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

I didn't encounter any glitches in Black Sigil. I quit at the final (?) dungeon, so maybe that place is glitchy, I dunno.

You'll always be the Zone Eater to me, Sandworm.

My game froze during the sailing portion, but it was less of that and more how clunky fights in general felt. I quit out around the time I hit Isapolis.

Seriously, though, I love the characters so hard you have no idea. To this day, I have never seen anyone pull off the "mysterious double agent" cliché with more style than Nephi.

I think to some folks playing videogames is like being trapped in an abusive relationship. The game only hurts them because it cares.

Dear Talking Time,

I am so sorry this LP is taking so long. I hope we can still be buds.

Love, that one guy with the swank hat





Oh look! An update!


♪♪ Main Theme ♪♪

Standard operating procedure is to get to the Ice Cave by sailing north of Crescent Lake. But did you also know you can walk there from Pravoka? It's true! If you head southeast from here you'll eventually reach a river tucked away near some mountains. This river would have been a barrier to you if you'd explored that direction earlier in the game because your broke Light Warrior asses would have lacked a Canoe. Now, though...


See? This is where you'd normally dock!

This is merely a curiosity, not a shortcut. Your Ship is going to naturally be on the outside of the newbie sea at this point, and there's no reason to sail it back in.


Hallo... what's this?


♪♪ Mt. Gulg ♪♪

A watery... cave of some sort? Ol' Gamhidhopants here isn't too helpful about this whole situation. Anyway, I can't get in... a curiously Tiamat-shaped statue blocks the entrance.


♪♪ Battle ♪♪

I didn't take a screenshot of the outside of the Ice Cavern because I am a rebel. Oh, but yeah, Cockatrices still suck. The randomly drop Gold Needles, so they don't suck quite as bad as in the NES version, but... yeah. Still.


♪♪ Matoya's Cave ♪♪

The graphical overhaul received by the Ice Cavern is one of the most dazzling in the game. On the NES this place was grey and boring... now it's pristine. Crystalline. It twinkles.


It's still full of assholes though. These so-called Mindflayers (formerly BlueZOIDs) can still cause insta-death with a single attack. Failing that, they have this rather cool looking paralysis attack. Scrolling past this screenshot I was all "Did I copy a shot of the volcano in here by mistake?"

The other shot is some dudes who can cast -aga spells, if you let them. I didn't give them the chance.


One of the things I haven't shown off in previous LPs are the treasures of the Ice Cavern. Getting some Clothes is just insulting, and the Flame Sword isn't much better. It's not an upgrade for Zach, and Percy can't equip it. That diamond thing in the middle of the room is our goal: the fabled Levistone. A totally bass-ackwards and convoluted route is required to reach that point, though.

Also of note: the huge holes from the NES version have been replaced with much more subtle cracks. Because the cracks don't take up the entirety of a 16x16 pixel tile, it's rather easy to step onto one when you aren't intending to. I know the layout of this room by heart, and even I almost did that while trying to get to these Clothes.

As to the more pressing question of why FF1 puts utterly useless crap inside treasure boxes you have to fight tooth and nail to reach, I don't know. Even this is something for the "not that big a deal" pile in Dawn of Souls, though! Remember, the NES version didn't have a communal inventory. Each Light Warrior can carry four weapons and four pieces of armor, so the armor screen in particular tends to get clogged pretty quickly. Finding some Clothes or a Wooden Helm or whatever basically just eats up an inventory slot until you can get back to town and sell it off. This is a huge problem in the Floating Castle, which has lots of armor pieces, but by which time you won't have slots to store them all. In essence, this is just the game's way of fucking with you. Back in the 80s games were allowed to do that.


♪♪ Battle ♪♪

Stepping on one of the cracks drops the boys deeper into the dungeon, where they are forced to face off against a huge pack of undead on a spiked square. Ika has no problem whatsoever toasting them with Fira -- payback for all the game overs his forebear received while soloing this level.


