Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]

Omicron · Aug 10, 2022

There was a point in my life where I considered myself a Final Fantasy fan, because I enjoyed playing every game in that series. Eventually, I looked back and thought this wasn't right, because while I had played some of every mainline Final Fantasy game ever released, I had never finished a single one. Not one!

I've always vaguely meant to go back and do a full replay of the series, but also that's a huge endeavour, so I just put it off indefinitely and likely would never have done so.

But now someone actually gifted me the entire Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remaster bundle, catching me in a deadly trap. With about a dozen other games I meant to play, it is therefore time to procrastinate on all of that and instead begin playing:

Every Final Fantasy Game In Chronological Order

Hopefully I don't get bored and wander off halfway through the ones nobody ever talks about. Like FF2. Or FF3. Or FF5-

Anyway!

Starting with the original Final Fantasy!

Oh yeah baby, that's the nostalgia- wait something is wrong.

Yeah, that's better.

I first played Final Fantasy: Dawn of Souls when it was released on Game Boy Advance. My memory of it is that it was kind of… eeeh? A hugely important piece of video game history for sure, but far outstripped by its successors. The specific reason I stopped playing, as I recall, was getting lost with no idea where to go next on the overworld and wandering off to play FF2 instead, since Dawn of Souls was a bundle.

So I'm interested in going the distance this time with the critical eye I did not have as a fourteen-year old.

With these expectations appropriately set, let's dive in!

My starting party. I realize the sprites were probably designed with a specific gender in mind, but they're low-poly enough that it's impossible to really tell, so this monk is a girl and this white mage is a guy.

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.

Also Red Mage is my favorite 8-bit theatre character.

An icon.

The fact that you pick your party offers replayability over several playthroughs, but also comes with one implication: the player characters aren't actually characters, being interchangeable, voiceless, nameless avatar of the player's tactical decisions. Not necessarily remarkable in the grand scheme of things, but notable for Final Fantasy, a series whose character writing has always been highlighted as one of its most important aspects.

The game opens on a very sparse, yet suitably ominous cutscene telling us that the world is proper fucked, all the elements being out of alignment. Luckily, a prophecy says the Warriors of Light will come bearing crystals and save the world.

That's us!

The game opens up with your avatar (the topmost player character in the roster) appearing on the overworld map, right next to a town/castle. You are at this point given no indication what to do, but moving in nearly any direction causes you to enter the town proper, Cornelia, the Platonic Ideal of a Starting City. You immediately bump into a guard who takes you to see the king, who is like "oooh the warriors of the prophecy!" and asks you to go save his daughter from Garland, once a revered knight and best swordsman in the kingdom, who has turned evil for unspecificed reasons. If you save her, the king says, he will have the bridge upnorth rebuil to allow you to continue your quest.

Honestly it feels like he should have that bridge rebuilt for the sake of basic transportation and commerce, but the world is ending, so that's probably low on the priority list.

So after talking to everyone (this is done fairly quickly, there are few NPCs and their dialogue is extremely limited) I head out towards the Shrine of Chaos. On the way I defeat some goblins and wolves, get a couple of levels. I reach the game's very first dungeon, and begin exploring.

I instantly run into a werewolf and get team-wiped.

Grinding. I had forgotten grinding was a thing.

So after reloading, I spend a few minutes running around the grasslands and forests of the starting kingdom, fighting a bevvy of sprites, gaining levels and eventually enough money to upgrade some of my equipment. This is shockingly faster than I anticipated; my childhood memories are of hours spent grinding in most games, but this is done in twenty minutes.

The key thing is that battles are lightning-fast, rarely lasting more than three rounds, and with very simple and quick (if still impactful) animations.

Eventually, I make it back to the shrine, wipe out all in my path, leave to rest outside with a tent, then head back in to confront Garland.

Iconic line.

Garland cuts an intimidating figure, but as the first boss in the game, he isn't too much of a problem and quickly goes down.

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.

SHUT UP YOU'RE NOT MY MOM I DO WHAT I WANT

Anyway Garland is down, the princess is saved, and the king has the bridge rebuilt.

It's cute that this game actually has animated cutscenes given its limited sprite budget.

With the bridge rebuilt, I am free to roam further, fight new beasts, and rob a blind old woman.

No, I'm serious. One of the first places I find is Matoya's Cave; Matoya is an old witch who lives with her singing and dancing brooms. She's lost her "crystal eye," and is just stumbling blindly about her cave. So what do I do? I open every chest in her cave and leave without a word.

The heroes of the prophecy, everybody.

It's actually funny seeing the very first implementation of concepts that will be re-utilized much later; the Matoya I'm familiar with is from FF14, where she is also a cranky old witch living alone in a cave with her singing brooms, although she is a much more significant character with ties to the main plot of the game as well as a desperate attempt to give Y'shtola depth.

Eventually I reach the second town, [NAME], which has been taken over by pirates. I expected this to be a much more involved affair than it turned out to be: I literally just talk to a couple of townspeople, rest at the inn, buy some lv 2 spells, then go talk to a pirate NPC and it triggers the encounter.

"Cannon balls of steel." Hah.

This is the first time the game throws nine enemies at once at me, and I find this initially very intimidating due to the iron law of the Action Economy. I needn't haave worried; each individual pirate deals low damage and has low HP, so the whole group folds like paper and the pirate boss never enters the fray himself, but gives up the moment his men are down and promises to change his ways. He even offers me his ship! This overworld movement upgrade comes much faster than I expected.

So I take the ship and move around the map, exploring thee inner sea of the main continent, going back and forth between the two towns I have access to, exploring a little in land, until I find the third town, Elfheim. It's populated by, well, elves.

This town has a gravestone for "Link," no joke.

Their prince has been put into a magical sleep by the "king of dark elves," Astos, so I'm guessing that's my next side quest. I stock up on lv 3 spells (this progression is going much faster than I expected), head out, and just… wander around.

This game has very little signposting, is something I'd like to note. It just opens up the worldmap, and leaves you to figure it out. Sparse dialogue and it pre-dating any kind of 'quest log' means you're given very vague indication on what to do and how to go about doing it. In a sense, this gives the game a sense of freedom; it's also a bit confusing and makes it easy to not know what to do. In this case, I have no idea where Astos is, so I just wander about, going back to the town to rest when I fail to find anything and start getting low on resources.

