HSUP B TCELES - Let's Play FF1! Again!

I dunno, some people are just ranting and ramen.

Spaghetti.

I thought about joining in phở a second but I figure I'll curry more favor if I just simmer down.

Remouillage.

I roux ever making that pun...

I can barley stand to read this.

Look what you turned this thread into, you chowderheads.

Sounds like you're all barking up the wrong tree!






Oh, I'm no good at this.

CAMPBELL'S SOUP

I remember the days when I was a young mage growing up
Staring at my crystal, dreaming about FIREin up
the monster crowd, make money, chill with the honeys
sign autographs or whatever the sages want from me
it's funny how impossible quests manifest
and the parties that be comin with it
nevertheless
you got to go for the gusto but you don't know
about the blood, sweat and tears
and losing some of your peers
and losing some of yourself to the levels past,
gone by
hopefully it don't manifest
for the wrong guy
egomaniac and the brainiac
don't know how to act
Shit's deep grind and backtrack
destined warrior, mack,
sign the deal, thinks he's gonna make some gil
but never will til he kills astos still
filling your head with fantasies
come with me, show the sacrifice it takes to make the cheese
You wanna be a light warrior in the biz
and take shit from people who don't know what it is
I wish it was all fun and games but the price of fame is high
and some cant pay the way
still trapped in what you rapping about
tell me what happened when you lost cout
the party you took started collapsing
no upgrades no fame no The orbs don't change no women
and everybody shittin on your name

So you wanna be a light warrior, and live large
a big party, spell charges, you're in charge
comin' up in the world, don't trust no body
gotta look over your shoulder constantly

Man, I thought I was the only one that remembered that song. Also, Beat is my new favorite person.

The raps are so much better than the MOAR pictures, but the puns? While a Tyrant hallmark, it was somewhat less endearing here.

Less endearing and therefore so emboiling.

At this pace, the thread will start updating itself with bad puns and such.

Oh god, Skynet with puns.

guys, remember when this thread was about final fantasy?


....


yeah, me neither.

About what now?

Fina whoda what?

Eh, we're just keeping the thread simmering while Brick works on the next bit.

(... I'm so sorry...)

Eh, I heard it was on the back burner.

I'm sure he's cooking up something.

Brickroad is like a chef and also he plays videogames

brick can just ignore this thread for a year and it'll still be on the first page of the LP forum.

Truth is this update's been ready for a day or two. It just seemed like such a shame to break up that brothy cauldron of punny goodness.

hey guyz i herd u liek souls so i put some dawn in ur souls so u can dawn wile u soulz

I'm sure I botched that meme. Nobody cares anyway. Let's play that game with those guys! This is actually a very special update, because you get to see an area of the game world in a way you've never seen it before! At least, never seen it before in the previous FF1 LPs. Because today we're headed for...


♪♪ Main Theme ♪♪

...Mt. Gulg! AKA Gurgo Volcano.

Once you get your cute little hot-dog-shaped canoe there are two options available to you. You can row west of Crescent Lake to take on this fire fiend business. Or you can sail north to a separate waterway and take on the Ice Cave, which earns you your airship. The string of clues in the game leads you to the volcano first; only after completing it does the NPC in Crescent Lake who knows the way to the Ice Cave wake up. He's not a plot trigger, though, just a clue; if you want to sequence break and do it the other way around, you're free to do so.

And indeed, there's really no reason not to. Once you get the airship all of the best equipment in the game becomes accessible, and it's not like the volcano is going to go anywhere. My typical MO is to gear my dudes up in amazing duds, knock out the other two fiends, then make a very short pit stop here on my way to the final boss.

But what's actually in the volcano? What does it really have to offer, if you were to do the dungeon in its proper sequence? Is the boss at all difficult? That's what this update is about.


I grabbed this shot of the waterways around Crescent Lake. It's not obvious at first, but there are two: from the red square of Crescent Lake itself you can reach the tiny desert to the south, some marshland over to the west, and even go all the way to Elfheim if you were so inclined. If you take the river west then wrap around to the north you'll arrive at the bottom yellow square, which is Mt. Gulg.

The top yellow square is the Ice Cave, but you can't reach it from Crescent Lake. You have to sail north and dock your boat at the river mouth near that northeasterly port. It's possible to walk to Pravoka from this area.

(The port in the northwest corner of the map is Cornelia, the orange dot is my ship, and the red square in the southeast is Gaea, accessible only by airship.)

Trivia: at no point do these two river networks meet, and it is not possible to reach one from the other except by ship. If it were, you could walk from Cornelia and the Chaos Shrine all the way around the continent to Elfheim and the Marsh Cave once you have the hot dog canoe. This means you could dock your ship and your airship at Cornelia at the same time, rather than leaving the ship abandoned by Crescent Lake. We spent h-o-u-r-s as kids trying to accomplish this feat, but it's simply impossible. Sorry!


I forget what level we're on! Who cares anyway.

Oh wait, Ika cares, because now he can use L6 magic. Score! It means we have to turn around and row back to Crescent Lake though.


