- Location
- Norway
Hey now, it might be a dead web comic, but that is a BEAUTIFUL corpse!
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Final Fantasy I, Part 2: Astos & The Vampire
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That first post was kind of scattershot, looking back. I've never done a Let's Play before and I have to remind myself to take screenshots and to present information in a way accessible to people who aren't in my brain. Hopefully I'll improve over time!
So, after getting instantly annihilated upon setting foot inside the Marsh Cave, the party goes back and does some grinding outside. This grinding is itself a risky endeavour; at one point while roaming the overworld marshes around the cave, I run into a random encounter of four ghasts (or ghouls? One of the zombie palette swaps). The zombie family have a special feature: their claws have a chance to cause paralysis. A paralyzed character does not take actions until the paralysis resolves after a few turn or at the end of combat - the game literally skips their turn.
This means that, on Turn 1, I got to watch each of my characters get stunlocked, and then the entire party be annihilated again as the zombies took repeat turns without the game letting me do anything until I was teamwiped.
Which didn't feel great.
Eventually, I feel confident to head back into the Marsh Cave.
It's not the most cheerful place.
The Marsh Cave has three levels and a variety of opponents, including zombies and ghouls, skeletons, snakes, giant worms, giant spiders, slimes (green slimes have very low HP and do little damage, but are poisonous and take only 1 damage per hit from things that aren't magic or critical hits; gray oozes hit really hard but have no special defenses); amusingly, the cute weedle bats that are hanging out in the dungeon screen are not on the list of enemies.
But also, worst of all, there are scorpions.
Flames. Flames on the side of my face.
You see, Final Fantasy is old school about the way it handles its status effect, and that's going to make the Marsh Cave take up the next hour of my life at least, requiring several trips. Snakes, slimes, and spiders all have a chance of poisoning their targets; scorpions also do, seem to have a higher chance, and more importantly show up in packs of 4 scorpions instead of being mixed in with other enemy types like spiders and slimes, meaning any scorpion encounter means one of your characters is probably getting poisoned (usually Yda, the Monk, or Alisaie, the Red Mage, who are on top of the priority order).
Once your character is poisoned, they stay poisoned until cured or dead. The damage per turn during combat is mildly annoying, but more importantly the character takes damage with every step in the dungeon or the overworld. The only cures available at this level are Antidote items and Poisondna, a lv 4 spell that costs 2,500 gil to buy and that I do not have yet. Resting at an inn will not help, and the status effect will not disappear over time (I mean, it will; it resolves in death). This means every run of Marsh Cave is on a timer; once I've burned through my entire supply of antidotes, the only thing left to do is high-tail it frantically, hoping I don't get poisoned on my way out. The first time I go to the Cave, I'm not anticipating this, and so I rapidly exhaust my stock of naturally-accumulated Antidotes and find myself with a poisoned monk. I run, burning through all my healing spells to keep Yda alive, but eventually this fails and she dies partway through the overworld. I flee every battle from then on to avoid the XP issue and also the risk of a teamwipe, until I am back in Elfheim and can pay to have her resurrected by a priest dude.
Hopefully my last time here.
So I stock up on Antidotes at the local shop and head back in. This time, I make it further in, and manage to explore quite a bit, open chests, make fat loads of cash and XP, and generally profit from my endeavour. My problem here is that I just plain underestimated the density of poison attacks in Marsh Cave. I thought five or six Antidotes would cut it, but no, you need at least a dozen to have any real room to maneuvre. This means I once again find myself in a poison death spiral situation, and need to abort this cave run and flee back to Elfheim.
Been seeing a lot of this place. Check out the little signs over each building telling you what it's for! It's cute. A lot of this game is just plain cute. I like that the elf sprites are very obviously modelled on Link.
Thankfully, I now have the resources to gear up.
And by "gear up" I don't actually mean gearing up. Without a Warrior in the party to wield the heaviest arms and armors, I have little need for expensive equipment. Alisaie wields the best sword available at any given time and the heaviest armor she can equip, which is usually a step weaker/cheaper than the Warrior would equip. Yda fights naked and unarmed, and Papalymo and Alphinaud have yet to have access to any upgrades beyond "clothes."
Instead, all my money goes to spells, which are far more expensive.
Check out the description on Haste. If it sounds insanely powerful to you, be assured that you are completely correct.
The way this works is that every level of spells has four spells in total, but your mage can only know three at a time, so you have to leave one out. Usually there are clear picks, though, as well as wasted level where you don't care about any of these. Here, Blizzara is a straightforward "all enemies take ice damage" spell, Haste buffs one character (usually Yda) by doubling their number of attacks and therefore their damage, and Confuse and Sleepna probably do something but I have never used them so who knows.
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.
My third run through Marsh Cave is the one where I finally succeed. Having already looted the place, I beeline for the last room, where I find a chest surrounded by statues. I open it aaaaand
This screenshot is from a later encounter against the same opponents. I had a lot less HP the first time around.
I am jumped by four mind flayers dealing 80+ damage per hit without having fully healed my party and I fucking wipe, again.
The surprise was kind of funny in an awful way, and after reloading and prepping correctly, I take them out without much trouble. Weirdly enough they have no fancy tricks, they just hit really hard with normal attacks, no psychic blasts or anything like that. A Hasted Yda cuts through them like chaff while Alphinaud keeps everybody topped up.
Once defeated, the chest reveals the expected item - the crown!
This is where I realize another of FF1's archaism in its dungeon design: modern RPG dungeons typically end by dropping you outside the dungeon. Whether there is a story cutscene, a convenient teleport screen, or just a Dark Souls style shortcut, once you killed the boss, you're out.
Not so FF1. You have to go back the entire way with whatever resources you have left after the big showdown, facing all the normal random encounters. And in Marsh Cave, that means poison.