FF1's combat system is… interesting and frustrating in equal measure. It has more complexity than I expected, despite very simple systems. Each character acts in turn and can either Attack (deal physical damage), use an item, or cast a spell. Spells either deal damage, heal HP, cast a buff, or cast a debuff. With that said, the difference in outcome between just hammering Fight to get through a trash mob encounter and actually approaching that encounter for optimal results is fairly significant over time, because even lowly overworld mobs drain resources at the level I'm at.

Using a spell is also a fraught proposal. FF1 calls its magic points 'MP', but they actually work like D&D spell slots: you have a number of slots for each level of spells you know, and they don't cross over. This means that even after burning through all your high level spells, you can still cast low-level spells; it also means these spells become increasingly weak as time goes on, and you can't upcast. If your White Mage has run out of lv 1 and lv 3 slots, which contain Cure and Cura, the healing spells, no amount of lv 2 slots will allow them to heal, because there are no healing spells at lv 2 - only buffs and debuffs. It can get annoying to deal with.

lookit the cute little thing.

A little more exploring leads me to what I initially assume is a dungeon, but is actually the ruined castle of another king cursed by Astos, who laments that if he had his crown, he could end his curse, and tells me it is in the Marsh Caves. With nothing better to do, I head southwards towards the extensive marshlands and, wouldn't you know it, there's a cave entrance there.

I go down there…

And instantly get my shit pushed in by a slime.

The face of death.

So, back to grinding, and a good point to end my first play session of the game with.

This game is breezy. I only have a couple of hours logged in so far; the game just goes at breakneck pace from new town to new town to new overworld movement, battles are extremely quick. Everything is fast and… I think for the better? In a different game that would be poor pacing, but FF1 doesn't have the writing chops yet to actually do a slow burn, so keeping things fun and light on their feet is the best approach, I think.

Having a surprisingly good time so far!

Omicron · Aug 11, 2022

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.

Omicron · Aug 14, 2022

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!

Omicron · Aug 18, 2022

A reminder that if you like my work and want to support it, or want to ensure I am trapped in my commitment to seeing this whole thing through by financial incentives, you can donate to my ko-fi or Patreon!

Last time on Final Fantasy, we slew the Fiend of Fire, Marilith!

With no clear direction on where to go next and the whole party injured, we do the sensible thing and go back to Crescent Lake. This turns out to be the right move as, after replenishing supplies (I bought thirty Ethers, most important item in the game, I honestly should have shelled for a full 99), it turns out one of the townsfolk NPCs, who was previously sleeping, is now awake and telling me about his search for the "levistone."

Not one to leave a man to hang dry while the opportunity to steal his lifelong dream from him is right there, I follow his directions to an ice cave to the north which is the latest location he's tracked the "levistone" to.

This requires a lot of navigating rivers and I'm starting to realize the Pixel Remaster has a massive difference from the NES original: going from the level design alone there are many screens, both in dungeons and in the overworld, that require navigation. Plenty of dungeon corridors terminate in dead ends. Rivers run through impassable mountains and ford into streams and only one of them will lead you to your objective. If you go by the screen alone, this can actually get tricky, cause you to waste time, get lost, and bump into more random encounters than your resources can comfortably allow.

But the Pixel Remaster has a minimap and a full world map, which turns into a floor map when in dungeons. It's right there in the corner of the screen and it gives you an extended view of the environment. You can always pick the most efficient route to get to anywhere. So there's an entire level of gameplay that has just vanished in the name of quality-of-life improvements.

Is that… bad? I don't know.

I could just decide to turn off the minimap and not consult the map, and work my way through the game the old-fashioned way. But I don't want to. The game is fun as it is, but combat encounters aren't interesting enough for me to play in a way where the primary mechanical change is going to be how many I have to fight through as I figure out where to go. Would it be a dealbreaker if the choice was taken from me and the game just didn't include a map? Would it be more fun in the end? I don't think so. But it's something to think about.

Anyway, we make our way to the Ice Cave!

Chilly.

The ice cave offers two environmental challenges. One is that some stretches of the dungeon are covered in ice spikes, which function as Mount Gulg's lava, doing damage when you walk on them (I am guessing the game was too early to implement a "slide" mechanic like later ice dungeons in many games typically would). The other are cracks on the ground. If you step on a crack, you fall into a hole and land on the floor below. I manage not to find any crack until the final room with the levistone in it, which makes my disappointment immeasurable and my day ruined when I go for the loot and immediately fall back into the depths of the dungeon.

Interestingly, while I still haven't seen any "dark elves" in the narrative portion of the story and likely won't, these guys are using a downsized, palette-swapped model of Astos, their king.

Eventually I make my way back up and, as I reach for the levistone (which I forgot to take a screenshot of), I am instead confronted with this:

Spooky!

I don't know what this guy's about or why he's here, but my immediate thought on seeing him is, "uh, looks kind of like a beholder without the eyestalk." After all, so far, FF's bestiary has been lifted almost entirely from a D&D monster manual. Flying skulls are common as hell in fantasy, but I think it's the single huge eye that had me go 'Beholder.' I check that thing's wiki page, and, wouldn't you know it…

Incidentally a nice reminder that, while the character and enemy stripes remain the same only upscaled, the Pixel Remaster is a massive beautification of everything else in the game.

And it's "Beholder" in Japanese too; they changed the model and name in English releases for copyright reasons, which I find very amusing.

The Evil Eye has a bevvy of spells which include several instant kill ones. Unfortunately it has the HP of a standard enemy, not a dungeon boss, which means it goes down in a single hit from Yda without requiring any buffs.

Notice the cracks in the floor. Try not to step on them.

Now that I have the levistone, I can…

I can…

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.

Wiki time!

Okay I have to go into the desert south of Crescent Lake. I did find it odd that there was this patch of desert fully sealed in a circle of mountains with one entrance, but I went to explore it earlier and it was just normal desert; I would have no reason to go back there. Is it possible I missed an environmental hint or an NPC talking about some ancient legend related to that desert? Can't think of any. Maybe I was supposed to just wander around the map until I accidentally stumbled onto it, as some of the busywork stuff games like this ask you to do sometimes.

But thanks to the magic of the Internet, I head down there immediately, and as soon as I set foot inside the desert area, a cutscene plays out…

The party unfolds and raises the levistone…

The earth rumbles…

And the airship emerges!

Holy shit, I got the airship.