♪♪ Matoya's Cave ♪♪

Heading south from the undead room leads you towards the Levistone, but if you're not in a hurry you might take a detour to pick up one of the thirty-five million sacks of gil laying around. First the room in the northwest corner...

♪♪ Battle ♪♪

Many of the treasure rooms in this dungeon are spiked with White Dragons, which can tear you up in just a couple rounds with their frost breath attack. They're no more difficult than the Red Dragon we've already killed, though. If I had a white mage along I could have him cast NullIce to cut our damage in half. Zach, as you can see, is already wearing armor that has this effect.


♪♪ Matoya's Cave ♪♪

I'm getting tired of switching the music back and forth. I think you're one your own from here, gang.

Anyway, more Warrior gear. The Ice Armor is identical to the Flame Mail Zach's already wearing; it just halves damage from fire instead of ice.


This is about the halfway point of the dungeon. Head right if you just want to get the hell out of here; head left if you want the rest of the treasure.


Whoa. Nice haul!

No point sharing screengrabs of all six of these boxes -- they're all gil. All told you walk out of here with 39,884 gil, which is totally not bad for just a few minutes of work. If the population inside the Ice Cavern weren't so violent and the dungeon as a whole not so prone to luck-based game overs, I would absolutely take the extra sixty-ish steps to drop in here and raid this room. There's a lot of really expensive stuff to buy once you get your airship, and this windfall makes it go down a bit easier.


First level up of the Ice Cavern! Also a NullFire-casting item! Nice.

It's worth noting that, EXP-wise, the boys are almost completely desynced. Percy is first, followed very closely by Ika. (Very rarely they will level up on the same fight.) BlBelt is a little later, and Zach doesn't level up until Percy is almost halfway to his next level. Most of Zach's deaths have been due to petrification or insta-kills that prioritized him because he's in the top slot of the party. Before too much longer the rest of the gang will have completely lapped him.


A couple treasures back on the top floor of the Ice Cavern. We're up to 49,884 gil. This box isn't spiked, and it's not that far out of your way, so if you want to grab it on a FLOATER/Levistone run, be my guest.


Last treasures of the Ice Cave. The box on the left contained another 9400 gil. Grand total: 59,280 gil. Again though, be wary of stepping on the crack in the floor before you intend to. Doing so drops you down...


...to the Levistone floor! Of course the square in front of the Levistone is spiked.


Of course, it's spiked with one of the easiest "bosses" in the game. Evil Eye doesn't even merit the mini-boss music, let alone the real-boss music. The only challenge this guy ever presents is in a solo game, if he lands an insta-kill on you.

There you have it. Of course the only way out of this room is to step on another crack, fight through the undead room again, and make your way back up to the top floor. I'll do us a favor and cut to the chase.


♪♪ Main Theme ♪♪

Here we are back in the mountains south of Pravoka. Now, we could sail all the way back out of the newbie sea, past Melmond and the Earth Cavern, around the globe to Crescent Lake, and then south to our destination...


...or we could sail due south of Pravoka and dock at the rivermouth here, which grants Canoe access to Crescent Lake and/or Mt. Gulg. It's a longer walk but a much shorter sail. Strictly speaking, you never have to leave the newbie sea with the ship unless you're visiting Melmond or Crescent Lake before you get your Canoe.

I... don't really like the airship music in Dawn of Souls! The instrumentation feels wrong to me. At least the tune isn't drowned out by airship rotors, as is the case in the NES version.


Tradition dictates your first stop after getting your airship be the secluded town of Gaia.


Wait, Eye of the What-now? I'll come clean, I have probably never talked to this NPC before in Dawn of Souls. Naturally I took a few seconds to investigate what the crap he was talking about.


HOLY BAJEEZUS FUCK. I SEE IT! DO YOU SEE IT!?

Mind = BLOWN.

So Gaia in the northeast is the Eye of the Hawk. That would make Lufenia to the southeast and the Citadel of Trials to the west the Wings of the Hawk. And Mirage Tower would be the... uh... Anus of the Hawk. I guess.