Nonetheless I still make it. I rest up in a tent on the overworld, then I head back to the ruined castle of the cursed king.
I kind of… liked this?
There were several irritating aspects to Cave Marsh, and I wouldn't want this to be my sole experience of the game. But the feeling of a dungeon being too much to handle in one go, so you effectively prep and go on expeditions, each time exploring a little further and looting more of the stuff, then going back to spend your hard-earned gold in town, resupply, and go back, until you've taken everything you could and worked out a most optimal route to your final objective…
It was fun. I enjoyed it. And I felt genuinely challenged.
Anyway, back to the castle.
Snazzy place.
Wonder what he's been eating this entire time.
At this point, given that I have no lead on Astos and the cave lacked a 'proper' boss, I'm strongly suspecting this guy isn't on the up and up, so I make sure to be at full resources before talking to him.
And wouldn't you know it:
The King reveals his true identity as Astos, King of the Dark Elves. He needed the crown to… do something… with Matoya's Crystal Eye, and then he will be unstoppable.
Unfortunately, that idiot doesn't actually wait for me to give him the crown before revealing his true form, so he has to fight us.
You're one ugly motherfucker.
I'm actually curious as to what his status as "king of the dark elves" actually means. I have not encountered any other dark elf yet, he lives alone in his ruined castle, and his fucked up appearance makes me wonder if FF1's take on 'dark elves' might not be closer to 'evil fairies' than to D&D drow.
Either way, I am pretty excited about my first boss battle since Garland, a dozen levels ago. Astos pulls out the big hitters, with party-wide damaging and debuff spells like Thundaga and Dark, hitting everyone with lightning damage and blindness.
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.
Wow.
I mean I knew the Monk was a beast but… wow.
She punched him so hard he disintegrated.
Well, the good news is, now that he's dead, I can take the crystal eye and bring it back to Matoya! She receives it and…
Okay, rude.
Her disappointment at Yda's appearance aside, she rewards me by giving me her 'most powerful potion,' the jolt tonic, which is described as being able to wake anyone up.
What's interesting is that I am obviously meant to take this can of Monster to the sleeping prince of Elfheim, but the game does not make that connection in the narrative. Despite Matoya, Astos and the Prince all being part of the same tangle of events, Matoya does not appear aware of the prince's condition, and gives me the energy drink as a reward just because it's what she has on shelf. It falls then to me to make the (easy) connection to the prince and bring the Red Bull to him. This is not a huge issue or anything, but it's closer to the logic of a Zelda trading chain than a modern quest progression.
Once awakened, the Prince thanks me and gives me the Mystic Key, which opens a whole lot of doors I've been encountering in the game so far which told me they were "locked by the mystic key."
Naturally, the first thing I do with it is loot the royal inventories.
At this stage, I don't have any clear directions on what to do next, but I also have a whole chunk of map left to explore. So what I do is backtrack to every previous location in the game that could be opened by the Mystic Key. These are in the starting town of Cornelia, the starting dungeon Chaos Shrine, and… sigh… Marsh Cave.
Doing so nets me some really good loot, but is also time intensive. The Marsh Cave doors also surprise me with some seriousface monster encounters protecting said loot. Most of all though, it's… irritating, because this is where the old school random encounter design shows its weakness: 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 efforts are rewarded, though, when I open the mystic doors in the Cornelia royal palace and find…
This is a "key item," tied to a quest. Unfortunately, I accidentally sequence-skipped the part where someone told me I needed to go looking for it by doing things out of order. It doesn't get in the way of my game progression but it does make the plot feel a little weird shortly after.
With all this shiny new loot acquired, I take my boat and set off to explore the west part of the continent. I quickly stumble across a mountain city full of dwarves.
Oh so that's where that's from!
This is where things get weird; I was clearly supposed to meet the dwarves and have one of them request I acquire some explosives from the Cornelia ammunition stores, but I skipped that part, so when I talk to one of these funky little dudes he thanks me for helping out and immediately blows up a chunk of the map.
No, seriously. There was a chunk of land there.
This is huge, because it opens up the inner sea to the outer sea, meaning I can take my ship and explore the rest of the world! It also probably has dramatic economic and ecological repercussions that will cascade in unpredictable way for the next decades!
I do this and immediately land in a new town, which has seen better days.
The intro mentioned that "the earth decays" as part of the ongoing apocalypse, and this appears to be where this manifests the most strongly. The town is in ruin, stone eroded, soil barren, buildings barely able to stand together. It's an interesting way of portraying an earth-themed apocalypse I don't think I've seen before. The people there ask me to help; according to them, an evil vampire has set himself up in a nearby cave, and is somehow draining the earth's energy. So after restocking on stuff and buying some new cool spells, I head out.
This is every cave-themed dungeon for the next thirty years of isometric gaming history, right there. The original mold.
Marsh Cave had poison. The Cavern of Earth has petrification, which is worse. A petrified character is effectively KO, but can't be resurrected. Their only hope is a Gold Needle to turn them back to flesh, and they are otherwise literal dead weight in your party. Fortunately enemies that can petrify are much rarer than poisonous enemies were in Cave Marsh, so I can make it through mostly fine. Also, like…
I have significantly more firepower than I used to.
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.
The vampire doesn't have a name; he's literally just "Vampire," and he has a short, but neat villain speech about how "mortals cannot kill the undying."
Kind of an underwhelming sprite, tbh.
This guy fares even worse than Astos.
He fails his opening Gaze attack, and then he dies on turn 1. Just annihilated by a combination Diaga/Ydapunch. Just absolutely destroyed.
Killing him nets me a "ruby star," but unfortunately fails to heal the earth. There is a stone slab at the end of the vampire's hidden lair, and I cannot interact with it. "The stone seal cannot be broken" was one of his lines - so, presumably, I'll have to come back later.