Oh wow that slanted view of the map so you can see that you're "up in the air" certainly is something. And the airship is fast. The whole world just zooms by underneath us as I start moving. But where do we go?

Anywhere we want, baby.

Spooky desert tower.

Mysterious new forest town.

Lost ancient castle in the middle of a marsh.

The sky is, quite literally, the limit.

Okay technically the ground is. I'll explain.

The feeling of freedom on obtaining the airship is kind of exhilarating. We can fly over any place we want. There are no random encounters in the sky; within minutes I can cover the entirety of the map, see every town, every landscape feature, every overworld dungeon. Nothing's hidden anymore.

However, emphasis on "fly over." I cannot actually land on anything that isn't grasslands (yes, even the desert tile we first found the airship in). This means that the need to fight your way through the overworld isn't gone entirely - you still have to find a patch of grassland and make your way to your destination on foot. But this means we can now access the norther hemisphere - those two continents up north don't have any docks, which means our ship couldn't get us there before. Kind of a lame ship if you ask me.

There are two towns in the northern continents, and the first one I head to proves… Intriguingly useless.

This antique-looking place full of people in robes and headbands seems interesting… Only problem is I don't speak their language. Every character I bump into in this city repeats the same line of meaningless syllables. From this repetition and the greyish, antique aspect of the town, my initial assumption is that I stumbled on some cursed forgotten city and its mad inhabitants, but a line of dialogue from another NPC later on refers to a city whose language cannot be deciphered without a Rosetta Stone, so I guess they're just staunch isolationists.

In a hilarious bit of ludonarrative dissonance, this town also has a magic shop tucked away far from the main body of the town, its vendors are perfectly functional and speak English, but they have no lines of dialogue other than selling you shit.

So, this having been a dud, it's time to head for the second town.

I like the random freestanding Greek columns as decoration.

Yeah, that line.

Onrac is close to the sea, and legend has it that the Shrine of Water used to be right there next to it, until it was swallowed by the sea - likely as a result of the Fiend of Water's influence. It is rumored that the sunken shrine is now populated by mermaids, and, well…

Let's just say there are some subtle hints that the town's female population is at least partly made up of Ariels who decided to try out life on the human side.

Going to the town docks reveals a barrel that someone has converted into a submersible, but the NPC refuses to allow me to use it on account of how it doesn't have an oxygen tank and so when she tried to use it, she nearly asphyxiated. I obviously need to find a way to fix that.

Next to her is an NPC who tells me he saw something shiny fall from the sky behind a nearby waterfall. A quick zip with the airship does reveal a waterfall in the overworld nearby. I put two and two together and conclude I will find an oxygen convertor of some kind in the waterfall dungeon, then use the submersible to dive to the Sunken Shrine and slay the Fiend of Water. Easy as Sunday mornin'.

However, before doing any of that, I bump into a rather interesting-looking NPC…

An actual fucking dragon, just hanging about town.

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.

This place.

Inside, we find yet another old dude with a robe and a hat, who tells us…

Baby, I started a thread promising to play through every single Final Fantasy game without even having finished the first. "Courage" doesn't even begin to describe it.

The old dude tells me to sit on the throne, and vanishes. I explore the floor, find a corner room with a throne on it, and as soon as I interact with it, light surrounds me, and…

Oh I get it, the trials thing was a scam and now I'm just gonna be locked in his serial killer basement.

But no, the door opens, and the Citadel of Trials' gimmick quickly becomes clear:

These glowy items are teleporters. Each room has at least two. One of them sends you to the room ahead, the other sends you back. There is one correct path forward, and the only way to figure it out is trial and error. As usual, your only limitations are your patience and how many random encounters you can sustain with your resources.

Enemies of the Citadel include gorgons and clay golems, and the loot include… A staff I can use for infinite healing?!?

"Four enemies who can petrify me" is one of the few encounters that could potentially cause me a run loss, so I don't intend to stick around more than I have to.

Those are some… interesting… designs.

This item is very strange, in that its special ability is in fact unusable while equipped; it's activated from your inventory. I have only used it in battle so far - it only struck me just now that I might actually have obtained infinite out-of-battle healing?

I get relatively lucky finding my way through the teleporter maze, and quickly find the final room, with the special relic that will prove my courage to the Dragon King…

I beg your pardon.

Interacting with the spooky robed figured protecting the throne triggers the boss fight against two dragon zombies. Like any encounter in which I can convert Alphinaud to anti-undead DPS, it's over pretty quickly.

With the rat's tail (am I missing a cultural reference from 80s Japan?), I head to a string of island between the two northern continents that has a number of suspicious holes in them. Interacting with each hole takes me into a dragon's lair.

They're a friendly bunch.

And in the very last of these lairs…

Check out those new sprites!

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.

There is, however, one problem with these new classes…

The sprites are wrong. Like, it's not just me, right? The game has so far had all the character sprites on a cute, kinda chibi-ish design, kinda squat and compressed and now they've been… stretched out? I can't actually tell if the sprites are taller than they were before, but they definitely feel like the characters grew three feet taller in their transformation, and that doesn't mesh with the visual style of the game. Look at Yda! She's triangular now! I appreciate Alphinaud's luscious cascade of red hair, but why did they have to take Papalymo's hat.

I'm not a fan.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHc3GV9V9b4
I incidentally recommend these videos by New Frame Plus on the animation of Final Fantasy games. Fingers crossed, I'll be done with the series before he is.

Also, it's interesting to me that - when so many other franchise-defining aspects have yet to show up - Bahamut is already there, in the first game, but… isn't a boss (or a summon, as those don't exist yet). In fact, he's an ally providing you with the biggest boon you can receive in the game. So he's still a huge deal! I find that interesting.

Anyroad, after my purchasing spree is over, what better way to test out my new strength than to go explore the waterfall?

The waterfall is unique, and conspicuous enough that you'd probably guess it's a location without hints.

The Waterfall Cavern proves the easiest dungeon so far. This is because it's much smaller (only one floor), I just got a huge power upgrade, and the "gimmick" to the extent that there is one, is that the dungeon is radial with many dead ends… But one look at the map lets you beeline for the correct room.

This is a pretty spooky encounter: the Cockatrices can petrify, the Pyrolisks can cause instant death, and the Mummies can put characters to sleep with their basic attacks. Unfortunately, my new Black Wizard can cast Flare, the ultimate damage spell in the game, wiping out the entire encounter in one move.