The whole continent looks like a bird in flight! And this is the continent with the Fiend of Air and the Floating Castle et cetera! How have I never noticed this before? FF1, I have been playing you since my short-pants days!

This is so utterly crazy.

To the south in this shot you can see Matoya's Cave on another continent entirely. In the very southwest corner, just barely onscreen, is the Chaos Shrine, which is situated right in the center of the overworld map.


♪♪ Shop ♪♪

After recovering from the shock of learning something new about FF1, the boys return to Gaia to stock up on L7 magic. The only thing really worth learning is Blizzaga, which is a pretty decent attack spell to have on hand. Break is a pointless insta-death spell, and the rest of the L7 magic is nowhere to be found.


♪♪ Town ♪♪
Just some random gossip in town. Apparently folks done lost their faerie, and there's a blah to the blah where we can test our blah. (But that's another update.)


Next up is armor. The all-important Protect Ring is the most powerful shield money can buy. Everyone can equip it, which is lovely, because it blocks all sorts of insta-death spells. Not all of them though; spells with an elemental flag like Quake and Scourge can still get through.

Ika already has a Ruby Armlet, and BlBelt is already wearing the superior Kenpogi, so we just need one for Percy.


The weapon shop only sells this odd knife, which nobody in the team can equip. Yet.


More Gaia-gossip. Cool stuff in the west, and some asshole who sells faeries. There's more NPC hornswaggle that will lead you to solve this whole fairy caper, but as it happens I already know the solution...


In the NES version you could land directly on the desert tile leading to the Caravan. That's not possible in Dawn of Souls, but the location gets a pretty cool map to make up for it.

♪♪ Shop ♪♪

The first time you visit the Caravan you only have the option of buying a Bottled Faerie. Repeat visits, however, allow you to purchase stat-raising tonics. (Including one made of... faeries? Okay...) Wholehearted abuse of these items is how I managed to kill all the superbosses with a party of four thieves.


Back in Gaia, the boys release the captive faerie, who retrieves them some Oxyale. This allows them to breathe underwater in that one dungeon that's still a little ways off.


The last location of interest on this continent (for now) is the Citadel of Trials. Getting here with the airship involves landing about six zip codes away -- cannier players know to sail here with the watership and just dock at the river's mouth to the north.

Keeping in the spirit of showin' off the "right" way to do things, I'll be taking the airship route this time. But... that's another update.


Between the northern continents is a string of islands populated by dragons. This is a pretty cool place to visit.


♪♪ Matoya's Cave ♪♪

There's a bunch of gil here, for starters. Like... not as much as in the Ice Cavern? But still a goodly amount. The game presumably throws all this gil at you to help afford the Bottled Faerie, which is a mandatory item.


"We prefer purposely senseful killing."


The Cardia Islands is also home to Bahamut, who bestows all kinds of stat-ups and neat toys on us if we bring him something suitably disgusting. (But that's another update.)


♪♪ Mt. Gulg ♪♪

Aha! Here's that dungeon we saw earlier, previously home to a curiously Marilith-shaped statue. What awaits within?

...that's another update. I've still got Earthgift Shrine hounding my heels. No need to start another superdungeon juuuuust yet.

Next: Obtained X-Potion.

Man, all the boss prizes from Earthgift are total garbage.

Except for the boss that gives two prizes (I forget which one, I think it's Ahriman) because one of those is a Megalixir which is brokentastic.

Goddamn I love this LP. Thanks, Brick.

Airshipz

This LP is continued excellence.

Geez BR, you've been busy what with this, the return of the X4 LP, Evermore, and Super RMN Bros.

Your precious time spent to entertain us scrubs of the internets is appreciated.

I've known this since 2003, since the same guy says the same basic thing in Origins (except it's translated as "Hawkeye" instead of "Eye of the Hawk").

Honestly? I probably never talked to the NPCs in Origins either. I guess I just figured I already knew the game inside and out, so there wasn't anything left for me to discover.

Not in mechanics, but in the setting's rich lore.