Ominous!
And on this, that's a good point to end it today, I think.
So, after getting instantly annihilated upon setting foot inside the Marsh Cave, the party goes back and does some grinding outside. This grinding is itself a risky endeavour; at one point while roaming the overworld marshes around the cave, I run into a random encounter of four ghasts (or ghouls? One of the zombie palette swaps). The zombie family have a special feature: their claws have a chance to cause paralysis. A paralyzed character does not take actions until the paralysis resolves after a few turn or at the end of combat - the game literally skips their turn.
This means that, on Turn 1, I got to watch each of my characters get stunlocked, and then the entire party be annihilated again as the zombies took repeat turns without the game letting me do anything until I was teamwiped.
Which didn't feel great.
Eventually, I feel confident to head back into the Marsh Cave.
It's not the most cheerful place.
The Marsh Cave has three levels and a variety of opponents, including zombies and ghouls, skeletons, snakes, giant worms, giant spiders, slimes (green slimes have very low HP and do little damage, but are poisonous and take only 1 damage per hit from things that aren't magic or critical hits; gray oozes hit really hard but have no special defenses); amusingly, the cute weedle bats that are hanging out in the dungeon screen are not on the list of enemies.
But also, worst of all, there are scorpions.
Flames. Flames on the side of my face.
You see, Final Fantasy is old school about the way it handles its status effect, and that's going to make the Marsh Cave take up the next hour of my life at least, requiring several trips. Snakes, slimes, and spiders all have a chance of poisoning their targets; scorpions also do, seem to have a higher chance, and more importantly show up in packs of 4 scorpions instead of being mixed in with other enemy types like spiders and slimes, meaning any scorpion encounter means one of your characters is probably getting poisoned (usually Yda, the Monk, or Alisaie, the Red Mage, who are on top of the priority order).
Once your character is poisoned, they stay poisoned until cured or dead. The damage per turn during combat is mildly annoying, but more importantly the character takes damage with every step in the dungeon or the overworld. The only cures available at this level are Antidote items and Poisondna, a lv 4 spell that costs 2,500 gil to buy and that I do not have yet. Resting at an inn will not help, and the status effect will not disappear over time (I mean, it will; it resolves in death). This means every run of Marsh Cave is on a timer; once I've burned through my entire supply of antidotes, the only thing left to do is high-tail it frantically, hoping I don't get poisoned on my way out. The first time I go to the Cave, I'm not anticipating this, and so I rapidly exhaust my stock of naturally-accumulated Antidotes and find myself with a poisoned monk. I run, burning through all my healing spells to keep Yda alive, but eventually this fails and she dies partway through the overworld. I flee every battle from then on to avoid the XP issue and also the risk of a teamwipe, until I am back in Elfheim and can pay to have her resurrected by a priest dude.
Hopefully my last time here.
So I stock up on Antidotes at the local shop and head back in. This time, I make it further in, and manage to explore quite a bit, open chests, make fat loads of cash and XP, and generally profit from my endeavour. My problem here is that I just plain underestimated the density of poison attacks in Marsh Cave. I thought five or six Antidotes would cut it, but no, you need at least a dozen to have any real room to maneuvre. This means I once again find myself in a poison death spiral situation, and need to abort this cave run and flee back to Elfheim.
Been seeing a lot of this place. Check out the little signs over each building telling you what it's for! It's cute. A lot of this game is just plain cute. I like that the elf sprites are very obviously modelled on Link.
Thankfully, I now have the resources to gear up.
And by "gear up" I don't actually mean gearing up. Without a Warrior in the party to wield the heaviest arms and armors, I have little need for expensive equipment. Alisaie wields the best sword available at any given time and the heaviest armor she can equip, which is usually a step weaker/cheaper than the Warrior would equip. Yda fights naked and unarmed, and Papalymo and Alphinaud have yet to have access to any upgrades beyond "clothes."
Instead, all my money goes to spells, which are far more expensive.
Check out the description on Haste. If it sounds insanely powerful to you, be assured that you are completely correct.
The way this works is that every level of spells has four spells in total, but your mage can only know three at a time, so you have to leave one out. Usually there are clear picks, though, as well as wasted level where you don't care about any of these. Here, Blizzara is a straightforward "all enemies take ice damage" spell, Haste buffs one character (usually Yda) by doubling their number of attacks and therefore their damage, and Confuse and Sleepna probably do something but I have never used them so who knows.
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.
My third run through Marsh Cave is the one where I finally succeed. Having already looted the place, I beeline for the last room, where I find a chest surrounded by statues. I open it aaaaand
This screenshot is from a later encounter against the same opponents. I had a lot less HP the first time around.
I am jumped by four mind flayers dealing 80+ damage per hit without having fully healed my party and I fucking wipe, again.
The surprise was kind of funny in an awful way, and after reloading and prepping correctly, I take them out without much trouble. Weirdly enough they have no fancy tricks, they just hit really hard with normal attacks, no psychic blasts or anything like that. A Hasted Yda cuts through them like chaff while Alphinaud keeps everybody topped up.
Once defeated, the chest reveals the expected item - the crown!
This is where I realize another of FF1's archaism in its dungeon design: modern RPG dungeons typically end by dropping you outside the dungeon. Whether there is a story cutscene, a convenient teleport screen, or just a Dark Souls style shortcut, once you killed the boss, you're out.
Not so FF1. You have to go back the entire way with whatever resources you have left after the big showdown, facing all the normal random encounters. And in Marsh Cave, that means poison.
Nonetheless I still make it. I rest up in a tent on the overworld, then I head back to the ruined castle of the cursed king.
I kind of… liked this?
