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

How about a compromise then? I could go with PERCY as a Scholar in the next dungeon just to show how god awful it is in the NES version, then I can switch to the popular choices after the tree.

Obviously we've still got about 5 days to get choices in, so I guess popular opinion could shift in that time, though.

I would like to see how the scholar does in the original version, and the gimmick boss is the only time they are really helpful so I like your plan.
All parties must contain a thief, so it might as well be Percy. Are black mages any good with a bow on the NES?

Huh, funny thing is, looking at the stats, his raw power was brought down in the DS version. Someone who can cipher FF numbers better than me can probably explain why their still better.

I like where this is going.

Okay, I'm cool with letting the little runt be a scholar for one dungeon for good ol' fashion LP exhibition, but he's got to spend a chunk of time as a Thief later.

It's been awhile since I played the NES version of this game but I seem to recall Scholars not really being that bad. Their "special" ability wasn't worth it, but letting them dual wield books did a surprising amount of damage. Maybe my brain is fried but I think for awhile there my scholar was my hardest hitter.
In the DS version they are just crazy good.

Well, the biggest drawback to the Scholar isn't their physical abilities, but their lack of skills and decent armor. If I had a choice between it and anything else at this point I'd probably take everything but Onion Knight (without its job-specific gear) and Red Mage before it.

So basically the Hunter has the advantages of Black Mage elemental attacks, has more charges of elemental attacks (99 arrows vs. spell charges, 2 for Ice 3 in the last boss battle), can cast the WM Holy elemental, AND gets a non-elemental base arrow attack.

I double dog dare vote for Black Mage becoming a Hunter!

Just die once or twice then soldier on with him as a thief.

Actually, the only way to damage the boss is with magic. I'd guess the best way of killing him his have 3 BMs with full spellbooks and one scholar to tell them what to cast.

Preposterous. (upcoming fight spoilers via someone else's playthrough)

Its definitely the easiest way, but its not the only way.

Well, that makes me look like a huge idiot. I actually had trouble with that boss when I played a few weeks ago, but not so much that I had to grind or retry.

5/10/2010 - An Island Amidst...Nothing



First things first we switch PERCY over to a worthless Scholar. I don't even bother to buy him any gear because I figure they wouldn't let me head to the next boss without putting something for him in the next dungeon, right?



♪♪Castle Hyne♪♪

Returning to Tokkle, we find that we're none too welcome here. Well, at least we found a way into Hyne's floating fortress.



There are a few other men locked away here with us, most of which explain the same things that the forest fairies already did 2 or 3 updates ago.



The most notable prisoner is none other than King Argass, the very man we're looking for. Without him we've got no chance of getting our hands on another airship...



Some of the prisoners are Daemons, but are aren't any stronger than regular dungeon enemies. I took this opportunity to show off PERCY's more useless ability, Peep, that shows the HP values of the targeted monster.

To escape the cell you have to cast mini and run through the top-left wall of the cell you're first placed into. For once, the dungeon on the other side is also normal-sized, so I don't have to be put through another set of mini-dungeon nonsense finally.



This dungeon is the first to feature a copious amount of negative status effect inducing monsters. PERCY's lack of a weapon here does some good in that he can weakly hit our own characters to break them out of the effect, but it also means he can do absolutely nothing to thin the enemy's ranks as well. A few rounds of confusion and we die by our own hands.



Before making a second stab at it, I decide to gear PERCY up. It turns out, surprise surprise, that there is not a single weapon for sale that he can equip. Also, the only armor he can equip is from the first town in the game. He now has six times as much defense as before, though, bringing his total up to...6.



This time goes a lot more smoothly, despite PERCY still being worthless. Most of the chests simply contain gil or a few more FenixDowns.



There are a few more weapons here as well, but one of them is of no use to us until we add a Hunter to our ranks.

Deep within the tree we find Hyne. "Blah blah blah infinite power of darkness blah die!"



♪♪Boss Battle♪♪

Here is PERCY's big time to shine. Despite still being weaponless, his Scan shows us what element Hyne is weak to. With this information, Ringo is able to do damage over 25% of Hyne's total HP, not to mention what Katie and PERCY do via SouthWinds.



Hyne does manage to get one WallChange off, but for whatever reason he changes his weakness from ice to ice. Another shot of Ice 3 finishes him off in just under four rounds.



♪♪Return of the Warrior♪♪

Freed from Hyne's curse, the eldest tree thanks us and returns the captives to their homes.