At the end of the dungeon, I bump into a friendly robot of mysterious origin, who gifts me…

Buh?

Okay so I completely misunderstood the inference of the dialogue lines about needing some source of oxygen for the bathysphere and the shiny thing falling from the sky. They're unrelated. This turns out to have been my hint for the path to the Air Shrine. Our robot friend here must have been the "shiny thing falling from the sky," cast down from the air shrine, which I assume is a flying city, hence needing the warp cube (despite having the airship?)

So I'm left with a mystery item, not sure how to find the oxygen-supplying item I need, and a cue as to how to get to the Fiend of Air. We'll see how I go about things next time around!

Thanks for reading!

Omicron · Aug 19, 2022

Alright, we're back!

Here's the situation: we have a warp stone. We do not know how to use the warp stone. We do not know where to find the Rosetta Stone. We do not know where to find the oxygen supply to reach the Sunken Shrine. We know, essentially, nothing.

Oh, uh, incidentally.

Booting up the game this time is the first time I remember there is an Extra entry in the menu, and within that Extra entry is…

…the Bestiary, which I somehow forgot about this entire time.

The fact that it's in the starting menu but not accessible in-game is a bit annoying! But this is neat information. Not sure how much use I have for it (the only info I really care about from a problem-solving perspective is bosses, and you only get their data after beating them, so…) but it's there and it's neat.

Without a clear objective, I wander about the overworld. Since the spooky desert tower is the last overworld place I haven't explored yet, I decide to head there, and…

…it's locked. I can't enter it. NPC dialogue reveals that this is the "mirage tower," and that people aren't able to enter it and have given it its name because they doubt it is "real."

Thankfully, some more frantic zooming around the sky reveals that there is one more location I missed this whole time! Nested in a ring of mountains (meaning it's inaccessible on foot, only by airship, and townsfolk do wonder at how I managed to reach them), is the town of Gaia, the "Eye of the Hawk."

Gaia turns out to be a pretty nice place, with shops selling lv 8 magic (this is the highest level of magic in the game) and some pretty sweet items that are suddenly making my enormous hoard of gil seem woefully small.

Buying three Ruby Armlets to equip my party would wipe out my entire savings.

Wait, actually, hold up.

See that above? Stop, Warp, Kill?

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?

Well, in the meantime, there's a plot hook!

There's a small pool of water at the north of the town, and some asshole abducted and sold the fairy that lived there:

What a dick.

He sold the fairy to a "caravan." Unfortunately, I do not have any idea where that caravan is, and it does not appear in the overworld.

Eventually, I grow frustrated, and a friend tells me that it's in "a desert." So I land and wander through every desert area in the game.

This feels very stupid.

I still don't find it, so I go and look for the specific spot I have to be in, and it turns out that I went through the right desert, I just missed it by like one pixel.

It's exactly one step above this specific spot and nowhere else. Note the total absence of landmark.

But hey, at least I found the caravan!

The bottled fairy costs 40k gil, so it's a good thing I didn't end up spending all my money on gear.

Well, now that I have the fairy, time to go back to Gaia! (weird that this is just a town name btw)

You know, I do wonder as to the geopolitics of this world.

Obviously, the ongoing apocalypse is messing things up. But in towns, people seem to manage to hold out fairly well - but these towns are very few, and isolated, fortified spots amidst barren wastelands. Weirdly enough the primary form of political organization seems to be some kind of commune. Cornelia has a formal hereditary monarchy with a king, but it appears to operate as a city-state rather than a kingdom proper. Other towns appear to function independently - when I defeated Captain Bikke, Pravoka did not go back to a previous ruler, they went back to whatever they were doing before, without an obvious king or mayor or whatnot. Communication between communities appears fairly strained.

This guy, this caravan dude, seems to be the sole operating travelling merchant in the world. And yet he seems able to travel through mountains and oceans with ease. Strange.

Anyway.

As soon as I enter the town, a cutscene starts playing…

The fairy is freed from the bottle and returns to her spring, where, upon interaction, she thanks me for saving her and rewards me with the "oxyale," a jar of magical water that continuously generates oxygen, meaning I can use the submersible!

I wasn't expecting it so I couldn't screenshot it, but after this line of dialogue the girl floats away and vanishes, hinting that she's some kind of spirit or ghost.

I like the submersible bit. It's an entertaining sidequest idea and it makes sense the Water Shrine would be underwater.

The Sunken Shrine doesn't have a particular gimmick aside from all the enemies being water-type, meaning is Thundaga time. I'm just blasting through every encounter with lightning; Papalymo is really getting a workout. At this stage his bodycount has far outstripped that of Yda and Alisaie together.

A few of the Sunken Shrine's enemies. Note the D&D-accurate Naga design; mythological Naga come in a variety of forms but D&D is as far as I know the only fantasy franchise to depict them in this relatively goofy way.

The Sunken Shrine doesn't prove to be much trouble. As you can see, all the enemies are colored blue (literally all of them aside from Sahagin, it's actually kind of funny), and lightning spells tear through the opposition. The most annoying thing is that it's half a replay of Marsh Cave with a ton of poison encounters, but at this point I have essentially infinite poison heals, so it's just a mild nuisance.

This is the map I was mentioning in the previous post. Note a peculiarity of how it works: if I'm inside a room, the map reveals every room on the floor and their contents, meaning I know exactly which rooms have chests and so on. Here, the map revealed the Crystal room the moment I entered the floor.

And at the end of the dungeon, what awaits us but the Fiend of Water, Kraken!

He's actually the first antagonist in the game to show the Warriors of Light something approaching respect. It's also interesting that "Fiend of [Element]" appears to be a name they're willingly taking for themselves, rather than externally imposed. I wonder where Kraken came from.

This is a goof-ass design, though.

Unfortunately, Kraken runs into the problem of being the first Fiend fought post class change and all the grinding that came with it.

My strategy was actually kind of funny.

You see, there is a lv 7 Black Wizard spell called "Saber." It can only target the caster, and causes a massive improvement in weapon damage and accuracy. My assumption is that it was meant as a kind of "Mordenkainen's Transformation" spell - the kind of spell where due to enemy resistance or running low on spell slots your wizard can't fulfill their normal function, so you spend one slot to make them decent-ish physical damage dealers and have them move to an attack position. It's a decent niche, if obviated by the plentiful Ether supplies the game now grants me and the shortness of the fight.