There were several irritating aspects to Cave Marsh, and I wouldn't want this to be my sole experience of the game. But the feeling of a dungeon being too much to handle in one go, so you effectively prep and go on expeditions, each time exploring a little further and looting more of the stuff, then going back to spend your hard-earned gold in town, resupply, and go back, until you've taken everything you could and worked out a most optimal route to your final objective…
It was fun. I enjoyed it. And I felt genuinely challenged.
Anyway, back to the castle.
Snazzy place.
At this point, given that I have no lead on Astos and the cave lacked a 'proper' boss, I'm strongly suspecting this guy isn't on the up and up, so I make sure to be at full resources before talking to him.
And wouldn't you know it:
The King reveals his true identity as Astos, King of the Dark Elves. He needed the crown to… do something… with Matoya's Crystal Eye, and then he will be unstoppable.
Unfortunately, that idiot doesn't actually wait for me to give him the crown before revealing his true form, so he has to fight us.
You're one ugly motherfucker.
I'm actually curious as to what his status as "king of the dark elves" actually means. I have not encountered any other dark elf yet, he lives alone in his ruined castle, and his fucked up appearance makes me wonder if FF1's take on 'dark elves' might not be closer to 'evil fairies' than to D&D drow.
Either way, I am pretty excited about my first boss battle since Garland, a dozen levels ago. Astos pulls out the big hitters, with party-wide damaging and debuff spells like Thundaga and Dark, hitting everyone with lightning damage and blindness.
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.
Wow.
I mean I knew the Monk was a beast but… wow.
She punched him so hard he disintegrated.
Well, the good news is, now that he's dead, I can take the crystal eye and bring it back to Matoya! She receives it and…
Okay, rude.
Her disappointment at Yda's appearance aside, she rewards me by giving me her 'most powerful potion,' the jolt tonic, which is described as being able to wake anyone up.
What's interesting is that I am obviously meant to take this can of Monster to the sleeping prince of Elfheim, but the game does not make that connection in the narrative. Despite Matoya, Astos and the Prince all being part of the same tangle of events, Matoya does not appear aware of the prince's condition, and gives me the energy drink as a reward just because it's what she has on shelf. It falls then to me to make the (easy) connection to the prince and bring the Red Bull to him. This is not a huge issue or anything, but it's closer to the logic of a Zelda trading chain than a modern quest progression.
Once awakened, the Prince thanks me and gives me the Mystic Key, which opens a whole lot of doors I've been encountering in the game so far which told me they were "locked by the mystic key."
Naturally, the first thing I do with it is loot the royal inventories.
At this stage, I don't have any clear directions on what to do next, but I also have a whole chunk of map left to explore. So what I do is backtrack to every previous location in the game that could be opened by the Mystic Key. These are in the starting town of Cornelia, the starting dungeon Chaos Shrine, and… sigh… Marsh Cave.
Doing so nets me some really good loot, but is also time intensive. The Marsh Cave doors also surprise me with some seriousface monster encounters protecting said loot. Most of all though, it's… irritating, because this is where the old school random encounter design shows its weakness: 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 efforts are rewarded, though, when I open the mystic doors in the Cornelia royal palace and find…
This is a "key item," tied to a quest. Unfortunately, I accidentally sequence-skipped the part where someone told me I needed to go looking for it by doing things out of order. It doesn't get in the way of my game progression but it does make the plot feel a little weird shortly after.
With all this shiny new loot acquired, I take my boat and set off to explore the west part of the continent. I quickly stumble across a mountain city full of dwarves.
Oh so that's where that's from!
This is where things get weird; I was clearly supposed to meet the dwarves and have one of them request I acquire some explosives from the Cornelia ammunition stores, but I skipped that part, so when I talk to one of these funky little dudes he thanks me for helping out and immediately blows up a chunk of the map.
No, seriously. There was a chunk of land there.
This is huge, because it opens up the inner sea to the outer sea, meaning I can take my ship and explore the rest of the world! It also probably has dramatic economic and ecological repercussions that will cascade in unpredictable way for the next decades!
I do this and immediately land in a new town, which has seen better days.
The intro mentioned that "the earth decays" as part of the ongoing apocalypse, and this appears to be where this manifests the most strongly. The town is in ruin, stone eroded, soil barren, buildings barely able to stand together. It's an interesting way of portraying an earth-themed apocalypse I don't think I've seen before. The people there ask me to help; according to them, an evil vampire has set himself up in a nearby cave, and is somehow draining the earth's energy. So after restocking on stuff and buying some new cool spells, I head out.
This is every cave-themed dungeon for the next thirty years of isometric gaming history, right there. The original mold.
Marsh Cave had poison. The Cavern of Earth has petrification, which is worse. A petrified character is effectively KO, but can't be resurrected. Their only hope is a Gold Needle to turn them back to flesh, and they are otherwise literal dead weight in your party. Fortunately enemies that can petrify are much rarer than poisonous enemies were in Cave Marsh, so I can make it through mostly fine. Also, like…
I have significantly more firepower than I used to.
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.
The vampire doesn't have a name; he's literally just "Vampire," and he has a short, but neat villain speech about how "mortals cannot kill the undying."
Kind of an underwhelming sprite, tbh.
This guy fares even worse than Astos.
He fails his opening Gaze attack, and then he dies on turn 1. Just annihilated by a combination Diaga/Ydapunch. Just absolutely destroyed.
Killing him nets me a "ruby star," but unfortunately fails to heal the earth. There is a stone slab at the end of the vampire's hidden lair, and I cannot interact with it. "The stone seal cannot be broken" was one of his lines - so, presumably, I'll have to come back later.
Ominous!
And on this, that's a good point to end it today, I think.
Last edited:
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
I see the remake renamed the spells. I always thing of the FF games as having the classic Fire/Fira/Firaga/(Firaja) structure, but for the first few it was just Fire 1, Fire 2, etc. which baffled me when I played FF3, since those spell names were so iconic.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
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.
