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

Yeah, most of the bugs don't make the game harder, they just tend to screw up class balance towards FIGHTERs and to a lesser extent RedMAGEs. Yeah, for a newbie using the recommended FIGHTER THIEF Wh.MAGE Bl.MAGE party, the game is harder than it should be, but 3x FIGHTER RedMAGE is easier than it has any right being.

There are a couple exceptions, though; there's one where if an enemy with a status attack gets multiple swings, any misses that follow a hit still have a chance to inflict the status. So those SORCERORs (or BlueZOIDs if you prefer) shouldn't insta-death you quite as often as they do!

But the majority of the challenge simply comes from its archaic 1986 design sense. You can get ambushed by cockatrices or undead and petrified or stunlocked before you even get a chance to move, and then you have to start again from the last INN. After each dungeon run you have to replace your CURE potions one at a time. Most parties need to grind or be incredibly lucky. It's an era of design that I am perfectly fine with leaving in the past.

Getting everyone stunned isn't a Game Over since they can recover, but I still cursed the names of those eyeball/jellyfish hybrids at sea and those cadavers. Still not as bad as poison, though; easily burning through your PUREs and not having enough charges (if any) to cast the PURE spell along with foes better dealt with using FIR2 spells is what make the Marsh Cave the nightmarish (but IMSDLO* kinda awesome) roadblock it is. The more I play NES Final Fantasy, the more I realize how busted the game was and the more appealing replaying that remake again looks. I'm gonna have to put limitations on myself if I don't wanna steamroll everything's face off, though.

Putting a Red Mage and Monk in my group and ignoring the ever-tempting Warrior class should be a good difficult DoS start, I think.

*In My Sadistic Difficulty Loving Opinion

I'm hesitant to say "poor design" because, aside from INT not affecting spellcasting, I think the actual design is sound. It's the implementation of that design that got screwed up.

But otherwise, yeah, that's my position. The reason the NES version has a reputation as such a hard game isn't because it's a hard game, it's because people don't know how to play it properly. And can you blame them? "Properly" in this context means using some backwards and totally counterintuitive strategies.

It seems to me that 2 is the Final Fantasy that really needs that romhack tool.

Final Fantasy II is another example of a game that actually is pretty easy-- if you know what you're doing.

And no, I don't mean "attack/magic cancelling." I mean knowing how to do stuff like build a super-evasion character and turning the final boss into a toad.

- Eddie

I know I keep saying this, but I think DoS FFII is actually a decent game.

Super Evade is easy: Just play a solo game. You get pounded early, but eventually you'll have a shitload of HP and be able to evade almost anything.

I did not build up my toad spell. I might have to do that next time. Maybe I'll play with a fighter, a white mage, and a stupid-spells-I-shouldn't-use mage. I bet the way that game is built, anything on Lv. 9 would be effective.

(Still pushing for Brick to LP that in this thread )

I'm really glad to see Dawn of Souls getting some love. I've never understood why people prefer the original, but then I didn't play it as a kid.

Level 9 is definitely high enough to make a spell useful in the endgame. The Super-Maria I built in my first playthrough had Cure and Berserk at level 10, Fire and Teleport at level 9 and nothing else (Toad included) over level 7. That was more than enough to make her unstoppable, especially with her massive evasion and HP.

A solo, slightly sequence breaking, heavy support spell abusing run of FFII is legitimately fun times, I think. I should try actually playing the game with a full party next.

It's a looong ways off, but I'd like to request screenshots of each of your characters playing the lute.

That's more or less what I meant about 'poor design'.

No real opinion one way or the other.

Brick, maybe this is too late to ask, but if you want to make DoS challenging, how about make this a no-deaths run?

Because those are boring. We used to play the game like this when we were kids, because we liked keeping everyone's EXP equal... but there's really no point to it. The things most likely to kill you are all luck-based, so it doesn't exactly make the game more challenging. All it really does is force you to reset a few times in the Earth and Ice Caves.

No Equipment. No Magic. Final Destination.

Well I do have a Monk, so...

YOU LIE!

Seriously, I thought one of your favorite things about FF1 AND Golden Sun were ineffective attacks.

If I don't make it, tell my wife, "Hello."

FF1 trained me to spread my attacks around, so I pretty much just do that instinctively in every RPG I play. I don't really notice autotarget one way or the other.

I'm of the opinion that's a better way to play non-ATB RPGs anyway, since purely relying on autotarget means you're probably wasting an attack or two every fight.