However, one of the items found in the Sunken Shrine, literally moments before the Kraken Fight, are the Giant's Gloves. The Giant's Gloves are a usable item like the Healing Staff or the Defender sword; you use them from the inventory and they cause the user to cast Saber on themselves. They have infinite uses, and while they can't be used more than once per turn, they can be used repeatedly throughout a fight.

This means that on the first turn, Yda casts Saber on herself, Alisaie casts Haste on Yda, Alphinaud casts Protera on everyone, and Papalymo casts Haste on Alisaie. On turn 2, Yda attacks for 800+ damage, Alisaie casts Saber on herself, Alphinaud casts Invisibility on everyone, and Alphinaud casts Flare for 400+ damage. On turn 3, Alisaie goes first, hits Kraken for 800+ damage and the encounter is over.

So, yeah. We're having sashimi tonight, goddamn.

You might note that my HP totals on the first and last turn are identical. That is because Kraken attempted two party wide-debuffs (Ink, which blinds everyone it hits), then died before taking a third turn.

I like the little victory poses the Warriors of Light strike after cleansing a crystal. It gives them a little bit of personality.

With this done, I promptly cast Exit, teleporting back to town!

…

Then I realize that I did not find any key item.

You know, like the kind I would need to actually progress the plot.

Then I remember @Tempera last night telling me "the Rosetta Stone is the Sunken Shrine reward."

Rubbing my face in my hand with a groan of frustration at my own memory, I head right back to the Sunken Shrine.

Which turns out to be a good thing, anyway. Because guess what I missed completely my entire first run?

The zone with the NPCs.

Yeah, it turns out this whole time, Kraken was keeping the mermaids who inhabit the shrines prisoner in cells. Having slain the fiend, they thank me for their newfound freedom. This is nice. I like this bit, that one of the shrines is an actual inhabited place with people to rescue.

Also these mermaids work on Christian Andersen rules where they're not, like, biological beings but turn to seafoam if they die??? Weird deet.

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.

Eventually I figure out that my final goal is in this little cell all the way to the top right…

…which is completely cut off from where I'm standing by spots of water.

Until, that is, I realize the place obeys non-Euclidian geometry. You see that little straight corridor at the top corner of the image? There is another similar corridor at the top left, on the other side of the room… And going through one causes you to arrive through the other, without screen transition, as if the entire room was spherical and I'd just done the Risk play of crossing from Alaska into Kamchatka.

Wild.

And there it is!

I thought I'd do like the first time and cover two Shrines in one update, but honestly this is a nice cut-off point, I think.

We land in an interesting position - at this point I have my characters almost fully stocked on the highest tier of gear money can buy, and they have access to the highest levels of spells. I have a pretty accomplished party of murder machines with strong support/healing, even if they're all fairly fragile (but less so with Ruby Armlets which I didn't even have during Sunken Shrine). I wonder if the challenge is going to rise, or if Marilith was effectively the peak until the final boss?

Well, we'll find out next time, when we translate the Lufenian language and hopefully slay the Fiend of Air!

In the meantime please do give me your tips on which of the high-level spells are actually wort husing.

Omicron · Aug 21, 2022

Time to end this.

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

SOMEBODY GET JAMES C. SCOTT ON THE PHONE STAT

@Chehrazad GET IN HERE

…

My mind has been enlightened.

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.

Just a thought.

Omicron · Aug 22, 2022

The last stretch.

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?

Well.

We'll see how that goes!

Next time: Final Fantasy II!

Omicron · Aug 27, 2022

And here we are.

Steam's insistence on introducing the games in French is amusing, but futile.

After Final Fantasy "saved Square" (I am given to understand that this narrative is inaccurate to the actual historical events but I don't have the details and I don't feel like looking it up right now), establishing the visual, mechanical, and thematic basics of the series to come, if in a fairly bare-bones, blank canvas kind of way, it's time to iterate with Final Fantasy II: Final Fantasy's bigger, bolder, more ambitious sibling, with actual characters, a real plot (maybe?), and new, revamped mechanics!

Boy, these mechanics.

We'll be talking about them.

Before we start the game, though, I'd like to do a détour by the "Extras" tab in Pixel Remaster. I didn't really pay it much attention in the first game; it had the Bestiary but the Bestiary wasn't really needed at any point. It also has a BGM section, which is neat, and…

…a gallery?

I didn't notice that the first time around. I wonder what's -

Holy shit it's a complete gallery of Yoshitaka Amano's concept art for the game. I love it. It's all there! The monster sprites, the environment art… It's beautiful.

Okay, going back to focusing on the game: this time, our starting screen is only asking us for names, not class picks or a party selection. Seeing as these look to be more like actual characters with some degree of personality, I decide to go with the proposed character names:

Firion, Maria, Guy and Leon.

Or rather…

Firion…

…Maria…

…Guy…

…and Leon.

Goddamn, look at these character designs. I mean, they're goofy as hell, but they have this quaint old-timey fantasy charm, back when we put barbarian heroes in literal chainmail kangaroo slips and so on.

They look so dumb. I love them.

The opening is much more dynamic than FF1's.

So here we have our diegetic explanation for the monster-plagued world: the Emperor unleashed them from "the Underworld" to aid in his conquest of the world. So they're not just random monsters - they're active participants in an ongoing conflict.

Our four protagonists are orphans from Fynn whose parents died in the conquest (all of them? damn), and the very first thing that happens as the game opens is…

"Ah ah, we're doing an in medias res combat tutorial, I like this, that's-"

"Hm."

It's pretty hard to catch these things in time with the screenshot, but this five-hit combo does several hundred damage and kills Leon instantly.

Well, I suppose "first forced loss intro in JRPG" isn't a bad feather to hang to your hat either, assuming that it's indeed a first!

We are rescued off-screen by Hilda, the princess-in-flight of the Kingdom of Fynn, and Minwu, her… advisor? Or more likely by some of their soldiers. They deliver some exposition over our unconscious body, leaving Firion to wake up alone, before wandering out of the room and finding his friends… some of them at least.

Guy's only had a couple of lines so far, but he appears to be speaking in a vaguely caveman/barbarian kind of speech?

So, already we have at least the bare bones of simple characterization and in-group dynamics. Leon, unfortunately, seems not to have make it, dead or captured. Probably captured, given that he's got his own Amano art.