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.
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
Yda: "Astos? Mo' like yo' ass is toast!"
… Look, 8-Bit Theater is immensely quotable, okay?
cB557
voOOP
There's also the option of just recording the entire session and taking frames from that.
- Pronouns
- He
Just like everywhere else in a few years, thanks to you!
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
In the French localization, the convention for spell increases is "Fire," "Fire+," and "Fire-X," which worked a lot better before the App Era made these names retroactively very funny. "Hey, have you renewed your monthly subscription to Thunder+? I can't access it and I'm fighting a bunch of fish!"
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's also the kind of line Yda would have proudly trotted out.
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.)
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Do eeeeeet. I will endlessly shill for FFT. Firstly, the score is outstanding and a premiere example of game soundtracks that make effective use of leitmotifs in their scoring, and also an early example of being a close to actual orchestral score even if they used MIDI. Secondly, the class system and combat works really well to give you interesting choices even if your late game stuff can let you easily steamroll basically everything. Thirdly, the story is basically PS1 era game of thrones with plenty of politicking and backstabbing. Great times.
Did I mention the score? It's really fucking good.
I warned you lol
FF is super mean with its treasure chest monsters and the mind flayers are a "fun" surprise for 1st time players.
Hey, at least spells scale with INT now
Adding that even though I know nothing about final fantasy I am so down to see you play them, because I know for a fact I will never be able to do it myself with my shitty attention span.
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
Complete novice question: I'm playing through FF1 PR myself (on mobile Android, for portability), and I was wondering about your setup.
As you mentioned, grinding is pretty much mandatory, if made much easier with the Pixel Remaster improvements. However, I'm at a loss on how to make the mages useful during these grinding sessions.
I'm running a "traditional" party setup, Warrior Thief WHM BLM (named, of course, Ardbert, RendaRae, Lamitt, and Nyelbert). Warrior and Thief can obviously fight as per normal, but the WHM and BLM are (understandably) terrible at physical attacks, and they don't really have enough spell slots to use attack spells before running out after only a few fights.
In your grinding, are you using spells and accepting that the spell slot resources will run out very quickly? Or are you accepting that the mages will become essentially dead weight when they're not using spells, and relying on the physical attackers (I assume RDM Alisaie has a decent physical attack)?
As you mentioned, grinding is pretty much mandatory, if made much easier with the Pixel Remaster improvements. However, I'm at a loss on how to make the mages useful during these grinding sessions.
I'm running a "traditional" party setup, Warrior Thief WHM BLM (named, of course, Ardbert, RendaRae, Lamitt, and Nyelbert). Warrior and Thief can obviously fight as per normal, but the WHM and BLM are (understandably) terrible at physical attacks, and they don't really have enough spell slots to use attack spells before running out after only a few fights.
In your grinding, are you using spells and accepting that the spell slot resources will run out very quickly? Or are you accepting that the mages will become essentially dead weight when they're not using spells, and relying on the physical attackers (I assume RDM Alisaie has a decent physical attack)?
You just have to buy tents or ethers pretty much, maxing out on basic Potions since they're cheap to use to heal after battle instead of magic is also smart. Mages get a lot more lower level slots eventually and that helps.
Skipping fights when not grinding also makes things faster, you don't need every piece of EXP.
Skipping fights when not grinding also makes things faster, you don't need every piece of EXP.
- Location
- Columbus, OH
That's because these aren't mindflayers. They're piscodemons using the same sprite. More confusingly, they were named WIZARD in the NES version, which seems to be a localization error. This is one of the many places that FF1 shows its roots in Dungeons & Dragons.
The original D&D piscodaemon has the feet of a hawk, the body and claws of a lobster, and a head with many long, thin mouth-tentacles. It was literally a demon from the lower planes, but it had few tricks, just a strong physical attack that could grapple, leading to a deadly poisonous bite. It was one of several creatures that somehow never made it into later monster manuals, however a similar creature called a "chuul" was introduced as a servant race created by the mighty aboleths.
Oddly enough the name 'piscodemon' or 'piscodaemon' continues to show up in later games, at least as late as FF14, but as either a mindflayer variant or a spellcaster instead of as a D&D piscodaemon.
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sadly I have no miracle solution for this. At the earliest levels, I saved spells for encounters that seemed like they would be particularly tough or long to get through while grinding. Eventually it stopped being so much of a problem for BLM and RDM - soon enough you start having a lot of lv 1 and lv 2 spells for grinding random encounters, and it becomes more about saving the screen-wide damage spells for encounters with 6+ opponents.
WHM is just kind of sadface the whole time though. They mostly just bonk people with a hammer and heal others periodically. Best I can suggest is remember the Dia chain and favor places with undead so White Mage can still do some DPS.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A good thing about FF1's grinding is that most of it can be done within spitting distance of a rest stop. Whenever you get to a new area, you can basically run circles in the fields outside the town there and run into level appropriate enemies. Go nuclear for a few fights, run to the inn when you're hurt/tired, sleep, dream, go back outside and resume the murder. For the longer dungeons, later in the game you'll have enough cash to stockpile a bunch of tents and other resources so you can camp outside the entrance and muck about in the upper levels of the dungeon itself without having to go all the way back to a town. Later still when you unlock the airship you'll be able to do your fighting virtually anywhere and then fly back to starter town Corneria in a mere few seconds to sleep at the cheapest inn.
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Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Fun fact: in the original NES english release, they changed that to Here Lies Erdrick, the hero from Dragon Quest's backstory... because Square was so small at the time that the US release was published by Nintendo, who didn't like the diss
- Location
- France
The real news in this post is that Omicron has alerts activated for whenever he gets a like. That's... Sort of insane, considering his like counts on his main stories. Didn't your alerts just explode whenever you posted a new Number None chapter?