♪♪Living Forest♪♪

For our help, the eldest tree gives us the Wind Fang and tells us to go forth and crush the darkness. He also mentions that, for whatever arbitrary reason, no one may enter this forest for another 1000 years (any attempt to do so will just make our party twirl around and end up back where they started).

Now that that's done, I change PERCY and Ringo to the Talking Time selected jobs. Notice that since both of them were changing from magic(ish) jobs to physical attackers that its a fairly steep CP cost.

PERCY ditches the books for a sweet porn 'stache.



Returning to the Castle Argass, we obtain the necessary piece to complete another airship- the Time Gear. Strange that the King says it was created by the ancients, as it seems kind of counter-intuitive that we blew an airship up when these pieces seem to be finite.



After handing over the Time Gear Cid goes to work right away in converting our boat into an airship. It can change back and forth from boat to airship at the push of the A button, but it requires me to land in the water regardless.



Haha! Time to explore further than this floating continent and see what lies in the great world beyond!



♪♪The Boundless Ocean♪♪

The world of nothing? How could this be? Were we too late to stop the forces of darkness?

This is the best music track in this entire game. Pairing this with the realization that the majority of the world is already long gone makes for one hell of an emotional response, especially compared to its contemporaries.

We find a few mountains and some kind of a landmark*, but not much else but ocean. Even the map is totally worthless.

*(spoiler) That's the final dungeon!



♪♪Elia, the Maiden of Water♪♪

We do come across a shipwreck eventually, and immediately set to work on looting its treasures.



There are a few survivors on the ship, and old man and a woman who appears to be sick.



Feeding her a potion, the girl suddenly comes back to perfect health. She turns out to be the maiden of the Water Temple.



It looks like the two elemental crystals of earth and water seem to be in conflict here. Its nice to know that we might be able to save the people since they were turned to stone rather than outright killed.

The departure from the Magic Continent to the world below was always the most powerful part of FF3. There aren't a lot of games out there where you escape from the starting area only to discover that, well, that's pretty much all there IS to the entire world any longer. Though I do think Dark Cloud 2 and Dragon Quest VII have better overall executions of the concept, whereas it's more of a temporary-and-quickly-resolved problem in FF3.

Elia joins up with the group in the hope that she can change the state of the world for the better. Next stop, water temple!



[10 minutes of aimless airship wandering later]

Here we are!

Next time: The Water Cave

Considering how Xande's whole reason for being evil is that he's unhappy about the fact that he's going to eventually die, burying his castle at the bottom of the ocean might not have been the best idea in the world.

Wow, that is an empty world.
Castle Argass has a full set of Scholarly equipment in the remake. All behind locked doors, but that's what a thief is for.

Looking it up, I guess it was hidden in a treasure room in the Dwarf Cave. Oh well, didn't really need it anyways.

So, the Enterprise. I love that airship so so much. The animation and sound effects when the sails go down and the props come up is about my favorite thing in 8-bit gaming. It's such a great way to give you an airship with some reasonable limits (can only really reach things on coasts) but still provide a lot of flexibility. It's about the perfect airship design in my book, it doesn't open up the entire world but the barriers feel natural, rather than artificial.

5/17/2010 - Exciting New Career Opportunities, Inquire Within



The Temple of Water is mostly empty, save a single crystal shard and a pair of heal/resurrection springs. The shard is what we came for, though, so onwards to the northern cave.



♪♪Crystal Cave♪♪

The overall goal of this cave is to reunite the small shard of crystal with the large one at the end of this cave. Elia hopes that this will somehow restore the world to its former state.



There's a bit of story here, where Elia opens up the remainder of the dungeon for exploration. This would be to prevent us from going any further had our random exploration of the ocean brought us here before we came upon Elia's ship.



There are a few monsters here that can poison or stone our party, but thanks to Katie's Pure and the tons of Softs we have on hand they're no big deal.



♪♪Crystal Room♪♪

Reaching the fourth basement of the dungeon, we find the crystal and return the shard to it.

Out of nowhere, Elia is shot down by a masked assailant!



Somehow Kraken was able to fit eight limbs under that hood. And fire a bow and arrow with tentacles.



♪♪Boss Battle♪♪

Here we learn a bit about the Hunter job! Ringo's attacks require expendable ammo which can correspond to one of the elements or a neutral source (i.e. Iron). Each attack in battle costs one of these arrows, and when depleted, results in him attempting to punch the monster to death unless reequipped. I try to take advantage of Kraken's water type by using Bolt arrows, but even with that SL is easily outpacing Ringo in damage dealt.