We proceed to the "throne room" (this isn't a palace, it's a big house in a village the rebellion had to flee too), and when our trio asks if they can join the rebellion, Princess Hilda rebuffs them, saying they're too young/weak to be of help.

That's interesting. Where FFI started us off as powerful warriors who could take on Garland as their opening act (though they still had room to grow, of course) and were immediately sent on a quest to save the world, FFII opens on the main character suffering a crushing defeat at the hands of the Empire's troops, barely avoiding losing their lives, and then being immediately told they're not cut for taking part in the rebellion. Huge shift in presentation here.

While not allowed to formally join the rebellion, the… Youths… Hm.

They're not Warriors of Light. They're the… Rebels? I need a fancy nickname.

Sure, why not.

The Wild Roses are given a password to identify themselves to rebellion members so they can still receive help. Hilda tells them that going to Fynn would be ill-advised, as the Imperials have taken it over and are highly hostile, but her advisor Minwu strongly suggests doing so because he can see the shape of our destiny and it involves going to Fynn. Also, it's possible Leon might be held captive there.

Of note is how the password works - look at that dialogue screen. For the first time, the party has "dialogue options" of a sort. That is, when people bring up a red-colored keyword, you can Learn that keyword, and then Ask about that keyword to anyone. In this case, Wild Rose allows you to trigger specific, rebellion-related dialogue from figures associated with the rebellion. If you have a key item, you can also bring it up to ask about it.

Incidentally, neat detail, check out the guy in the bottom left corner of this image - he's the standard Fynn/Rebellion soldier sprite. And interestingly, he's not modeled after a generic "medieval knight" - wide feathered hat, cape, bright primarily color? This is clearly some kind of musketeer. They may or may not actually have guns, but this situates the setting in a more early modern kind of aesthetic/vibe than FFI.

Well, before heading out on adventure, we are advised to go back to the first room, where we find…

A whole bunch of sages to explain to me the mechanics of the game.

So.

Let's talk about them.

This is a character's status screen:

Maria is weaker but more agile, Guy is slower but stronger. Very classical archetypes here.

The attribute spread is fairly straightforward. Strength determines how hard you hit with weapons, Agility informs your dodging chances, Mind affects your white magic spell, Accuracy and so on are derived values that include the appropriate stat and equipment, etc.

Just one thing.

Notice how there is no character level.

That "skill level" column on the right indicates your proficiency with a given category of weapons, like "all swords" or "bare hands." You level it up by using that weapon. Straightford and common, yeah?

The same is true of every trait on that character sheet.

Every single one.

You don't gain "XP" in the traditional sense in FFII, no, no no no. You gain "Strength XP" for hitting people. You advance your HP number by taking hits. You advance your MP by spending it on spells. You advance your sword proficiency by using sword, yes, but the same is true of spells - you don't buy Fire and Fira and Firaga here, you buy "Fire" and then every time you use it it advances that character's Fire proficiency, increasing both the level of Fire (Fire II, Fire III, etc), its damage, and its MP cost (and locking you out of the weaker but less expensive versions).

It's definitely… Interesting? I'm sure I'm gonna have some Opinions about it when I get, like, a super-spear midway through the game and I look and realize Firion still has only lv 1 in Spears.

We'll see.

In the meantime, time to head out, see the town of Altair, meet some NPCs!

Strong "spot the future playable party member" energy here.

Gordon is miserable because his brother Scott was struck down while they were fleeing and he feels like a coward.

a magic store in the first town and I have some gold, but I decide to try out the basics of fighting before getting into that stuff. So I head out of Altair to fight some goblins:

Interestingly there's a bit of an artistic shift from the previous Pixel Remaster: notice the "softer" contours, taller, more rounded trees, more rounded-edged city walls, and so on. Even the coastline is less jagged:

The world map. Bigger, with what looks to be a more "arctic" biome up north that didn't exist in the first game. Fewer deserts. There's no clear division between a southern and a northern hemisphere; while the game is clearly going to be throwing a thousand barriers to traversal in my way, the landmass has enough continuity that an evil empire growing to conquer the entire thing is somewhat believable.

Familiar faces.

Without magic, of course, combat is incredibly simple: just press attack until everything is dead or you are. The one complication is the introduction of a "row" system; characters in the back row both take and deal less damage from/with everything that isn't a bow or a spell. Maria comes equipped with a bow and is in the back row by default.

The leveling up screen.

With the familiar basics confirmed, I head back into town, and I'm going to split this post here for image length.

Omicron · Aug 27, 2022

Continued.

I briefly toy with the idea of going against the grain and making Maria a punchwoman and Guy a Magic Guy, but honestly I want to keep my life easy so I just go with what the basic stats incentivize. I buy Cure and Fire for Maria to start her off on her journey as the Caster Girl, and Thunder for Firion so he can do a sword and spell kind of thing.

As for Guy…

After a moment's thought, I decide to just up and steal something @ZerbanDaGreat did in their own recent playthrough they commented on Discord. You see, shields have their own stat, which determines your Evasion chance when equipped with one, but they aren't a weapon as such. If you dual-wield shield, getting twice the Evasion bonus, the weapon you're using to actually hit enemies is your fists. However, the devs anticipated the dreaded Shield Monk build, so unarmed damage is halved while dual-wielding shields.

But not skill growth. Your Evasion still gets trained, and so do your fists. The goal, then, is to train Guy into a dodge tank who will annihilate the opposition when he takes off his shields. Will this work? We'll find out!

With no clear objective other than "find Fynn but you will also probably die when you do," I just wander about the map to figure out my environs. Grassland snake encounters, forest goblin encounters, hornet swarms, so far so familiar. I found a swamp area heading south, and enter it…

Hm.

I am immediately concerned. While these are "mere" animals, Final Fantasy has so far followed a pretty strict ladder of animal threats - the early game is occupied only by common vermins such as snakes and large bugs. A rhinoceros is a huge escalation, so I decide to be on my guard and -

Oh.

Okay so overworld encounters in this one aren't strictly gated behind traveling tools. You can wander off too far and Just Fucking Die. Good to know!

Also, I hadn't saved since Altair, so… that's a near-total reboot. Fun!

So we reload, and try again. With the South being cut off by powerful wildlife, we head north. There's a small village on the way called Gatrea, but it has nothing of much interest beyond being a waypoint you can rest at. And after some journeying, here we are in Fynn!