Does it change the random encounter table on the inner sea? Or does this game not have naval random encounters?
Likes are summarized for single posts, so it's not as bad as that.
Also I didn't realize until you posted that anyone didn't have alerts for Likes enabled. Or for that matter that the option existed.
- Location
- France
They get summarised for single posts, but only after a certain threshold is reached. And if you go look at your alerts for any other reason, the threshold restarts and you get bombarded with another bunch of alerts.
Tbh I get annoyed by it when I dare to make a funny post in a big thread, I can't believe Omicron has browser alerts active despite writing big fics himself.
I suppose it just depends on what you find annoying; I have <checks> a reaction count about 4/5ths of theirs (199,694 as compared to 240,726) but it doesn't bother me.
Also, wow but those numbers are high, I don't think I ever really looked at them before. Off by at least an order of magnitude over what I would have guessed without looking. A like here and there really adds up over ~eight years I guess.
Final Fantasy I, Part 3: The Fiends of Earth and Fire
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Last time on Final Fantasy, we killed a vampire and failed to save the earth. But I'm feeling good about second shots!
I was expecting the Cavern of Earth's mystery slab to be something looming in the background and resolved later, but actually it's dealt with very quickly. Having rested in town, we head for another cave north of the CoE, where we meet a stone giant.
This guy is apparently a big rock lover, in that he eats them, and the shinier the jewel, the more he likes it. He's currently blocking the way forward, but once gifted the star ruby, he promptly munches on it and then leaves the room, allowing us to pass through to a small new area.
Past some more mountains and grasslands, we find another cave, but this one turns out to not be a dungeon but the abode of the sage Saddia.
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.
So I go back into the Earth Cave, fight my way past the first couple of levels, reach the vampire boss room, and interact with the stone slab, and the rod's nature power breaks whatever evil is protecting it, allowing me to pass into the next levels of the dungeon.
Since they follow so directly after the first, these levels are not noticeably more difficult.
What the fuck is a "hyenadon" though.
The Ogre Mage in the above picture is going to be a recurring opponent and can honestly be kind of dangerous, as they eat like an ogre but can also cast Sleep on your whole party.
Quickly enough, we reach the final room of the dungeon, and find ourself in front of the "Earth Crystal," whose exact nature and function is unclear but which, from what I have gathered so far, produces the "earth energy" that allows the element of Earth to function properly, and which a monster has been feeding on for its own power. There's a weird orb in front of it and, being not an idiot, I save before interacting with it. And wouldn't you know it - it reveals its true form as…
The Lich, the "Fiend of Earth."
His battle sprite is pretty dope too:
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.
You may notice in the above picture that my characters are already injured as the fight starts. This is because I'm a very smart boy, and while I remembered to quicksave, I did not remember to heal and refuel my party before starting this fight.
The direct result of this is that the Lich hands me my ass on a sliver platter with his powerful spells and vast amounts of HP. He truly is a significant step up from the Vampire. He can cast Slow on the party, reducing their number of attacks, he can cast Sleep and Hold, and he has party-wide damaging attacks. The result of this is that the broken action economy keeps me from keeping up my efficient "stack layered buffs on the MNK and RDM and own him with incredible DPS" because at least one member of my party spends each turn disabled.
Here, you can see that despite my party being topped up and buffed (the RDM is both invisible and Tempered), my two physical hitters are disabled, one by paralysis, the other by sleep.
Eventually though on my second try, thanks to healing and having recently gained the ability to finally raise KO characters in-battle, I defeat the Lich.
You can see from these HP numbers that pulling this off with the whole party alive came close to the wire.
This heroic victory allows the Warriors of Light to bring power back to the Earth Crystal, ending the decay of earth, soil and stone!
Then it's only a quick trek back to Melmond, the nearby town.
And then I have no idea where to go!
Talking to the people around town doesn't help; they tell me to "restore the crystals to grace," a line repeated often enough it's starting to sound vaguely creepy. So I do what I do when I have no clue, I go talk to the Dancing Girl in Cornelia, who is there as an advice dispenser to give clues about where to go next.
SHE DOESN'T KNOW WHERE TO GO NEXT EITHER
Wait, hold up. Is this a White Mage avatar in the picture above?
Yeah I uh.
At some point in the menu I did a command press that changed which of the PCs is the "front" character and I have no idea how to change it back.
Thankfully, there is a very easy solution to the issue of not knowing where to go: just go somewhere. Literally just take your ship and go to some portion of the map you haven't explored yet. This is mildly annoying because of the unavoidable random encounter with hopelessly outmatched Sahagins, but otherwise is a fine solution to being lost.
So I head west to a new chunk of the map and, what do you know, I stumble upon a new town!
This is Crescent Lake, a town located within, well, a crescent-shaped lake. At first it's disappointing: the town has the traditional store but they sell no new item except for lv 6 spells, which do more to make me mad than anything:
I want, I need this spell so, so badly, and I can't have it, because none of my characters can learn it.
There are only two "townsfolk" NPCs to talk to either, one of whom is sleeping.
But then!
I notice a path off to the right!
A circle of weird old bearded dudes!
These are apparently the "twelve sages," and they're here to deliver exposition. They reveal that there are four Fiends, one for which elements, prophesied to wake up one every 200 years. The Fiend of Wind awoke 400 years ago, the Fiend of Water 200 years ago, and the Fiend of Earth only very recently - but by killing it, I accidentally caused the early awakening of the Fiend of Fire who was only to wake up 200 years in the future, so now I have to go solve the issue.
By killing it.
In order to do that, they give me my next transport upgrade - the canoe, which allows me to travel river currents that the ship is too big to go through.
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.