♪♪ Shop ♪♪

The only of these spells worth buying is Thundaga. This won't help us out much here, but it'll be awesome once we get to the water fiend area.

And you know? This always bugged me: Thundaga is most useful in the third fiend's area, but it's a L6 spell which means you buy it in the second fiend's area. Blizzaga would own Mt. Gulg's shit, but it's a L7 spell so you can't get it without some serious level grinding and an airship. I don't know why they arbitrarily picked the Fire < Thunder < Blizzard spell progression, but it kind of stings from a game progression standpoint. The best Ika can do is sail back to Elfheim and pick up Blizzara instead. Ice magic doesn't really make this section of the game much easier; the boss doesn't have any elemental weaknesses after all. But it would be nice.


All this last minute runnin' around got me another level up... then we campe out at the foot of this here active volcano. Fun fact: the NES volcano sprite was more side-on, and you had to enter it from the top. The GBA sprite is more top-down, and you have to enter it from the bottom, where a convenient path has been placed.


♪♪ Mt. Gulg ♪♪

There are a lot of dungeons in FF1, but the volcano is the one that benefits the most from the graphical upgrades in the remakes. The walls glow. The floors are a hardened and cracked layer of cooled magma, rather than stone. The lava bubbles and spits. It really is a very cool looking dungeon, considering the NES version was just a red version of every other cave you'd been in.

There are three cardinal rules to Mt. Gulg:

1. Lava tiles damage you. Bring lots of Potions.
2. Lava tiles don't trigger random encounters.
3. None of the treasure is worth getting, so skip it all.

If you follow these rules you will spend maybe five minutes in the dungeon by walking on the lava as much as possible and avoiding all the encounters. I'm doing this for you guys though, so I'll skip Rule #3 and showcase exactly what the volcano has to offer a group of hearty adventurers.


The first treasure room is down on B2, and it is one of the largest rooms in the game. Beyond this door is a huge maze of passages with a ton of treasure but zero lava tiles, which means lots and lots of fights.


There are also lots of spiked squares with Fire Elementals. Like Earth Elementals, these guys hit hard and have lots of HPs. They can't use magic though, so as long as you're reasonably healthy you can take them down with regular attacks. BlBelt is so manly that he punches fire with his naked fists... and kills it.


We already have one of these.


Boy, all this detouring sure is causing the EXP to pile up.


Next up is a new sword that lets Zach trade two points of ATK for five points of ACC. Not a bad upgrade, plus it does bonus damage to giants! (That last thing isn't really important though.)

Ooh... a rare drop. This will permenantly increase someont's STR. I'd ask you guys who to give it to, but you'd be all like "lol ika" so I just gave it to Zach or Percy or someone instead.

Speaking of Ika, how's he doing now that he has ice magic in the fire dungeon?


♪♪ Battle ♪♪

Er... kind of underwhelming, actually! Aren't these guys supposed to be weak to ice? Dawn of Souls gives us an easy way to check...


The handy in-game bestiary is your one-stop shop for enemy data. Studying the bestiary for any length of time reveals one of FF1's little oopsies: they were very inconsistent with handing out spell weaknesses. A lot of RPGs let you develop this sense of what will be weak to what, and several later FF games are designed around a more-or-less intuitive network of black magic spells and enemy weak points. Not FF1, though! Not only isn't this red devil volcano monsgter weak to ice, virtually nothing else is either... not even the fiend herself. Blizzard is the most powerful black magic spell line, but it's also the most useless


♪♪ Mt. Gulg ♪♪

The next three chests are all gil, as if we needed any more at this point.


Level level level ups, ya'll.


Ho-LEE CRAP! That's a lot of treasure boxes all in one spot! Let's see... one, two, three... yep, there are thirty six million treasures in this room. Surely this is worth the detour, right?


Er, not exactly. I mean, pretty much everything in that montage could be obtained with a trip to the store in Crescent Lake. I mean, it's impressive that I was able to crop 36,000,000 screenshots down into a single image like this, I guess. And you can see the subtle glowing effect on the cave's graphics if you look close. But all in all... well, that Mythril Axe doesn't look too bad, maybe?


Four points of ATK for ten points of ACC. Which means the Mythril Axe is +6 ATK/-5 ACC from the Mythril Sword. I'll let you do the math, but I don't think the trade-off is worth it. In other news...


OH GOD GIANT WORM KILL IT WITH FIRE I MEAN ICE OR WHATEVER.

These guys are on spiked squares all over the place in this treasure room. Not really a monster that's worth mentioning in the grand scheme of things, except that I've never been able to tell if that grey thing was its tongue or a trail of drool.


Oh wait yeah one more chest lookie more gil woo. Can we get on with life now please?


Here are the stairs down to B3. They are located about one screen west of the stairs up to B1. The path between the two is comprised almost entirely of lava tiles.

Time spent on B2 if you get all the treasure: 10..15 minutes or more, once you consider all the walking and the dozens of fights you have to resolve.