*pulls out 200-page thesis on how every Final Fantasy obviously takes place in the same world*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*sharp inhale*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I still say that my idea of playing through each of the nine previous games* was a better idea for X than what they went with. Some day, someone's going to come up with the FF equivalent of Crisis on Infinite Earths....

* - With a brief stopoff in a black-and-white world where your weapons mysterious start deteriorating every time you use them.

Isn't that what Dissidia was?

And I remember, after attending the FF: TSW premiere, a group of friends and I started crafting a fanfic plot that did exactly that

For some reason when I first heard about Final Fantasy Tactics back in the day I imagined it as being a Tactics Ogre version of something like this. Granted, what we eventually got was pretty awesome, but I still wouldn't mind something similar to my original vision somewhere down the line.

Nah, that overwrote the styles of the individual games with its own. What I want is a game that you have a unique party that actually has to adapt to each world they enter, but you get to retain enough of your prior skills from the individual worlds going forwards. So you'd pick up an Esper or two in the VI world, and then somehow combine them with the jobs you had from III and V.

(... and then after building yourself up for so long, VIII would come along and kick you in the crotch for bothering to level up your characters....)

I don't know if something that ambitious would work, but it'd be cool.

So... Kingdom Hearts, then?

Yeah, kinda. Hell, turn it around and have Mickey and Donald exploring FF worlds.

C'mon, you know you'd pay to see Donald blustering at Kefka in a cutscene.

All I got from Kingdom Hearts 2 was that we were beating up Nobodies. I finished the game and I'm still a little puzzled why. What exactly did they do that was so terrible.

They set the Heartless loose upon many worlds, just because Sora happened to be there?

I'm also fairly sure they forced Sora to sing in Atlantica because WHY THE FUCK ELSE WOULD HE DO THAT.

Because they were Nobodies. Wasn't that the reason you constantly picked on them in High school. Alternatively, that's the reason you were constantly picked on by Sombodies in High School?

My group did it different! We picked on Nobodies and had one in our group of Somebodies just to pick on when no Nobodies were around.


PS. Finch, if you are still alive, I'm sorry for being such a dick!

I played KH2's Atlantica minigames on mute. Thankfully the timing icons were more than enough to guide me through the songs (with perfect synch, even!) but I never heard a single one. My brain is happier that way.

And then we got to college and learned that the people who thought they were Somebodies are actually Nobodies, and the Nobodies who thought they'd grow up to be Somebodies are still Nobodies as well.

I was actually pretty surprised to learn that Final Fantasy Tactics had any elements of Final Fantasy at all. I assumed for the longest time that it was just one of those half-baked products Square slapped the brand name onto to buoy sales (eg. FFL/SaGa, Mystic Quest, The Spirits Within)

♪♪ Airship ♪♪

oh god please not more earthgift shrine

Yep. We're finishing this bitch up. Don't worry, I'll try to keep it short and sweet.


♪♪ Victory ♪♪

Level-dee devil-dee doo.


♪♪ Boss Battle A ♪♪

Armed with Protect Rings, the insta-death attacks slung around by Ahriman and Echidna should be manageable.


Uh... or not.

Okay, so what's happening here is that magic spells in FF1 all have a flag attached to them, and sometimes these flags make no sense. So while a spell's function might be "instant death" its flag might be something different, and whether or not the Protect Ring works is goverend by the flag and not the effect. Two insta-death attacks in NES-FF1 are QAKE and BANE, and are marked as the "Death" flag, which means the Protect Ring (ProRing) guards them. In Dawn of Souls, however, it's possible these flags were shuffled around. Since Quake and Scourge are both elemental attacks (earth and poison, respectively) I bet it's the Ribbon, and not the Protect Ring, that guards them.

Which means I'm in just as much trouble as before! Aaaah!



♪♪ Victory ♪♪

...or not! Ika seems surprisingly resistant to the effects of Ahriman's Quake spell, which gives him enough time to revive Zach, get him Hasted, and Blizzaga his way to a narrow victory. The prize?