Row, row your boat, gently down the stream…
The river itself is filled with surprisingly tough encounters, like crocodiles that can tank a full round of hits, or hydras that inexplicably come in packs, or "piranhas" that are tougher than Garland himself. I mean, I know that's just how RPGs work, but it's kind of funny here because most of the enemies are still ostensibly animals rather than supernatural creatures.
With the canoe, my new job is to navigate the river currents in order to find Mount Gulg, an active volcano where dwells the Fiend of Fire. Thankfully I have the minimap to help me find my way, although it's tiny enough that which streams connect to which is ambiguous, and-
WHAT THE FUCK WHERE DID THIS COME FROM
I did an accidental button press and a map screen I have literally never seen before showed up???
This is a way higher definition worldmap than anything I've seen! It shows the precise spread of each terrain type in the game and shows you which areas are walkable to and from each other! This is an invaluable resource that I somehow only discovered six hours into the game!
And all I had to do was press "A." I'm an idiot.
Well, anyway, here's Mount Gulg.
Look closely at this interior picture of the first room in the dungeon.
Is there something in particular you are noticing?
That's right.
The only way forward is to cross through the lava.
Dooming any potential for a hypothetical no-damage run, Mount Gulg's chief gimmick isn't a new type of status effect, it's 1) Element-typed enemies (so your fire spells are useless and your ice spells are much more effective, hope you bought that Blizzaga for both casters), 2) The Floor Is Literally Lava. Crossing the lava deals 1 damage per step to your entire party. This is poison on steroids: there's no status effect cure for literally walking on boiling rock.
It's also by far the best part of the dungeon.
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.
This results in Mount Gulg's 5 levels feeling a lot breezier than the Earth Cavern. They're also very pleasantly designed. Each level is geometrical, the second level is actually only one corridor and an optional maze with a ton of loot at the end (which I assume was significantly more annoying when the minimap didn't give you a full overview of the maze's layout), and soon enough, I am facing the boss.
"Marilith"? Oh, no. She's going to be hot, isn't she?
Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy-
Mommy proves to be a significant step up over even the Lich. Her vast physical resilience means that even my double-buffed Monk and Red Mage only hit her for the normal amount of damage they'd do to a normal enemy unbuffed, and she has significantly more HP. She's also not actually vulnerable to ice magic; she just doesn't have the special resistance to it she has to Fire and Lightning, so ice spells don't hit her all that hard. She has three spells - Fira, which hits everybody for fire damage, Dark, which blinds a chunk of the party, and Hold, which paralyzes a single player. She also hits extremely hard with her physical attacks, which are her primary source of damage.
I've also exhausted my supply of aether going through the dungeon, so I don't even have all my spells available, restricting my options. Mommy wipes my party her a couple of times as a result; my buff strategy runs into the problem that when a character, say the monk, dies, then gets rezzed, they don't have their buffs anymore, so a lot of actions that went into supporting them were basically wasted time.
Thankfully, in the previous town I acquired Protera, which raises the defense of the whole party, and Invisira, which makes everyone invisible, increasing their evasion. With this combo and judicious management of healing spells, I manage to keep the whole party mostly alive long enough for Yda, Alisaie and Papalymo to sloooowly wear through her defenses, and eventually defeat her.
As you can see, this was a pretty scuffed run, and even Alisaie had to spend a lot of time healing. A single blow from Marilith might have killed any of the other three on that turn.
And with this, the Fiend of Fire is defeated! Two down, two to go!
I was expecting the Cavern of Earth's mystery slab to be something looming in the background and resolved later, but actually it's dealt with very quickly. Having rested in town, we head for another cave north of the CoE, where we meet a stone giant.
This guy is apparently a big rock lover, in that he eats them, and the shinier the jewel, the more he likes it. He's currently blocking the way forward, but once gifted the star ruby, he promptly munches on it and then leaves the room, allowing us to pass through to a small new area.
Past some more mountains and grasslands, we find another cave, but this one turns out to not be a dungeon but the abode of the sage Saddia.
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.
So I go back into the Earth Cave, fight my way past the first couple of levels, reach the vampire boss room, and interact with the stone slab, and the rod's nature power breaks whatever evil is protecting it, allowing me to pass into the next levels of the dungeon.
Since they follow so directly after the first, these levels are not noticeably more difficult.
What the fuck is a "hyenadon" though.
The Ogre Mage in the above picture is going to be a recurring opponent and can honestly be kind of dangerous, as they eat like an ogre but can also cast Sleep on your whole party.
Quickly enough, we reach the final room of the dungeon, and find ourself in front of the "Earth Crystal," whose exact nature and function is unclear but which, from what I have gathered so far, produces the "earth energy" that allows the element of Earth to function properly, and which a monster has been feeding on for its own power. There's a weird orb in front of it and, being not an idiot, I save before interacting with it. And wouldn't you know it - it reveals its true form as…
The Lich, the "Fiend of Earth."
His battle sprite is pretty dope too:
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.
You may notice in the above picture that my characters are already injured as the fight starts. This is because I'm a very smart boy, and while I remembered to quicksave, I did not remember to heal and refuel my party before starting this fight.
The direct result of this is that the Lich hands me my ass on a sliver platter with his powerful spells and vast amounts of HP. He truly is a significant step up from the Vampire. He can cast Slow on the party, reducing their number of attacks, he can cast Sleep and Hold, and he has party-wide damaging attacks. The result of this is that the broken action economy keeps me from keeping up my efficient "stack layered buffs on the MNK and RDM and own him with incredible DPS" because at least one member of my party spends each turn disabled.
Here, you can see that despite my party being topped up and buffed (the RDM is both invisible and Tempered), my two physical hitters are disabled, one by paralysis, the other by sleep.
Eventually though on my second try, thanks to healing and having recently gained the ability to finally raise KO characters in-battle, I defeat the Lich.
You can see from these HP numbers that pulling this off with the whole party alive came close to the wire.