Kraken goes down fairly quickly, but not before PERCY manages to faceplant from a Fire 2.



We manage to save the crystal, but like Desh before her Elia seems to perish in the resulting victory. We are granted the jobs of the water crystal and are warped to the outside.

Thanks to Elia's infusion of power from the crystal shard, the world has been restored to its former state.



♪♪Town of Water♪♪

We awake to find ourselves in the town of Amur. Somehow the old man from halfway across the sea who had saved Elia is here as well.



Seeing as how we don't have anything else in particular to do (beyond stopping evil), I guess we should check this Jiru guy out.



I do blow a big chunk of my cash on equipping PERCY with the latest in Thief gear. Its especially nice not only because of the stat boosts associated with the armor, but now with double boomerangs I can toss him on the back line and still get front line results.



Floating shoes? I have no clue what in the hell we're talking about.

♪♪Good Ol' Fellows♪♪

In addition to the weirdness of looking for flying shoes in the sewers, we're also being spied on by a bunch of bald old quadruplets. I guess they want the shoes too since they think they're the Light Warriors?



Next stop, the sewers!



Once again job selection is up for voting! It'll be a dungeon or two before PERCY can be changed, but feel free to put Ringo through the ringer if you'd like.

Geomancer: MP-less magic caster based on the terrain. For whatever reason their magic has a chance of backfiring and hurting themselves. Attacks with bells and wears light armor.

Dragoon: This is essentially what Kain is based on. Its like a Fighter with the ability to Jump and use lances. Required by a later dungeon. VETOED

Viking: Kind of like a Fighter that can equip stronger weapons like axes and hammers. No special abilities and develops extremely slowly stat-wise.

Karateka: Aka Monk part 2. Has the special ability BuildUp that can increase your damage on your next attack (or hurt yourself if you build up three times in a row without releasing).

M. Knight: This is essentially the Dark Knight class, but for whatever reason it can cast lv1-3 White Magic (minus Aero). This is the only non-Ninja job that can equip ninja swords. Required by a later dungeon. VETOED

Conjurer: Aka summoner in training. Using a summoned monster with a Conjurer has a 50% chance of a white effect (heal / buff the party) or 50% chance of a black effect (hurting the enemies). Can be really helpful or annoying depending on how lucky you are.

Bard: Has the special abilities of Scare (lowers enemy accuracy or makes them run) and Cheer (aka party Haste). Attacks with harps, which have a chance of inflicting status effects on enemies.

Next time: Sewer Surfin'

I used a Geomancer through my entire run of the DS version since the Geo effects tend to hit really-REALLY damn hard (assuming they aren't trying to do an instant-kill, which only seem to work once-in-a-never), so while I can vouche for them; I don't think that's quite in the spirit of this LP. Which is to make you unhappy with your party set-up.

Which means that Percy is going to be a Bard.

Wow, this LP has reached the point where I gave up on my Final Fantasy III DS run. I got the game shortly after it came out and played up to here before putting it down and just not picking it back up.

The Kraken kind of killed my interest I think. I mean, I BEAT the thing, but it took more tries than I liked and I didn't feel like continuing. Maybe I should dust it off. I've heard that the rest of the game after the Kraken, until the final dungeon anyway, is a lot smoother. Anyone have any advice for the DS version past this point?

And I vote for Bard, because obvious.

Kraken was cheesey, one of the very few times I wiped and had to do the whole dungeon again (and again). When I beat him it was by spamming pheonix downs with my thief and bombing the heck out of kraken with Zeus's Wraths from my Scholar (2k a pop).
The next boss was pretty easy, though he one-shotted my scholar with a critical hit.
DS advice would be to have a geomancer and a thief and maybe a viking, because the geomancer is better than a black mage, and because these are the classes there is equipment for. My thief has higher defense than my knight.
Spoilering because it's slightly ahead of the LP
The mansion isn't very hard but it's a bit mazey. There is treasure through the north exit, and the path to the boss is in one of the rooms. Bring a thief or a few keys.
Also, visit the two other towns you can access with your airship before you investigate that gigantic thing in the northwest continent. They have spells and equipment that are useful.

Throwing my vote in for Conjurer.

Note: geomancers were buffed to HELL in the DS port. In the original game they're rather... not good.

bard plz