Get a job! - Let's Play Final Fantasy III

Bah, just wait until the soul of rebirth mode after you do almost no grinding in the original game and still don't want to grind... Ugh, THATS the bad part- but the original game isn't so bad and ya don't have to grind much.

In Soul of Rebirth you can kill everything but Zombie Baigan and the Emperor with Teleport and Frog.

Teleport and frog in battle? Never touched teleport there and frog I only used to get to lvl 16 for the minigame... I know I oughtta use magic more but I'm the melee and cure spam type lol- but it is useful sometimes

My party composition for FF3 was as follows:
Darius (main melee)
Seirif (off-melee)
Seth (main magic)
Parin (off-heals, and random stuff)

This means Darius pretty much spent the whole game as a Knight, Seirif got to dabble in Thief/Monk/M.Knight/Karateka, Seth just went between the mage types (usually red, I think), and Parin was occasionally white mage or conjurer, often something random (such as scholar or geo). It worked okay for the most, save that Parin always seemed worthless, and Seirif kept pulling ahead of my "protagonist" Darius. I initially kept Parin as an onion knight for a long time to see how it went, but it didn't go well.

When I went through on DS, I scarcely remember it. I think I tried to keep Luneth well-rounded, made Ingus my main-melee/tank, let Refia be thief/white mage, and Arc became my mutt, as he was pretty close to what I'd imagine my Parin being in design.

Also, I love listening to "Roaming Sheep" and "The Breeze."

10/4/2010 - Sequence Breaking For Fun and Profit



Rather than return to Dorga's house as he requested, I'm going to take a little detour.



Each of the four elemental fangs we picked up will destroy these four barriers. This will only work on foot, though; approaching via the air will result in an exploded airship and game over.



This is the Ancients' Labyrinth and home of the real Earth Crystal.



Surprise surprise, its another stupidly easy boss I can beat in 3 or 4 rounds just by applying the physical hurt and occasionally healing.



Whoo, new jobs! This time we got:

Warlock: Essentially Black Wizard 2.0, their stats are a bit higher and they get access to the final level of spells.

Shaman: Ditto for the Warlock, only sub in "white" for "black." Definitely the cutest job available with its cat-eared hood.

Summoner: The non-gimpy version of the Caller. With this job we can be guaranteed a strong attack spell out of all of the summons.



Wait, so they concentrated light in a singular point to summon the darkness? I guess that makes as much sense as anything.

Katie and Percy take up the mantles of the Shaman and Summoner respectively. Might as well leave SL and Ringo alone since they'll be changing soon enough. *hint*hint*



Anyways! Back on track, we go retrieve the fast airship so that we can make it up the windy passage to Dorga's house.



Immediately after entering his house Dorga summons us...



...to his cave and beckons for us to come to him and Unne. Why you would drop us off here if you have the power to teleport us in the first place is beyond me.



There are a few new monsters here, but nothing especially challenging. Thank god they're done splitting, though.



Similarly, the chests are mostly full of money and worthless (to my team, at any rate) magic-casting items. I would say the money is completely worthless, but I've got some rather expensive purchases coming up in the endgame.



Its really quite a short dungeon compared to the previous two. Believe me when I say they're just giving you a breather before what's to come, though.

For whatever reason, we have to battle Unne and Dorga to create the Eureka Key to enter the final dungeon.



If that's all you need is battle power, couldn't you have dropped whatever off on us a couple dungeons ago and collected it that way? I guess it wouldn't lead to a climactic battle with the old heroes that way, though.



Dorga comes at us first, holding no quarter!



Honestly, Dorga isn't really that challenging.



The biggest challenges to face are his elemental attacks that hit the entire party, a petrification spell and a rather strong drain attack. Thanks to Katie's boost from the Shaman class, though, she's got spell charges to spare and can spam Cure4 as much as necessary.

Dorga's down! No time for healing, Unne attacks immediately.



Unne is really a rather similar fight to Dorga. Her one difference is the inclusion of the W.Wind spell which will drop a single party member's HP to critical levels if hit with it. Thankfully the single-target version of Cure4 recovers to full HP.



With both Dorga and Unne defeated, we're now in possession of the Eureka Key.



Before we can enter Eureka, though, we have to go through the Sylx Tower.



Thank god Unne just happened to have the key on her when she died.

Exit, recover airship, rest.



Return to final uber mega dungeon.



But that's for another time.

Next Time: Fightin' The Darkness (Part 1?)

Man, what am I looking at here? Unne at least resembles... SOMETHING, but Dorga? This reminds me of some of those weird transformations in Breath of Fire 1 & 2. You'd face a normal-looking humanoid and they'd inexplicably transform into something out of left-field.

I'll never forget how at the end of the first game it gives up on monsters that look like stuff we can recognize and just has Jade turn into a mess of balls, blobs, and spikes.

I'm not sure what Dorga turned into... it's like an evil quilt monster.