This heroic victory allows the Warriors of Light to bring power back to the Earth Crystal, ending the decay of earth, soil and stone!
Then it's only a quick trek back to Melmond, the nearby town.
And then I have no idea where to go!
Talking to the people around town doesn't help; they tell me to "restore the crystals to grace," a line repeated often enough it's starting to sound vaguely creepy. So I do what I do when I have no clue, I go talk to the Dancing Girl in Cornelia, who is there as an advice dispenser to give clues about where to go next.
SHE DOESN'T KNOW WHERE TO GO NEXT EITHER
Wait, hold up. Is this a White Mage avatar in the picture above?
Yeah I uh.
At some point in the menu I did a command press that changed which of the PCs is the "front" character and I have no idea how to change it back.
Thankfully, there is a very easy solution to the issue of not knowing where to go: just go somewhere. Literally just take your ship and go to some portion of the map you haven't explored yet. This is mildly annoying because of the unavoidable random encounter with hopelessly outmatched Sahagins, but otherwise is a fine solution to being lost.
So I head west to a new chunk of the map and, what do you know, I stumble upon a new town!
This is Crescent Lake, a town located within, well, a crescent-shaped lake. At first it's disappointing: the town has the traditional store but they sell no new item except for lv 6 spells, which do more to make me mad than anything:
I want, I need this spell so, so badly, and I can't have it, because none of my characters can learn it.
There are only two "townsfolk" NPCs to talk to either, one of whom is sleeping.
But then!
I notice a path off to the right!
A circle of weird old bearded dudes!
These are apparently the "twelve sages," and they're here to deliver exposition. They reveal that there are four Fiends, one for which elements, prophesied to wake up one every 200 years. The Fiend of Wind awoke 400 years ago, the Fiend of Water 200 years ago, and the Fiend of Earth only very recently - but by killing it, I accidentally caused the early awakening of the Fiend of Fire who was only to wake up 200 years in the future, so now I have to go solve the issue.
By killing it.
In order to do that, they give me my next transport upgrade - the canoe, which allows me to travel river currents that the ship is too big to go through.
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.
Row, row your boat, gently down the stream…
The river itself is filled with surprisingly tough encounters, like crocodiles that can tank a full round of hits, or hydras that inexplicably come in packs, or "piranhas" that are tougher than Garland himself. I mean, I know that's just how RPGs work, but it's kind of funny here because most of the enemies are still ostensibly animals rather than supernatural creatures.
With the canoe, my new job is to navigate the river currents in order to find Mount Gulg, an active volcano where dwells the Fiend of Fire. Thankfully I have the minimap to help me find my way, although it's tiny enough that which streams connect to which is ambiguous, and-
WHAT THE FUCK WHERE DID THIS COME FROM
I did an accidental button press and a map screen I have literally never seen before showed up???
This is a way higher definition worldmap than anything I've seen! It shows the precise spread of each terrain type in the game and shows you which areas are walkable to and from each other! This is an invaluable resource that I somehow only discovered six hours into the game!
And all I had to do was press "A." I'm an idiot.
Well, anyway, here's Mount Gulg.
Look closely at this interior picture of the first room in the dungeon.
Is there something in particular you are noticing?
That's right.
The only way forward is to cross through the lava.
Dooming any potential for a hypothetical no-damage run, Mount Gulg's chief gimmick isn't a new type of status effect, it's 1) Element-typed enemies (so your fire spells are useless and your ice spells are much more effective, hope you bought that Blizzaga for both casters), 2) The Floor Is Literally Lava. Crossing the lava deals 1 damage per step to your entire party. This is poison on steroids: there's no status effect cure for literally walking on boiling rock.
It's also by far the best part of the dungeon.
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.
This results in Mount Gulg's 5 levels feeling a lot breezier than the Earth Cavern. They're also very pleasantly designed. Each level is geometrical, the second level is actually only one corridor and an optional maze with a ton of loot at the end (which I assume was significantly more annoying when the minimap didn't give you a full overview of the maze's layout), and soon enough, I am facing the boss.
"Marilith"? Oh, no. She's going to be hot, isn't she?
Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy-
Mommy proves to be a significant step up over even the Lich. Her vast physical resilience means that even my double-buffed Monk and Red Mage only hit her for the normal amount of damage they'd do to a normal enemy unbuffed, and she has significantly more HP. She's also not actually vulnerable to ice magic; she just doesn't have the special resistance to it she has to Fire and Lightning, so ice spells don't hit her all that hard. She has three spells - Fira, which hits everybody for fire damage, Dark, which blinds a chunk of the party, and Hold, which paralyzes a single player. She also hits extremely hard with her physical attacks, which are her primary source of damage.
I've also exhausted my supply of aether going through the dungeon, so I don't even have all my spells available, restricting my options. Mommy wipes my party her a couple of times as a result; my buff strategy runs into the problem that when a character, say the monk, dies, then gets rezzed, they don't have their buffs anymore, so a lot of actions that went into supporting them were basically wasted time.
Thankfully, in the previous town I acquired Protera, which raises the defense of the whole party, and Invisira, which makes everyone invisible, increasing their evasion. With this combo and judicious management of healing spells, I manage to keep the whole party mostly alive long enough for Yda, Alisaie and Papalymo to sloooowly wear through her defenses, and eventually defeat her.
As you can see, this was a pretty scuffed run, and even Alisaie had to spend a lot of time healing. A single blow from Marilith might have killed any of the other three on that turn.
And with this, the Fiend of Fire is defeated! Two down, two to go!
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- Location
- Not the asylum anymore
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, of course she's hot. Fiend of Fire, after all."Marilith"? Oh, no. She's going to be hot, isn't she?
Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy? Sorry. Mommy-
It's to hyena what myrmidon is to myrmi, obviously.