The characters discuss among themselves that they should stay away from the soldiers. Because I have the reaction to the unknown of a cat, I immediately go interact with the soldier, who somehow immediately identifies the group as "Rebel curs!" and…

That's another wipe. Second in a row. Christ. What are these kids made of, tissue paper?

We reload again, go back to Fynn, and this time we avoid any Captain encounter. Which doesn't mean we get through without a fight!

The city is crawling with low-level monsters, which strikes me as odd until I remember that that is in fact the point of the plot, and these monsters are part of the army that conquered Fynn in the first place.

There's also… nothing else in town.

Even the shops are empty.

There's nothing. Literally nothing. Castle gate's closed, shops are empty, houses are empty, there are NPCs…

Lost and vaguely confused, I check a couple times, then with no clue where to proceed I leave Fynn. I go back to Altair to check if there's new dialogue, but nope. I try to journey past Fynn to the north to see if there's anything up there, and…

In the jargon, that's called a "beef gate." Technically it would be possible to go through, it would just be extremely painful.

Firion gets murked by a giant turtle and I have to hoof it back to Altair for the shrine.

At least in this game it's free.

It's only after asking around on Discord and getting some pointers that I finally understand what I've been missing: one NPC in Gatrea is meant to be your hint and I didn't realize what he was saying mattered and forgot about it until I talked to him again.

Now, in a sane game, this wouldn't have been an issue. Because I would simply have visited Fynn, found the pub, and talked to barkeep. But I didn't find him last time around. Why is that?

Well, you see, in order to reach him you have to "leave" Fynn through a fence to the north, without tripping over the invisible line that decides you left the town screen and drops you back into the overworld, then circle all the way around the town walls until you reach this place:

Inside are more soldiers (the party wipes again when I talk to one to find out if any of them has actual dialogue inside the inn; so far the game has been incredibly more lethal than FFI) and the barkeep.

The barkeep shows me a hidden door, and down that hidden door…

Scott, Prince of Kashuan, lies in bed mortally wounded. He gives me three messages - to his brother, that he is stronger than he believes and to have faith in himself; to the King, that Fynn was taken by the betrayal of one Count Borghen; and to princess Hylda, that he loves her. He then tells us to forget that last one, as "the confession of a dying man would only cause her pain."

Then he gives us his ring as evidence that we met him, and…

He ups and dies right here and there.

With these important words and this item, it's time to go back to Altreia.

On my way there I take a wrong turn somewhere and wipe to a pack of werewolves.

Back in town, I carry Scott's words to his brother and Hylda. Hylda asks me if Scott had any message specifically for her, very clearly hoping for some kind of closure or confirmation of the love they shared, and the Wild Roses tell her "nope," which, like, cold. But I guess he did ask for it. Instead, she tells me that we have proven ourselves worthy of taking full part in the rebellion, and tasks us with our first mission: the Empire owes its victory in part to its troops being fully decked in precious mythril armor, and so the rebellion must secure its own source of mythril.

In order to do this, we'll need to do some light traveling - using a canoe to reach a port town, then buying a trip on their ship, to a town that has an airship, and finally to Salamand. But first…

Our fourth playable party member! Minwu, the royal advisor! I've heard enough to know that he is the first of a rotating cast of "guest members," with the Firion/Maria/Guy trio remaining core, which is an interesting experiment in party design. We'll see how it plays out. Also, having taken one look at his spell list, Minwu looks like a beast. A hundred MP and at least a dozen lv 2-7 spells, although all of them are white magic:

So I guess he's going to be our crutch for now!

I think that's enough for a first round, this post is getting big tall as it is.

So that's our introduction to Final Fantasy II - more story, more characters, weird mechanics, weird party design, high lethality, high grind. This looks like it'll be quite an experience.

Omicron · Aug 28, 2022

Last time, Minwu joined our party!

God he looks so cool.

The key thing Minwu is bringing to the party isn't his rad aesthetic or his vast magical power, though (although both are nice), it's his canoe.

Il était un petit navire, qui n'avait ja, ja, jamais navigué, ohé ohé…

Interestingly this is a shuffling of the previous order, which had the seafaring vessel be your first upgrade item, and the canoe next. Here, we need it to cross the lake you can see in the picture above and reach the seaside town of Paloom.

One thing I appreciate about Final Fantasy is that it has female characters coming on impressively hard. Here's lookin' at you, Jessie.

We're only really in Paloom for one purpose, buying a ticket to the ship and crossing the sea to reach the town of Poft, where lives a newly-introduced staple of Final Fantasies to come - Cid, The Guy With The Airship!

We haven't unlocked the ship yet; we're paying 32 gil a pop specifically for a trip from Paloom to Poft or back.

Curious what that space at the top is for.

Incidentally, while Cid's sprite looks mostly like a normal old dude with some kind of pauldrons, his concept art is absolutely amazing:

Look at this time traveler from a specific brand of 80s-90s SFF. The flying pauldrons. The bare thighs. The chestplate worn straight over the naked, muscular chest. The moustache. An absolutely outstanding man. He could be on the cover of Métal Hurlant.

If you look at the picture above, you can see that Cid's airship can take us not just to our intended destination (Salamand), but also to places I've never heard of, like Bafsk, Semitt Falls, or that place the brother princes are for, Kashuan. This is intriguing, and I might just go and poke around when I next load up the game, but it didn't happen yet for reasons that will be clear soon.

I decide to explore a little around Poft before committing to any big flight, see if there's some new wildlife to fight, but to my disappointment it's just the same as back in Altair, Goblins and snakes and so on. I bought Maria the Protect spell, but honestly it's unnecessary (although I still use it to train it ahead of time).

I also notice something quite curious.

The character here is buffed with Protect, but eventually the same will happen without buffs.

Notice that damage number.

FFII does not have chip damage. Every hit did at least 1 damage, and with attacks doing multi-hits, this meant in the early game you could still, for instance, defeat a Green Slime despite running out of Fire casts. Not so FFII. If your Defense is high enough, you will reduce damage to nothing.

This plays an important part in the "reduce an encounter to one goblin then have the characters whack each other down from full HP to as low as you can go" method of HP farming, because there is almost zero danger - the goblin literally can't hurt you. And, because most of the random encounters in this region are of the same tier as those back in Altair, this means that pretty soon they come to pose no actual threat whatsoever, as none of the enemies can cause me any harm.

It's an odd feeling.