In the DS version, I tried to fight Dorga and Unne without getting the Earth Crystal first, meaning I had no access to high-level healing.

That... that was not the most efficient strategy, on the whole.

This has convinced me to give the DS version another go... Let's hope I can get past the first dungeon this time...

I'm pretty sure I didn't know I could go to the Crystal, and so the battles were a bit harder.

Oh man those two were so annoying in the DS version.

Think of it in a "tipping the scales" sense. By artificially gathering the Light in one place, they're forcing Darkness to concentrate there too in order to maintain the balance. This concentration of both forces is what allows Zande to summon the Cloud of Darkness which, despite what its name implies, is an entity of destruction of both Light and Darkness.

That's right. Sephiroth ripped off the plot of a villain three generations older.

It's Amano art like no other. He looks like his blimp airships, all bulbous and colorful. Dorga should be glad he doesn't have happy faces like Yang's pants!

Wait, the instakill statues kill you if you try flying through 'em on airship, even with all the fangs? Why am I tempted to rebuy the DS game just to try this? O.O;

....It does still murder you if you go airship with all fangs on DS, right? Or was that cut along with groups of more than two or three monsters?

I'm pretty sure in the DS version that you can get through with the airship.

When I was emulating this game years ago, when I entered the Ancient Labyrinth, the game would crash every time. I searched about the internet for a while, and discovered this was a known issue with the emulator I was using, and I was quite horrified. I could do everything except the last dungeon, unless I started on another emulator!? Fortunately, it was that day that I learned I could rename my save state file to the naming conventions and file extensions of another emulator, and it would work just fine with it. It made me feel really weird the whole time I was in the final dungeon, though. I kept expecting it to cause a glitch at some point.

10/25/2010 - Headlong into Darkness



Back to the Ancient's Labyrinth!



The enemies here are pretty weak, but have some pretty tricky status effects. That clone of Unne here (summoned by the Gt. Daemon) is belting out WWind, which reduces HP to critical levels.



On the other side of things, we've got guys like Thanatos going around petrifying our party members (almost always starting with Katie ).



There's a whole set of Crystal gear down here, which is a slight upgrade to the Genji gear that SL is already rocking.



There's also a few nice weapons, but nothing we can use besides tossing the Ultimate wand at PERCY.



KBehemoth is a total joke compared to what he becomes in FFIV. Seriously didn't take more more than a single round to knock him out.

There are a few more interesting bits down here, including a Protect ring; I wonder if it actually works in this version unlike FFI?



And there's the exit! Outside of the few branches to treasure, it was a pretty straightforward dungeon.



Better save here just to be safe. Shit gets crazy inside the tower.



Not much here so far, beyond a couple single-use spell items. Notice that this dungeon is already more interesting than the Ancient's Labyrinth thanks to the inclusion of a false wall.



A recolor of a previous boss! It goes down in a couple rounds though, no problem.



Another recolor! Despite being a recolor of the lowly Jinn, second boss of the game, the FlameDevils manage to Flame all over us and destroy the party. I guess this dungeon is going to take a bit more grinding to be able to safely explore.

Next time: The Ultimate Jobs?!

Gasp!
Ultimate jobs are always more fun then your current ones!
Except fully geared onion knight anyways :P

Don't expect to see that one, I'm not made of grindy free time!

I've got youtube as a good source of finding fully geared onion knights anyways...
Although if ya really wanted to you could hack for the gear- whatever floats your boat

I actually planned on doing that for the LP, but the the glitch didn't take with the emulator I'm using. I did it on my actual cart before and it totally breaks a good chunk of the game.

This last update makes me think the Mystic Quest took a good bit of its monster line-up inspiration from this game for some reason. That Thanatos shows up almost exactly (as Dullahan, maybe?), the Jinns are pretty similar, and of course there's a Medusa, though she's not just a head.

11/22/2010 - OH GOD EFF THIS DUNGEON



Back into the tower!



These guys really aren't threatening in the least, beyond the scare of potentially being petrified. The real problem in this dungeon lies in the incessant back-attacks and the ridiculous overall length of it.



There are a lot of items lying about, but they're more just inventory wasters than anything especially useful.



Using the Sylx key on this door in the back leads us to the tower proper.



Even just going up one level leads to a lot more difficult battles, but nothing that we can't handle at this point.



Except these GOD DAMN FLAME SPAMMING SOBs. I made a second attempt at this immediately following this run and it met with the same end.

Might as well run back and empty out my bag of all this worthless crap I don't need and stock up on a stack of Hi-Potions.



Back to the tower!



Saving to be safe!



Well, shit.

Honestly, this is the part I had the most apprehension towards when I committed to this LP so please be patient with me during this difficult section. There's going to be quite a bit of grinding involved if I'm going to stand a chance in the Sylx tower, much less Eureka.

Next time: The Ultimate Jobs?! (Ha ha, maybe!)

Oh that Crystal Tower.

What a fun ride it is

The Shaman and M.Knight dead sprites look... bizarre.