This LP happened to pop up just a few weeks after I had picked up DoS from the GameStop GBA bin for like $10 and thrown it in my bag, so I am totally hopping on the bandwagon with my own play-through. Since it's putting me in a retro mood, I went with my retro self-insertion naming conventions and whipped up a team of:

- Kirin - Fighter
- Aislinn - RedMage
- Fang - Monk
- Terra - BlackMage

In fact, it's probably entirely due to reading Brick LPs that I immediately ditched Thief and WhMage from the roster. I'm pretty happy with this set-up.

I'm only a bit ahead of the LP (chillin' in Pravoka), so I'll have to find some time if I want to keep up.

My last full play I went traditional Fighter, Thief, White Mage, Black Mage, and with the extra MP keeping my Black Mage useful, and my Knight/Ninja combo getting some good buff spells late, I was pretty happy with it.

I kind of want to do a Red Mage solo, Dragon Quest I style.

Regarding solo runs, I'd probably find 'em easier to do if I could just dump the other members out of my party like in a good amount of Final Fantasy VI. Doesn't feel right, lugging three corpses around.

Might try a solo run in one of my Strange Journey replays, though. Be interesting to see how far I could get by going batshit crazy and not relying on demons.

The more I see this LP, the more I have to remind myself to play through my backlog first and not borrow Final Fantasy V and Dawn of Souls from my friend. I'm not sure whether to congratulate you or hit you on the head, Brickroad.

I feel that desire for all my characters' experience to be even and I don't understand why. I'm always annoyed the first time somebody dies and I always have to tell myself it isn't worth resetting just to make everyone's level-ups happen at the same time.

I played a romhack of FF1 that included, among a host of tweaks, dead characters getting experience just the same as if they were alive. It seemed like a weird feature until I realized it meant my characters would always have the same number of experience points, and then I was inordinately happy.

I would make fun of you for that, but then I would also be making fun of myself.

You get used to it pretty quick, especially if you name them right. Just pretend they're your minstrals who follow you around everywhere and prostrate themselves before your magnificence every time you demonstrate the awesomeness of your mighty battle skills.

Or that they are your party escort, and so out of their deep respect for your heroic glory they assume the party escort submission position every time you stop walking long enough to fight a group of monsters.

Personally, I still think a party of two is just the right size for a FF1 run.

Different XP totals is actually useful from FF5 on. The only way to learn (or survive) Level 5 Death is to have an unevenly leveled party.

As for a duo run, I demand two black belts: BILY and JIMY. Bonus points if you can romhack one to have a red outfit.

Man, ditto VI. Realizing that you have all the same level when any Lv. X spell is used it a real bummer.

No way, man. Dragging around three mages named DEAD turns the game into some kind of strange horror film.

It's even more bizarre in latter games. Trying to solo Cecil in IV (impossible, BTW) requires several instances of your party being revived by plot, being totally under leveled, and then the Dark Knight going crazy and stabbing all his friends. Very macabre.

Incorrect. The only real "brick wall" is all the Trap Doors in the Sealed Cave, which can gotten by grinding past Level 70, grinding for a Ribbon drop, or abusing the GBA version's ATB glitches. Every other encounter in the game can beaten with proper knowledge of the game's mechanics and some modest grinding, GBA superbosses included.

And call me a sociopath, but I always got a kick out of slaughtering my teammates (or having them slaughter each other). I especially liked doing this during Rosa's trial, where the game revives your party members but forgets to do anything to their HP, meaning they can have 0 HP but still be alive. I always thought of them as zombies.

Why past level 70?

Also, you can technically skip the sealed cave altogether with a glitch I can't remember off the top of my head.

I kept getting exploded to death by Dr. Luge, but I knew the sealed cave was next, so I gave up. Solo Cecil is so much just griding that I lost interest. It'd be different if I could use rods/etc. as items in battle, but it doesn't work if he can't equip it. Still, it was a lot of fun through becoming a Paladin.

So I guess it's possible, but I didn't care to try past a certain point.

My other FFIV idea was a "weak link" run, where I solo as the "weakest" (as voted on by, uh, maybe you guys) character for each different party. It would take an obscene amount of grinding to attempt.

OK, this one's new to me. Does the Ribbon protect against Disrupt? The only way I can see grinding to Lv70 working is if it would net some serious speed/strength boosts to let you kill the Door before it fired off the insta-kill.