And eventually, through my wandering, I end up in…

Snowy Salamand, the town I was looking for in the first place! No need for an airship! We saved so much money on this.

Josef, Hilda's contact in Salamand, proves less useful than hoped. All he can do is point us in the direction of the local mythril mine, which is controlled by the Empire and worked using the town's enslaved population. Just your classic empire stuff.

On our way there, we do finally encounter some new enemy types, although by now we already far outmatched them:

The Soldier is a far less powerful version of the Captain who owned us so hard in Fynn, and using the same sprite model.

And we arrive in the first dungeon in the game, Semmit Falls! (so named because the entrance to the cavern is situated at the top of a waterfall)

Another iconic enemy making its first series appearance, with its iconic Self-Destruct ability. Green is an odd choice of color for it, though.

So.

Let's talk dungeon design.

There's one big environmental change in FFII compared to FFI. FFI modeled interior rooms as part of the structure they were set in; FFII models them as separate rooms. To clarify what I mean:

This is FFI. You can see that the central room of the chaos shrine is part of the same screen as the shrine itself. It is obscured while we aren't inside it, and lights up when we enter, but it's one single continuous space. This allowed for the map trick per which entering one sub-room would reveal all others on the map and allow us to avoid dead end room.

Contrast:

The building is one screen. Upon crossing that door to the right, we move to a different screen. This is convenient because it means that the room can be "bigger on the inside" - the building does not need to be wide enough to actually accommodate its presence.

This also means that my previous map trick is impossible.

So how is Semitt Falls designed?

Well, every level has doors. Like, there's the floor map, which is your typical "wet cavern" floor map:

And there are doors. One of these doors take you to a room with stairs down to the next floor. Every other door leads to this:

An empty square room. No chest, no NPC, nothing. Just an empty room.

The dungeon's design is just to throw three to five mystery doors per floor at you and hide the way forward inside one of them, leaving the others as dead ends.

It is.

Annoying.

For the most part, the enemies of Semitt Falls are easily dealt with. But they absorb a lot of my resources as I push forward and use my spells with a little too much abandon. And every so often there are encounters like this:

Green Slimes take 0 damage from my physical attacks. Magic is the only way to hurt them. As you can see on the screen, Firion is running low and Maria is… fairly comfortable still. Minwu, of course, basically never runs out of MP.

On the third floor, I find my secondary objective:

The men of the village, along with Josef's daughter Nelly, are held in this room. Paul, the self-proclaimed greatest thief in the world, attempted to infiltrate the mine to steal its precious Mythril for the rebellion ahead of us, explicitly to show us up, but got captured for his trouble. Now that we've opened their cell and cleared the path, Paul announces he will take the prisoners with him back to Salamand, and leave me to go deeper to get that sweet mythril.

We head down a couple more floors, and…

This is the Sergeant, the first proper boss in the game, although I expect him to come back as a generic enemy type later - he's too generic not to (this is the same sprite as Captain/Soldier).

This encounter baffles me.

The Sergeant is a straightforward enemy. He can hit you with his sword, or with his bow. He hits really hard - enough to take out nearly half of Maria's health in one blow. That's not enough to win - Minwu can heal that much for the entire group with a single Cure spell, and has a ton of MP left. Minwu can also buff the whole party with Invisibility, vastly reducing the changes of the Sergeant actually hitting anyone.

The problem is that Maria and Guy are literally the only people in this fight capable of doing damage to the Sergeant.

Firion has run out of MP before the fight, and, despite being by far the second heaviest hitter in the group, he just… Can't do any damage with his sword. All his blows bounce off with 0 damage. Minwu is crucial to keep the party alive, but on any turn when he's not healing someone or casting buffs, he's also useless, and also doing 0 damage. Only Maria's Fire III and Guy's fists are able to get through his armor.

He can't kill us, though, so we eventually grind him down. But man, it's not fun to have one and a half character in your party just be literally useless for an entire fight.

But eventually I make it.

Note how everyone is at full health and Minwu is still sitting on fifty MP. He hard carries this group.

In the chest behind him, the mythril! Mission accomplished!

Just one thing before we leave - there's one final chest on the final floor that I'd like to get.

Aw come the fuck on.

Maria exhausted her MP on the Sergeant. Firion didn't have any to begin with. The Land Turtle has, as you might expect, high defenses. Very high defenses. Literally only Guy is doing any damage at all (except when one of the others is lucky enough to land a critical hit). This is slow. And boring. While also being dangerous.

I need to never go anywhere without Ether again, but the problem is that in this game Ether is crazy expensive, like 1,000 gil a pop expensive.

Eventually I wear it down. And it was worth it: inside the chest is a Tome of Teleportation. I immediately use it to teach Maria the spell, then use Minwu's own teleportation to thankfully escape having to backtrack through the whole place.

Exhausted, low on resources, but fat with newfound gil, the Wild Roses head back to Salamand… Where they find out another very funny feature of FFII:

There is no standard inn price per town like in FFI.

The cost of resting at an inn are proportional to how much HP and MP you've lost. The more hurt you are, the more you have to pay. 409 gil is much higher than what any inn cost in any place in FFI, and we're barely at the start of the game. Jesus.

Alright, with all this settled, we go back to Salamand. Cid could fly us directly back to Altair, but for an eye-gouging 700 gil, so we instead take the long way round with ship and canoe.

The Empire is building a massive armored flying airship with which it means to rain devastation upon the world. It has to be stopped, and that's our next mission. We also have our first mention of a "Dark Knight" being labeled as such in the series, I believe - I actually thought these didn't show up until Cecil in FFIV, but I was clearly wrong.

We go to the local blacksmith to hand him the mithril, with which he makes a few mythril weapons… That we still have to purchase with real money, of course.

I like spears, I kinda want to give one to somebody, but I'm not sure it would fit anyone. Maybe Firion could dual wield sword and spear instead of doing basic sword and shield like he's doing now?

A brief look at the map shows no clear land path to Bafsk, so it's time to actually use Cid's services!

Oh, so that's what that bit is for. It's an airship parking space.

Timing this was a bit difficult but you can catch a glimpse of the Dreadnought in the background.

The town of Bafsk.

And that'll be it for today, I just wanted to catch some sweet shots of the airship.

Next time: we tackle the dreadnought and meet the Dark Knight, I think!

(It's Leon, I already know it's Leon)

Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]

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Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

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"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

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"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

Omicron

"I already have dragons, I do not want men."

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