Time spent on B2 if you ignore the treasure: like four seconds. Maybe.

The next couple floors don't have any treasure, and as long as you stick to lava tiles they go pretty quick. There are some dead ends though, so it helps to know the layout beforehand.

When you take damage from a lava tile your little map guy flashes yellow for a second. I went through great pains to ensure every single screenshot I took of lava tiles was caught mid-flash. This is how utterly devoted I am to providing LP-flavored entertainment for you cats.


B4 has lots of little treasure rooms strewn about. Also another level up.


Room #1 has a bit of gil. The other box here was a Gold Needle.


Room #2: more gil.


Room #3 has a couple new pieces of equipment: the Ice Brand and Flame Shield. Let's take a look!


These are both absolute upgrades to what Zach already has, and the Ice Brand will hit enemies with an ice weak point (if they do in fact exist, which I'm still not convinced of). Percy, of course, can't use it yet. And yes, it makes perfect sense to find the ice sword in the fire dungeon. Why do you ask?

The other treasures in this room were an Antidote and about 8000 gil.


Room #4: A grand total of 165 gil. Percy scrapes more than that from under his fucking fingernails every night.


This Cottage was the best thing in Room #5. Please note that you can buy these anywhere.


Oh my god you guys. Remember when we found one of these in the Earth Cave? And how awesome that was? And how I was like "don't worry ya'll we got that Staff now, we good"? It's like Christmas up in this bitch! Only you have to pretend Santa has down's syndrome, and that all your stockings are filled with spiked encounter squares.

At long last we reach the bottom floor of the volcano. Six of these paths lead to empty rooms. The southwest path leads to the fiend. The west path leads to a room where we fight...


♪♪ Battle ♪♪

...the Red Dragon. As far as I know, this is the only time you can encounter this monster in vanilla FF1, making this one of the rarest enemies in the game. As you can see, it's got some pretty bitchin' fire attacks that will wreck your shit straight up. If you have a white mage, have him cast NullFire to take the edge off. Fortunately it's only got enough HPs to stand up for a round or two, which is good news, because that's probably all the time Ika has.


The Red Dragon guards a box containing the Flame Mail, which is a big buff over Zach's ancient Iron Armor. In my opinion this is the only treasure in the dungeon worth getting, since it's 1) unique, 2) useful and 3) in an easy-to-remember location. Plus the Red Dragon is kind of a sub-boss, so it's nice to stop by and kill him.


Actually, the Flame Mail is the most well-guarded treasure in the entire game. The path to the box is surrounded by a bunch of rocks, see. The square in front of the box itself is spiked with a Red Dragon, but the square between the first two rocks is spiked with this Fire Lizard. This means you have to fight the dragon once and the lizard twice to walk off with this armor. Fire Lizards are just typical random encounters in this dungeon though, so ain't no thang. The main event is still ahead.

(Also of interest: another level-up.)

Behold Marilith, fiend of fire. In the previous FF1 LPs she was called KARY, and was barely noticeable...


...this time around, though? Bitch hard.

Marilith can land six hits with a single attack, and can cast damaging fire magic besides. She has no elemental weakness and a high enough DEF that only critical hits will be able to touch her.


She shrugs off Ika's most powerful attacks without even flinching. Fortunately by this point the rest of the guys are Hasted, and from here it's just a race to see whether or not I can get my criticals before she wears me down.


♪♪ Victory ♪♪

Victory! The guys defeat Marilith a couple hundred damage at a time. They were fortunate; if she'd have gone with fire spells rather than physical attacks I probably could not have outlasted her.


The fire fiend is defeated and the second crystal is lit. Huzzah!


♪♪ Mt. Gulg ♪♪

Meanwhile, somwhere else in the world, a young elf witnesses the evaporation of a curiously Marilith-shaped statue. What wickedness does this portend..?


The boys warp out of Mt. Gulg and save. A hard-fought victory, and they still have a long walk/row home to look forward to!

So on its face, Mt. Gulg looks like a pretty shitty dungeon, right? Lots of treasure, but most of it is just gil (or worthless consumables). There's some decent Warrior gear in here, true; Zach is much more powerful now than before he went in. But here's the rub: if you skip the volcano and do the Ice Cave first, you can then access a few more easy dungeons where you find a boatload of stuff that will just replace all this Flame equipment anyway.

And make no mistake: I got lucky on the Marilith fight. If she starts bustin' out Fira, my team would have been in hella pain. It would have taken her two or three attacks to drop each of my boys, but it would have taken her two or three Firas total to totally wipe me out. Of course if you save Mt. Gulg for last your team will be mostly decked-out with Ribbons and the danger is therefore lessened considerably.

So: a long dungeon with a ton of random encounters and full of treasure that is only useful for one class (and even then, only for a short while) capped off by a really tough boss fight that has strong elements of luck involved.

Is it any wonder why I sequence break?

Next: You broke the 3rd place record!

Forever.

You are both crazy.

That Staff will save his LIFE in the final boss fight.

It will also ask him for a date on Christmas Eve.