truest form - and I do think, had I had the original in my hands as a child, I would have spent the long afternoons and dozens of hours of play to slowly wear my way through the game, through this cornerstone of the genre to come. But today, I'm happy with the Pixel Remaster. I'm happy with its speed, its convenience, its beauty. And I see very much indeed in there - so many building blocks of both the Final Fantasies to come and the JRPG genre as a whole. It's a fascinating work.
And for how little story it has, its world is appealing, its visual designs cute, and its variety intriguing. I can see the potential for many runs using different parties and strategy, and for challenge runs - someday I might attempt a solo run, perhaps. Or deliberately not using certain of the QoL features. It's an easy game, but it has within it the potential for real challenge. I was genuinely surprised to find myself relying on a fairly intricate (if deterministic) buff architecture relying on one or two characters alone to do damage, when my memories of playing FF games as a kid was to just hammer the most damaging move always all of the time. Even FF1 has strategic depth.
I liked it. I had fun with this.
And though I don't intend to go out of my way to turn this into Crackpot Theory Hour, especially as we move into games whose lore is more settled and obvious, it was fun daydreaming the Final Fantasy: Isolation space canon.
If there's one thing - one genuine negative experience that casts a shadow of apprehension in me for this project - it's that after a while, the system of random encounters gets tedious and repetitive to the point of bringing down my experience of the game.
And I know that's what Final Fantasy is committing to for the next… Nine games?
It could've been even worse: Tiamat is the one boss in the entire game who's vulnerable to any instant death effects (namely Scourge and Break)...but only in this fight, you have to do things the hard way in the endgame.
(I believe you can also make Marilith run away if you cast Fear, but that's not quite the same thing.)
This will make a suitable replacement for missing Excalibuer (that I can't use anyway). It's a significant step up in damage for Alisaie, and she's gonna be one of my two primary damage dealers in the final fight.
Incidentally, Masamune has absolutely no restrictions on who can equip it. Which is honestly very good way of doing things, since it means that no matter what your party looks like you'll have at least one character who can do decent damage in the final battle. You could be using a solo thief and you'd still be in decent shape for Chaos with this thing.
You know, assuming you somehow got a solo unpromoted Thief this far in, which feels kinda impossible to me.
I kill Garland. The Four Fiends send him back in time just as he dies. Here in the past, Garland sends the Four Fiends into the future, where they save him by sending him back in time, where he sends the Four Fiends into the future, where they…
This is definitely one of the more interesting and unexpected plot points to come up in any of these early CPRGs. Like, this is hardly the first time anyone's had to change the past to beat the villains (hell, Ultima had you doing it back in '81) but it's not something you expect to happen in this particular story, you know what I mean?
(As a bit of a technical aside, Garland's monologue is the only time in the NES version that anyone says more than one text box at you. Since they were only doing it once they didn't set the engine up to handle that, so you have to manually talk to him multiple times before the fight starts.)
(As a bit of a technical aside, Garland's monologue is the only time in the NES version that anyone says more than one text box at you. Since they were only doing it once they didn't set the engine up to handle that, so you have to manually talk to him multiple times before the fight starts.)
I had a strong suspicion that an engine limitation was the reason for a number of multiple NPCs in various instances, such as the sage circles being there because the game couldn't initially handle having one sage providing all the needed dialogue.
(I believe you can also make Marilith run away if you cast Fear, but that's not quite the same thing.)
The Lich is back again, and more powerful than ever!
It doesn't have any dialogue lines unfortunately, so we don't really know why or how, and also "more powerful than ever" is from a baseline of thirty levels ago. It gets dealt with quickly.
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.
But the mechanics of the game, the magic that is actually available to the player characters, are divided into three elements: Lightning, Ice, and Fire. This actually has gameplay consequences! For instance, I know that if a water-aspected enemy shows up, they're likely vulnerable to lightning spells. But what is an earth-aspected enemy vulnerable to? Are fire-aspected enemies weak to ice, or resistant to it? One could decide either way depending on justification! And while you can kinda squint and associate lightning to wind and ice to water, it's not a clean fit, and it leaves Earth without a representative.
Quake is the only Earth-aspected spell. No enemies are weak against it, but some of the bosses don't resist it. Flying enemies are immune to Quake. Sand worms will cast Earthquake at you, which you can only survive with luck or a Ribbon. Why is Quake the only Earth spell? Yeah, you're probably right that it's D&D.
Time, Poison, Status, and Death are part of the same element system from a game mechanics perspective.
